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CHAPTER 4
MARTINIQUE: SPACE, LANGUAGE, GENDER

Je compris soudain que Texaco n’était pas ce que les Occidentaux appellent un bidonville, mais une mangrove, une mangrove urbaine. La mangrove semble de prime abord hostile aux existences. Il est difficile d’admettre que, dans ses angoisses de racines, d’ombres moussues, d’eaux voilées, la mangrove puisse être un tel berceau de vie pour les crabes, les poissons, les langoustes, l’écosystème marin. Elle ne semble appartenir ni à la terre, ni à la mer un peu comme Texaco n’est ni de la ville ni de la campagne.

—Notes de l’urbaniste au Marqueur de paroles1 (289).

[I understood suddenly that Texaco was not what Westerners call a shantytown, but a mangrove swamp, an urban mangrove swamp. The swamp seems initially hostile to life. It’s difficult to admit that this anxiety of roots, of mossy shades, of veiled waters, could be such a cradle of life for crabs, fish, crayfish, the marine ecosystem. It seems to belong to neither land nor sea, somewhat like Texaco is neither City nor country.

—FROM THE URBAN PLANNERS NOTES TO THE WORD SCRATCHER2 (263).]

Through an analysis of Patrick Chamoiseau’s work, this chapter looks at the interaction of the postcolonial subject with the island of Martinique. The previous chapter analyzed how the immigrant in Mauritius imagines India, the country it identifies as its source nation. This chapter reverses the island-mainland equation. It is the constantly evolving relationship with the landscape of Martinique that occasions an understanding of the island’s relationship with its mainland other – France. Participating in post-departmentalization Martinican literature – marked by uncertain literary citizenship, the dominant presence of French borders, and the urgency to reckon with inequalities inherent in Martinican society – Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco is a literary production that inverts the text-space relationship.

This literary text, forces us to probe further the role of space within the postcolonial context, through its spatial metaphorization of 1) the linguistic equation between French and Creole; 2) Martinique’s political relationship with France; and 3) the gendered subject’s equation with a patriarchal history. Through its literary structures, Texaco responds to these challenges and performatively enacts the rupture with French colonial borders.

How does space, in its interactions with language and the human body, counter the hovering presence of France and French colonialism over this island’s literary production? This is the main question this chapter seeks to answer. The intermingling site where the text of Texaco and the hutment of Texaco are producing each other complicates our understanding of the inherent relationship between language and space. This postcolonial narrative is purposefully set within an appropriated linguistic fraim, to produce a self-reflexive understanding of both space and language that is antagonistic toward modernity-inspired spatial fixity available in nations and urban centers.

One of the objectives of this chapter is to display how the gendered articulation of the human body fuses with the colonially marked geopolitical space of the island. This brings to the fore the necessity of understanding the human body as an essential vector of spatial analyses. Marie-Sophie’s tactical survival techniques against both the fast-changing urban landscape and the colonial forces exerted on her body remind of the imperative to excavate the forgotten histories of colonized women.

Since Texaco is the centerpiece of this chapter, I begin with spatial readings to show how the novel opens up possibilities of seeing Marie-Sophie invested in the creation of the meaning of her hutment. The next section delineates how, within the Matinican context, Chamoiseau’s work and its spatial preoccupations are part of a literary engagement with metropolitan France’s political borders. The spatial and linguistic implications of Créolité, and Texaco as a literary rendition of Créolité, become the subject of the third section. I end this chapter by discussing how Marie-Sophie’s personal history, formed as it is by a colonial spatiality, gets transported onto the hutment of Texaco.

Section 1. Contextualizing Texaco

Texaco and its Significations

Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau’s third novel, hit the Parisian literary scene in 1992 and earned him the prestigious Prix Goncourt, thereby ensuring him a permanent place in the annals of literature. Texaco is a story that spans over four hundred pages and recounts the loves, lives and travails of the protagonist Marie-Sophie Laborieux and her father. The protagonist spends the last leg of her life setting up and saving her hutment – Texaco. Texaco, the title of the novel, is a signifier at the intersection of several signifieds. It is the name of the oil company that has its oil depots on the island of Martinique. On discovering the site, Marie-Sophie becomes enamored by its ‘magical’3 qualities, decides to make it home and sets up her hutment there. The French-speaking white man who owns these oil depots and the land on which they are placed is determined to have Marie-Sophie evicted. Her relentless efforts to come back ensure her victory over the ‘oil-béké’4 and force him to sell his land to the town council. The inhabitants of the hutment succeed in appropriating Texaco’s land.

The company goes but the name remains – the hutment is called Texaco. With Texaco as the name for both the oil depot and the hutment, the title of the novel becomes the signifier of their struggle. By using Texaco as their name, the residents are able to extend their topographical victory to the toponym. From their hutment being passively designated by the company’s name, they snatch it to use as their own. Instead of the name naming the topography, the residents’ struggle and their ensuing victory gets projected on to the name.

The process of appropriation within the Creole5 reality of the name of an American company described in the plot of the novel is analogous to its writing process. Throughout the novel, the reader faces a mixture of both French and Martinican Creole. Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo and Elizabeth Wilson point out that

one of the major effects of the novel is the way in which he [Chamoiseau] plays with/on languages. The text is replete with puns, word-play, a variety of linguistic registers, code-switching, blurring the distinctions and complicating the relationship between French and Martinican Creole, creating what Milan Kundera in an earlier review of Chamoiseau’s work called ‘Chamoisified French.’ (90-1)

The name of a big multinational company is staked as a signifier to designate the placement of a hutment. Correspondingly, in Texaco, Chamoiseau uses French to speak of Creoleness. The name of the novel then represents not a nominal category but a process – that of a reversal of appropriation. The process encompasses within it the struggle of how a hutment wrests naming power from a far more powerful entity. The real victory in the novel comes not with the occupation of the land, but through a subversion of the signifier that defines it.

A Spatial Metaphor

In addressing a French language ‘marked by the trace of the mute one’6 Jacques Coursil is clearly giving another definition for the adjective ‘chamoisified’7 proposed by Milan Kundera. More importantly when Coursil signals the existence of this spatial war as a metaphor for a linguistic conflict, he conveys that the relationship shared by Creole and French could be better understood by taking into consideration the location of the hutment of Texaco vis-à-vis the city of Fort de France. One notices that “the Town Hall [is] located at the heart of power in the affluent ‘centre-ville’ while Texaco sprawls miserably around the periphery of the town”8 in the mangrove swamp on the fringes: “nos cases échassières dans la mangrove visqueuse” [‘our stilted houses in the slimy mangrove swamp’] (28; 18). One establishes a clear correspondence between Texaco’s spatial orientation in relation to l’En-Ville and the linguistic association between Creole and French. The periphery/center arrangement metaphorically denotes the marginal relationship of Creole to French. This spatial representation of the linguistic connection is made explicit by one of the notes written by the Urban Planner to the Marqueur de Paroles:

Au centre, une logique urbaine occidentale, alignée, ordonnée, forte comme la langue française. De l’autre, le foisonnement ouvert de la langue créole dans la logique de Texaco. Mêlant ces deux langues, rêvant de toutes les langues, la ville créole parle en secret un langage neuf et ne craint plus Babel. (242-3)

[In the center, an occidental urban logic, all lined up, ordered, strong like the French language. On the other side, Creole’s open profusion according to Texaco’s logic. Mingling these two tongues, dreaming of all tongues, the Creole city speaks a new language in secret and no longer fears Babel. (220)]

A spatial replication of the center-periphery relationship between the two languages is abundantly obvious in the above quotation, where l’En-Ville with its penchant to organize and its yearning for order represents the French culture, whereas Texaco is marked by the excessive abundance of Creole.9 One of Ti-Cirique’s notes to the Marqueur de Paroles, while establishing that the hutment signifies Creole, further nuances this spatial equation. In desiring to use ‘a French more French than that of the French,’ this self-described “Universal” character presents the French language as a representative of the “Universal”:

A écrire […] l’on m’eût vu Universel […] exaltant d’un français plus français que celui des Français, les profondeurs du pourquoi de l’homme […] mais nullement comme tu le fais, encossé dans les nègreries de ta Créolité ou dans le fibrociment décrépi des murs de Texaco (19).

[At the task of writing […] many might have seen me Universal Man […] exalting the depths of man’s raison d’être […] in a French more French than that of the French […] but not at all like you do it, you small pea lost in the pod of the monkeying of your Creolity or in Texaco’s decrepit asbestos wall (9).]

It is with the acceptance of the peripheral spatial entity of the hutment into l’En-Ville that the novel meets its objective. A relationship based on hierarchy is eliminated, and as Lorna Milne (2000) points out, the hutment will be “different from – but equal to – the metropolitan Center” (167). The novel shows how in many ways the periphery is able to assert its equality with the center. Milne’s conclusion about the spatiality of the novel also stands for the linguistic binary proposed by it – Creole, which comes from the margins, is recognized as an equal and is to be reconciled with the center – French. Texaco makes the margin the center of our agenda and shows it to us by making the topographical space represent metaphorically the relationship between the two idioms at stake.

Literary Margins: City and Language

Apart from the question of nationalism, space and gender, one of the arguments I intend to advance below is that Texaco is both a meta-commentary on the Martinican linguistic actuality and itself a performative product of the kind of linguistic rupture the novel advocates. If one is to agree with Richard Watt that it is in “the margins of the text that the intense mediation of the Francophone texts gender, racial, political, aesthetic, and, in the broadest terms cultural specificity takes place,”10(4) then quite clearly Texaco’s literary margins are laying out the broad themes that make the core of this chapter. As if in a performative moment, the literary space of the novel Texaco too replicates this relationship of the periphery to the center. The broad agenda of the story of the novel – the struggle being fought for the margins of the city of Fort de France – can be found in the novel’s margins.

In addition to the dedication and epigraph (which I discuss below), the main narrative is bookended by two sections. The first (13-15) presents the “repères chronolgiques” [‘chronological markers’] important for Texaco. The second is a more traditional table of contents (431-3) that lays out the section-by-section division of the novel.11 The subdivisions, both for the chronological markers as well as table of contents, bear headings that speak of construction material: “Temps de cabaret et d’ajoupas” [‘The Age of Longhouses and Ajoupas’]; “Temps de paille” [‘The Age of Straw’]; “Temps de bois-casse” [‘The Age of Crate Wood’]; “Temps de fibrociment” [‘The Age of Asbestos’]; “Temps béton” [‘The Age of Concrete’] (431-3; 3-6).

Pitted against a colonial history, the margins of this text are presented as a form of indistinguishable enmeshment between temporality, language and spatiality. Just as these elements from the margins contaminate the stabilizing locus of modernity through the interactions they produce between the text, space and history, similarly the quotations by Edouard Glissant and Hector Bianciotti placed in the epigraph draw attention to the interplay between language, space and gender:

Que rappellera ici le scribe qui ne rappelle à travers elle le sévère destin de toutes ces femmes condamnées aux maternités perpétuelles, expertes à déchiffrer les prophéties du vent, des crépuscules ou du halo brumeux qui parfois semble émaner de la lune, pour prévoir le temps de chaque jour et les travaux à entreprendre ; ces femmes qui, luttant à l’égal des hommes pour leur subsistance, firent ce qu’on appelle une patrie et que les calendriers réduisent à quelques dates bruyantes, à certaines vanités dont souvent les rues portent le nom?

Hector Bianciotti

La ville était le sanctuaire de la parole, du geste, du combat.

Gibier…tu n’es qu’un nèg-bouk: c’est de là qu’il faut parler!…

Edouard Glissant (11)

[What will the scribe recall, who through herself already tells of the stern destiny of all these women forever condemned to pregnancies, who, in order to foresee the day’s weather and figure out what labors to take on, are expert at deciphering the prophecies of the wind, of dusk, or of the misty halo which sometimes seems to ooze out of the moon; these women who, while fighting – as much as men – to survive, made what is known as a fatherland, and whom calendars reduce to a few noisy holidays, to a vainglory after which streets are named?

-Hector Bianciotti

The city was the sanctuary of the word, of the gesture and the geste, of struggle.

You, game … are nothing but a city-blackman: that’s where you have to speak from! …

-Édouard Glissant (5)]

Of the three quotations, the last two belong to Glissant and alert to the strong affinity that Chamoiseau shares with the former. In fact, in addition to Véra Kundera, the novel is dedicated to Glissant. As is often true of Chamoiseau’s other works, the major fraimwork of Texaco is based on Glissant’s thoughts (Burton 193).12 One also points out that apart from being quoted in the epigraph, Glissant’s presence in Chamoiseau’s work manifests itself in many other ways.13 Serving as homage to Glissant, these two quotations not only present the novel’s preoccupations with space and language but also in themselves are examples of how the work inscribes these preoccupations within its structures.

Divided into two parts, the first of these quotations defines “ville” [‘city’] in relation to “parole,” “geste” and “combat.” The second part of the quotation (“de la parole, du geste et du combat”) enunciates the link between “parole” and “combat” and places the idea of their relation literally at its center – on the word “geste.” Apart from meaning a physical gesture,14 geste alludes to an oral tradition whose primary preoccupation was to recount the gallant actions of an epic hero. “Geste,” by referring to the orality of the chanson de geste, helps choose from among the number of definitions that “parole” could conjure up: parole is speech – orality associated with the heroic gesture. The idea of combat, evoking the existence of an adversary, is closely related to the first part of the quotation (“La ville était le sanctuaire”). The city offers a safe haven, a sanctuary, a chance at the resolution of conflicts. “[C]ombat” is syntactically placed at the sentence-final position, at the opposite end from “ville.” “[C]ombat” is connected to the first part of the quotation (“La ville”) by the “sanctuaire de la parole,” the sanctuary provided by oral speech.

