Purportedly a childhood memoir, Chamoiseau's Chemin-d'école is inscribed in a long tradition of Caribbean autobiographical writing. As such, it inherits and expands upon the themes and tensions of autobiography, both as a narrative of selfhood and as a discursive tool of identity and culture in the Caribbean context. Patrick Chamoiseau inscribes a set of writing practices in Ecrire en pays dominé and Chemin-d'école, both aimed at illuminating the contradictory results of almost fifty years of French Caribbean overseas departmentalization. This double process of economic and cultural domination appropriates identitarian issues of ambiguity, belonging, and authenticity predicated on the departmental experience in general and its educational practices in particular, and inserts them into his re-presentation of his Martinican childhood. Ultimately, his work highlights the intrinsic paradoxes of departmental integration that, in bringing the départements d'outre-mer directly within the ambit of France, progressively erased their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural difference from the mainland.
I
In Ecrire en pays dominé, Patrick Chamoiseau recounts the visit of President Charles de Gaulle to the French Antilles in the 1960s, a period, as he points out, marked by decolonization movements elsewhere, indeed in much of the Third World: "Il ne vit qu'une marée humaine vibrante d'émoi filial. Surpris, il s'exclama: Mon dieu, mon dieu, comme vous êtes français! . . . Le centre lointain ne fut jamais perçu comme une quelconque base colonialiste, mais en mère lointaine, bienveillante, ignorant les turpitudes locales des méchants békés et administrateurs" 'All he could see was a human tide, quivering with filial emotion. Surprised, he exclaimed to himself: My God, my God, how French you are! . . . The remote center was never perceived as some colonialist base, but as a distant, benevolent mother, unaware of the wicked white creoles' and administrators' turpitudes' (222).1 In this double moment of loss and recognition, which crystallizes, in a sense, the absence of a decolonizing consciousness that seems to have passed the French Antilles by, he locates the seeds of the ambivalence and domination that would come to characterize these territories as the departmental era evolved: "les lancinements de la domination brutale sont là" 'the shooting pains of brutal domination are there,' he claims, envisioning a vicious circle of tentative identitarianism in which "toute domination . . . germe et se développe à l'intérieur même de ce que l'on est" 'all domination . . . is formed and develops in the very heart of what we are.'The domination to which he refers, then, and which lies at the core of the writing strategies I wish to analyze, is at once discursive, demographic, economic, and subjective; indeed, it might be claimed that its multiple forms reflect the fragmentation, ambiguities, and pluralities that-despite easy metropolitan claims of égalité and fraternité-came increasingly to define the material reality of the departmental subject. In these terms, then, given the discursive framework that formed the basis not only of the colonial encounter and its hierarchies of domination and exclusion, but the continuation of similar policies of economic and ethnocultural erasure under the aegis of departmentalism, the primary discursive challenge faced by Chamoiseau would be to configure writing and representation to be adequate to such a cultural challenge: "Il me fallait alors interroger mon écriture . . . l'influence qu'exerce sur elle la domination-qui-ne-se-voit-plus" 'I therefore had to question my own writing . . . and the influence that the no-longer-visibledomination has on it' (20-21). It is the transposition of these complex processes, intersections, and paradoxes of politics, culture, and identity into an enabling framework for inscribing a (re)sited psychosocial subject that Chamoiseau takes as the enabling conditions of his representative project.
Purportedly a childhood memoir, Chamoiseau's Chemin-d'école is inscribed in a long tradition of Caribbean autobiographical writing. As such, it both inherits and expands upon the themes and tensions that have long informed and undergirded autobiography as a discursive tool of identity and culture in the Caribbean context. Caribbean writers, particularly on the anglophone side, have built on the autobiographical paradigm to explore ideologies of location and longing, subjectivity and erasure, and other patterns produced by the region's complex historical experience, in which the indigenous population was wiped out, to all intents and purposes, and then replaced by a daunting variety of peoples and cultures, none of which originated there. Stuart Hall has articulated this cultural conundrum well: "None of the people who now occupy the islands-black, brown, white, African, European, American, Spanish, French, East Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Jew, Dutch-originally 'belonged' there. It is the space where the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated" (400-01). Negotiation might amount to something of a misnomer here; in the succession of hierarchical systems that came to dominate and direct demographic development in the Caribbean, in no case did the negotiation of social or political roles occur on anything even remotely resembling the well-known level playing field. Even as colonialism, along with its corollaries of slavery and racism, gradually gave way to independence, peoples of color, often forcibly transported from elsewhere, remained tragically uprooted from their lands and cultures of origin. In a sense, then, inscribing the tensions of this axis of identitarianism in the search for the public or the private self has become an important component of Caribbean literary history, giving rise to a discursive strategy that Sandra Pouchet Paquet describes as "facilitat[ing] an understanding of the constitutive relationship of autobiography to the region's cultural formations." At the same time, however, even as the symbiotic structures of autobiography and culture continue to evolve, they are simultaneously and astygmatically split by the ongoing material realities of politics and ethnicity, where the drive for independence is pitted against ongoing patterns of (neo)colonial domination, such that "[e]ach autobiographical act constitutes a different spatial and temporal point in Caribbean literary and cultural history." Yet these differences, as Pouchet Paquet continues, also can creatively "provide different points of reference from which to chart the influence of interculturative processes on racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies in the multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, and polyglot Caribbean" (4). By the time he came to pen Ecrire en pays dominé, Chamoiseau was himself a sociocultural product of almost fifty years of French Caribbean overseas departmentalization; his own more personal experience of this double process of economic and cultural domination amounted to just a little more than four decades (at the time of writing). As a result, Chamoiseau's autobiographical acts perforce articulate and adumbrate a set of political and psychosocial realities separate and apart from those stemming from the largely independent territories of his anglophone Caribbean brethren (and sistren).
While it may verge on the reductive to repeat that complex discursive strategies of distancing are generally conflated with the alienation produced by psychological splitting in order for the temporal displacement and inside/outside perspectives intrinsic to autobiography to take shape, any comprehensive interrogation of the genre must contend with the conjoined issues of "perception, memory, and representation," and the ways in which they "call[s] into question the ability of language to mediate [the] author's self-division." So while self-division is ostensibly a prerequisite for, or a key constituent of, autobiographical re-presentation (literally as a secondary presentation of a distant, primary set of events), a comprehensive analysis of the relationship obtaining between author and presentation must also "focus on the inability of language to bridge the distance between what he takes to be a past self and a present self," as Paul Jay explains (30). Language and its (de)formations will indeed become a key component of Chamoiseau's differential discursive strategy, as he seeks to interpolate identitarian issues predicated on the departmental experience into his re-presentation of his Martinican childhood. To re-engender himself as departmental subject, then, Chamoiseau must, in a sense, engender alienation by and for himself; he must cross the border of subjectivity by stepping out of or going beyond himself in order to (re)discover himself, must learn to re-present himself, his country, his culture and their corollaries of domination, subjection and exclusion as the (metropolitan) other sees them. It is in and through the complex instantiation of these imperatives that the critical transformation of the core discursive framework will occur, and that the creative (re)alienation of the author/subject-away from the artificialities of metropolitan integration and towards a new, enabling order of otherness-is inscribed. The result is such deliberately doubled discourses of disconnection as "Je me suis découvert admirant en me laissant aller à m'accepter" 'I found myself admiring while stooping to accept myself' (EPD 100; emphasis in the original), where the conjoining of subjectivity and self-reflexivity gives rise to a complex wave of psychosocial and psychohistorical splitting, a discursive articulation of postcolonial alienation that Chamoiseau draws on to engender the separation and (re)birth of the writer, his culture, his peers, and others as subjects of the discourse. Drawing on this assujettissement ("subjection"), Chamoiseau conceptualizes and inscribes a discursive framework for subjective dis-location, thereby undertaking "a literary operation that allows him to create an imaginatively conceived Other," and presenting his young narrator, le négrillon, as a dis-placed, third-person doppelganger of the narrative "I" who is "patently fictional," as Jay puts it. Suggestive patterns of chronology and linearity shore up the appearance of a factually based fictional world, one whose structure allows it to lay claim to being a mimetic reiteration of material reality, as Jay continues: "Chronological narrative remains as the structural principle of these works, but truth becomes a function not of remembering but of fictionalizing" (36). Yet, in a departure from Jay's vision of the autobiographical universe, the truth that is re-presented in Chamoiseau's world through his doubled discourse will be arguably a joint product both of remembering and of fictionalization, where memory is strategically placed at the service of a complex fictional framework that seeks to create a distanced, doubled re-citation of real events and subjects.
