Re-Imagining Diversity and Connection in the Chaos World an Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau

Re-Imagining Diversity and Connection in the Chaos World An Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau

by Janice Morgan

We have all heard the rhetoric of politicians and corporate leaders on the topic of globalization. Meanwhile, fierce controversies are arising all around the planet about just what, exactly, globalization means, what its implications are, and who it serves. And then, there is the ugly paradox: even as global cultures seem to be merging more closely together, we see ethnic/racial/linguistic conflicts erupting on nearly every continent. With the old identity structures breaking down and amid ardent appeals to maintain the boundaries by returning to religious and cultural fundamentalisms, what progressive alternatives do we have? How do we, both individually and collectively, re-conceive our identities and our places in the world? For a group of forward thinking Caribbean writers who grew up within a post-colonial society with a history of slavery going back to the 17th century, returning to the past is neither possible nor desired. So it is not surprising that some of today’s boldest thinkers on the subjects of diversity and re-imagining cultural identities should come from tiny islands located between worlds. Both Patrick Chamoiseau and Edouard Glissant (cited often in the interview) come from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, situated geographically between the two Americas; demographically between Africa, Europe, and Asia; and historically between a genocidal past and an uncertain future. In this region of the world, which has seen two Nobel laureates in literature recently–V. S. Naipaul (Trini- dad, 2001) and Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia, 1992)—issues of racial/ethnic identities, native territories, and linguistic communities have never been easy. Yet, while keeping their eyes open to present dangers, writers like Chamoiseau and Glissant believe that it is possible to persuade a troubled world with the beauty of another vision. Patrick Chamoiseau (b.1953) is a novelist and essayist, known internationally especially for his multi-generational fictional history of Martinique,Texaco , which won the Prix Gon- court in 1992. With a style as rich and thick as a Creole gumbo, Chamoiseau writes tales of working class struggle, unrequited love, marronnage, sorcery, zombies, and politics. Though many readers associate him with the créoliste movement, the writer’s ideas have evolved to become more complex on the subject of identities that are both post-colonial and transnational, as can be seen in his essay, Ecrire en pays dominé/ Writing in a Dominated Land (Gallimard, 1997). The author lives in Fort-de-France, where besides working full- time as a counselor for young adults in the court system, he is a public spokesperson and activist for the preservation of local culture and the environment.

Callaloo 31.2 (2008) 443–453

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Throughout the interview, Chamoiseau refers to terms and ideas by Edouard Glissant. Born in Martinique, trained in Paris, Edouard Glissant (b.1928) is a novelist, poet, and essayist who has emerged as an influential theorist of transcultural hybridity and complex relational identities, frequently inventing his own poetic vocabulary—such as the “Tout- Monde” [Whole World] or the “Chaos-Monde”[Chaos World] —to describe the changing cultural landscapes of our time. Specifically, Glissant adapted Deleuze and Guattari’s no- tions of root/verticality versus rhizome/horizontality to re-examine the ways we define our identity. Do we define ourselves through the idea of rootedness, a connection to a single line of ancestry, a single place of origin? If so, then we will tend to exclude the Other, maintaining a fundamental sense of separation between ourselves and those whose origin is elsewhere. Or, do we define ourselves in rhizomatic terms; that is, our identity arises out of an unfolding series of connections across places and times? This view of identity privileges contact and relationship with the Other; it acknowledges travel and exchange. It is this “poetics of relation”1that both Glissant and Chamoiseau write about, seeing it as providing a new, more positive framework for both speaking about our individual identities and for solving our collective problems. The interview that follows deals with these ideas in a Caribbean context, but it is evident that they are applicable everywhere.