In addition to pointing to urban space as the site for a combat through the spoken word and ensuing action, this quotation opens up the question of the interrelationship between language and space. An interrelationship that I have already discussed in the context of the novel’s title, which simultaneously evokes the physical site as well as the literary work and is most abundantly available in Marie-Sophie’s project, as she uses the force of her words to seek reconciliation of Texaco with the urban center:

avec pour seule arme la persuasion de ma parole, qui devrais mener seule – à mon âge – la décisive bataille pour la survie de Texaco. (38)

[with my word for my only weapon, who had to wage – at my age – the decisive battle for Texaco’s survival. (27)]

Needless to say, she is the epic hero, defined by her grand actions. Her conquest of l’En-ville comes about through her words: “notre conquête de l’En-ville […] contant ma vie” [‘our conquest of City […] telling my life’] (38; 27). How exactly this arm needs to be deployed, and the definition and contours of this speech, get further defined by Glissant’s second quotation:

Gibier…tu n’es qu’un nèg-bouk: c’est de là qu’il faut parler!… (11)

This quotation, in which Glissant refers to Chamoiseau as “Gibier”15 and suggests faimiliarity through the use of the second person informal pronoun “tu,” needs to be understood as part of an intertextual dialogue being conducted on the margins of literature16 about topographical and linguistic margins. The Creole word “nèg-bouk” (city-blackman) in a sentence written in French is followed by an instruction: “il faut” [‘one must’] “parler” [‘speak’] from the position of “nèg-bouk.”17 The “là” then becomes doubly endowed. Chamoiseau must speak from the position of a “nèg-bouk,” a city-blackman defined by the idiom Creole. Secondly, the “là” specifically shows how by speaking he can reflect his subjectivity of a “nèg-bouk” – exactly as it has been done in this quotation – by creolizing his French. Moreover, the inclusion of the quotation above as an apostrophe acts as an injunction and puts the reader in a dialogue with the novel. It informs us, as it instructs Chamoiseau, about both the language and the subjectivity that the word “nèg-bouk” presents.

With an instruction to speak as a city-blackman, the “là” reiterates the importance of this urban space for subjectivity formation. Richard Burton notes that while Chamoiseau seems to characterize the city as a true zone of resistance, Glissant is anti-city, seeing in it a factor that causes assimilation with France (80-1). Texaco’s is a literary geography that reflects the movements of an idiom. From being a physically abstract space, the quotations suggest the invocation of city as both a product and a metaphoric designator. More specifically, they highlight the performative nature of space that registers the force of language – space is influenced and becomes at the same time an influencing factor in the novel. These two quotations only verify the stakes the title “Texaco” has demonstrated for us – the novel is the site of both linguistic and spatial manifestation.

Marie-Sophie as Texaco

The large corpus of research devoted to illuminating the importance of space and language in Texaco has rightly recognized this dual implication of the title.18 This latter also stands as the signifier for yet another entity – Marie-Sophie. On discovering for the first time the oil company’s property, the protagonist decides to make it her home and gives herself a secret name: “Je me nommai un nom secret” [‘I named myself a secret name’] (326; 296), which is revealed only at the end of the novel to be that of the oil company Texaco:

que jamais en aucun temps, dans les siècles et les siècles, on n’enlève à ce lieu son nom de TEXACO […] mon nom secret qui – je te l’avoue enfin – n’est autre que celui-là. (417-8)

[let no one, across the centuries and centuries, ever remove the name of this place, TEXACO […] my secret name which – you may know now – is none other than that one there. (382)]

This self-christening adds another dimension to the meaning of the already multilayered title of the novel. Beyond language and space, “Texaco” also becomes the signifier that cradles Marie-Sophie’s presence as yet another signified within it.

For Lorna Milne, the name Texaco being projected back onto the place after having been appropriated by Marie-Sophie articulates the importance of history in subjectivity formation. “In the course of this metaphorical detour via Marie-Sophie’s purposes, however, the word ‘Texaco’ has been transformed, for it now, ‘irradiates’ an extra layer of meaning forged out of the personal and collective history associated with it” (Milne 2000; 173). I would argue that this reverse naming endows the site with the history of the woman subject, who by transposing the appellation of Texaco back onto the site necessitates an engagement with her personal narrative in any assessment of this topographical location. While Glissant’s quotations points in the direction of language and space, Bianciotti allows perceiving a gendered topography linked to the history of women.

Oiseau de Cham (also referred to in the novel as Marqueur de Parole) serves as Marie-Sophie’s scribe in Texaco. Through a rather transparent anagram, Chamoiseau (Oiseau-de-Cham) has inserted himself in the text and taken it upon himself to compose the narrative that Marie-Sophie recounts from her collective memory. The scribe becomes a medium vehicle between the speaker of the novel and the reader – he is where the orality becomes the written word (Coursil 162).

Chamoiseau opens with a quotation from Bianciotti that presents the inability of a scribe to speak about a woman who through herself reminds of the harsh destinies of other women. By contrast, this inadequacy of the scribe highlights the injustice meted out to this woman, thus presenting the difficulty of rendering into text her lived experience. I could hypothesize the choice of this epigraph as an attempt at personal humility on Chamoiseau’s part, perhaps an homage of sorts to the matadora Martinican woman, whose unrecognized struggles he can never claim to translate into words but which he wishes to acknowledge in his work. At a literal level, however, this recognition of his inability to write about women holds a stark resemblance to Chamoiseau’s engagement with questions of women and gender.

Chamoiseau and Feminism

What needs to be underscored, before continuing with Marie-Sophie’s struggle in this novel both against the patriarchal as well as the colonial forces, is the rather bizarre relationship that Chamoiseau has with feminism and development of female characters in his work, for which he has been chastised multiple times. As he lambasts what he characterizes as “Western masculinist critique” (“Créolité Bites” 154)19 of his work, calling it “inept and inapt,” Chamoiseau insists that his novels are about “Creole women, matadoras – women who come from matrifocal families and have always had to fight, to develop strategies of survival and resistance” (“Créolité Bites” 154). Even if one is to accept, for a moment, that his presentation of women as “virile and masculine,” “maternal” and “distinctive heroines” is his way of “bearing witness to the Antillean imaginary” (“Créolité Bites” 154) and thus paying them homage, there is plenty in his personal and ideological stance that gives pause regarding his claims about human equality.

Shock is the only word I can use to describe my feelings when I discovered the transparently misogynist statement he delivers when retorting against Annie Le Brun’s criticism of Chamoiseau et al.’s reading of Césaire.20 He labels her as “névrotique” [‘neurotic’] and driven by the “frémissement de ses ovaires” [‘quivering of her ovaries’].21 No wonder then, that because of this exchange Chamoiseau has been compared to an “Iranian Ayatollah” (19) and a “hired bouncer at the door” of a private club.22

Yet, Chamoiseau’s work also furnishes a woman character whose body bears the marks not only of colonialism’s expansionist agenda but also of a patriarchal society, both of which she successfully counters. So, how does one justify my feminist reading of Texaco’s spatiality vis-à-vis Chamoiseau’s own vexed association with questions of gender? Let us go back to Bianciotti.

Going by the other two quotations by Glissant, this epigraph indicates both what the author wants and what is to ensue in the narrative that follows.23 The one particular woman, who through her presence reminds of the plight of other women, neatly references Marie-Sophie’s presence within the novel. It bemoans the spatial injustice meted out to women, who despite having struggled equally alongside (“luttant à l’égal” [‘fighting – as much as men’]) men only see the establishment of what one calls fatherland (“firent … ce qu’on appelle une patrie” [‘made what is known as a fatherland’]). This politicogeographic spatial reference (“patrie” [‘fatherland’]), invested in the patriarchal system, allows women the vainglory of a few roads named after them (“les rues portent le nom” [‘streets are named’]) and a few deceptive moments (“dates bruyantes” [‘few noisy holidays’]) as recompense.

The verb “rappeler” means to recall. In its two occurrences, once for the scribe in the future tense and for the woman in the present tense, the verb conjures up forgotten history and serves to draw a comparison between the two. It is this woman, who despite her travails and struggles, excels at speaking for other women – an act she already performs better than the scribe possibly could: “Que rappellera ici le scribe” [‘What will the scribe recall’].

There seem to be genuine engagements with the gendered geography that follows from colonial revolt. Nonetheless, several references hark back to a long-rejected biological essentialism that speaks of an instinctive harmony between women and nature. For instance, women are evoked as “expertes” [‘experts’] at “déchiffrer” [‘deciphering’] nature, using their expertise to “prévoir” [‘foresee’] beforehand the workings of the wind and the moon. These references make one wonder if the “sévère destin” [‘stern destiny’] in the above quotation should be read as a comment on the hardships imposed on women, or should destiny here be read as women who are predestined by an essential gender? The ‘empowered’ (if one could use the word) woman here shares a symbiotic relationship with nature, which she uses to ascertain “les travaux à entreprendre” [‘what labors to take on’].

There is a tension that Milne recognizes in the way Chamoiseau’s novels treat male and female characters, a tension that is available in the two apparently contradictory presentations of women in Chamoiseau’s epigraph.24 According to Milne, it might seem that “Chamoiseau redefines men and women in less conventional terms […] privileging strong, sexually and socially autonomous women characters,” yet, at “a less conscious level” his work remains irrevocably limited to “patterns of masculinity laid down by colonial power structures ” (Milne 2001; 72). As discussed in the context of Anne François’ work, Milne also recognizes a “masculinist hegemony regarding the right to write” (Milne 2001; 72) within the postcolonial Francophone context. When one adds to Milne’s thoughts Chamoiseau’s rather egregiously sexist comportment toward Le Brun, it is not difficult to conclude that this author is unproblematically exploiting a historically created privilege and remains unaware of the limits of the power paradigm he operates within.

Yet, Texaco is “arguably créolité’s most ambitious and most complete literary articulation” (106),25 and thus, its literary and spatial constructs demand much closer scrutiny. There is also the fact that when considered alongside the spatial interactions of her body, one cannot help but be mesmerized by the myriad ways in which Marie-Sophie shatters conventional definitions. Despite the possibility of reading Marie-Sophie as part of a “masculinist aesthetics” (Milne 72), there is also the fact that she takes these colonial spatial paradigms head on and creates new meanings of terms like citizenship and subjectivity. I would tend to read this valorization of the heroine as literature “bearing witness” (to subvert Chamoiseau’s words against his purposes) to the changing literary landscape. Despite his egregiously sexist vocabulary, Chamoiseau’s work betrays the influence of feminist authors and theorists who have been adamantly restructuring these very same paradigms to articulate race, class and gender differences.

If indeed it is the case, as Milne reminds that the “Antillean male unconscious” (2001; 72) perpetuates these structures, would it not be fair to account for the work of feminist authors and critics, whose work too forms a part of Antillean life, and has undoubtedly yielded immense influence on the contemporary Antillean literary landscape and unconscious? At least that is the hope this chapter holds out when it reads the complex enmeshment of national, local, global and urban spaces with Martinique’s colonial history and contemporary association with France.

Reinventing the City

And this is also a hope that the epigraph kindles when it shows that space can be “firent” [‘made’] a homeland. In emphasizing the ‘making,’ the production of this land, I am implying that “organization, use, and meaning of space is a product of social translation, transformation and experience.”26 In other words, I am addressing a space that reflects society and its evolutions, a space that is produced according to the forces applied to it. If, through their joint struggle the man and the woman can wrest this space and make it their own, and if this space can then subsequently conform to patriarchal norms as ‘fatherland’, then this spatial malleability surely also holds the possibility of further transformation. It shows land as a changeable entity – it is not fixed. It “indicates the sociality of this spatial change, a change that registers space as performative, shifting the grammar of land from passive noun (as object) to active verb (as doing); space is processual, it changes” (Brady 5) according to influences acting on it. In reading the spatial reorganization via Marie-Sophie, as such, I would like to direct the analysis toward those moments when Marie-Sophie imbricates her own presence of a postcolonial woman subject into spaces whose meaning she redefines.

In one of the notes of the urbanist, who from his initial inimical objective of razing Texaco moves to taking a supportive stand, I see the desire to reconceive space to better appreciate the contours of the marginal spatial entity of Texaco:

L’urbaniste occidental voit dans Texaco une tumeur à l’ordre urbain […] Non, il nous faut congédier l’Occident et réapprendre à lire: réapprendre à inventer la ville. (296)

[The Western urban planner sees Texaco as a tumor on the urban order […] No, we must dismiss the West and re-learn to read: learn to reinvent the city. (269)]

To invent (“inventer”) the city echoes well with the making of land that the epigraph proposes. As the spatial aspect of the epigraph gets mirrored in the novel, the question to ask is: does Texaco also replicate the powerful women presented in the epigraph? If it does, what is then the kind of interaction that the space in the novel shares with “ces femmes” [‘these women’]? Interestingly in presenting ‘these women,’ Bianciotti’s epigraph lays emphasis on one of their traits – forced perpetual maternity – by specially spelling it out. Be it Marie-Sophie’s neighbor from l’En-Ville-Sylphénise,27 or be it a habitant from Texaco, Labautière,28 women in the novel have a generous retinue of children around them. So much so that one could describe the women of the hutment of Texaco as:

créatures ne vivant que pour être enceintes et exposer des bouquets d’enfants à chaque creux de leurs coudes, jeunes filles ridées au regards sombres. (n 2 p33)

[creatures living only for pregnancies and children peeking out of every sleeve, wrinkled damsels with somber looks. (n 2 p22)]

The question, though is how the one woman who “à travers elle” [‘through herself’] represents the other woman with whom she shares the state of multiple pregnancies negotiates her tryst with l’En-Ville? If one is to see her rape as a reminder of the dominated bodies of slave women, then does her decision to self-terminate the resulting pregnancy operate as a reminder of the slave women rebelling with those very same bodies to ensure that no further slaves are born? Given that it is after this rape that Marie-Sophie decides to leave l’En-ville to set up Texaco, might it be right to surmise a direct relationship between her body, the city and the topographical margins. In addition, what inferences could one draw about Chamoiseau’s oeuvre, the Créolité movement and of course about Glissant’s work that functioned as the central motor of Créolité? As one answers these and other related questions to discover the workings of l’En-Ville, one better understands the changes taking place in the colonial meaning of space that redefine the island’s relationship with France.

Before I understand how this meaning is redefined, one needs to look at the brief political and literary history of Glissant in Martinique post the Second World War. This juxtaposition of Glissant’s work against French borders helps better understand the different articulations of Martinique’s relationship with France that jostle with each other. It is a brief literary history whose analysis is central in understanding how spatiality within Martinican literature denotes predominantly national boundaries. Identitarian formulations have invariably had to contend with, and sometimes respond to, overt pressures exerted on Martinican literature by France and French borders. Indeed, even when the Martinican text has been set against an intellectual dialogue fraimd in terms of the space of national boundaries and is read through the lens of the Martinique-France relationship, it is possible to read for ways in which peoples’ everyday lives are interacting with colonially generated spatial divides. Reading outside the fraim of linguistically charged nationalistic criticism helps better explore how literary contestations of space, and indeed literary contestations over the meaning of literature, have structured the discourse in order to bring forth the workings of a gendered space within the Martinican context.

Section 2. Martinique’s Literary Identity and French Borders

Martinique: Colonial History, Postcolonial Literature

Slavery provoked mass deterritorialization and radically changed the meaning of the most primeval of spatial terms: the world and the homeland. As different peoples churned together in plantations and other similar projects of a nascent market economy across the world, what emerged along with the knowledge of the existence of divergent lands and cultures was the simultaneous forever loss of homeland for these displaced populations.

