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 global- ization. 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 16_31.2morgan.indd 443 8/28/08 8:35:29 AM © 2008 Photo by Janice Morgan Photo of Patrick Chamoiseau 444 16_31.2morgan.indd 444 8/28/08 8:35:29 AM C a l l a l o o 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 es- sayist 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 identi- ties 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. ***** 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 influenc- es—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 pos- sible 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. 445 16_31.2morgan.indd 445 8/28/08 8:35:29 AM C a l l a l o o 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 cre- ated 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.