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MORGAN: As well as being a writer, you work within the legal system here in Martinique. You work with young people on parole. What kinds of changes or trends in society have you observed over the years in this role? 2

CHAMOISEAU: Family structures, social structures receive more and more influences—structures, value systems that come from everywhere. That’s modernity: modernity is entering into perspectives from outside the community, from everywhere. An example of a powerful cultural code here is matrifocality—that is, the family is organized around the mother and women relatives—grandmother, sisters, etc.—so families in Martinique have traditionally been maternal families, only women, men were peripheral in popular culture here. Since slavery, the symbolic father was the master, so there wasn’t a place for the father for multiple reasons; the father remained peripheral and the family was struc- tured around the mother, the grandmother, and women—that’s the foundation. Now today, through immigrations of families from India, which are patriarchal, through the influence of French families—and the subsidized housing systems we have built by the French—we have also single parent households: in that case, because of limited living space, there isn’t room for the extended female family members; the family is reduced to its smallest expression from the type of lodging. In any case, today we have all the possible types of families: father-centered, mother-centered, single parent, nuclear family, also homosexual families which are starting to appear—and all these types of families, we are choosing to create them not in a collective manner but in an individual manner.

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What constitutes modernity—and we are not escaping it here in Martinique—is that we are moving away from traditional models, from community models, from what is culturally defined here, locally, in terms of language and identity, too. And what is hap- pening? It’s that the individual is more and more alone; it isn’t the collectivity anymore that is giving the fundamental code to follow; that is to say one is more and more alone in deciding one’s sexuality, one’s family type, the place where he or she is going to live, behavior, clothes, etc. Even fashions today—sure, there are still big fashion trends, but if you look around, you see ways of dressing and hairstyles that recapitulate styles from every era practically—so individuals are alone and each one must construct his own scale of values—from which comes our contemporary anxiety, because we no longer have the kind of collective comfort that gives us the key to our behavior. Before, when one was a Sioux Indian in a Sioux tribe, there was no metaphysical problem. Today when one is born, one has to define oneself personally, and neither the family nor the place where one lives is sufficient to give me the overall model of the behavior that I should have. Not to mention that women today are moving out of the traditional behavior for women and that the differentiations between males and females are no longer sufficient to give the roles that people should follow. It is not the sex that determines; more and more we are simply human beings between a feminine pole and a masculine pole, and each one positions himself or herself between the two poles as he/she sees fit according to personal history, one’s potential. So, everything is becoming much more complex, more situational.

MORGAN: For you, what is the link between your role as a social worker and as a writer?

CHAMOISEAU: For me, the writer that I am today—in fact, those of my generation—the problem for us is not to try to establish a traditional community. You know, literature has always accompanied the solidification of a community; all traditional communities created a genesis story, an explanation of the creation of the world. Under this genesis story the community tells itself how it was founded, a founding History with a capital H from which flows all the literature that explores human nature, creates bonds, helps to better understand human passions, to guess what is going to happen next. We Caribbeans, however, we are a Creole, hybrid people; we don’t have a genesis story, we don’t have a founding myth. Therefore, in order to understand where we came from, we would have to have all the genesis stories, all the founding myths—of the Amerindi- ans, of the Africans, of the Europeans. However, what has happened, instead, is that one system, one History has been imposed on us—that of the conquest, of colonization. Today we know that under this history of colonization there are histories of the Amerindians, of the slaves, of immigrations—a complex history that isn’t in books and is only in verbal form. Look at the monuments around Martinique: “Empress Josephine, the slave owner” on the Savane (a city park in Fort de France); another monument is “D’Esnambuc, the Discoverer”. When you do the tourist circuit, 80% of the edifices come from colonization, and it’s that which serves us as an apparent cultural heritage. But underneath, there is something else, and that’s what we need to find.