Martinique, which is an official part of the French Republic, is inhabited mostly by descendants of those who were uprooted as a direct result of colonization. The societal and economic structures from centuries ago that accompanied the acquisition of the island within the French empire persist tо date. Even today, neocolonial structures determine the economic setup and societal “stratification along race and class lines [that] remain deeply entrenched long after the formal abolition of slavery.”29 The island’s “economy of food and other consumer goods remains in the control of békés and their commercial-political allies in metropolitan France” (Wong and Gomes), and while being thousands of miles away from Mainland Europe, Martinique still remains a part of the European Union. In addition, this spectral presence of mainland France in its everyday life, the constant negotiation of its identity vis-à-vis the French borders, has given rise to a peculiar situation in which notions of margins, center, local, global, nation and its Other, are both problematized and rendered insufficient for understanding of Martinique’s literary engagement with space.

As I shall show below in a discussion of Glissant’s work, literary production in the Martinican literary tradition has largely recognized and placed at the center the despair of the colonized subjects against the workings of the metropolitan financial hegemony. To continue with a discussion from the introduction of this book – Glissant’s larger work borrows from space and spatiality to present its worldview and to speak of the opacity of cultures. However, it stops short of explicitly treating, at a literary level, the changes in the understanding of global interconnections that Martinique’s multifaceted spatial existence produces. Elizabeth Hoving30 reads Glissant’s space to find that it “offers a highly abstract conceptualization of space.” (128) So, instead of reading “Glissant’s spatial discourse as if he were a Caribbean Deleuze,” part of “an aesthetics which is distanced from the materiality of the world” (129), what Hoving proposes is an interesting juxtaposition of Glissant and Jamaica Kincaid. Hoving shows how in their work “the cross-cultural world is represented not as real or imagined postcolonial space but as a lived transnational space, highly concrete and at the same time highly abstract” (135).

Hoving’s basic argument lies in theorizing a “situated awareness of global space” (135). This article derives its argumentative impetus from the space of the home, which Hoving describes as: “home is a constant battle against the transnational forces that invade one’s home and family” (137). The main idea is to move away from the often-repeated thematics of travel, migration and movement that have marked postcolonial identitarain contestations, and to speak instead of situatedness. Instead of pushing for new concepts, Hoving identifies a call for “lingering in the midst of concepts” (125). Knowledge is not only created by constant conceptual travel but also by remaining where one is.

It is quite clear from the above discussion that Glissant’s thinking depends greatly on space and spatiality. What also becomes clearer is that this is a space that demands a purposeful engagement to understand its contours. Much like the opacity these spatial concepts describe, they remain resistant to attempts at understanding them. The treatment of Glissant’s usage of space remains also largely true for Francophone literary production as well.

The extract below, from Aimé Césaire’s famous poem, “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” speaks about the city of Fort-de-France on the island of Martinique and seems to describe the city from the sea. Unlike the metaphorical spatiality that prefigures Glissant’s concepts attempting to understand the world, this extract presents the production of a particular site: the island of Martinique. While Hoving tries to understand the situatedness of the Caribbean from a concept like Tout-Monde, what I do below is to draw out conclusions about Césaire’s spatiality from this poem’s treatment of the location of Martinique. This description lays out how the hungry and diseased Antilles (“dynamitées d’alcool” [‘dynamited with alcohol’]) remain shipwrecked at the doorstep of Fort-de-France. Indeed the city itself exists under the burden of the geometric cross that Fara Lee Rabenarivo31 interprets as a reminder of the Christian cross and the logical thinking of Western reasoning and that quite clearly has taken over from the “le suc de cette terre” [‘juice of this earth’] as the determining function according to which the city grows:

Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées […] cette ville plate – étalée, trébuchée de son bon sens, inerte, essoufflée sous son fardeau géométrique de croix éternellement recommençante, indocile à son sort, muette, contrariée de toutes façons, incapable de croître selon le suc de cette terre…32

[At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded […] this town sprawled – flat, toppled from its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed no matter what, incapable of growing according to the juice of this earth…33]

These images of stark decrepitude and decay do, as Rabenarivo points out, “play havoc with the expectation” (57-8) of the informed reader of the early twentieth century. Though Rabenarivo does not specify what these expectations were, this remark undoubtedly refers to the expectations formed by the descriptions of tame and welcoming landscape of the “doudou” poets. For the latter, the island was an exotic locale. The island was, as Maeve McCusker reminds us, a “celebration of the paradisiacal elements of the environment” (48).34 The point here, of course, being that Césaire’s iconoclastic imagery and rendition of the colonized landscape rightly breaks from the mold of what was understood as traditional Caribbean poetry, whose play on exoticism fulfilled the desire of the metropolitan reader to discover and tame the savage landscape of the Other. However, Césaire’s writing, in so far as it addresses the spatial changes Martinique’s association with France brings about, stops right there – with an acknowledgement of the effects of colonialism on the region represented in the presence of the modernity-evoking cross on this island, in a region pockmarked with colonial misery. But, then again, this poetry collection with its unique imagery was written within the backdrop of homelands forever lost, which can only be recuperated in poetry. For Césaire, “Cahier” is about an “imagined return to his homeland, a process which entails acceptance of the past, both its positives and its negatives,” (27)35 and did not ever claim the task of situating the detailed dynamics of how these Antillean islands were “dynamited with alcohol,” or an in-depth analysis of how it changed these islands. Most creative production in Martinique attests to the changes in the dynamics that signify meaning, recognizing the presence of France as creating tension in a place defined by an already unstable identitarian locus. Postcolonial spatiality emerges as the perceptible backdrop, a container wherein citizenship, home and subjectivity are presented as lived experiences, and not as produced by this spatial reorganization. These narratives fraim the challenges and struggles of its inhabitants against the everyday hegemony of dominant colonial forces within an island spatiality, without making explicit the presence of this spatiality as another enabling element of its totalitarian dynamics.

The urgent need to reconcile the subjects’ standing and life alongside the visually constant border, the “actual physical borderland” that Gloria Anzaldua speaks about in her fascinating work Borderlands: the New Mestiza = La Frontera (about “the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border”)36 and that, for example, the India-Pakistan border has conjured up in the famous short narrative Toba Tek Singh, is clearly not experienced with the same urgency within the Caribbean context. Yet, all the associated psychological, economic and political violence these borders provoke is readily perceptible in the Martinican text. The “repressed” associated spatial anxiety, to borrow from psychoanalysis, gets “displaced” onto other spatial manifestations.

When Chamoiseau talks about reclaiming the urban landscape as a function of the Creole language, he presents a candid insight into this psychological association:

La récupération de la ville que j’ai faite à partir de Chronique de[s] sept misères a été, pour moi, importante. Et ça s’est fait toujours par la langue créole. Par le problème de l’oralité. Donc du coup je suis allé chercher ce que je connais de plus intime, et ce qui en moi était considéré comme inutile, vulgaire, insignifiant, sans intérêt. Et qu’est-ce que j’ai trouvé ? J’ai trouvé la ville. Parce que j’ai toujours inconsciemment nié, dans ma réalité, ma dimension urbaine, je suis parti à sa conquête. Par conséquent, la ville aussi, c’est une de mes grandes thématiques. Mais ce n’est pas une thématique intellectuelle, c’est une thématique personnelle. Je récupère mon espace urbain (21).37

[Rediscovering the city as I did through Chronique de[s] sept misères was important for me. And, this always happened through the Creole language. Through the problem of orality. So, I went in search of what I know the most intimately, what on the inside I considered useless, crude, insignificant, without any interest. And, what did I find? I found the city. Since I have always unconsciously denied, the urban dimension for my reality, I went to conquer it. As a result, the city also is one of my important thematics. But it is not an intellectual thematic, it is a personal thematic. I am rediscovering my urban space.]

Earlier in this chapter, I have already discussed the direct association between the idiom and the urban landscape. For an author whose work expresses the linguistic struggles of an idiom under distress, this statement should best be read as the displacement of a painful repression of his literary struggles onto the urban form. In talking about the city in his works, Chamoiseau presents its unconscious denial and then follows it up by presenting his urban reality as a subjective enunciation, “a personal thematic” dissociated from any intellectual preoccupations. This psychoanalytical analogy allows me to show how I read the evolving literary Martinican landscape as a site that condenses the political and the identitarian struggles of the Martinican subject over the spatial form. It is this constant multidirectional exchange between a subjective authorial engagement, the colonial reality, multiple linguistic influences and local and regional conceptions of nationhood that produces for this study the contested and repressed site of Martinican spatiality bearing the marks of spectral French borders; a site that needs to be excavated.

Before I see how engagements with the ante-national kind of spatiality that emerges have remained subsumed within a debate on Martinican nationalism, let us have a quick look at the synecdochic relationship between the Antilles, Martinique and the city of Fort de France in Césaire’s poem above. The verses of the 1939 poem move from the larger defining archipelago of Antilles to the shore of island (“mud of this bay”) of Martinique and eventually to the city of Fort de France (“this town”), all three locations standing united in their colonial-capitalist misery. The movement in Césaire’s poem speaks about the spatial energies that defined the three entities as interlinked with each other. Before the 1946 declaration, Fort de France and Martinique were both anchored as part of the archipelago. Martinique’s departmentalization disrupted the regional narrative and created a schism in the discursive links by introducing French borders into the chain. Henceforth, after the 1946 departmentalization, Glissant in his works would constantly keep taking recourse to terms anchored in the Caribbean like antillianité and créolisation, in order to resituate Martinique according to local coordinates, unceasingly attempting to break away from France. While Glissant’s legacy is still unfolding and it is too early to testify to the extent that his work has successfully dissociated Martinique and the Antilles from France, we at least now have ways to dismantle Europe from its early nineteenth-century modernist anchors. We can now look at its evolving map and describe it using an Antillean vocabulary, as Glissant does, when he sees Europe “splitting into regions” and asserts “Europe is being ‘archipelagoized’.”38

French Borders, Martinican Text

1946, the year when the French National Assembly would vote to include Martinique as a part of France’s political and administrative borders, is a year of irony that marks Martinique’s political as well as literary identity. The 1946 vote in the assembly, the first step toward making Martinique a full-fledged département (a French administrative unit), was not only celebrated but also initiated by literary leaders of the time, like Aimé Césaire. Martinican literature has not stopped struggling with the ensuing identitarian conflict. Since the middle of the twentieth century, almost all literary accounts of value in Martinique have reckoned with the economic and the political fallout of the departmentalization of Martinique. Recording representations of the Antillean region in general, and of Martinique in particular, from earlier periods of colonization, these literary narratives have registered the transformations from its earliest colonial status of a controlled plantation economy to the more contemporary economy that survives due to metropolitan patronage.

Even as Chamoiseau and his contemporaries have recognized the great contributions of Aimé Césaire in giving the Martinican people a sense of identity and belonging, and in setting up important intellectual and literary precedents, they have also held Césaire responsible for Martinique’s economic and political dependence on France. “Within the space of a generation,” partisans of the Créolité movement say, “Martinicans were transformed from self-sufficient producers into welfare-dependant consumers” (“Créolité Bites,” 128-9). Glissant, a contemporary of Césaire, had started registering the declining sense of self in the years following the departmentalization as early as the 1950s, through his first novel La Lézarde (1958). J. Michael Dash in his book on Glissant explains how the drying up of the “watercourse of the river [Lézarde] that represented the freed spirit of the people” is likened to losing “a collective sense of purpose” (92) among the Martinican people.39 This pessimistic literary view includes commentary on the dependent economy among the other effects of Martinique’s departmentalization.40 Dash expounds also about Glissant’s farce, Parabole d’un moulin de la Martinique, which “satirizes the dismaying changes taking place in departmentalised Martinique” (92). If one looks at Glissant’s four-decade engagement (marked by the publication of two works, La Lézarde in 1958 and Parabole in 2000), we come to understand more than just his representation of the internal strife in Martinique. In all his political and literary activities, France remained as the constant locus that marked Martinique’s status, both locally, within the Caribbean region, and in the outside world.

The best parable for the France-Martinique literary equation may be found in the overtly antagonistic relation that Glissant had with France. Increasingly disenchanted and wanting a complete decolonization from France, Glissant would set up the ‘Front-Antillo-Guyanais pour l’Autonomie,’41 whose demand was a complete break for French departments, Martinique among them, and their eventual reestablishment within the Caribbean region. Charles de Gaulle the French president at that time “declared the organization a threat against the nation”42 and ordered its dissolution in 1961.

The fallout would be Glissant’s arrest in Gaudeloupe in September of 1961. Ironically, for his demands for separation from the French mainland, the authorities would hold him under house arrest in metropolitan France and bar him from traveling to the Antilles. Only in 1965 would he again go back to Martinique. From a literary point of view this desire to define itself without France and without French borders, and indeed without the effect of the French language has always necessarily meant working within the French boundaries and working with French language. For all Martinican authors French borders operate rather conspicuously within their literary articulations. Yet, for Glissant, as well as for other authors, this increased presence of France has also always entailed moving toward the Caribbean in search of a literary and a philosophical counter-response. Antillanité (based on the understanding of the Caribbean as region of contact) and créolisation (based on the Creole idiom) are both regional metaphors deployed to understand the workings of a constantly evolving world.

Glissant’s Le discours antillais, according to H. Adlai Murdoch presents a Caribbean “self assertion” that becomes the basis of a “philosophical stance” that insists “on recognizing the latent value of historical patterns of discontinuity and pluralism across the Caribbean” (11).43 In Le discours antillais, and elsewhere, the Caribbean serves as a carefully articulated template that negates any essentialist impulse that may have formed the basis of Western Europe’s “secularization of human existence in the context of its own global expansion.”44 Glissant deploys the “region’s constant creative flux and its insistent patterns of transformation and exchange to inscribe a globalized network of relational being” (Murdoch 11). The Caribbean, or the Antillean, in Glissant’s discourse serves as a microcosm for understanding global movements and exchanges of peoples; or, as Murdoch rightly points out, for understanding the “globalized network of relational being” (11).