Here, the presumed panacea of integration encounters its limits in the impossibility of adequately representing the symbiotic yet paradoxical pluralities of self and other, the conjunctural contradictions of "I" and "they" that make up the material realities of Martinique as contemporary overseas department. The doubled teleologies of this ambiguous geopolitical status have been argued at length by myself and others2; its underlying antinomies were perhaps stated most forcefully in Justin Daniel's introduction to a groundbreaking collection of essays on the subject:
[L]a réalité qu'il est censé désigner est tantôt dénoncée ou rejetée, du moins sous la forme imposée par le pouvoir métropolitain, tantôt objet de demandes d'approfondissement ou d'aménagements, avec en prime une interrogation longtemps demeurée en suspens: la départementalisation correspond-elle à une forme hétérodoxe de décolonisation ou au contraire au simple travestissement d'un phénomène colonial poursuivant nolens volens son devenir historique? . . . la réalité est probablement plus prosaïque: la départementalisation se situe à l'intersection d'une double perception contradictoire dans la mesure où elle semble désigner tout à la fois un aboutissement et un processus en constant devenir.
[T]he reality that he is supposed to put forward is either denounced or rejected, at least in the form imposed by the metropolitan power; or it is subject to requests for further consideration or adjustments; with, for good measure, a question long left hanging: Does departmentalization correspond to a heterodox form of decolonization, or, on the contrary, is it a colonial phenomenon simply in disguise, pursuing willingly or unwillingly its historical becoming? . . . the reality is probably more prosaic: departmentalization is placed at the intersection of a double, contradictory perception in that it seems to indicate both a completed action and a process which is constantly coming into being. (11)
Such an analysis highlights the intrinsic paradoxes of the very principle of integration that, in bringing the départements d'outre-mer directly within the ambit of France, progressively erased their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural difference from the mainland, these sacrifices being the price, in one view, of infrastructural improvement. But if the persistent patterns of doubleness that drive this relationship of center to periphery enact a geopolitical and geocultural simulacrum of Derrida's pharmakon (the poison and the cure3), suffice it to say here that in inscribing Martinique as a distanced, creolized fragment of the French hexagon, Chamoiseau paradoxically posits the blackness of the autobiographical subject, a key component of the cultural heritage of the deliberately dis-placed figure of the strategically and symbolically (un)named négrillon, as that which must undergo constant revision and (re)inscription, bounded as it is by the universalist assumptions of francité/Frenchness on the one hand, and the historically elided avatars of Africa on the other. Again, Hall sums up the boundaries and implications of these complexities with his usual admirable clarity:
It is the presence/absence of Africa, in this form, which has made it the privileged signifier of new conceptions of Caribbean identity. Everyone in the Caribbean, of whatever ethnic background, must sooner or later come to terms with this African presence. . . . But whether it is, in this sense, an origin of our identities, unchanged by four hundred years of displacement, dismemberment, transportation, to which we could in any final or literal sense return, is more open to doubt. The original 'Africa' is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible. . . . Africa must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean people, but it cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered. (398-99)
This implicit recovery of the "rêver-pays" 'country-dreaming' (EPD 101) through a narrativized "he" that is simultaneously conjured and material, displaced and plural retrospectively (re)shapes and (re)constitutes the boundaries of black Franco-Caribbean subjectivity that the author seeks to unearth through the compound perspectives and corollaries of the writing process. As Chamoiseau seizes and capitalizes on this creolized space of doubling and dislocation, of a developing departmental subjectivity predicated on a toi devenu moi ("yourself become myself") (EPD 103), he will actively (re)imagine and (re)inscribe a formidable range of cultural markers and lieux de mémoire ("sites of memory") that embody the critical creolization of the French Caribbean, from key figures of the French colonial period like Pierre d'Esnambuc, a French trader in the Caribbean, who established the first permanent French colony, Saint-Pierre, in Martinique in 1635, to the Guadeloupean-born 1960 Nobel laureate Saint-John Perse, a descendant of a white creole family resident on the island since the eighteenth century. Deliberately conflating past and present, self and other in a paroxysm of psychocultural displacement, he inscribes what he calls the "moi-colons" 'myself-colonists' compressing split temporalities while literally adopting opposing subjectivities- "Un jour, dans un terrible rêve, je devins ce tout premier colon français" 'One day, in a terrible dream, I became that very first French colonist' (EPD 102)-and admits that the creolized poesis of Perse is the road to a kind of freedom: "Avec Saint-John Perse, les choses se transformèrent . . . le béké Perse, descendant des premiers colons blancs, a investi sa culture créole . . . je m'aperçus que Saint-John Perse dispose, en terre créole, d'une liberté fondamentale" 'With Saint-John Perse, things changed . . . Perse the white creole, descendant of the first white colonists, wears his creole culture . . . I realized that Saint-John Perse possesses, in a creole land, a fundamental liberty' (EPD 237). Ultimately, the presence of this dual "French connection" in Chamoiseau's text is neither ironic nor coincidental, since together these figures serve to reinforce the complex patterns of historical and ethnocultural métissage ("mixing") that make the French Caribbean more than the sum of its visible parts.
Chamoiseau's goal, then, as his discourse glides effortlessly between fiction, autobiography, and essay, is not simply to valorize a single strand of Martinique's historico-cultural experience, but to illuminate the complexity and diversity of his island world by locating and representing the interconnectedness of its many elements. To do so, he will have to struggle against what he calls, in an interview with Maeve McCusker, "ce formidable travail de l'unicité" 'this formidable work of unicity'; as part of a reductive cultural discourse of suppression and conformity, the overall delimiting effect of such universalist processes "fait que le plus souvent l'Histoire écrase les histoires et que la langue officielle écrase les autres langues" 'results in History most often crushing histories, and the official language crushing the other languages.' In a sense, then, Chamoiseau will engage in a form of discursive excavation and reconstitution, but one predicated on intersection and interconnection rather than exclusion and exclusivity: "Donc je ne cherche pas à reconstituer une Histoire, je cherche à reconstituer une tresse d'histoires, qui donnerait un petit peu le signe de la diversité dans le pays. Je suis également dans une perspective du lieu" 'I am therefore not looking to recreate a single History; I am looking to recreate braided histories, which would give a little indication of the country's diversity. At the same time, I am within a perspective of place' (725; emphasis in the original). As part of his evocation of his Martinican childhood in Chemin-d'école, Chamoiseau will insist on inscribing this cultural creolization through the unique and ubiquitous sounds of the creole language, but in the end, locating the Africa-driven blackness of the négrillon amid this cultural profusion will become his primary task. Recognizing Africa's role in shaping Martinique's compound landscape of cultural memory is also carefully inscribed in Ecrire en pays dominé: "Les présences africaines ont ainsi éclaboussé le pays tout entier. . . . J'appris donc à lire les mornes, les quartiers, les arbres, les cases, les hauts-et-bas: ils me révélaient ces trajectoires nègres dans la construction souterraine du pays. Leurs Traces-mémoires sont aussi dans les chants, les danses, les tambours, la cuisine, les cases, les légendes de la terre . . . nos rapports à la mort, notre goût de la vie. . . . Des concentrés d'identité" 'African presences thus marked the whole country . . . so I learnt to read the hills, the neighborhoods, the trees, the huts, the high and low ground. They revealed to me the black paths in the underground construction of the country. Their memory-tracks are also found in the chants, dances, drums, food, huts, the legends about the earth . . . our relationships with death, our taste for life. . . . They are identity condensed (EPD 127-28). The resonances of such markers will allow us to revise long-held notions of the relative locations of "center" and "periphery" for the post/colonial Caribbean, and to bring into play important concepts of location, cultural fusion, and creolization as a means of interrogating and displacing rigid assumptions of identity drawn on a supposedly exclusive relationship to the metropole as well as the implied abandonment of ethnocultural traces of Caribbean otherness. The role of place in this discursive and cultural schema becomes an increasingly primal one, such that, as Suzanne Crosta explains, "Le déplacement du 'qui suis-je?' à 'où suis-je' met en valeur les lieux de l'identification dans la formation identitaire" 'The displacement of "who am I?" to "where am I" emphasizes the places of identification in the creation of identity' (124). As author/narrator, Chamoiseau successively inhabits a plethora of iterations of the disjunctive Caribbean subject, becoming in turn "moi-Amériendiens" 'myself-Amerindians' (118), "moi-Africains" 'myself- Africans' (122), "Moi-indiens, moi-chinois, moi-syro-libanais" 'Myself-Indians, myself-Chinese, myself-Syrian-Lebanese' (129). His striking, repeated conjoining of the singular-plural underlines the diversity and difference that are intrinsic to Caribbean ethnohistory, culture, and subjectivity, even as the displacements that they signify suggest that exploring the boundaries of the creolization of identity in the post/colonial periphery remains an important if largely unaddressed issue, as Simon Gikandi puts it in his introduction to a special issue of Research in African Literatures on the Black Atlantic" "[W]hat is important to keep in mind, however, is the ambiguous ways in which margins and centers are conflated or blurred, the process of fusion and fission that brings them together and also separates them" (5). Thus Chamoiseau's insistence on a pluralized perspective on the Caribbean experience both implies and inscribes a corollary of plurality for the discursive armature girding his deliberately displaced exegesis of Franco-Caribbean subjectivity through a creative exploitation of narrative's autobiographical framework, one that will interrogate its function even as it extends its intrinsic form.