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So, our history is a mixture of the histories of different peoples, and for us what is fundamental, what is creative from the beginning, is the oral tale. The tale is fundamental because it is at the moment when the story teller stands up before the crowd in the eve- nings on the plantation and says “Et cric?” and that everyone answers “Et crac!” together that the communitarian bond is beginning to be established and that the culture that was created, the culture of resistance that was created on the slave plantations, is going to find its modalities of expression and verbalization. It’s from there that everything be- gins for us. Our communities begin—not under the form of a genesis that opens up to a founding myth, a History—but under the form of a di-genesis, that is to say that the tale opens and creates within diversity. Why? Because of all the diverse sources we find in these tales—and not only that, but the mixture of oral traditions and written ones, as for example, the references to the Bible. So there is no absolute—not linguistically, not racially, not culturally, not historically; we are in an extreme relativisation of traditions, a chaos of diversity—that’s what charac- terizes our populations here, not a monolithic story. So, how do we handle this? First, to understand this chaotic identity—what does it mean to be at once a black person like me with an African reference that negritude has given us and which is important—but which cannot be confused with Africa itself? That is to say that myself, as a writer today, I am closer to any white Caribbean writer—closer to Carpentier, to Garcia Marquez—than to any African writer even if in African literature there are presences, solidarities, circulations that are fundamental for me. Because of the structure of the novels I write, my literary brothers are here in the Carib- bean. And I am closer to any English or Spanish-speaking writer from the Caribbean than to any French writer from Europe; it’s not the language that gives the key to identity or to a kind of classification. That means that the old identity markers don’t work anymore; so my brothers are perhaps writing in English or Spanish or in Creole—it’s the structure of the imaginary that is going to give the real connections. Because of this, the new literary anthologies will be ones that cut across languages, race, geographies—that will look for common structures of the imaginary, authors that share a common vision of the world. So, the big problem writers of my generation have is to create a community, to understand individuals, cultures, and identities that exist—not on the scale of a closed community—but on the scale of the whole world community, within the diversity of the world—what Glissant calls the “Tout-monde.” That’s what is fundamental and that changes everything: the literature that we make, the identity clarifications that we explore, the modalities of linguistic confrontation that we examine. Our perspective is the totality of the world.

MORGAN: This perspective you call “mondialité”, globality—so as not to confuse it with the term “globalization,” which as both you and Glissant point out, is ruled by economic and technical concerns more than anything.

CHAMOISEAU: Yes, everything has changed: identity has become relational. We Carib- beans are in some ways the precursors of this bumping together of cultures, of races, of imaginaries. All that created this Creole American culture has made our identity today relational. That is, to define who I am, it’s not by excluding others to look for some primor-

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dial essence that exists separately; on the contrary, it’s by mobilizing all these influences that constitute my identity and allow me to be who I am. In the past, people thought a cultural identity was powerful when it enclosed and defined what belonged to me and not to others; today it is powerful when one is—and recognizes that one is—in relationship with the diversity of cultures. And the more a cultural identity is capable of putting itself into connection with diversity, the more powerful it will be—that’s our big issue, that’s what we want to examine today in our literature. The strategies we use in our writing are ones to understand how we can exist in this relational scale of the Tout-Monde [Whole World]—along with the idea that we are each more and more alone, unbound by the traditional heritage of the old communities. And the linguistic issues I explore, for example, are no longer the ones of national languages confronting each other (i.e., Creole versus French), but of multiple languages co-existing within the same culture—the whole chaos of linguistic complexity we are entering. In societies of the future, we will be able to have several languages going on at once: a language for literature, one for love relationships, one for songs, one for economic discussions, one for religion—these will be societies where the linguistic eco-system is much more complex. We are entering complexity at all levels, all levels—and there will be many reactions: complementary antagonisms, syntheses, hybridizations, ruptures, racisms, fundamentalisms—all that. This is the chaos of our time and that’s what will constitute our cultural space.

MORGAN: Today there are 400,000 Martinicans here in Martinique and maybe 400,000 in France. People talk about “the third island” when they talk about the Antilles: Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the Ile de France around Paris. And, of course, there are many French Caribbeans from Haiti in the U.S. and in Canada. What is your perspective on possible solidarity between these groups? What is your perspective on the diaspora?