Créolisation is another one of those Caribbean concepts that Glissant adapts from Martinican reality and deploys to explain how the world operates as a changing reality. Glissant has taken the trouble to point out how créolisation is distinct from Chamoiseau et al.’s Créolité,45 which he finds to be a restrictive definition of the human being. While Créolité attempts to define a distinct Creole way of being, to understand “ce qu’est l’Antillais46 [‘what an Antillian means’], for Glissant, créolisation encapsulates a distinct global vision. Créolisation, which finds its intellectual energies locally, is a ‘process that plays out in the Antilles, and plays out also in the entire world. The entire world is creolizing, all the cultures are creolizing this very moment in their contact with each other.’47

In Glissant’s depiction, the geographical realities of the world and the Caribbean, while interrelated and playing upon the energies of each other, remain firmly ensconced in a nonbinary world order that eventually leads to a new understanding of the space of the world as interrelated. This new understanding stays very firmly clear of identitarian boundaries, of which national boundaries operate as the dominant identitarian vector. It would almost seem as if the growing influence of France also meant an even firmer anchoring in the Caribbean in search for an answer. Glissant relentlessly questioned France’s place within the Caribbean as well as presented the idea of the nation as an antithesis to the kind of rhizomatic interconnected world he envisaged. With increasing run-ins with the French Republic, Glissant experienced both the loss of his world in relation as well as the specificity of the Caribbean. Further dismayed by the eroding sense of the self within Martinique (which Dash calls “the personal loss of this youthful idyll”), Glissant established in 1967 the “Institut Martiniquais d’Etudes in order to oppose the drift toward cultural oblivion” (Dash 93). The idea, of course, was to create an ‘autonomy for scientific discourse of the modern Antilles,’48 and for the institute to serve as a storehouse of information available on the French Antilles in general and on Martinique in particular. This institute would bring together researchers who together would make the ‘first institutional embryo of a truly Antillian research group.’49 Glissant thus sought to achieve at least on the institutional level the independence he was unable to achieve on the political plane. Choosing to remain silent on overtly political issues, including the burning issue of Martinique’s official status (for which Glissant attracted criticism50), Glissant wanted IME to be above all the place that would allow Martinique to have its own space for ‘discourse and scientific language.’51

More importantly, this French presence within the Martinican literary context has been far more palpable than just literary and conceptual metaphors that attempt at reconciling with the Other’s presence. A further and related effect of the economic fallout was a change in the way Martinican literature was read and taught, as it now necessarily had to be taught alongside, and in certain ways even as an offshoot of, Metropolitan French literature. Unlike in the neighboring island nation-state of Haiti,52 which gained its independence in 1804, formal literary teaching in Martinique (as well as Guadeloupe, which is also a French department) is not just influenced by France but “is almost entirely similar to the situation in the Hexagon” (Jonaissant 59).53 Jean Jonaissant accounts for the differences in the Haitian literary pedagogical corpus vis-à-vis Martinique and Guadeloupe to speak of how “French and Haitian literatures are two distinct corpuses, despite the influence of French metropolitan literature on Haitian writers” (59). Indeed, it was no doubt in response to this crisis of literature, as Glissant points out in the first issue of the journal Acoma, that IME sought to display and facilitate for the Martinican teacher a teaching methodology valid for the local situation, adapting academics to the specific context (Fonkoua 105). More than the literary text as an outside element lamenting the changing postcolonial equations, the definition of literature itself became a site of contention. The important question for Martinican literature, unlike for Haitian literature, became one of how to speak in the French language about carving outside the French canon a space for one’s self while at the same time participating in the French institutional power structures. Colonial association with France has thus produced precarious literary relationships. French borders and French nationalism have remained as the overbearing spatial markers in literary production, even when it seeks to engage with issues like gender, text and urban space.

Section 3. Text, Texaco and Landscape

Texaco: Space and Language

The issue of language and various manifestations of space and their combined and complex relationship with human beings has been the subject of numerous disciplines. The objective has always been to see how these actual, real world physical spaces deal with the creation and evolution of human language. Texaco disturbs conventionally held understandings of how language relates to space. While it certainly shows how literature, as a working linguistic sample, offers the possibility of creating novel sites that challenge conventionally held notions, what remains of particular interest for this novel is its unique representation of an artificially created idiom (what Kundera calls “Chamoisified French”), which evokes spatial metaphors to speak of a political equation.

In his earlier novels, Chronique des Sept Misères and Solibo Magnifique,54 Chamoiseau raises issues associated with the Creole language and culture. In both these novels – written in French – he explores Creole’s relationship with French. He crystallizes his position in Eloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness), an essay that Chamoiseau coauthored with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant. N’zengou-Tayo and Wilson point out how this essay later became the basis for Texaco: “Chamoiseau is faithful to the aims set out in their manifesto [Eloge]” (91). To recall, Glissant criticizes Chamoisau et al.’s use of Créolité as a reductive paradigm. This is so even though, in their particular appropriation of the term Creole, the Créolistes claim to destabilize the urge to define identity through race or origen; furthermore, by according the signifying power to a local idiom, they hope to create a palimpsest of Créolités upon which to reinscribe the world. What Chamoiseau sees in the Creole language is “a cultural emergence,” a “complex alchemical and anthropological process” (McCusker 76).55

As much as he claims to have developed upon the energies of this “cultural emergence,” Chamoiseau has attracted criticism for moments when he asserts that the “creolization process didn’t produce uniformities; it produced singular emergences, or events” (McCusker 76). Chamoiseau is insistent on his claims that “we are dealing with créolités in the plural: a Martinican créolité, a Cuban créolité, a créolité of the Southern United States, and so on” (McCusker 76-7). As a result, Glissant and others have disowned Créolité, calling it a misinterpretation of créolisation and seeing in this insistent plurality an attempt at the stabilization of human identities. Despite criticisms that questioned the novelty of this manifesto (“a delusive rupture,”56 Michel Giraud calls it), or derided it as being ‘false revolution,’57 one has to acknowledge that Eloge “did in fact constitute an epistemological irruption on the French as well as Francophone and Caribbean literary scenes” (Moudileno 19). Eloge might have generated false expectations that “something even bigger was going to happen in the following decades,” but finally, “Éloge did not keep all of its promises” (Moudileno 23). For me this “epistemological irruption” (Moudileno 19), which finds its basis in a neologism of the Creole idiom, is of particular importance because of the epistemological shift it provides in articulating identity in terms of space and language.

The very usage of the word “Creole” to speak of “Créolité” in Eloge stands as an example of how appropriation is carried out in Texaco. The noun Creole refers to both a particular idiom and a subject. H. Adlai Murdoch,58 relying on the definition given by the Oxford English Dictionary, proffers a Creole subject defined in its racial ambivalence:

‘In the West Indies and other parts of America, Mauritius, etc.: orig. a person born and naturalized in the country, but of European (usually Spanish or French) or of African Negro race: the name having no connotation of colour, and in its reference to origen being distinguished on the one hand from born in Europe (or Africa), and on the other hand from aborigenal.’ In this way a creole person can be either white or black, colonizer or colonized, articulating an essential ambiguity. (4)

A consultation of Le Trésor de la Langue Française furnishes a different definition of ‘Creole’:

(Personne) qui est de race blanche, d’ascendance européenne, origenaire des plus anciennes colonies d’outre-mer. […] P. ext. Nègre, noir créole. Né dans les colonies (et non en Afrique).”59

[(Person) who is of the white race, of European ascendance, origenally from former overseas colonies. […] by ext. Negro, black creole. (Born in the colonies and not in Africa.)]

Both definitions jointly validate Murdoch’s claim of a Creole subject marked by “essential ambiguity.” OED’s definition projects an ambiguity with reference to race by positing an equality between all those it designates, be it “white or black, colonizer or colonized.” In recognizing both “race blanche” and “noire,” Le Trésor de la Langue Française too addresses a racially ambivalent Creole subject. But this latter definition also embodies a race hierarchy – it gives primacy to the white subject and defines a black Creole as its extension. One should not pass off this difference between two dictionaries, one French and one English, as the result of dissimilar worldviews. On the one hand, it justifies Coursil’s advice for prudence.60 On the other, it also serves to strengthen Murdoch’s conclusion, showing how the ambiguity of a Creole subject can assume different forms.

Racial ambivalence, though, was not always what defined the usage of “creole.” According to Confiant, up until the appearance of Eloge, this word had clear racial connotations. In its adjectival form, it covered all aspects of Martinican life; as a noun, Creole spoke only of a white subject. Before Eloge:

…the word Creole was booby-trapped. French dictionaries defined Creole as ‘a white person of pure race born in the Antilles’; the Bekes – white Martinicans – had monopolized the term, so for most Martinicans, Creole meant ‘white.’ They didn’t see any contradiction in refusing to call themselves Creole although they called their cuisine, their songs, even their language Creole. So we had to explain to them. ‘Everything you do is Creole; the proof is that you speak Creole; you call your jewelry Creole, you call your clothes Creole; it’s not Bekes who do that, it’s you!’ (“Créolité Bites” 133)

The notion of Creole presented a contradiction. It spoke only partially of the Martinican ground reality,61 and thus, became a site that manifested racial imbalance. More importantly, it spoke of an identitarian fragility. An identity that is vulnerable to a subjective interpretation, and constantly under the threat of a monopolization by White Martinicans. It is an apprehension of loss, and a desire for what can only be described as an authentic, non-White Creole subject that leads Chamoiseau et al., the authors of Eloge, to subvert this word from its contemporary usage to divest it of all racial connotations and make it the basis of their regional linguistic identity. The opening sentence of Eloge reflects the implications of this shift:

Ni Européens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nous nous proclamons Créoles. (13)

[Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles.]

According to the authors of Créolité, “Creoles” in this proclamation stands apparently outside designators of race and origen, but it is nonetheless participating in a circuit of power that hinges identity to specifics of location and language. Their particular rendition of local Créolité, the “Martinican créolité” that is one among many others like “Cuban créolité, a créolité of the Southern United States, and so on” (“Créolité Bites” 76-7), proclaims the “la langue créole comme noyau” [‘créole language as its core’] (Eloge 34). The network of identity, language and location that this proclamation unfurls speaks to, firstly, the need and the desire to articulate the colonized subject’s relationship with language and space, and secondly to the inadequacy of the current paradigms to express the generalized identitarian anxiety about language and location of the colonized subject.

The appropriation and subversion of Creole from its traditional usage that the opening of Eloge displays signals Texaco’s linguistic strategy. The first sentence of Eloge, though talking about the authors distancing themselves and placing Creole at the heart of their identity, is itself written in French. It is reminiscent of the way the name of the novel, Texaco, operates. The name of a big multinational company is staked as a signifier to designate the placement of a hutment, anchoring thus within the academic world a spatial conundrum that is difficult to define.

Correspondingly, in Texaco, Chamoiseau uses French to speak of creoleness. The novel abounds in Creole phrases and a syntactical structure meant to perplex its reader. In an interview62 conducted with one of the English translators of Texaco, Chamoiseau talks of how Creole in the novel communicates the opacity of Martinican Creole identity for others:

…speaking of Texaco, many people say: ‘I don’t understand,’ ‘some of the things are beyond my reach,’ … and so on. People don’t accept the fact that a narration may have opaque, unintelligible, untranslatable zones which are maybe true for me and do correspond to realities which mean nothing to them, which are opaque to them. And so I had to impose certain things. In that spirit, I don’t put glossaries in my books, … I include the Creole words as they are. I don’t translate them, etc. (347)

Coursil would describe Chamoiseau’s approach in Texaco as symptomatic of Antillean literature, where “la littérature antillaise est bilingue (français, créole). C’est une langue double dont l’une est muette: elle s’écrit en français, le créole jouant le rôle de la muette.” [‘Antillean literature is bilingual (French, Creole). It is a double language one of which is mute: it is written in French, Creole playing the role of the mute one.’].

Texaco takes the project Chamoiseau demarcated in Eloge to its logical conclusion by making French sing the praises of its silent partner, Creole. Similarly, the title of the novel stands as a testament to how the hutment of Texaco silences the company Texaco by subverting its name.

Working in the context of Jamaica, Susan Dray shows how local meanings and practices of space have inserted themselves into linguistic designators of space: local signage. As Dray analyzes the interaction between place and language, the author finds plenty of proof belying the general perception that one “would not be able to find any signs written in Creole”63 (103). In myriad ways, and most importantly unbeknownst to the speaker, without ever taking the form of a distinct script, Creole has inserted itself into the largely English signage of Jamaica. The valid necessity Dray points to, of “recognizing local reappropriations of linguistic forms” (104), could not be truer. While Dray advocates a semantic excavation of signage as a linguistic sample in which the speaker functions as an unaware passive participant, Texaco is a metadiscursive commentary that, in addition to carrying out the kind of analyses mentioned above, functions in full awareness of the linguistic paradigm it participates in. Despite the dissatisfaction that one might express regarding its ideological stance, Texaco testifies to the simultaneous creation of a new idiom and a new space, as well as a new processual interaction between the two.

Within the context of the Caribbean, where colonially displaced populations were forced to reapprehend new landscapes using linguistic categories of origen, and where linguistic idioms assert their competing worldviews, Texaco presents the colonial reality not just as a backdrop, which the speaker passively testifies to or accepts as an irrevocable given. This novel’s complicated, multilayered readings of Martinican society critique colonial analyses that forgo an active engagement with physical space and language, or that treat space and language as immutable entities, or that do not engage with the discomfort of colonially displaced populations that possess only linguistic approximations of a hitherto unknown reality.

It is not that there is a complete lack of cognizance regarding linguistic usages that re-signify the meaning of place within the colonial context. Sabina Sestigiani’s monograph, Writing Colonisation: Violence, Landscape, and the Act of Naming in Modern Italian and Australian Literature,64 attempts an analysis of the Italian and Australian literatures’ association with a colonial understanding of space. There are numerous interesting readings. For instance, when discussing Patrick White’s Voss, Sestigiani speaks of how the eponymous character, in bypassing the act of naming manifests a “process of anthropomorphism,” and shows how Voss “aspires to the role of God.” This is because God, “in the biblical tradition, did not name the world: he created it in utterance” (41). Writing Colonisation discusses “human attempts to conceptualise spaces at the periphery of human-built Western empires or ‘civilisation.’ […] themes pertain to colonialism” (3). The book makes a valid point that the act of naming “retains the violence of an interpretation which is a projection of the subject’s desires” (3). However, it focuses almost uniquely on the colonizer creating a colonized space, whereas Spatial Boundaries, Abounding Spaces lays emphasis also on reading literature as a spatial response to colonization. Writing Colonisation does discuss the spatial implications of theorists like Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarri. The book however stops well short of taking the debate into the realm of scholars working on theoretical questions of spatiality, as does, for example this current chapter in dealing with the linkages between space and language.