II
In a crucial sense, then, one can claim that the subjective and discursive displacements of Ecrire en pays dominé and Chemin-d'école are critically and thematically linked; the explicit acts of locational and subjective doubling and appropriation of the one both set the scene and provide the framework whereby the other articulates its cultural and symbolic content. In an important way, the appropriation of the childhood memoir that Chamoiseau undertakes is aimed specifically at interrogating the linear causalities of both autobiography in general and the creole world represented here in particular; as Crosta points out, Chamoiseau's text "est avant tout une introspection et un cheminement dans la vie quotidienne d'un enfant et d'une communauté" 'is above all introspective, and shows a progression in the everyday life of a child and a community,' its putative mandate being to pose "des questions intéressantes sur le genre autobiographique et sur les conventions qui lui sont rattachées" 'interesting questions on the autobiographical genre and the conventions attached to it' (117). Only by putting himself through the demands of this complex act of creative (re)appropriation and discursive restructuring, by engendering textual specificities of place through the discursive and subjective (re)constructions of la parole architecte 'the word as architect' (EPD 102) would Chamoiseau make possible in turn the differential representation of the intersecting lives and experiences of the négrillon and his interlocutors. These acts of construction and creativity must be engaged in positively, as a means of contesting elided histories and hierarchized cultural differences, as Chamoiseau insists to McCusker: "N]ous sommes en train de construire non pas des territoires mais des lieux, des lieux multiculturels, multilingues, multiraciaux, avec différentes histoires qui s'entremêlent" '[W]e are in the process of constructing not territories but places; multicultural, multilingual, multiracial places, with different, intermingling histories' (725-26). Thus, images and figures of displacement and unfamiliarity function in tandem with a plethora of linguistic and ethnocultural pluralisms to uncover the négrillon's way forward; however, these discursive and subjective complexities also appropriate through their displacements continuing figures of unhomeliness and unfamiliarity. In this regard, Crosta calls our attention to "la relation auteur-narrateur-personnage [qui] donne le change sur un récit autobiographique mais l'effet d'étrangeté domine sa narration" 'the author/narrator/character relationship [which] allays suspicion about an autobiographical tale, but the effect of foreignness dominates his narration' (128). For if the goal of this autobiographical work is to "trac[e] the young protagonist's first encounter with the French educational system in late 1950s' [sic] Martinique," as Renée Larrier puts it, "he becomes bewildered and fearful, experiencing a virtual exile, a paradoxical exile in that it occurs in his own land" (18). As we are about to discover, what the négrillon encounters is departmentalization's recurring phenomena of Frenchness; essentially, the French language, French culture, and the French bureaucracy all conspire to make him a seeming stranger in his own land, unable to traverse the codes of doubling and displacement that act as barriers to his mastery of the complex cultural and historical framework within which he exists. At the same time, however, his narrative remains critically and astygmatically split, shifting subtly between past and present and the first and third persons to engender alternating axes of judgment and point of view, as Crosta explains: "Le narrateur adulte, qui se souvient de son enfance, s'exprime à la première personne lorsqu'il intervient dans le récit pour faire des jugements de valeur, ou pour s'interroger sur les premisses de son projet mnémonique. Le recours à la troisième personne est utilisé plus souvent quand le narrateur décrit les événements du passé à travers les yeux du 'petit négrillon' " 'The adult narrator, who is recalling his childhood, uses the first person when he interrupts the narrative to make value-judgments, or to question the premises of his mnemonic project. The third person is adopted more often when the narrator describes past events through the eyes of the "petit négrillon"' (119). Ultimately, Chamoiseau's writing of Martinique and Martinicans is an extended articulation of discursive doubling, one that takes place between "I" and "he"; through the inscription of a dis-placed and supplementary Nous-Caraïbes /Ourselves-Caribbeans (EPD 140), the alienation and ambivalence of the hyphenated moi build creatively on this process of splitting to frame this communal voice and its telling of the tensions and paradoxes of growing up subject to the departmental condition.
Ostensibly an account of the narrator's early childhood-recounting incidents involving his interaction with his family, attending school for the first time and learning to read-Chemin-d'école tellingly incorporates a number of intriguing discourses, voices and strategies that function at the structural level to illuminate the narrator's several stages of self-discovery that themselves are the product of narrative self-reflexivity. Of overwhelming importance here are the rejoinders of the répondeurs/people who respond, and the continuing gloss of the primary narrative discourse through a series of strategically placed footnotes. This doubled, oscillating presence and absence of the répondeurs-who at times fail completely to respond-underlines the intended and intrinsic orality of the narrative, setting up a series of call-and-response exchanges that re-calls the role of the plantation conteur even as their historical framing in oraliture-the combination of oralité and écriture ("writing")-embodies the very subjective blackness that the négrillon attempts to negotiate and master. In coining this neologism, Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant highlighted the artful survival strategies of linguistic and performative deception that undergirded the universe of African slavery on the plantation: "L'oraliture créole naÎt dans le système des plantations, tout à la fois dans et contre l'esclavage, dans une dynamique questionnante qui accepte et refuse. Elle semble être l'ésthétique . . . d'un monde habitationnaire où il fallait survivre (résister-exister pour les uns, dominer pour les autres). Cette oraliture va s'affronter aux 'valeurs' du système colonial . . . et diffuser souterrainement de multiples contre-valeurs, une contre-culture" 'Creole oraliture is born in the plantation system, at the same time within and resisting slavery, in a questioning dynamic which accepts and refuses. It seems to be the esthetics . . . of a world of settlements where people had to survive (some resisting by existing; some dominating). This oraliture will confront the "values" of the colonial system . . . and clandestinely disseminate counter-values through a counter-culture' (LC 57). In a critical sense, these "Caribbean traces" of blackness are precisely what the négrillon will attempt to recuperate and appropriate, as he struggles to identify his place in this former slave colony turned departmental fragment of the greater hexagon.