CHAMOISEAU: I don’t believe in this diaspora concept; I think that the term “Diaspora” corresponds to an older identity system based on territories and bloodlines. When one says “Diaspora,” one supposes that there is a center somewhere radiating out that is sus- taining people who are in exile. The problem—Glissant says it in Le Soleil de la conscience (1956,1997) —when he, as a Martiniquais, arrives in France, he says “I have the vision of the son”—everything he sees in France, he recognizes, etc.—“and that of the foreigner”; so, at the same time he is in the culture and outside of it. I think that that is the situation of the Antillais in France, and that’s why they have trouble forming a community. People say they don’t have any solidarity, that the community doesn’t work; people try to create solidarity because they are trying to think of French Caribbeans within the former modalities of the diaspora. It’s true that maybe there is an African community in France that is more united, maybe an Algerian community that works better, but the Antillais and their place within French culture–unlike the others—are both insiders and outsiders at the same time. They are inside and outside by virtue of their state of mind, their history—all those things. For my part, I believe more in what I call “presences,” and I think we are coming out of the era of closed territories and entering the era of “places.” The place, then, is multi-

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transcultural, multi-translingual; the place is inhabited by diversities and so, in that sense, there aren’t any diasporas because the diverse, the “other” is already there—everywhere. So, what you have are emanations, networks, and presences. There is a French Caribbean presence in France, a similar one in Canada. An example: I was talking once with Emile Ollivier, a Haitian writer who is dead now but who said that his children were Canadians and didn’t want to go back to Haiti. They had Haiti in their souls; Haiti was still part of who they were, but their life was in Canada. So that kind of complexity, that is the complexity of places, of multiple belongings, and of diverse cultural presences in a country.

MORGAN: So, in this new world, how do you see this concept of place evolving?

CHAMOISEAU: The place will exist in a dimension that is truly multiple on all levels: multi-transcultural, multi-transracial, multi-transreligious, and it will have networks of solidarity tied to its history. The place of Martinique, for example, has an African presence, an American presence, a European presence across the history that it had with France—and all that constitutes the networks of solidarity and presences that sustain Martinique as a place. But, we aren’t dealing with diasporas anymore.

MORGAN: If we are moving away from the concept of territories and diasporas, what about the theme of exile, then, that has played such a large role in post-colonial identities and literatures? How will that evolve?

CHAMOISEAU: The old concept of exile will no longer exist. In my generation, for example, when I left for France to do my studies, I was very unhappy, it was a difficult experience for me; my son left—he did very well; he became a Parisian, he comes back, he leaves, whether he is here or there—for him, he does fine either way. I’m not saying that is true for everyone: one can have personal stories, problems, troubles with racism, of course, of course. But, fundamentally, that feeling of rupture, the ancient sentiment of exile that has been so predominant in literature no longer functions. I think that the concept of place we just can’t get around; we cannot live in the whole totality of the world at once by escaping one’s place. Likewise, an abstract citizenship of the world has no meaning; an abstract universality has no meaning. We always live in the world community across a particular place—that is inescapable. The problem is that a place, one can choose it; often it is one’s native land—for me, my place is my native land, but I can completely acknowledge that for many Martinicans, it might be somewhere else. In all the countries I’ve gone, I have always seen a Martinican who is living there, happy, integrated, who still has the native land in his heart but who has found his place elsewhere and who feels fine about it. So, we can say that the place can be chosen—it can be anywhere. There are many people who have moved here, who love Martinique more than I do and who have done more for the island in certain respects than myself; I’ve seen this happen in Guyana, in Guadeloupe, in Trinidad. The place can be chosen, and it’s from there that one lives the world community. And what is going to create the cohesion of a place is not the old identity markers—a unique language, a unique race, a unique place—it will be that complexity that we were talking about earlier.