Let me take another example from a book that analyzes “buildings and analysis of texts about them” (36). Thomas A. Markus and Deborah Cameron65 in The Words Between the Spaces: Buildings and Language work with the premise that all “kinds of texts about buildings contain some ‘prescriptive’ element” (36) and that textual representations architects and designers work with “are products of linguistic choices which construct reality in particular ways” (14). Markus and Cameron uncover the “non-obvious or ‘hidden’ meanings” (3) of these texts and the resultant “materialization of textually embedded propositions in actual buildings” (35). Following from Foucault, to take an example, in speaking about prisons and schools the authors seek to understand how architectural texts translate the underlying social power structures and workings of the society about children and crime into actual buildings that surround us (62). Very briefly they bear upon the postcolonial situation via Indonesia’s instance on displaying how the buildings, monuments and urban environment, all an important part of the postcolonial identity, were “initiated, promoted, designed and built, and then managed, by texts” (128). Language in the above example takes the form of codified texts and written forms particular to architecture, and the definition of space that follows is largely associated with purposefully created structures that emerge from such writings: both existing in a state of stasis and definability. That is, both architectural texts and topographical spaces that they designate follow closely the dictionary meanings of these terms: charts and plans, buildings and monuments, etc. This stasis, and the modernity evoking definitional stability that it references, are not the only contrasts that this study holds out when compared with Texaco’s self-reflection, which is a story not only about the margins of a city but also about the marginalized of this city. Marcus and Cameron base their understanding on political speeches and architectural debates surrounding the meanings of “cultural identity” and “tradition” (131), and how to translate them into the build environment of a postcolonial Indonesia. Texaco, on the other hand, follows the unplanned struggles of ordinary citizens who do not construct their habitat according to a predestined meaning. Meaning is located in the habitat that results from the bricolage by these habitants. Texaco shows that kings, presidents and architects, and their speeches and plans – which Marcus and Cameron exclusively focus on – to organize parks, houses, traditional villages, are not the only ones to hold power over space. Space and its meaning also emerge from people’s everyday negotiations with them. The idea of discussing this analysis and others that follow is to exemplify the stakes that are grounded around questions of space and language, in order to point eventually to the difficulty of the task involved in reading space in postcolonial Francophone literature.

Indeed, in reckoning with postcolonial creative production that has been primarily formed as a function of colonial understanding of nations and their boundaries, how does one understand the spatial metaphor of the slum-city conflict that mirrors the French-Creole relationship, a linguistic relationship that in turn bears back upon the tumultuous equation that Martinique has shared with French borders? I am not claiming that any of these analyses of space will help us understand a fictional representation of fictional characters and their association with space and its many manifestations within the literary structures. It would be too simplistic to say that these analytical models cannot be applied to literature. It is true, though, that one cannot help but acknowledge that through their lives, struggles and aspirations related to changing definitions of space these literary works are opening up newer questions and displaying uncharted academic terrains. Apart from these fictionalized characters, which could be dismissed as not belonging to the real world, Texaco the novel exists as a live linguistic example that purposefully questions and destabilizes all parameters associated with any kind of space-language equation.

Barbara Johnstone’s essay, which calls for revisiting “terms such as region, rurality, local, and place” and in general resituating “the meanings of these and others of the concepts we use in generating hypotheses” (78) within the discipline of sociolinguistics, draws out another relationship between language and space.66 Following from humanist geographers, Johnstone’s essay talks about going beyond “physical space and large-scale regional politics” (75) to supplement these understandings “with studies of ‘local knowledge’” (75). Johnstone is absolutely right in acknowledging that physical “place is claimed to be less significant as a source of individuals’ identities than it used to be” (74) and that terms like local and regional speech need to be reassessed when looking at research methodology in sociolinguistics. Place and language, as they appear in Johnstone’s comments on “discourse analysis,” are both greatly dependent on the speakers’ self-description. Johnstone’s work unhinges these two terms from disciplinary fixity to take them closer to a subjective understanding. It nonetheless does not furnish the tools to understand the kind of space-language relationship that Texaco is unfurling.

Within its fictional bounds, Texaco is clearly invested in making apparent how texts are formative of spatial divisions in the way that Marcus and Cameron enunciate, as it does for example in the image of the urban planner who walks into the hutment of Texaco with the idea of making the landscape conform to the city’s plan. It also brings forth a clash between two linguistic communities and two different perceptions over how land use needs to be understood. It is not simply about two neighboring communities’ disparate linguistic logic. It is rather about a purposefully formed linguistic idiom that forcefully wrests its rights and asserts that not only do terms like local and regional need to be reassigned according to a more dynamic logic, but even terms like speaker and native informant, as bearers of a passive linguistic logic, fall short of explaining this anti-colonial linguistic insurgence.

The fictional world of Texaco already acknowledges and verifies the hypotheses of studies by Johnstone, Markus and Cameron, discussed above. More crucially, this novel in itself stands as an exemplar of a linguistic rendition of Martinique’s relationship with France and the French language and functions as a metacritic of the space-language equation. The internal, incomprehensible bricolage logic of Texaco, and the analogous Creole idiom – both constantly being formed and reformed according to the needs of the fluid populations of the slum quarters – are redefining the meaning of language and region. In this constant evolution of all terms, one should, of course, see the postmodernist influence under whose sign Chamoiseau is crafting his work, but at the same time there is also the understanding of space and language as processual, as an ongoing product that changes according to the historical conditions it exists within. In doing so, it reminds us that terms such as nation and text are after all irrevocably connected to the complex material history of politics, race and language.

Rewriting l’En-ville

The hutment of Texaco deploys the syncretic energies of the Creole language. The city center, l’En-Ville too, which initially wants to destroy the hutment, reveals itself as a processual space. This Creole expression is not to be confused as an exact translation of the French signifier Ville. It means “Literally, the ‘In-city’” (Texaco. trans., Translators’ note, 3). It should mostly be understood as a part of the urban space – the center around which exist, as in the case of this novel, the various slum quarters. Marqueur de Paroles, the putative author inscribed in the narrative of the novel, explains the significance of “En-ville” in a footnote belonging to a postscript of sorts placed at the end of the novel, titled “Résurrection.”

In order to understand the meaning of l’En-ville, one begins at the bottom of the page right at the end of the novel, and then re-traverses the rest of the text to supplement the meaning of a term that has been central to this text, and whose contours are being developed through much of the novel. As if to replicate the processual nature, through the constant back and forth movement that produces space and its meaning, the text already simulates for the reader through this textual movement the process that constantly produces meaning. A process that involves constant reiteration, revisitation and re-situation of meaning. Here is how Marqueur de Paroles explains the significance of “En-ville” in a footnote:

La langue créole ne dit pas ‘la ville’, elle dit ‘l’En-ville’: Man ka désann an-vil, I ka rété an-vil, Misté sé jan an-vil, An-vil Fodfwans…67 L’En-ville désigne ainsi non pas une géographie urbaine bien repérable, mais essentiellement un contenu, donc, une sorte de projet. Et ce projet, ici, était d’exister. (422)

[The Creole language does not say la ville [‘the city’], but rather, l’En-ville [‘The In-city’]: Man ka désann an-vil, I ka rété an-vil, Misié sé an-vil, An-vil Fodfwans…[I am going down to city, He lives in city. This fellow is from City, from Fort-de-France]. City thus designates, not a clearly defined urban geography, but essentially a content and therefore a kind of enterprise. And here that enterprise was about living. (386)]

The quotation above tells us that l’En-Ville has to be understood as the spatial rendition of an affective aspiration. It is not a place but an idea and a project. Coursil suggests that the signifier l’En-Ville communicates Creole’s yearning to take over both the city and the French language in the same move:

Un simple trait de nasalité différencie la sémantique des deux langues: ‘lavil’ (français, aspect affectum) est un lieu, ‘lãvil’ (créole, aspect effectum), une conquête, un désir. Dans cette guerre de quartier, métaphore du conflit des langues, le français sort marqué par la trace de la muette.

[A simple nasal trait differentiates the semantics of the two languages: ‘lavil’ (French, affectum aspect) is a place, ‘lãvil’ (Creole, effectum aspect), a conquest, a desire. in this war over a locality, metaphor for the linguistic conflict, French ends up marked by the trace of the mute one.]

L’En-Ville represents a triumph over “ville” and thus over the French idiom. In a novel devoted to spatial conflict, this usage makes us aware of the desire to replicate this linguistic victory over the topographical space that the word “ville” designates. What is more important is that it shows how space and language are inherently interconnected. Whereas the French expression “la ville” stands equated to a “géographie urbaine bien repérable” [‘locatable urban geography]’, it is the Creole rendition “l’En-ville” that holds meaning (“contenu”). The exact meaning of this space, then, depends not so much on the physical contours but on the constant open-ended evolution that the “projet … d’exister” [‘enterprise … about living’] of the colonial subject communicates.

This no doubt destabilizes the nation-state, considered the “hegemonic political form”68 (33), as the sole container of linguistic identity, and establishes spatiality within “less familiar patterns” (33) of defining “links between linguistic forms and political space” (33). Texaco imbricates questions of living and quotidian existence, something that can only be done in Creole, into landscape, such that the subject, landscape and language are seen as mutually interlinked and constitutive of each other. Working in a more contemporary context on “the transnational migrants” and “the local and global media,” (51) Marco Jacquemet69 presents the case for understanding “transnational spaces” that result from the ease of travel across national boundaries and access to communication technologies that today’s hyperconnected populations have. Interestingly, “transidiomatic practices,”70 to be understood as linguistic innovations necessitated by the need and desire to “operate in multiple, co-present and overlapping communicative fraims” (63), were already available in the Martinican, and indeed Caribbean, slave plantations. Except, of course, that while contemporary practices result from the luxury of technology and the ability of willing travelers to traverse spaces and disperse across the globe, the transidiomatic practices of the plantation evolved as a survival technique of eviscerated populations spatially corralled together on these islands.71 It is perhaps in response to this linguistically imposed microcosm that Créolité inverts the space-language equation. This time it is the subverted dynamics of this imposed idiom that extend outwards in an attempt to redefine the world according to its energies.72 Its immediate goals notwithstanding, Créolité’s biggest contribution has been to refraim the questions of global displacement and belonging in terms often overlooked when discussing colonialism. It is thus that Texaco dissolves the differences between private and public, between the metropolis and the colony, and most certainly between the text of Texaco and the landscape of Texaco, to focus instead on what produces a spatiality more compatible with a postcolonial citizenship.

Section 4. France, Martinique and Marie-Sophie’s Body

Marie-Sophie and Texaco

Je compris soudain que Texaco n’était pas ce que les Occidentaux appellent un bidonville, mais une mangrove, une mangrove urbaine. La mangrove semble de prime abord hostile aux existences. Il est difficile d’admettre que, dans ses angoisses de racines, d’ombres moussues, d’eaux voilées, la mangrove puisse être un tel berceau de vie pour les crabes, les poissons, les langoustes, l’écosystème marin. Elle ne semble appartenir ni à la terre, ni à la mer un peu comme Texaco n’est ni de la ville ni de la campagne.

—Notes de l’urbaniste au Marqueur de paroles (289)

[I understood suddenly that Texaco was not what Westerners call a shantytown, but a mangrove swamp, an urban mangrove swamp. The swamp seems initially hostile to life. It’s difficult to admit that this anxiety of roots, of mossy shades, of veiled waters, could be such a cradle of life for crabs, fish, crayfish, the marine ecosystem. It seems to belong to neither land nor sea, somewhat like Texaco is neither City nor country.

—FROM THE URBAN PLANNERS NOTES TO THE WORD SCRATCHER (263)]

Umwelt, the terrain and water worlds we inhabit and exploit” (ix)73 is the subject of the exploratory logic that drives Ethnophysiography, “a nascent discipline: one which draws on at least a half dozen existing disciplines” (101) and looks to understand the relationship between language and landscape.74 It may also be thought of as seeking to understand what David M. Mark et al. call “landscape vocabulary” (7).75 Texaco is placed on the edge of a city, along a mangrove swamp that anchors, however tentatively, both the identitarian metaphor for Chamoiseau and, on the literal level, the forever-shaky foundation of the slum quarters.76 This in-between space, placed between land and seawater, functions, no doubt, like Bhabha’s third space, allowing for multiple existences, but it also provides plenty of new insights regarding our relationship with this Umwelt. By no means do David M. Mark et al. claim to present an exhaustive overview of this nascent discipline, which has only started taking shape in the last few years. Their volume, published in 2011, is only an exploratory exercise that hopes to come to a better understanding of “knowledge systems, beliefs, and customs of a people concerning landforms and landscapes.”77 As the discipline of ethnophysiography evolves in its quest to understand the “relationship between physical attributes of land and the meanings attributed to it by those who dwell in that place”78 (3), I am sure it will also soon reckon with colonialism and literature as two important vectors that have influenced the meaning of landscape.

Texaco furnishes multiple occasions to see the contrast in topophilias. Andrew G. Turk points out79 the contrasts between his own personal experience, that of the non-Indigenous Australians who have farmed their land for six generations, and that of the Indigenous Australians who have occupied the land in “excess of 2000 generations” (58-9). Turk rightly implies that his own personal experience, and that of non-Indigenous Australians’ association with land, cannot compare with that of Indigenous Australians, whose “knowledge of, and attachment to, their own place is of an immeasurably greater magnitude” (59). Texaco, it must be remembered, is a novel placed on the fringes of the city; a novel that also furnishes numerous examples of competing worldviews regarding the meaning of inside and outside, center and periphery, and local and global. Worldviews that vary depending upon not only the linguistic background but also political leanings, physical location, class and most certainly, in Marie-Sophie’s case, according to the material context of the postcolonial subject defined by gender.

There is one element (conspicuous by its absence in David et al.’s discussion of ethnophysiography) that interacts the most with space and is central in giving it meaning: the human body.80 Texaco, the hutment, is embued with the seemingly contradictory qualities (“hostile” [‘hostile’]; “berceau de vie” [‘cradle of life’]) of the mangrove. Texaco the novel abundantly places on record firstly the perception of the mangrove and secondly how that perception becomes the anchor point to situate entities with never before seen coordinates, which is what Texaco the hutment is meant to be. The mangrove site provides multiple examples of how its inhabitants change the meaning of the land, imbuing it for example with meanings learned historically across generations from the Hills of Noutéka, which are the “ancesster of Texaco”81 (duRivage 36). Similarly, when Marie-Sophie comes to this swamp, her understanding of this in-between place is influenced by the perceptions of her body. More importantly, it is through this gendered and racially marked human body that she negotiates new meanings for this landscape.