Overall, structural elements such as these also draw attention to the dependent, fragmented character of the narrative voice, itself standing in for a displaced subject forced to refer to itself as "il" 'he.' This impressionistic palette ranges from Chamoiseau's overt summoning of the répondeurs: "Je demande les Répondeurs, à present" 'Now I call on the Répondeurs' (CD 36) in an act that elicits no response, to an exchange with the répondeurs that allows their response to act as a commentary on the unfolding events and characters, thereby supplementing the voice and account of the narrator himself: "Là, d'emblée, inoubliable, se tenait sa première maÎtresse: man Salinière. Répondeurs: Man Salinière / . . . Toi / du règne de ta porte / un oeil sur les enfants / tu t'attires d'une main / une promesse-poissons-rouges / O les pêcheurs sont là . . .!" 'There, immediately, stood his first unforgettable schoolteacher: man Salinière. Répondeurs: Man Salinière / . . . You / from the reign of your doorway/one eye on the children/with one hand you win for yourself/a red-fish-promise / O, the fishermen are there . . .!' (CD 36) to an apparent subtext to the main narrative line, embedded in a footnote, "Alors, chaque jour, chaque jour, il réclamait l'école" [1] Footnote 'Répondeurs: C'est réclamer qu'il réclamait! . . ." 'So every single day he demanded to go to school [1] Footnote Répondeurs: Is demand he was demanding! . . .' (CD 32). Now I have already discussed at length the discursive value of Chamoiseau's inventive incorporation of footnotes into a freestanding narrative4; these vocal and perspectival shifts subvert the narrative line through their very presence, and although here they act as commentary rather than explanation, they necessarily draw attention to and emphasize the self-reflexive, artisanal, fabricated nature of the literary text as structured artifact. Indeed, the very embedding of the footnotes enacts a key order of secondary re-presentation that highlights a complex Caribbean nexus involving layers of language and archetypes of creole identity Resultantly, any semblance of authority appearing to emanate from the négrillon's narrative is the product of the disjunctural displacement of narrator and narratee that, since they both are and are not one and the same, conspires to construct a doubled perspectival framework that allows multiple locations and formulations of subjectivity to take place, through a complex process of positioning that strategically places them neither fully inside nor outside the narrative frame. This simultaneity of commentary and strategically placed silences, confounding pre-ordained expectations and causing the narrator to ask, on occasion, "Où sont mes répondeurs?" 'Where are my répondeurs?' (CD 62), reinforces the fact that the répondeurs often remain silent or absent themselves with neither rhyme nor reason, thereby causing such inadvertently rhetorical gestures as the narrator's "Qui répond?" 'Who is responding?' (CD 56) to remain unanswered. By both subverting and exposing the reciprocal relationship that binds storyteller to audience, Chamoiseau's deliberately doubled narrative structure invites "une lecture axiologique" 'an axiological reading,' as Crosta puts it (119), as it ties the dual temporalities illuminated by the narrative to the historical, social, and identitarian complexities that undergird the négrillon's encounter with society.
Chamoiseau gives "Envie" 'Desire' and "Survie" 'Survival' as the symbolic subtitles of the two major sections into which he divides his narrative, "a juxtaposition," as Larrier aptly writes, "that reproduces the way in which the protagonist's desire to go to school is quickly transformed into a need to survive the experience" (20). But even before longing turns to survival, the narrative opens with a body of references to the pluralities that make up his creole world. As he espies and recognizes his others, as he "suivait de yeux jaloux les autres négrillons" 'jealously watched the other' négrillons, this inscription in an indigenous blackness slips immediately to a culinary trace of slave-era cuisine, as he was the one sent when "il fallait descendre à la boutique en quête d'une salaison manquante pour Man Ninotte, sa maman" 'someone had to go down to the stall to fetch the seasoning that Man Ninotte, his mother, needed.' This slippage from slave descendants to a form of food preparation introduced during that period due to its resistance to spoilage in heat and humidity reinforces the initial patterns of suggestive force; then, in quick succession, our subject is made to "traverser la rue en mangouste furtive" 'cross the street like a stealthy mangoose' and to "risquer un regard audacieux dans les échoppes syriennes" 'risk a daring glance inside the Syrian stalls' (17). By adding the mongoose, an animal introduced into the region to kill snakes and which is now considered indigenous, and the "Syrian" population, a group of migrant arrivals into the region from the end of the nineteenth century, and who are now widely considered an "indigenous" ethnic group, to this narrative and symbolic masala, Chamoiseau insists on the diversity of ethnocultural elements that the négrillon must confront and in and through which he must establish his subjectivity. In other words, even here, at the outset, the ethnic and cultural boundaries of identity that will be at play in Chemin d'école are clearly inscribed. Further, grounded as they are in the fabric of resistance and revival, these discursive displacements will themselves be commented on and deconstructed further by the insistent intrusions of language; figures of implicit erasure and absence emerge from what appears to be an almost parenthetical phrase, "la langue créole ici devenait maÎtresse-pièce: les rancoeurs accumulées à l'en-bas du francais l'avaient chargée de latences terribles" 'here the creole language became our most prized possession; the resentment accumulated in the downstairs rooms of French had given it a terrible, hidden weight' (CD 129). This new discursive landscape uses language to frame and enable the subjective trajectory of the négrillon, drawing on figures of subversion and hybridity similar to the ones that marked the symbolic dyads of the moi that, as we have seen, was gradually being constructed from the discourse of Ecrire en pays dominé: Through the persistence of these compound patterns of discursive ethnopluralism, where the parentheses bracket and highlight these critically doubled discursive simulacra, a strategy for expressing both the complex, creole filiations of communal difference and the subjective singularities of the négrillon's quest is constructed and valorized.
As autobiography, Chemin-d'école certainly observes and recreates the classic split between past and present selves; such a division, since it spans the temporal and psychological domains, is itself doubled in character, content, and implication. As Stephen Spender puts it, "the problem of an autobiographer, when he considers the material of his own past, is that he is confronted not by one life-which he sees from the outside-but by two. One of these lives is himself as others see him. . . . But there is also himself known only to himself, himself seen from the inside of his own existence" (116). By displacing himself from the constructed fictive subject of the négrillon, Chamoiseau's discourse in Chemin-d'école deftly accomplishes the necessary separation of this double distancing. At the same time, by seeking to recreate and re-present past events, conversations and thought processes in a narrative present, the narrator implicitly frames these discourses (and their subjects) within a constructed linearity that extracts its own "truth" out of its very act(s) of performativity. James M. Cox describes this conundrum well: "The truth or falsity of autobiography is thereby subordinated to the creativity, the design, the 'inner' truth of the narrative. The more we can say . . . that the autobiographer is creating and not inertly remembering his past life in the present, the more we can claim for autobiography a presence all but identical to the fictions and closed forms of 'imaginative' literature" (124-25). This critical "presence," then, through its generation of believability, interacts with the reader by being embedded in the (re)generation of character, and can be seen in the fascinating exchanges of a child's simple, single-minded logic: ". . . il voulait aller avec les Grands. - Eti? - Aller. - Aller où ça? S'inquiéta Man Ninotte - Aller" ' . . . he wanted to go with the big children. - What? - To go. - Go where? asked Man Ninotte, worried. - To go' (22). But importantly, these creative fragmentations of both narrative and subject also mark a symbiotic relation; the implicitly pluralized subjectivity of the négrillon is both embedded and embodied in the structure and function of the narrative discourse itself.
Further, the stylistic discourse in this novel also makes extensive use of free indirect discourse (FID), a critical narrative device on which I have written at length elsewhere. Suffice it to say at this juncture that FID is frequently incorporated into postcolonial texts because of its effective transmission of subjective ambiguity; a conjoining of subject and narrator, it most often marks a subject so conflicted as to be unable to articulate itself through the "I" of direct discourse. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan effectively discusses the parameters and implications of its functional incorporation into discourse,
FID can have a variety of thematic functions, contributing or being analagous to the governing thematic principle(s) of the work under consideration . . . it conveys the theme of the discontinuous, developing self. . . . FID enhances the bivocality or polyvocality of the text by bringing into play a plurality of speakers and attitudes . . . it also dramatizes the problematic relationship between any utterance and its origin. (113)
The discontinuity and development of subjectivity is certainly a common theme in postcolonial discourse, and its implicit locational ambiguities have often served in French Caribbean literature to unproblematically articulate and assert the "I." Such ambiguities, as I have shown elsewhere, are closely linked to the innate geopolitical and cultural ambivalences of overseas departmentalization itself, and the imperceptible slippage from one discourse to another repeatedly visible in this text is indeed uncoincidental. For example, while the fear of subjective erasure is first framed within the symbolic parameters of writing, with the self made visible (and erasable) through the intrinsically unstable temporalities of the chalkmark-"Le négrillon se voyait là, emprisonné entier dans un tracé de craie. On pouvait de ce fait l'effacer du monde!" 'The négrillon could see himself there, trapped whole inside a chalk line. From there he could be erased from the world! (CD 31)- the discourse clearly shifts into FID mode with the second sentence, thereby reinforcing the patterns of displacement and objectification on which the entire text is predicated. In addition, the three phases of expression embedded in the following extract-"Il y eut aussi des drames silencieux: réserver un ultime bout de craie en prévision d'un chef-d'oeuvre à venir ou le manger là-même? Quel fer pour choisir! . . ." 'There were also silent dramas: put aside a final bit of chalk anticipating a future masterpiece, or eat it there and then? What a hellish choice! (28; emphasis in the original)-from narrative, to semirhetorical question, to its implicit response- highlight the status of the négrillon as a divided, developing subject, one forced to share the departmental space with a complex set of contemporaries who "étaient multicolores, chabins, koulis, cacos, mulâtres, chi-chines, békés-goyave . . . mais il ne s'en apercevait pas" 'were multicolored: paler-skinned blacks, Indians, Haitians, mulattos, Asians, white guava creoles . . . but he did not notice' (CD 38-39). In other words, this plethora of ethnoplural subjects emphasizes the complexity of this narrative undertaking and its implicit, extended interrogation of the hybrid hierarchies overdetermining both him and his creole others within the departmental condition.