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What will constitute the density of a place is the shared project of the people of that place. Those who come to Martinique, for example, adhere to a project in Martinique that is defined by the collectivity, and it is that allegiance that makes them members of a community—not soil or blood. It’s their allegiance to the project. So, the problem we have is that we are still not fully conscious of that; we are still irresponsible, we don’t have a project, and the immigrations appear dangerous or threatening—not to mention that we are still very often in the old mentality of territory—that is to say, the mentality of the old identity based on “This is mine, it’s not yours.” So, we still have trouble accepting and understanding this world wide movement whereby the diverse goes everywhere and no one can close the windows. To close the doors and the windows is to condemn oneself to the most horrible death imaginable. Therefore, we have to open ourselves, but according to the modalities we have just spoken of—with the mentality that accepts diversity.

MORGAN: This sounds a lot like Glissant’s idea of cultural identity as being based not on ancestry alone—a specific historical past—but on all the relationships one has with the rest of the world—so identity becomes relational and in constant movement.

CHAMOISEAU: Yes, Glissant defines relational identity by saying, “I can change by exchanging [with another] without losing myself or becoming unlike myself.” We can apply that to language; if I can change by exchanging without losing myself in the process, that means that change is inscribed as a principle of my identity. This is a new concept, and it is fundamental. And a relational identity is what we must live today—not to mention what we talked about earlier, that individualization is becoming more and more extreme, people are no longer so defined by their community heritage, therefore the “me,” the “I” which was formerly so scripted by cultural codes and frameworks—today is becoming more open and much more problematic. The self is multiple—that is, one can have people, more and more people, who discover and admit their homosexuality, whereas within the older cultural framework this was difficult. The progression of homosexuality is tied to that—it’s simply that the potentialities of the self and the diversity of the self can express themselves and today each person can construct his or her multiple selves, multiple positionings, scale of values, and that becomes very complex. It is toward those kinds of societies that we are going.

MORGAN: Do you think that the Caribbean is a kind of a select place for all this to happen because it’s a cultural crossroads, a place where we have seen this mix of races and languages flourish, so maybe you are a bit ahead?

CHAMOISEAU: No, Glissant thinks—and I do, too—that we are all disarmed in facing the world community, that there is no one chosen people. You see atavistic communities with very ancient traditions that can receive or find this whole world poetic in an absolutely incredible way; there can also be peoples confronted by diversity—plunged into diversity—and who, on the contrary, refuse this concept of exchange because they are looking, instead, for unity. Very often, it is in countries where the diversity is extreme that you find racial fundamentalisms because when confronted by diversity, people have

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a tendency to pull back. Why? Because of the old dialectic that says that when you are in the diverse, the diverse pushes you toward unity, whereas a unity that is too strong so that it becomes a kind of uniformity pushes toward the exaltation of the diverse. It’s that kind of balance that we always have to find within culture. So that in the places where uniformity is strong, the diverse can, perhaps, be an escape route—that is to say, people can burst out of cultural straightjackets. And in the places where diversity is structurally powerful and active, people can wish for some kind of unity. Today, for example, many Martinicans are more attracted by the theory of negritude which simplifies the problem, rather than by this idea of Creolisation. And black Americans, when we speak to them about Creolisation, they call themselves African Americans, that is to say it’s almost as if they consider Africa to have moved to America whereas no, that isn’t it at all. Therefore, we see all these different modalities, these modalities are different ways of conceptualizing the unity-diversity encounter and this makes all of us young when facing the new Chaos-World. Everyone has to find his own compass by virtue of his own problems, his places—but this new poetic, we have to diffuse it, despite all the difficulties. From time to time in communities, we will have great poets of cultural hybridity, great poets of diversity who will be able to live this kind of complexity with more facility, but no one is ahead of anyone else.

MORGAN: But to get back to the question of languages, there are many who say: “Di- versity is a fine idea, but for the unity and cohesion of a country, there has to be a single language that everyone knows.”