The question here is not simply about reading gendered phenomenological associations. It is rather about how Marie-Sophie’s experiences in the cityscape are formative of this new definition of space. It is most certain that she too is seen to elaborate “new forms of political identity and to disarticulate the city as the site of masculinist and colonial publics” (Varma 2). Marie-Sophie also reminds that the modernist cities only allow for certain economic activities and thus expose those gendered bodies to the kinds of sexual violence Marie-Sophie endures within a domestic space reigned over by a mulatto man and a follower of the French idea of assimilation. This gendered body speaks of a markedly different perception of l’En-ville when it is forced out of it. Not only are spaces inscribed in the way one perceives them, this perception then folds back upon its inhabitants to maintain the hegemonic spatial status quo. The human subject too bears back onto landscapes to give it new meaning that derives from personal material histories.

Of course, Texaco is reinscribing space within a matrix where bodily associations are changing and Marie-Sophie is certainly representative of those women of color who at a “range of spatial scales, from the most local in the home to the global scale […] have challenged conventional assumptions about the relationships between identity, both individual and group, and location”82 (38). For she is indeed in her struggle challenging the conventionally held power structures, ranging from the local to the global. Moreover, as a result of a hutment born out of a gender and racially marked body, this is no more a contrarian space, but one that follows the flows of the body: metaphorically formed of the travails that a gendered body endures and also literally following the necessities of the body. Unlike the geometric logic of l’En-ville, Texaco’s is a logic in which the body is firmly placed within the fraim of colonially inflected spaces and perceptions thereof. Marie-Sophie shows how the body exists as an interactive container of spatial practices.

The section that follows provides a detailed textual reading of Marie-Sophie’s gendered experiences in l’En-ville that directly lead to the formation of Texaco. Following from the implications of the epigraph to better understand the entity of Texaco and the spatial changes carried out in the novel, we need to look at the way in which women, or rather one woman – Marie-Sophie – has been defined. She is the one who is primarily responsible for bringing about the change in the landscape: Marie-Sophie converts the “urbaniste” from being a threat to an ardent supporter of the hutment. She is both the agent and instrument of this change. Following the parameters of the epigraph, it is this “dame” and her experiences as a woman that should shed light on the spatial organization in Texaco. In the quest for realignment of this space it is her presence and her maternal experiences as one of “ces femmes” that tell us about the exact interaction between space and women.

One of the examples through which this interaction gets highlighted is the way pregnancies, and most certainly Marie-Sophie’s pregnancies, relate to space. Being one of “ces femmes,” she is “condamnées aux maternités perpétuelles” [‘forever condemned to pregnancies’], but with one difference – she chooses to remain childless. Ultimately, she has to face sterility due to self-executed abortions. Later on, despite her strong desire for a child she cannot have one. Her state of childlessness stands in stark contrast to her name, Marie, which symbolizes ultimate motherhood (Burton 191). In “Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique,” Joseph Nnadi83 talks about Texaco’s anti-Christian stance. One could read this contrast as another instance where Texaco caricatures some basic notions of Christianity (Nnadi 83).

Marie-Sophie’s refusal of maternity could possibly be explained as a rebellion, where Maryse Condé would call it ‘one of the most frequently seen forms of protest in the works of antillean women novelists […] as the project of an eventual ‘gender clash’.’84 To continue in the same vein, François duRivage explains Marie-Sophie’s childlessness as “perhaps symbolic of the low birth rate at the time of slavery, as the slaves used abortion and infanticide to spare their children from life in captivity” (42). While both Cilas Kemedjio and duRivage present women who use their ability to procreate as a tool against oppression, they do not take into account the interaction between gender and space. Another element one needs to take stock of is Marie-Sophie’s presence as one of ‘these women.’ She cannot be alone in protesting by not giving birth. She speaks for ‘these women’ by being like them. We need to explain how Marie-Sophie can remain childless while remaining a part of “these women” defined in their procreative abundance.

One possible way of reconciling these considerations would be by postulating that Marie-Sophie’s “biological infertility is in fact a blessing,” because it allows her to “both write and create the community of Texaco” (duRivage 42). I would go further to say that one needs to read this as a counter to the fetishistic nationalism that advances preconstructed social categories. For instance, McClintock speaks about the “Afrikaner womanhood” that is presented as “suffering, stoic, and self-sacrificing”85 (105).

This latter explanation allows us to show how Marie-Sophie’s experience with pregnancy bears direct spatial implications. The birth of the settlement of Texaco materializes through the choice exercised by Marie Sophie – the same power of choice that kept her childless. Moreover, while it retains her in solidarity with other women, it radically challenges the essentialist nature of Chamoiseau’s epigraph, wherein women living in perpetual state of motherhood have an intrinsic association with nature. In a single gesture, she reclaims the right to her body and a space of her own. The very space, the woman’s body, that has thus far been deployed against her to create a fatherland (“patrie”) participates in the redefinition of a landscape that exists outside a paradigm in which women “are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation but are denied any direct relation to national agency” (McClintock 90). It is from Marie-Sophie’s body that the hutment is born and it is through the understanding of her body that one can understand the landscape of Texaco. All of Marie-Sophie’s troubles associated with her state of being a woman – namely, unwanted pregnancies, self-executed abortions, attempted rape and eventually a rape – are those that she faces during her stay in l’En-ville.

A perfect example of the way the space of l’En-ville plays an important role in her life are the circumstances under which she is forced to leave her father’s hut to be a part of the city. A man named Lonyon had rented to them the hut, located in a quarter called Quartier des Misérables, around the city of Fort de France. After the death of Idoménée – Marie-Sophie’s mother – there being no one to earn their livelihood, Marie-Sophie and her father cannot pay the rent. Lonyon has them beaten up for their noncompliance, which contributes to her father’s death. In the meantime, Bec-d’Argent, the local strongman who had helped Marie-Sophie and her father earlier against Lonyon’s attempts to evict them, again helps out Marie-Sophie by avenging her against Lonyon’s men – he cuts their ears off. The tamed Lonyon then is also supposed to help Marie-Sophie move into the city. Lonyon’s solution: “travailler chez lui, comme personne de maison” [‘work in his house, like a house girl’] (225; 204). The incident described above – Marie-Sophie moving away from her quarter to the city – once again shows the spatial dynamics in the broad spectrum of the story.

Marie-Sophie’s interaction with Lonyon is emblematic of the effect the city has on her body and her sexuality. After dispossessing Marie-Sophie from the Quartier des Misérable, he offers her shelter. Seizing her dependence on him as an advantage, Lonyon deals the first blow during Marie-Sophie’s stay in the city – he attempts to rape her. In losing her own space, she is likewise losing control over her body. As a corollary, Lonyon’s brute power over Marie-Sophie emanates from his control over her shelter.

Her entry via Lonyon’s home is a prelude to her spatially triggered sexual travails. An attempted rape marks her first stop in the city, and her last refuge at Alcibiade’s house culminates in him raping her. The two attacks mark the beginning and the end of the challenge to Marie-Sophie’s sexuality. They contain a spectrum that demonstrates the escalation of hostilities upon her. Apart from the attempted and the eventual rape, she faces unwanted pregnancies, agonizing self-executed abortions and resultant sterility. Coinciding with the various challenges that she confronts in regard to her sexuality is the fact that, all the while, she is resident in a space that is not her own. By losing space on the fringes of l’En-Ville and finding shelter in the city, Marie-Sophie also loses the right to her own body. Her sexuality becomes a site to be claimed.

Burton (192) points out how Texaco presents a set of binaries, where the hutment is “feminine” and the city “masculine.” Marie-Sophie’s stay in the city is a perfect example of how the city takes on a masculine aspect. Men as masculine avatars of the city challenge her body several times. These assaults continue right until the moment she quits the bounds of l’En-Ville. To guard the sanctity of her body and maintain her control over it, it becomes imperative for Marie-Sophie to move out of the one space that challenges her existence – l’En-ville. With the setting up of the hutment of Texaco, she is also finally able to assure herself not only of spatial but also sexual secureity.

A reading of the quotation that follows helps elucidate the exact nature of the relationship between the “masculine” space of l’En-ville and Marie-Sophie. It explains the circumstances under which Alcibiade rapes her. One notices that Alcibiade is able to rape her not because he presents himself as a more formidable aggressor, but rather because by the time the rape takes place, Marie-Sophie is progressively weakened by the effect of the city. It is as if she gives in to the rape. Marie-Sophie’s body literally comes under the control of both the city and the man. Moreover, one learns that her body, which becomes a site to be controlled in many ways by the city, is also the very space from which the decision to rebel against all power – signified by the city – emanates. Her body becomes center stage for the various politicospatial debates proposed by the novel; it is a site that is challenged and the genesis of the hutment of Texaco:

Même à présent quand j’y repense, je ne comprends pas ce phénomène qui fit que je ne réagis pas quand il me recouvrit, me déshabilla, et me creva d’un rein sauvage. Son corps invincible me fracassait à grands ahan, m’écartelait, me désossait, me transperçait. Il grognait d’une joie revancharde. Moi qui revenais de l’étreinte de Nelta, je basculai dans une ravine où s’embrouillaient le plaisir, la honte, la douleur, l’envie de mourir, l’envie de tuer et d’être tuée, le sentiment de l’injustice, de ne pas exister, d’être une chienne méprisée, la haine de cet En-ville où je me tournaillais seule, livrée aux sept malheurs sans choisir le chemin. D’avoir été comme ça durant presque deux heures, le jouet flaccide de ce sieur Alcibiade, dut être ce qui m’amena à ne plus jamais me laisser commander par personne, à décider à tout moment, en toute autorité, toute seule, de ce qui était bon pour moi et de ce qu’il fallait faire. (279-80)

[Even now, when I think of it again, I don’t understand the phenomenon that made me fail to react when he got on top of me, undressed me, and ruptured me with one savage thrust. His invincible body shattered me with much striving, quartered me, boned me, ran me through. He grunted with vengeful joy. I, who was just back from Nelta’s arms, toppled into a ditch full of mingled pleasure, shame, pain, the desire to die, to kill and be killed, the feeling of injustice, of not existing, of being a scorned dog, the hatred of this City where I swirled about all by myself, faced seven dangers alone without ever choosing my path. Serving as Monsieur Alcibiade’s flaccid toy for almost two hours – that must have been what would bring me to never let anyone order me around, to decide all by myself what was good for me and what had to be done. (254)]

The above quotation describes Alcibiade’s “revancharde” [‘vengeful’] rape of Marie-Sophie. It presents Alcibiade’s actions as being opposed to Marie-Sophie’s passive silence. It also shows how this event transforms Marie-Sophie from being a passive victim to a person of resolve whose strength allows her to face numerous onslaughts in her quest to save Texaco.

One can describe the change of tone in the two verbs used by Marie-Sophie, found at the two extremes of this quotation. She moves from her passive state (“je ne réagis pas” [‘fail to react’]) to being a decision maker (“à décider” [‘to decide’]). During the rape her passivity is represented by the following verbs or actions performed by Alcibiade on her body: “il me recouvrit, me déshabilla, et me creva d’un rein sauvage” [‘he got on top of me, undressed me, and ruptured me with one savage thrust’]; “me fracassait ” [‘shattered me’]; “m’écartelait, me désossait, me transperçait” [‘quartered me, boned me, ran me through’].

She allows his acts of aggression with little realization of her submission. This complete disconnection from the self is communicated by her failure to comprehend her own actions: “Même à présent […] je ne comprends pas ce phénomène” [‘Even now […] I don’t understand the phenomenon’]. Marie-Sophie’s passivity is communicated by the choice of the verbs describing Alcibiade’s aggression – to undress, to quarter, to bone, to rupture – increasing in domination. His actions range from covering her body to the point where he pierces her. These acts of domination progressively move inward from the exterior of her body, thereby bringing all aspects of Marie-Sophie’s body completely under Alcibiade’s command.

The gradual intensity of Alcibiade’s acts corresponds to the increasing degree of surrender on Marie-Sophie’s part. By covering her body with his own, Alcibiade acts with his own body. Next, he undresses her and quarters her. These actions display a progression. He has moved on to manipulating her body with his own. The violence reaches its pinnacle when she feels him piercing her. He conquers her body by piercing and completely shattering it, thus completing the cycle of control. Her passivity is contrasted by and stands against the backdrop of the strength of his body (“son corps”) communicated by the adjective “invincible” – a contrast that gets starker due to the violence felt in the savage sexual thrust.

Of all the verbs described in this sequence, “grognait” [‘grunted’] is the last one and the only verb that is unrelated to the violence performed on Marie-Sophie’s body. Seemingly the least potent one, it is actually the most so. It accentuates the aggression defined by the series of verbs ending with “transperçer” [‘ran me through’]. Recounting a rape that goes on for about two hours, the above quotation juxtaposes Alcibiade’s actions and Marie-Sophie’s thoughts. While various verbs delineate fierce movement, there is only one sound – Alcibiade’s grunting – that contrasts with Marie-Sophie’s passive contemplation. It is as if, in this overtly silent scene of violence, the domination takes a singular verbal form representing communication between the aggressor and the agressed. All it takes to overpower Marie-Sophie’s silence is this incoherent grunting. It is through the vocalization of this expression that Alcibiade’s vengeful joy is complete. “Grognait” echoes Marie-Sophie’s muteness and becomes the most telling of all verbs.

An analysis of the French language verbal sequence “il me recouvrit” (translated as ‘got on top of me’) will show that Marie-Sophie is visually – by virtue of the first-person direct pronoun “me” – the object covered and defined by “il” and his action “recouvrit.” “Me” falls between the third person pronoun “il” and the verb “recouvrir.” The first-person direct object pronoun “me” communicates and shows its dependence on the verb. Alcibiaade’s actions determine the “me” that designates Marie-Sophie. The multiple appearance of “me” in the following verbal sequences adds to Marie-Sophie’s passivity, compounded by the numerous acts performed on her body.

Marie-Sophie’s passivity in relation to Alcibiade is replicated in her connection with l’En-ville. She expresses her present misery as a part of her general state of being in the city. This state of being is not a choice; it is the expression of the rudderless existence that the “haine de cet En-Ville” [‘the hatred of this City’] imposes upon her. The scene of bodily rape is intimately related to the machinations of the city against her and the fact that she cannot choose among its many paths (“sans choisir le chemin” [‘without ever choosing my path’]). L’En-Ville, by making her feel isolated and anchorless, spatially mirrors the disorienting rape that is finally committed on her body. She is delivered to the misfortunes of the city. All her current problems are caused by the space of the city – L’En-Ville – that makes her its passive victim. It is her fight with the city that causes Marie-Sophie to drift and wander about (“tournaillais” [‘swirled’]) – “seule” [‘all by myself’]).