By the same token, one of the key tropes through which this displaced subjectivity of the négrillon is framed is clearly that of metropolitan alienation. Indeed, in a classic example of colonial estrangement, the text provides incontrovertible proof that he has internalized the "foreign" images and referents of the mainland before he has learned to read. Early on, we learn that he delights in impressing his teacher, Man Salinière, "en lui dessinant une sorcière, un sapin, un pommier, un flocon de neige" 'by drawing for her a witch, a fir tree, an apple tree, a snowflake' (CD 41). Barring some miracle or catastrophe of nature, objects such as these-and the apple tree and fir tree in particular-will always remain select avatars of the Euro-American landscape, be it of the physical or mental variety. But these references are but the tip of the iceberg (so to speak); in short order, we learn that even preschool, departmentalization has pushed the boy into the arms of a geographically and culturally foreign country from whose clutches it becomes increasingly difficult to extricate oneself:
Il pouvait babiller de la fée Carabosse, des sept nains, des affaires des sirènes, de pommes, de poires, d'un frère Jacques qui somnole, de son ami Pierrot-prêtemoi- ta-plume. Il savait les problèmes de la Belle au bois dormant. Il débitait l'enfilade du Printemps, de l'Eté, de l'Automne et de l'Hiver. . . . Il pouvait dessiner la tour Eiffel, des trains, des bottes de foin. Il expliquait à Man Ninotte que les sorcières volaient avec de longs balais, et . . . il dessinait la maison entre chênes et sapins, coiffée d'une cheminée fumante. Eti? . . .
He could babble about the wicked fairy, the seven dwarves, mermaid stories, apples, pears, a certain sleepy Frère Jacques, and his friend Pierrot from Au clair de la lune. He knew Sleeping Beauty's problems. He could chant Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter in order. . . . He could draw the Eiffel Tower, trains, and haystacks. He would explain to Man Ninotte that witches flew on long brooms, etc. . . . he drew the house between oaks and fir trees, wearing a smoking chimney. What's that?! (44)
The problem here is not that the négrillon has been absorbing the core elements of metropolitan culture per se, but rather that he has been doing so to the exclusion of any balancing or countervailing force from his own native Martinique. This critical absence neatly underscores the extent to which an inherent risk of neocolonial domination has long been-and continues to be-part and parcel of the subterranean hierarchies of the departmental relation. Once the ongoing trope of FID appears, punctuating the text through its rhetorical question "Eti?" 'What?' and signaling its discursive difference by its inscription in italics, it is the négrillon's father who ultimately sums up the extent to which his son's worldvision is, literally, out of place, as he picks up, implicitly, on the rhetorical italic closing the preceding extract: "Hola, cette marmaille nous dessine des pommes en pleine saison-mangots! . . . Il lui faut un bain de menthe glaciale! . . ." 'Hey, this kid is drawing us apples in the middle of mango season! . . . He needs a mint bath!' (48). And thus it is that the négrillon, literally and figuratively suspended between the symbolic binary of apples and mangoes, now finds it insufficient to "faire encore figure d'écolier aux yeux des Syriens qui le voyaient passer, de partir en même temps que les Grands" 'look like a student in front of the Syrians who saw him walk by, leaving at the same time as the big children' (47), and must now wend his way to school, forced thereby to negotiate the trees of departmental identity in order to discern the forest of creolization that the former so successfully mask.
III
'The material representation of the schoolyard itself is inscribed as an incipient microcosm of the tensions that simultaneously join and separate department and metropole; in a critical sense, the alternating binaries of alienation that have marked the négrillon's attempts to inscribe select specificities of Martinican subjectivity persist untrammeled. The négrillon's initial encounter with the school reinforces this paradoxical impression of "strangeness at home," as he confronts "une grande bâtisse de bois affublée d'un drapeau bleu-blanc-rouge" 'a large wooden building decked out in a blue, white and red flag' (48). The absence of any overt sense of familiarity or belonging here on seeing the French flag emphasizes the growing notion of black Martinican subjectivity set adrift; meanwhile, the ongoing and developing conflicts, oppositions and strife that are a universal part of growing up are transmuted into patterns of bullying and victimization that become symbolic re-presentations of the department's historical, economic, and geopolitical subordination to the metropole. Ultimately, the symbolism contained within the narrative commentary is conjoined with Chamoiseau's trademarks of humor, exaggeration, and irony, appropriating and subverting terms and practices that had worked to enable or maintain colonial domination in bygone eras: "Le négrillon comprit alors que la récréation était un lieu de guerre totale, sans pitié, entre jungle et désert, ou de vastes génocides pouvaient se commettre sans que nul n'en soit alerté" 'The négrillon therefore understood that recess was a pitiless, total war-zone, in between the jungle and the desert, where vast genocides could take place without anyone being notified' (62). Here, by repositioning the choice signifiers "guerre" 'war' and "jungle," Chamoiseau manages to simultaneously highlight and undermine the implicit inscription in violence and primitivity that has historically mediated the metropolitan perspective on its "others": here, a departmental other, in Homi Bhabha's phrase, marked as less than one, and double.
Slowly but surely, the hierarchical patterns and practices of French colonial education-even in the departmental era of presumed equality of ethnicity and opportunity-emerge through its implicit ignorance and erasure of local material realities. Indeed, by playfully mocking the overdone and overly correct French delivery of the new schoolteacher, who speaks in mellifluous tones and flowery sentences that draw on structures more often read than heard, the continuing dominance of the French language and culture in the hexagon's overseas territories remains unchallenged: "Permettez-moi sans plus attendrre, nonobstant les aléas du moment, de vous souhaiter bien le bonjourr, messieurs . . ." 'Allow me, sirs, without hesitation, notwithstanding the vagaries of the moment, to wish you wholeheartedly a good-day' (CD 51). And in fact, one of the Teacher's seemingly simple questions soon frames the cultural disjuncture between mainland and department, while simultaneously illuminating the precise identitarian conundrum being faced by the négrillon: "Qui est en mesurre de me dirre quel jourr, de quel mois, en quelle année, nous sommes? . . ." 'Who is in a position to tell me which day, month and year it is?' Given that his previous knowledge on this issue is now demonstrably limited and inadequate-"Il connaissait les jours de messe, les jours de lessive de Man Ninotte, le jour de la Toussaint, le jour de Noël, le jour de l'an . . ." 'He knew which days they went to church, which days Man Ninotte did the laundry, All Saints' Day, Christmas Day, New Year's Day . . . (57)-and thus finding himself incapable of bridging the gap between the local and the global, it is the rhythms and realities of his creole world that must now be set aside in favor of historico-cultural markers that are almost as foreign as the French flag: "La vie se rythmait avec les temps-la-pluie ou temps-soleil, le temps des poissons rouges et du poisson blanc" 'Life was regulated by the rainy season or the dry season, the red fish and white fish seasons' (57-58). Such culturally foreign impositions insistently displace the familiar elements of the négrillon's world and progressively re-place them with a growing body of referents from the world of fir and apple trees, and, as Larrier states, "lead[s] one to conclude that his school experience is similar in many ways to a migrant's experience. Although the border he crosses is neither to another nation nor to a big city, it could still be considered another world" (18-19). It is the narrator's implicit recognition of the négrillon's embarkation on this identitarian journey of body and mind-and of the key role within it played by language(s)-that elicits his crucial pronouncement that "ce chemin français se faisait étranger . . . des mots . . . ne disposaient plus d'aucune proximité créole" 'this French path became foreign . . . words . . . were no longer even close to creole' (68). As this paradoxical process of creole estrangement continues, the traditional hierarchies of center and periphery are progressively reversed, such that metropolitan exemplars of the road to culture appear increasingly opposed to indigenous ones: "Les images, les exemples, les références du maÎtre n'étaient plus du pays. Le MaÎtre parlaient français comme les gens de la radio ou les matelots de la Transat" 'The Teacher's images, examples and references were no longer from our country. The Teacher spoke French like the people on the radio or the Transat sailors' (68). But although these patterns of metropolitan foreignness strongly suggest the inexorable progression of subjective and communal alienation, overall we see a departmentally driven doubling that ultimately envelops and overdetermines the narrative, engendering an alterity that subsequently drives the forms and strategies of discursive resistance slowly being adopted by the négrillon. As Larrier puts it, "this new space welcomes neither his creole language, nor his creole culture. . . . School, an arm of France's assimilation policy, consumes the students instead. French culture wants no part of creolization" (21). But this goal of assimilation will itself be increasingly contested by a growing praxis of creole appropriation and inscription being put into place by the négrillon himself, engendering an ongoing framework of alienation and otherness that, as Crosta puts it, "amène l'enfant à se considerer autre qu'il est" 'leads the child to consider himself to be other than what he is' (149). But this doubled and disjunctural moi insists on re-presenting the path of discovery embarked upon by the négrillon, even as these past acts are reflected upon and undergo a form of secondary revision through the oraliture of the present being expressed by Patrick Chamoiseau the author.