CHAMOISEAU: But that belongs to the monolingual imaginary, which is the old identity that only functions in a monolithic way. Today the mental exercise that we must do is to understand that unity can only be conceived from within diversity and that diversity can only express itself within unity. It is this conjunction, this ongoing interaction that permits us to express, to envisage the new modalities of societal organization: unity/diversity. Unity opens to diversity; diversity opens to unity, and the two maintain each other; and that’s why rather than to say “universality” in languages, let’s say “diversality” since universality has a tendency to line us all up along Western values under the pretext of looking for unity. We can look for unity, but while keeping in mind that unity isn’t the same as uniformity; uniformity is really something poor and dried up; unity can conceive of and allow for diversity, and diversity which isn’t a type of horrible chaos can project a complex unity—one that is more in keeping with reality. And that is the new imaginary—that’s what we need to have today. And even in the new European construction, it’s not the Roman Empire they’re building; if they were building the Roman Empire again, it would fall apart. As in the past, the Empire fell apart when there were these great silences on the peripheries; the peripheries fell silent and then the center caved in; it asphyxiated. We need complex structures, so we need rhizomes, multi-metropoles, multi-centers—so that everything feeds and sustains everything else. But this is an exercise of the imagination, and we need to diffuse this so people hear about it. The characters in my novels, they are always problematic; people aren’t too sure what color they are, whether they are men or women; their behaviors are

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very open and the character becomes already complex; there are no more monolithic absolutes as there are for traditional novelistic characters. And all that helps to create another imaginary—and people say that it’s impossible or difficult because they are still in the old framework.

MORGAN: Yes, people say that there is no structure; they’re afraid.

CHAMOISEAU: Yes, structure appears difficult because we don’t have the new mentality yet. It’s a little like the situation here in Martinique. We have proposed that Martinique become an organic country—globally organic. That’s a special designation that would give an added value to our products like the banana. The banana we grow now has no commercial value over bananas grown elsewhere; it is loaded with pesticides and it costs more—whereas if we had an organic banana, completely healthy, perhaps it would have a commercial value. So then, people said: “Ah no, that’s not possible in a tropical country; there are too many insects, pests, etc.” That’s true, but organic farming appears impossible in a tropical country because no one has ever tried it in a tropical country before. That is to say, all the research centers like the INRA or others have spent more of their time looking for new pesticides to kill pests; they have never worked with organic protocols. But, they are only now beginning to do this, and they have found, for example, that they can use nematode traps (nematodes are a type of vermin that eat plant roots), so they can put these kinds of organic traps in the banana fields and all the nematodes go right into them. This is a start but this shows that when you seek, you find, and when you haven’t been looking, the solution seems impossible. So, we have to get used to the idea, begin to put our minds into these new modalities which might appear at the time to be completely idealistic and unrealistic—and once we do this, we enter into another way of doing things, another kind of learning, another kind of teaching, of writing. It all happens progressively—another way of thinking.

notes

1. This is the title of an influential book by Edouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, translated from the French by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997. 2. Another part of this interview deals with Chamoiseau’s novel, Chemin d’école [School Days] and dis- cusses Creole culture, French education, and the relationship between minority languages and global cultures. It has been published in French under the name Janice Morgan with the title “Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau” in The French Review 80.1 (October 2006): 186–198. The present selection is translated from French by the interviewer.

Selected Works by Chamoiseau in English

Eloge de la créolité/In Praise of Creoleness. (bilingual edition, written with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant). M.B.Taleb-Khyar, trans. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. School Days. Linda Coverdale, trans. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. Creole Folktales. Linda Coverdale, trans. New York: New Press, 1995, 1997. Texaco. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov, trans. New York: Pantheon, 1997.

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Childhood. Carol Volk, trans. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999. Seven Dreams of Elmira: A tale of Martinique. Mark Polizzotti, trans., photographs by Jean-Luc de Laguarigue. Cambridge: Zoland Books, 1999. Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. Linda Coverdale, trans. (preface by Edouard Glissant). Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999.

Excellent bibliographies and critical sources featuring Chamoiseau, Glissant, and other Francophone writers (texts in English available also) can be found on the “Ile en Ile” (Island to Island) website, www.lehman. cuny.edu/ile.en.ile, maintained by the City University of New York, Graduate Center.

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