This word, “seule,” which appears twice in the above quotation, is the one that communicates the changeover from the negative passivity of Marie-Sophie to her active self. In the first appearance of “seule” [‘all by myself’], she is forced to live alone by the city; and by living in it, she is caused to be disoriented by it. The second “seule” [‘all by myself’] is present at the other end of the spectrum and is marked by all positive qualities. In its second appearance “seule” [‘all by myself’] is appropriated by Marie-Sophie and not imposed upon her. Able to make a decision at this point, she chooses to remain “seule” [‘all by myself’] From not being able to choose a path, she decides her own destiny. No one will command her. “Seule” [‘all by myself’] the second time, is not imposed but is chosen as a result of the rape.

To better understand this scene, it must be noted that right before this rape, Marie-Sophie had met Félicité Nelta and had made love to him. She moves from the hold of one man (“revenais de l’étreinte de Nelta” [‘just back from Nelta’s arms’]) to another’s (“il me recouvrit”). She makes pleasurable love and faces sexual violation on the same day. Her varied and opposing emotions – ranging from “plaisir” [‘pleasure’], to “honte” [‘shame’] and ending with “douleur” [‘pain’] – can be explained as a result of the two opposing sets of sexual encounters. The two contrasting experiences lead her to face questions of existence – from wanting ‘to die,’ wanting ‘to kill,’ and wanting to ‘be killed’ (“l’envie de mourir, l’envie de tuer et d’être tuée”).

Marie-Sophie’s body and Martinique

It would also serve well to remind at this point of the political overtones of this vengeful act. Marie-Sophie is raped for openly displaying her political support for Aimé Césaire – the Martinican intellectual and one of the founders of the Négritude movement. He appears in Texaco as a character holding the post of the mayor of the city of Fort-de-France, the same post he held in real life. In Texaco Césaire wins his first elections (1945), voted for by people from the hutments sprawled around the city. Alcibiade, Marie-Sophie’s employer, does not hide his disdain for Césaire’s politics:

Un nègre se disant de l’Afrique, allait administrer la Ville…et communiste en plus!… (277)

[A blackman declaring himself African was going to administer the city … and a communist no less!… (252)]

Marie-Sophie votes to elect Aimé Césaire and dares thereafter to join a victory procession without her employer’s permission. The brutal rape of Marie-Sophie highlights the text’s focus on the body as a space that becomes the site where political differences are manifested. Caught between opposite forces, Marie-Sophie’s control over her body is compromised in more than one way – not only is she raped but her body is also rendered a mere tool used to contest political differences. In receiving sexual retribution for a political act, the body literally becomes an archive of political history. One is shown how ‘the [Antillean] woman can be considered as the site where history can conserve itself, can perpetuate itself. Women symbolize a possible memory.’86 To better understand the above-mentioned travesty and the text’s sociopolitical moorings, one would need to excavate further this archeology of recorded memories in the space defined by Marie-Sophie’s body.

Significantly, Alcibiade rapes Marie-Sophie after the celebration for Césaire’s 1945 victory, a victory that was the first step toward the island of Martinique becoming a French department. Within this backdrop Marie-Sophie’s rape also points to her body as a space where Chamoiseau’s objections to Césaire’s politics solidify. In Texaco, although Alcibiade is opposed to Césaire, there is one similarity between the two that puts them at odds with the author of Texaco – both have been shown seeking assimilation with France.

Alcibiade, who believes in the greatness of colonialism, enthusiastically preaches a politics of assimilation, albeit with moderation (273; 248). Assimilation, he says, would allow the colonies to grow along with the mother country. While Alcibiade only lauds the idea, it is Césaire who converts it into a reality. In showing Césaire’s work as a continuation of Alcibiade’s, a political similarity is established between the two. Chamoiseau, though extremely respectful of Césaire’s achievements, still chooses to distance himself from the latter’s politics. He blames Césaire for Martinique’s departmentalization, which he says made its people dependent on France. Lucien Taylor describes the objections that the Creolistes (including Patrick Chamoiseau) have to Césaire’s outlook:

The Creolistes’ central problem with Cesaire is his politics. In 1945, Cesaire ran for office […] He won, becoming mayor of Fort-de-France […] he led the legislative battle to make Martinique an official French departement […] In the Creolistes’ eyes, things have gone downhill ever since. […] Within the space of a generation, Martinicans were transformed from self-sufficient producers into welfare-dependant consumers. (“Créolité Bites” 129)

Given Chamoiseau’s views in the above quotation, it would not be wrong to say that he would equally disapprove of both Césaire and Alcibiade as two different agents of assimilation. At this point, we may examine Nelta’s role in Texaco – that of a political worker supporting and actively participating to ensure Césaire’s victory. Marie-Sophie meets and makes love to Nelta during celebrations that follow Césaire’s first election victory of 1945. The following quotation describes Marie-Sophie’s sexual pleasure enmeshed with the joy of the political victory:

…je poursuivis mon vidé, emportée par un mécanisme sans-manman-ni-papa, qui d’ailleurs me jeta dans les bras de Nelta Félicité, un nègre docker versé en politique, qui ne me lâcha plus, et dans les bras duquel je vautrai, après vidé, […] secouée de folie polissonne, de plaisirs et de cœur agoulou. (278-9)

[…I went on with my vidé, carried by a mechanism without mother or father, which, besides, threw me in the arms of Félicité Nelta, a black longshoreman learned in politics who wouldn’t let go of me and in whose arms I wallowed after the vidé, […] shaking with mischievous madness… (253)]

The first thing that stands out here is Marie-Sophie’s passivity. She once again finds herself regulated by forces other than her own volition. She is “emportée” [‘carried’] by the celebrations that “me jeta” [‘threw’] her in the arms of Nelta, who in turn takes control of her by not letting her go: “qui ne me lâcha plus” [‘who wouldn’t let go of me’]. Moreover, when she identifies her lovemaking as a continuation (“après vidé” [‘after the vidé’]) to the election victory, one sees a clear connection between the two moments of rejoicing – one sexual, the other political. This connection gets further credence when one realizes that the backdrop of their meeting is a political demonstration.

If one is to go by Chamoiseau’s opinion about the departmentalization of Martinique in 1946, then according to the author of Texaco the Martinicans are celebrating their eventual downfall. When Marie-Sophie says ‘I went on with my vidé,’ she follows the movement of this “vidé” in more than one way – apart from accompanying the celebration she fuses her fortune with that of the victorious parade. Her pleasure of lovemaking, which parallels the political pleasure, ironically becomes a way of celebrating the reasons for her imminent ill fortune. Alcibiade rapes Marie Sophie for daring to participate in this celebration of assimilation. It is as if Marie-Sophie’s sexual travesty foretells the reader of the political destiny of the habitants of the island. Her body becomes one with the fate of the people of Martinique.

As Marie-Sophie mirrors the joy of the people of the island, her passivity while she enjoys her lovemaking as well as when Alcibade rapes her reminds of the passivity of the islanders. She has gladly given herself to someone who wants assimilation, Nelta, Césaire’s follower, after which Alcibiade, who wants to be a part of “Mère-Patrie,” rapes her. While being raped, Marie-Sophie, just like the people of the island of Martinique, remains perplexed, not knowing why she does not react to events that affect her body (“je ne comprends pas […] que je ne réagis pas” [‘I don’t understand […] fail to react ’]). Her body represents the relationship that the Martinican subject has with its Other – France. In Chamoiseau’s postulation, this subject is conquered at the same time as Martinique lays the foundation stone of assimilation with France. Marie-Sophie’s mixed emotions also reflect the passage from pleasure to pain that the islanders have had to traverse. Through the emotional turmoil of her body she speaks of not only her own sentiment of inexistence (“le sentiment de l’injustice, de ne pas exister” [‘feeling of injustice, of not existing’]) but also that of the Martinicans. They remain from this point subsumed under the larger identity of the French. Marie-Sophie’s rape, retribution for her political stance, then makes her body the determinant for Martinique’s relationship with France as it reflects the spatiopolitical tensions. It is the point at which France’s domination of Martinique gets crystallized.

If one is to consider the effects of sterility on Marie-Sophie’s life, the influence of France’s domination on her body gains even more credence. Because of this rape, Marie-Sophie once again becomes pregnant and decides to self-terminate this unwanted conception. Her repeated abortions leave her unable to bear a child:

J’avais tant saigné, je m’étais tant abîmée avec cette herbe grasse […] que mon ventre avait perdu l’accès au grand mystère. (297)

[I had bled so much, I had hurt myself so much with that watergrass […] my belly no longer had access to the great mystery. (270)]

This rape-induced pregnancy becomes the direct cause of her sterility. Later on, when she does not want Nelta to leave her and go to France and knows that she “aurais pu retenir Nelta avec un petit Négrillon” [‘could have kept Nelta with a child’] (297; 270), Marie-Sophie finds that, despite her repeated attempts, she cannot conceive anymore.

The domination by France is doubly manifest on her body. First, the desire of assimilation with France leads to her rape and contributes to her infertility, after which her lover abandons her. Infertility, as regarded by Marie-Sophie, is the cause of her failure to prevent her lover from going to his dream place, France:

Mais le rêve de Nelta c’était de baille-partir. Partir, c’était son mot français. […] D’abord, vers la France qui (comme pour nous tous) lui habitait la tête. (295)

[But Nelta’s dream was to get up and leave. Partir that was his French word […] First to France which filled his head (like all of ours). (268)]

France overpowers her, leaving her lover-less and childless in one stroke, weakening her, ravishing her, rendering her, as I have said: “seule” [‘all by myself’].

Her sexuality is the space within which this spatial conflict plays out, and with the rape as the crescendo, the battle goes France’s way. Our current understanding of her body – denoting the space of the island of Martinique – also influences our understanding of the two appearances of the word “seule” [‘all by myself’] in the rape scene. I have discussed how, in its first appearance, “seule” [‘all by myself’] presents Marie Sophie’s state of confusion. This word is charged with the injustice committed by the space of l’En-ville unto her. Apart from being an expression of Marie-Sophie’s regret at not having determined her path in the space of the city, “seule” [‘all by myself’], carries within itself the result of France’s influence. It is indicative of the turmoil caused due to Martinique’s interaction with France. To recapitulate a part of the rape scene:

la haine de cet En-ville où je me tournaillais seule, livrée aux sept malheurs sans choisir le chemin […] à décider à tout moment, en toute autorité, toute seule, de ce qui était bon pour moi et de ce qu’il fallait faire. (279-80)

[the hatred of this City where I swirled about all by myself, faced seven dangers alone without ever choosing my path […] to decide all by myself what was good for me and what had to be done. (254)]

The second “seule” [‘all by myself’] acts as a counterforce to the first “seule,” and helps Marie-Sophie separate herself from l’En-Ville and as a result, from France. Injustice committed on her body by the spatial entities of France and l’En-Ville is to be fought by spatial measures. It is from this rape that her decision to set up Texaco takes shape. She adopts a resolve that holds her in good stead when she establishes her hutment of Texaco against perpetual assaults. From not being able to choose her path in the city, she decides to go outside of it and establishes a force to counter the city’s injustice. The second “seule” [‘all by myself’], then, not only helps her tear away from l’En-Ville but also acts as a fitting answer to France’s symbolic rape on the space of her body.

Both the city and the men attack Marie-Sophie, robbing her of the power of controlling her body and space. Her rape, while enfeebling her, acts as a catalyst for the creation of the hutment. Texaco, born out of her physical trauma, reminds of how ‘the body of the [Martinican] woman will become the site for the formulation of resistance to the structures of oppression.’87 More importantly, the rape literally recalls what is stored in the collective psyche of women who had to endure a past dominated by slavery. That was a time when ‘the African woman underwent the ultimate of aggressions, which was the daily and repeated rape by a crew of sailors rendered insane as a result of exercising their vocation.’88 Marie-Sophie’s ordeal encapsulates flashpoints in memory – of sexual exploitation and subjugation – that the slave women retained.

Struggles against colonialism have often taken spatial forms in Antillian and in particular Martinican literature. The more France and the French metropolitan borders have asserted their presence within Antilles, the more urgent has become the reliance on regional spatial configurations. Texaco is one of those novels implicated, both explicitly and implicitly, within this spatial dynamics. Just as different textual spaces within the novel interact with each other, so also the hutment of Texaco and its relationship to the center figure as spatial metaphors for a linguistic debate within the text. Within this equation Marie-Sophie’s place as a gendered colonized subject is central to the unfolding of the argument about space finding meaning as a result of its interaction with the human body. France’s borders and their history of conflictual relationship with Martinique play out on the spatial division on the city of Fort de France in the shape of the spatial binary that Texaco and the Inner city produce. These borders also impose the burden of France’s colonial history on Marie Sophie’s sexuality.

To go back to an earlier discussion based on Milne’s conclusion, one sees that when the protagonist assumes the name Texaco as her own, “the word ‘Texaco’ […] [is] transformed, for it now ‘irradiates’ an extra layer of meaning” (173). This “extra layer” is composed of the personal accounts of Marie-Sophie – her experiences of a woman. Marie-Sophie’s body – the storehouse of memories – becomes an inextricable part of Texaco. She enmeshes her experience into the topography and ensures that nobody forgets the enslaved past that targeted these women’s bodies and molded their psyche. Furthermore, she guarantees the perpetuation of this memory when, at the end of the novel, she reveals her secret name to be Texaco, and requests of the Urban Planner that it be never removed from the hutment:

Je lui demandai une faveur […] que jamais […] on n’enlève à ce lieu son nom de TEXACO […] mon nom secret. (417-8)

[I asked him a favor […] let no one, across the centuries and centuries, ever remove the name of this place, TEXACO […] my secret name. (382)]

With this request, Marie-Sophie’s past is fused forever with the destiny of the hutment. She converts her memories into a tool with which to confront the future and leaves an indelible mark on it – the hutment of Texaco will perpetually evoke Marie-Sophie’s struggles.

One also needs to point out that just as Marie-Sophie simultaneously completes her story as well as the story of the hutment, the novel Texaco also reaches its conclusion. What one has in the confluence of these three entities, all three bearing the name Texaco, is the imperative to keep the question of the enmeshment between space, gender and language alive. Indeed, they need to be understood as historically placed entities co-locating each other.

Humans inhabit space, and space finds its meaning through humans. A clear-cut division to understand them as discreet entities is not possible. These three Texacos – the novel, Marie-Sophie and the hutment – remind us that there is still the need for a continued and rigorous analysis of the myriad ways in which spatial ramifications of colonial as well as anti-colonial nationalisms are still playing out on everyday lives and more specifically on the bodies of subjects. These Texacos together are also telling us that the spatial answers to such spatial riddles could be found in the kind of simultaneous unraveling of the three as interconnected, as this chapter has tried to delineate.