What the négrillon and his counterparts are experiencing, in fact, is a form of subjective and cultural difference predicated on departmentalization's engendering of postcolonial alienation, in a paradoxical iteration that somehow centers on their recognition of their own otherness. Indeed, in the complex layers of social signification unleashed by departmentalization, Martinicans had gone from being the numerical majority in their island colony to being a minority within the larger geopolitical schéma of the hexagon. This turnabout of events obliged them, as newly minted French citizens, to face up to what Stuart Hall calls "their 'otherness,' their 'difference'. Difference has been marked. How it is then interpreted is a constant and recurring preoccupation in the representation of people who are racially and ethnically different from the majority population. Difference signifies" ("Spectacle" 230; emphasis in the original). In a sense, then, the challenge facing this generation is both to come to terms with this difference and to creatively appropriate it, to find a mediating strategy that will allow the articulation of their double identity as French and West Indian, metropolitan and Martinican. As they progressively encounter patterns of alienation in the system of socialization embodied in the French-based school system, the emerging patterns of recognition and resistance that increasingly center on the representation of language and culture "invite[nt] le lecteur à saisir les rapports entre les apparences et les réalités, les rapports entre les affirmations politiques et culturelles et les diverses formes de l'oppression" 'invite[s] the reader to grasp the relationships between appearances and realities, and the relationships between political and cultural affirmations and the different forms of oppression,' as Crosta explains (145). As the négrillon and his cohort gradually learn to interpret and re-iterate these differences in a way that valorizes these newly minoritized indigenous values over those of the metropolitan majority into which they have recently been integrated, the critical subjective displacement engendered here will mediate the discursive doubleness that frames négrillon and author, Martinicans and metropolitans, the colonial past and the departmental present.
This developing pattern of cultural alienation quickly centers on language, giving rise to a protracted battle between creole and French waged largely within the classroom. Even prior to the advent of departmentalization in 1946, as part and parcel of French historico-cultural indoctrination, any use of the creole language was firmly banned on school grounds, and infractions of this rule were severely penalized, with punishments up to and including the corporal. Pupils lived in abject fear of the mockery and scorn that would result if they were caught speaking what was, to all intents and purposes, their native tongue. Thus the intrinsic respect accorded the Headmaster is bolstered by this ongoing creole apprehension, a tension of which he is all too aware: "Qu'est-ce que j'entends, on parle créole?!" 'What do I hear? Is someone speaking creole?!' (65). This pernicious insistence on demonizing and demeaning the indigenous extended to the Teacher as well: "Le français semblait l'organe même de son savoir. . . . Et sa langue n'allait pas en direction des enfants comme celle de Man Salinière . . . Ô le MaÎtre était français!" 'French seemed to be the very instrument of his knowledge. . . . And his language was not aimed at children, like Man Salinière's . . . O, the Teacher was French!' But in fact the intrinsic authority embodied in, and wielded by the Headmaster, and particularly the Teacher, becomes the pretext for a number of incidents of authoritarian subversion that simultaneously serve as textual moments of great humor and hilarity. Primarily, such moments arise when the Teacher, intent on inculcating the correctness and ascendancy of French, encounters the atavistic persistence of creole pronunciation or terminology among his charges. Examples range from his bringing a pineapple to school and asking the class to identify it, only to receive a resounding chorus of "Un zannana, messié!" 'A zannana, sir!' The single-word commentary that follows subliminally sums up the teacher's reaction: "Horreur" (85). Or, after a moralistic recounting of a tale involving the mysterious disappearance of apples from their tree, the Teacher's strenuous efforts to have said action defined elicit the following response: "C'est un volêr-dê-poule, messié . . ." 'He's a chicken-thief, sir . . .' (79). Beneath the patterns of humor and ineradicable creole speech, however, lurk even more telling tensions of culture and belonging; interestingly, each explanation of this is couched in a footnote, a choice technique of the Chamoiseaudian oeuvre whose discursive and symbolic significance has been discussed above. By explaining, then, that "[e]n langue créole, le chapardeur est appelé 'voleur de poule,' quel que soit l'objet de son délit" 'In Creole language, a petty thief is called a chicken-thief, no matter what he steals' (79), or that "[e]n langue créole, ananas se dit zannana, et commence donc avec un z" 'The French word for pineapple, ananas, is said zannana in creole, and therefore starts with a z' (85), the narrator's goal at bottom is to emphasize the ineluctable fact that the creole language possesses both a logic and a historico-cultural tapestry that will forever separate it from French; indeed, its very resilience in the face of metropolitan imposition provides proof positive of the persistence and value of difference. Finally, by signing the latter footnote "Note de l'Omniscient" 'Note from the Omniscient,' Chamoiseau playfully re-engages with that critical element of discursive self-reflexivity for which he is so well known, mixing the implicit fact of footnotes with the carefully layered structure of this auto/biographical recollection, and putting (calling?) into question the status of the very text in whose de/ coding we are engaged with him.
What emerges above all, however, is the extent to which the pupils' resistance to imposed French pronunciation patterns appears both incontestable and involuntary; their insistence on their creole patterns of speech bespeaks the cultural triumph of their indigenous identity over an alien, "foreign" way of being whose aim is to displace and replace the former and to be internalized and articulated without question. No amount of force or repetition appears adequate to this task of cultural conversion:
Pour le son ou, on lui proposa manicou, boutou, balaou que la langue française ignorait. Le son o ne lui amena qu'un grossier boloko. . . . Quand les enfants parlaient, le u se transformait en I selon leur loi naturelle. La viande crue devenait cri, l'homme juste se faisait jiste; refusé dégénérait en refisé. Le son eur se délitait en ère: docteur donnait doctère, la fleur devenait flère, inspecteur s'étalait en inspectère. . . . Mais il y avait pire aux yeux du MaÎtre: les r disparaissaient, le torchon n'était plus qu'un tôchon, la force se muait en fôce. . . . (86)
For the French ou sound, we used the words manicou, boutou, balaou, which were not to be found in French. The sound o came from the coarse word boloko. . . . When the children spoke, the u transformed into an i (pronounced "ee") following their natural law. Cru became cri, juste became jiste, refusé became refisé. The sound eur became air: docteur gave doctair, fleur became flair, inspecteur resulted in inspectair. . . . But in the eyes of the Teacher, there was worse: r's disappeared; torchon was reduced to tochon, force mutated into foce. . . . (86)
These unique and inescapable vocal patterns are nothing less than the assertion of a Martinican identity, one forged in the survival strategies of slavery and colonization and from the atavistic, intersecting traces of Africa, Asia, and the European colonizing powers. And paradoxically, but certainly not coincidentally, while the attitudes of the authority figures of the Headmaster and the Teacher appear to have been subsumed into this neocolonial matrix, those of the younger, reputedly less mature and more susceptible generation show much more robust signs of resistance and independence.
This crisis that threatens valorized hierarchies of Frenchness reaches its crescendo with the arrival of three "petits-revenus-de-France" 'the-ones-backfrom- France' who immediately become the apple of the Teacher's eye; indeed, one of them-perhaps uncoincidentally "fils d'un mulâtre douanier" 'son of a mulatto customs official'-capitalizes on the social privilege accorded by his lighter skin color in that he also "disposait d'une science parisienne d'accent brodé, de vocabulaire et de comportement qui émotionnait le MaÎtre" 'had the knowledge of a Parisian and an elaborate accent, with a vocabulary and behavior that stirred the Teacher' (87). At this juncture, the Teacher may be said to evince a displaced desire to take the place of his mulatto pupil, in order perhaps to more literally embody the Frenchness that his young charge articulates so easily. For underneath, the Teacher himself is vulnerable, his mastery of French randomly exposed as little but a veneer: "En proie à l'énervement, le MaÎtre lui-même retrouvait son créole" 'When exasperated, the Teacher himself fell back into speaking creole' (89). But when, for all concerned, "Parler devint héroïque" 'Speaking became a heroic act' (88), the challenge embodied here clarifies the extent to which language became, or was made, a high-stakes testing- and proving ground in the battle over the internalization of the colonial landscape.
But language could also very easily be turned into a weapon, as the négrillon finds that his schoolmates have an astonishing facility for deconstructing his name, and, implicitly, his national, island, communal, and discursive identities. By the same token, the critically doubled narrator, speaking of himself in the third person as the négrillon, puts issues of discursive and subjective splitting front and center once again, since in this linguistic schéma he obviously both is and is not the author, Chamoiseau: "Son nom était un machin compliqué rempli de noms d'animaux, de chat, de chameau, de volatiles et d'os. . . . Cela transforma son nom en un mâchouillis d'un haut comique qui acheva son anéantissement" 'His name was a complicated thing, full of the French names of animals: cat [chat], camel [chameau], birds [oiseaux], and bones [os]. All of that transformed his name into a highly comical, chewed-up sound which crushed him completely' (54). This simultaneous fragmentation and pluralization, a progressive but inexorable unpersoning, is shortly conjoined with the implicit illegitimacy of the creole language, as his schoolroom neighbor, Gros-Lombric, is hauled before the principal for the egregious infraction of the "no creole spoken" rule. This confrontation between cultural patterns soon signals the triumph of the indigenous: "Interdite dans la classe, elle pouvait ici (en mots-rescapés, en mots-mutants, en mots-glissants, en mots-cassés-ouverts, en mots-désordres, en mots-rafales-hallucinés . . .) transmuer les bons-sentiments en chimies fielleuses, casser un sanglot apeuré en hoquet de chien-fer, raidir un tremblement en épilepsie brute" 'Forbidden in class, here it could (through survivor-words, mutant-words, devious words, words-brokenopen, disorder-words, hallucinated-flurry-words . . .) transmute finer feelings into venomous alchemy, snap a frightened sob into the dreaded hairless dog's snarl, strengthen a quiver into brutish convulsions' (CD 129).
However, while words imply at least the possibility of possession and mastery, culture is quite another matter, and the stratospheric heights of metropolitan values and practices are to be inculcated into these new departmental subjects at all costs: "Le mot France était magique. Il répartissait entre l'enfer et le paradis. Il y avait la farine-france, l'oignon-france, la pomme-france, les Blancs-France . . ." 'The word France was magical. It was divided between hell and heaven. There was france-flour, there were france-onions, france-apples, france-Whites . . .' (152). Here, the key presence of the hyphen is strategically multivalent; while on the one hand its function of separation marks a subjective and perceptual form of doubling similar to the permutations of the moi (both I and the other) that we have seen in Ecrire en pays dominé, where the "farine" or the "oignon" in question marks the conjunctural coming together of self and other, here and there, at the same time this is also the site of a strategic split in the dyad, a geopolitical and ethnocultural division that goes to the core of the separate historical trajectories that have joined and separated France and Martinique across almost 375 years and during both the colonial and the departmental periods. But this "foreignness" of metropolitan mores is even further emphasized by the alienness and incomprehensibility of the referents that emerge from their assigned readings, elements completely unknown either to the natural or the imaginative Caribbean landscape: "Les textes de lecture parlaient de fermes, d'oies, de violons d'automne, de sabots, de lièvres, de cheminées, d'écureuils . . ." 'Reading books talked of farms, geese, violins, clogs, hares, chimneys, squirrels . . .' (163). The problem here, as the Antiguan novelist Jamaica Kincaid has pointed out in regard to her discussion of Wordsworth's well-known poem "The Daffodils,"5 is in part the implicit valorization of colonial education and its attendant norms, the interiorization of a "foreign" natural world by means of an obligatory schooling in Romantic ideology. The tension here is between a forced suppression of the indigenous legacies of a slave-based history in favor of the inculcation of unfamiliar, yet overvalued metropolitan values and practices that function through a hierarchical educational system bent upon excluding the local; ultimately, it is not so much the absorption of unfamiliar or foreign cultural references, but doing so to the absolute exclusion of reading about comparable or contrasting components from the reader's indigenous world. For Chamoiseau's négrillon and his classmates, then, it is not just that they have never seen a goose, a squirrel, or a violin, but rather that as departmental subjects their metropolitanoriented syllabus disseminates "illustrations à chaque page qui emplissaient notre tête d'un monde bien loin du nôtre" 'illustrations on every page which filled our heads with a world so far from our own' (166); in other words, they are not being allowed to read about their own mongooses, sugar cane, or coconut trees, while simultaneously being forced to recognize not only the superiority of the culture that these elements metonymically represent, but its implied desirability as well. Departmentalization's implicit imposition of metropolitan desirability, or exclusivity, then, ultimately amounted to nothing less than the re-placement of one pattern of racial preponderance by another, a tacit racialization of the departmental condition carried out in word rather than in deed. In reasserting such colonial hierarchies, the metropolitan educational agenda implies that the binaries that have historically bridged relations between center and periphery are still vigorously and intractably in force. In other words, the racial unsaid continues to lurk, as Toni Morrison reminds us: "The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the fingers, but not the hand" (46). In these terms, the extended act of discursive erasure engaged in by the metropole ultimately encounters both material and symbolic resistance as the hand of the négrillon insists on learning to fashion its own marks and codes of signification, ones drawn on the historical, cultural and linguistic specificity of colonial and departmental experience.
The final link in this chain of signification comes with the négrillon's discovery of Aimé Césaire and the negritude movement; not uncoincidentally, this event is mediated by the appearance of a substitute teacher. And at stake is the interiorization and re-appropriation of an indigenous blackness, one perhaps taken for granted at the start of the négrillon's subjective trajectory, but increasingly contested as the arc of the story-and its attendant socializations-has progressed. As the whiteness of metropolitan culture and history are presented as the new normal, its binary opposition to Martinican departmental blackness takes on added significance when read from a Saussurean perspective, where difference-where one element takes on signification only through its difference from its opposite- becomes the prime determinant of meaning. Of key importance here are the ways in which binary color divisions are tied to diverging experiences of culture, ethnicity, and history, effectively setting up a situation whereby the opposing shades of white and black acquire layers and resonances of signification that surpass even the social significations that attach to "race"; as Hall reminds us, "We know what black means . . . not because there is some essence of 'blackness' but because we can contrast it with its opposite-white. Meaning . . . is relational. It is the 'difference' between white and black which signifies, which carries meaning" ("Spectacle" 234; emphasis in the original). In the newly significant social schéma of departmentmetropole relationality, then, learning and accepting what black means as a category beyond its difference from, or opposition to the category white becomes the ultimate challenge in the négrillon's search for a new, enabling form of discourse. By building on this doubled departmental perspective, then, the analeptic "workin- progress" of charting the "Chamoisification" of the French language draws on layers of linguistic and ethnocultural experience to essentially split difference, forcing discursive form to follow its function of indigenous cultural signification.
Difference in the classroom soon precipitates a difference in direction, as the substitute incessantly cites Césaire's "special black view of the world and a symbolism that would ultimately transcend race" (61), as James Arnold puts it; in a novel departure, the substitute teacher tolerates creole, wears African clothing, and does not denigrate Africa or other non-Western parts of the world. This indigenous resistance to metropolitan forces of cultural assimilation, to "the stigmatization, or even erasure, of non-Western cultural traditions," as Gregson Davis explains, and one predicated on a rehabilitation of Africa as "an idea that has to be constantly re-invented" (7-8), stands in stark contradistinction to the standardized platitudes of metropolitan superiority and colonial benevolence which were still the stuff of the classroom:
En ce temps-là, le Gaulois aux yeux bleus, à la chevelure blonde comme les blés, était l'ancêtre de tout le monde. En ce temps-là, les Européens étaient les fondateurs de l'Histoire. Le monde . . . commençait avec eux. Nos Îles avaient été là, dans un brouillard d'inexistence . . . pris dans l'obscurité d'une non-histoire cannibale. Et, avec l'arrivée des colons, la lumière fut. La Civilisation. L'Histoire . . . Ils ployaient les épaules sous le lourd fardeau de ce monde qu'ils élargissaient aux cimes de la conscience.
During that period, the blue-eyed, straw-blond-haired Gaul was everyone's ancestor. At that time, Europeans were the founders of History. The world . . . began with them. Our islands had been there, in a fog of inexistence . . . caught in the obscurity of a cannibalistic non-history. And, with the arrival of the colonists, there was light. Civilisation. History . . . Their shoulders bent under the heavy weight of this world that they were bringing to the heights of consciousness. (170-71)
Remarkably, all the standard tropes of colonial superiority are present here, from Western civilization as the incarnation of light and knowledge to the stereotypes of savagery, primitivism, and nonhistory from which the colonized were to be saved in spite of themselves. And it is precisely here that we may locate the specific space of the substitute teacher's subversion. Although still bounded by a binary system of discursive signification, this teacher effectively puts into place an alternative set of enabling constructs and suppositions, ones old and yet new, but predicated now on both African and Caribbean exemplars of the black experience: "[L]es mûres devenaient des calebasses, pommes et poires se transformaient en dattes. Les images étaient modifiées: Haut comme trois pommes se disait Haut comme trois amandes, Maigre comme un loup en hiver devenait Maigre comme la hyène du désert. Il prétendait que nos ancêtres nétaient pas des Gaulois, mais des personnes d'Afrique. . . . Face à l'Europe il dressait l'Afrique" '[B]lackberries became calabashes, apples and pears transformed into dates. Images were modified: As big as three apples was now As big as three almonds, Thin as a wolf in winter became Thin as a desert hyena. He claimed that our ancestors were not Gauls, but Africans. . . . Opposite Europe, he erected Africa' (182). Ultimately, a transformation of subjectivity is engendered, whereby the négrillon, increasingly aware of the critical intersections of language, race, and politics by which his world was clearly overdetermined, comes to internalize "this racialization of thought," as Fanon puts it (150), a realization that, within the doubled discursive world of this autobiographical act, valorizes Chamoiseau's key act of "literary creation," in that it "addresses and clarifies typically nationalist themes" (173). Thus the entire work becomes an act and an accounting of psychological decolonization, insofar as "la décolonisation culturelle (la remise en question de l'assimilation) l'amène à s'intérroger sur les perceptions de la domination du monde, au-delà des prescriptions ou des solutions politiques ou sociales" 'cultural decolonization (the questioning of assimilation) leads him to wonder about the perceptions of world domination, beyond the political or social recommendations or solutions,' as Crosta cogently explains. Ultimately, the négrillon slowly comes to terms with the disturbing yet creative realization that while the words and images to which he was so attached were indeed diverting, not only did valid indigenous alternatives lie within arm's reach, it might prove more of a challenge and an accomplishment to infuse the unfamiliar with the familiar. In this way, through a simultaneous act of creative transformation and valorization, the myths and histories, language and objects of his Caribbean world could be given discursive life.
At bottom, then, this creole world was engendered from his reverence for the printed word: "Le livre, pour lui, était objet phantasmagorique. . . . Le négrillon abordait chaque objet imprimé avec la même gourmandise" 'The book, for him, was a phantasmagorical object. . . . The négrillon relished every printed object in the same way' (199). Aided and abetted in this endeavor by his mother, Mam Ninotte, who now brings him "journaux, almanachs, bandes dessinées, romans policiers, photo-romans, tout" 'newspapers, almanachs, comic strips, detective novels, photo stories, everything,' conjoining the subjective and the communal identities constructs its own representative framework, as "la petite langue créole de sa tête fut investie d'une chiquetaille de langue française, de mots, de phrases" 'what little creole language there was in his head was surrounded by shreds of the French language in words and phrases' (201). The act of (re)writing in which he increasingly engages becomes the ongoing project of wresting identity away from metropolitan control, re-engendering and reshaping it to reflect local histories, expressions, ethnicities, and exigencies: "[L]e négrillon recomposait les livres à partir des images. Il imaginait des histoires et s'efforcait de les retrouver dans les textes imprimés toujours indéchiffrables" '[T]he négrillon rewrote books from their images. He imagined stories and made himself find them in the printed texts which were as yet indecipherable' (200). As he "encrait sans trop savoir une tracée de survie" 'etched out, unaware, a survival plan' (202), the double discursive project of subjective and departmental representation comes full circle to terminate in the book in and through which this arc of accomplishment is traced.
In the final analysis, it is the definition and articulation of Martinican cultural identity that have been at stake. Crucially, the divergent experiences of nations and the competing tensions of history mean that there are at least two ways of conceiving of this critical notion, as Hall reminds us in an important passage,
There are at least two different ways of thinking about 'cultural identity'. The first position defines 'cultural identity' in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self', hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves' which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people', with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. . . . There is, however, a second, related but different view [that] recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather-since history has intervened'what we have become'. . . . Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. . . . Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. ("Cultural Identity" 393-94; emphasis in the original)
I have quoted this passage at length because it seems to me to bear directly on the developing trajectory of subjective inscription and its framing in difference that is at the core of Chamoiseau's narrative. In other words, for the négrillon to effectively come to terms with the critical pluralities of his indigenous Martinican identity, he must first recognize that the notion of a "common historical experience" upon which the integrationist agenda of departmentalization is predicated is both specious and superficial; rather, it is by facing up to those patterns of difference and plurality that the population of the periphery will discover "what we really are," as the tensions and teleologies of history gradually illuminate the totality of "what we have become." It is through this process of "constant transformation," one that articulates the intersecting axes of "becoming" and "being" even as these nodes of contact frame the doubled Antillean identities of these French (post)colonial subjects against and through the metropole, that the varied strategies of resistance to departmental hegemony will be articulated.
Chamoiseau insists on the primacy of discursive displacement in his framing of departmental difference, using the imaginative inscription of regionally grounded experience to contest hegemony through an insistence on plurality. Ultimately, his discursive strategy can be said to privilege neither antillanité nor créolité, but rather functions within an agonistic problematic that draws on pervasive patterns of inferiority and exclusion, generating a double-voiced narrative that becomes a compound act of resistance and affirmation; it resists the hegemony of an imposed francité while affirming the communitarian vibrancy and cultural validity of the diaspora. By thus constructing a Caribbean post/colonial discourse doubled in intent and form, writing in the Caribbean context will be liberated from the constraints of linearity and causality, traits long used to validate the binary system of hierarchy and progress undergirding colonial ideology and its concomitant discursive praxis. In other words, Chamoiseau's inscription of the "how" and the "now" of Martinique's diverse contemporary materiality deliberately eschews chronological patterns of narrative order, replacing these implicit patterns of metropolitan imposition with creative pluralisms and disjunctures whose complexities are reflective of the Martinican experience. Further, as we have seen, the integral inscription of creole in these discourses, as Hall puts it, is clearly "powerfully expressive of local conditions" (2003: 28), and makes this creolized indigenous culture not only the material center of the négrillon's world, but "the existential and expressive basis for cultural production . . . an appendix to the project of national self-constitution" (2003: 35). Thus Chamoiseau's "sentiment d'un organisme polyrythmique, à voix multiples" 'feeling of a polyrhythmic body, with multiple voices' (186) assumes discursive shape and symbolic purpose, establishing an iconography for a nationalist writing strategy based on a complex, interlocking series of differences and syntheses. In this instantiation of the double vision that ultimately separates Martinican subjectivity from the material realities of metropolitan universalism, the former insistently valorizes its intrinsic capacity for divergence, doubleness, and distinction.
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