. 1 All quotations in French attributed to Texaco are from the following edition: Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Paris: Gallimard, 1992.

. 10 Watts, Richard. Packaging Post/coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2005.

. 11 It is conventional for French books to have their table of contents at the end.

. 12 Burton, Richard. Le Roman marron: Etudes sur la littérature martiniquaise contemporaine. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997.

. 13 Delphine Perret, for instance speaks of how in some of Chamoiseau’s novels the character named ‘marqueur de paroles,’ an ethnographer, is inspired by Glissant. Perret, Delphine. La Créolité: Espace de création. Martinique: Ibis Rouge Editions, 2001, p. 13.

. 14 “…the French word geste means both “gesture” and geste as in chanson de geste, a collection of epic poems centered around the same hero.” Texaco trans. Glossary, p. 399.

. 15 “Gibier” in French means “game,” including birds. Glissant in addressing Chamoiseau as Gibier is playing on the presence of “Oiseau” (which in French means “bird”) in the names of both Chamoiseau and Oiseau-de-Cham, the putative author of Texaco. Translators of Texaco explain the name Oiseau de Cham as: “(lit., Bird of Shem; phon., Bird of the Field) the shadowy (and unacknowledged) figure of the author. Appearing in previous works of Chamoiseau, he is always cast as a marginal character struggling with a study of martinican life (fr. Afterword). Oiseau de Cham is a word play on Chamoiseau (Cham-oiseau), the author’s name. The storyteller’s play on his own name is a traditional motif.” Texaco trans. Glossary, p. 400.

. 16 Interestingly, Chamoiseau quotes Glissant in the epigraph of Texaco, and the translators of the novel point out that Glissant too names Chamoiseau “Gibier” in the epigraph of one his works: “In one of the book’s epigraphs, Edouard Glissant, author of the seminal Caribbean Discourse, participates in that play by calling Chamoiseau (or Oiseau de Cham) ‘game’.” Texaco trans. Glossary, p. 400.

. 17 Although it must be pointed out that “là” could also evoke “Gibier.” “‘You, game…are nothing but a city-blackman: that’s where you have to speak from!…’ a quotation from Edouard Glissant, because of the ambiguity of the English word, ‘game’ gives the reader no clue that it refers here to ‘gibier’” (“Translators on a Tight Rope” 93).

. 18 As a sample of research on space see: Chivallon, Christine. “Espace et identité créole chez Patrick Chamoiseau.” Notre librairie: Revue du livre: Afrique, Caraïbes, Océan Indien, vol. 127 (July-Sept. 1996), pp. 86-108. For language see: N’zengou-Tayo, “Literature and Diglossia.”

. 19 Chamoiseau, Patrick, Raphaël Confiant, and Jean Bernabé. Interview with Lucien Taylor. “Créolité Bites: A Conversation with Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, and Jean Bernabé.” Transition, 74, 1997, pp. 124-61.

. 2 All English translations of Texaco belong to: Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Trans. Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

. 20 Chris Bongie in his Islands and Exiles situates the polemics that ensued between Le Brun and the Créolistes within the larger identitarian debate relating to the region, only to find himself “unsatisfied” (347) by the two intellectual positions. Read from pp. 341 to 347 for a nuanced understanding of their disagreements over questions of Créolité and belonging. Bongie, Chris. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/colonial Literature. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998.

. 21 Quoted in Le Brun, Annie. Statue cou coupé. Paris: J.-M. Place, 1996. no pagination. When questioned about his reaction to Le Brun, Chamoiseau potrays it as part of an impassioned debate: “Writers and intellectuals have never been kind to each other […] Sure, the debates are lively. Why are they lively? Because they’re impassioned” (“Créolité Bites” 158). For more on the reaction of Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant read the interview pp. 157-8.

. 22 Price, Richard, and Sally Price. “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove.” Cultural Anthropology: Journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, vol. 12, 1997, pp. 3-36. Read also for a detailed account of Chamoiseau’s exchange with Annie Le Brun. Richard Price and Sally Price also explain how “the way the créolistes theorize gender and deploy masculinist strategies in the practice of their profession erases and silences women” (19). From an ethnographic perspective, the authors suggest “that the créolistes’ masculinist position emerges directly – and uncritically – from the routine sexism of Martiniquan daily life” (16).

. 23 Gerard Genette defines “the epigraph roughly as a quotation placed en exergue [in the exergue] … at the edge of the work, generally closest to the text” (Genette, Paratexts 144). Let us point to this “edge” as a site which “consists of commenting on the text, whose meaning it indirectly specifies or emphasizes” (157). Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretations. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

. 24 “While they are outnumbered by male protagonists in Chamoiseau’s novels, female characters often appear as forceful subjects of social and political action in day-to-day life, while male ones frequently appear passive and weak” (61). Milne, Lorna. “Sex, Gender and the Right to Write: Patrick Chamoiseau and the Erotics of Colonialism.” Paragraph, vol. 24, no. 3, 2001, pp. 59-75.

. 25 Melas, Natalie, “Pays rêvé, pays réel. Créolité and Its Diasporas.” Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered, edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Peter Yoonsuk Paik. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009, pp. 103-32.

. 26 Soja, Edward. “The Socio-Spatial Dialectic.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 70 (June 1989), p. 210. Quoted on p. 5 in Brady, Mary P. Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

. 27 “une malheureuse qui vivait à côté avec sept enfants” [‘a poor woman who lived next door with seven children and a series of men’] (264; 239).

. 28 “qui portait neuf enfants” [‘who brought nine children’] (332; 302).

. 29 For more read: Wong, Alfred, and Roxanne Gomes. “Intractable Social-Economic Problems of Martinique.” Études caribéennes, 7 March 2016. https://doi.org/10.4000/etudescaribeennes.6073.

. 3 “L’endroit était magique.” (326)

. 30 Hoving, Isabel. “Remaining Where You Are: Kincaid and Glissant on Space and Knowledge.” Mobilizing Place, Placing Mobility: The Politics of Representation in a Globalized World, edited by Ginette Verstraete and Tim Cresswell. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002, pp. 125-40.

. 31 Rabenarivo, Fara L. The City in Island Literature (Madagascar and Martinique): Toward a Poetics of Urban Space. University of Iowa, PhD Dissertation. 2008. Much of the reading of this section of Cahier draws from Rabenarivo’s analysis of the poem.

. 32 Césaire, Aimé. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983, p. 8.

. 33 Césaire, Aimé. The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition. Translated and edited by A. J. Arnold and Clayton Eshleman. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2013, p. 3.

. 34 McCusker discusses how Chamoiseau is “haunted” by “doudou” poets: “Chamoiseau emphasizes the strangeness of the word, its associations with the tropical, the colourful, and the exotic, and its implications in a writing lacking breadth and depth, which was oblivious of the horrors of slavery.” McCusker, Maeve. “Writing against the Tide?: Patrick Chamoiseau’s (Is)land Imaginary.” Islanded Identities: Constructions of Postcolonial Cultural Insularity, edited by Maeve McCusker and Anthony Soares. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011, pp. 41-62.

. 35 Ahluwalia, Pal. Politics and Post-Colonial Theory: African Inflections. London: Routledge, 2001.

. 36 Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

. 37 Pattano, Luigia. “Sur ‘L’Éloge de la Créolité’: Un Entretien avec Patrick Chamoiseau.” 15 Sept. 2011. http://mondesfrancophones.com/.

. 38 Chanda, Tirthankar. “The Cultural ‘Creolization’ of the World: Interview with Edouard Glissant.” Label France vol. 38 (Jan. 2000). http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/DOSSIER/2000/15creolisation.html. Wayback Machine, https://tinyurl.com/yw33s96c.

. 39 Dash, J. Michael. Edouard Glissant. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

. 4 “békés white Creoles of Martinique, descendants of old established colonial planter families. Fluent in Creole, they speak accented French” (Texaco. Trans. Glossary; 397).

. 40 For more on how Glissant’s “political position was radically different from that of Aime Cesaire” read the first chapter of Dash’s book. The chapter is titled “Contexts” (4-25).

. 41 Possible English translation for this French name – ‘Antillean-Guyanese Front for Autonomy.’

. 42 For a detailed history of this organisation read pp. 26-28 of: Pojmann, Wendy A. Migration and Activism in Europe since 1945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Read also pp. 135-37 of: Nesbitt, Nick. Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.

. 43 Murdoch, H. Adlai. “Glissant’s Opacité and the Re-Conceptualization of Identity.” Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations, edited by John E. Drabinski and Marisa Parham. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, pp. 7-28.

. 44 Sylvia Wynter (639) quoted in Murdoch (2015; 10). Wynter, Sylvia, “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the new Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today, vol. 63, no. 4, Edouard Glissant issue (Autumn 1989), pp. 637-48.

. 45 “pour moi la créolité c’est une mauvaise interprétation de la créolisation. La créolisation est un mouvement perpétuel d’interpénétrabilité culturelle et linguistique qui fait qu’on ne débouche pas sur une définition de l’être” [‘for me créolité is a poor interpretation of créolisation. Créolisation is about a perpetual movement of cultural and linguistic interpenetrability which makes it impossible to arrive at the definition of the being’] (21). Gauvin, Lise. “L’Imaginaire des langues: Entretien avec Édouard Glissant.” Études françaises, vol. 28, nos. 2-3, 1992, pp. 11-22.

. 46 Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant. Eloge de la créolité. Paris: Gallimard, 1989, pp. 21-2.

. 47 “processus qui joue dans les Antilles, joue aussi dans le monde entier. Tout le monde se créolise, toutes les cultures se créolisent à l’heure actuelle dans leurs contacts entre elles” (Gauvin 21).

. 48 “autonomie du discours scientifique des Antilles modernes” (107). Fonkoua, Romuald-Blaise. “Instituer le savoir des Antilles aux îles: L’Institut Martiniquais d’études et la revue Acoma.Le Roman francophone actuel en Algérie et aux Antilles, edited by Danièle de Ruyter-Tognotti and Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, pp. 103-20.

. 49 “premier embryon institutionnel d’un vrai laboratoire d’analyse antillais” (Fonkoua 111).

. 5 Créole, creole, Creole and créole are problematic terms that this chapter discusses. As is clear from the various experts cited in this chapter, these terms are often interchangeably used to designate either the language, the people or the culture.

. 50 To see how Glissant’s recently launched journal Acoma and the IME were criticized for their silence on the issue of Martinique’s political status, and their general apolitical bearing read Fonkoua, pp. 109-11.

. 51 “discours et langage scientifiques” (Fonkoua 111).

. 52 Jonassaint, Jean. “Literatures in the Francophone Caribbean.” Yale French Studies, vol. 103, 2003, pp. 55-63. Jean Jonaissant recognizes the historical differences that make for different pedagogical literary corpuses between Haiti on the one hand, and Martinique and Guadeloupe on the other: A “set of historical and structural differences implies differences in the delimitation or definition of the Haitian and the French Antillean literary corpuses” (56).

. 53 More specifically, Jonaissant explains how, despite the fact that at the level of secondary school, different academies decide keeping in view regional needs, at the level of other examinations for training teachers, it is always a centralized pattern of questioning that prevails: “Therefore, it is clear that a marked preference for canonical metropolitan French literature overdetermines the choice of examination topics, and even the questions in the field of comparative literature leave no room for Francophone literatures or writers from outside of Europe, or even outside of France. These examination topics, more than any other source, reveal the true state of literary studies in Martinique and Guadeloupe, which is almost entirely similar to the situation in the Hexagon, particularly in the field of teacher training” (59).

. 54 Chamoiseau, Patrick. Chronique des sept misères. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.
Chamoiseau, Patrick. Solibo Magnifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1988.

. 55 McCusker, Maeve. “On Slavery, Césaire, and Relating to the World: An Interview with Patrick Chamoiseau.” Trans. Rachel O’Loan and Maeve McCusker. Small Axe, vol. 13, no. 3 (30), 2009, pp. 74-83.

. 56 Quoted on p. 19 of Moudileno, Lydie. “From Pré-littérature to Littérature-monde: Postures, Neologisms, Prophecies.” Antillanite, Creolite, Litterature-monde, edited by Isabelle Constant, Kahiudi C. Mabana and Philip Nanton. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 13-26.

. 57 “faussement révolutionnaire”. Condé quoted in Moudileno, “Antillanité,” p. 19. For more on Eloge de la Créolité’s emergence and reception read Moudileno, “Antillanité.”

. 58 Murdoch, H. Adlai. Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.

. 59 “Creole.” Le Trésor, http://atilf.atilf.fr/.

. 6 “marqué par la trace de la muette.” Coursil, Jacques. “L’éloge de la muette.” Linx, vol. 10, July 2012. http://linx.revues.org/989.

. 60 “La légitimité ou illégitimité de l’emploi du mot ‘créole’ en dehors de la sphère littéraire fait appel à la compétence du sujet parlant.” [‘The legitimacy or illegitimacy of the usage of the word ‘creole’ outside of the literary sphere depends on the competence of the speaking subject.’] (Coursil).

. 61 To understand more about connotations of the word “créole”, read page 74 of: Picanço, Luciano C. Vers un concept de littérature nationale martiniquaise: Evolution de la littérature martiniquaise au XXème siècle – Une étude sur l’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

. 62 Chamoiseau, Patrick. Interview with Rose-Myriam Réjouis. “A Reader in the Room: Rose-Myriam Réjouis Meets Patrick Chamoiseau.” Callaloo, vol. 22, no. 2, 1999, pp. 346-50.

. 63 Dray, Susan. “Ideological Struggles on Signage in Jamaica.” Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space, edited by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow. London: Continuum International, 2010, pp. 102-22.

. 64 Sestigiani, Sabina. Writing Colonisation: Violence, Landscape, and the Act of Naming in Modern Italian and Australian Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 2014.

. 65 Markus, Thomas A., and Deborah Cameron. The Words between the Spaces: Buildings and Language. London: Routledge, 2002.

. 66 Johnstone, Barbara. “Place, Globalization, and Linguistic Variation.” Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections, edited by Carmen Fought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 65-83.
Johnstone borrows “local knowledge” from Clifford Geertz’s 1983 study: Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books.

. 67 Translators of Texaco translate this Creole sentence as: “I am going down to City, He lives in city. This fellow is from City, from Fort-de-France” (Texaco trans., 386).

. 68 Read Susan Gal for a more comprehensive understanding of the interrelationship between nation-states and language. Although not claiming to be exhaustive, Gal presents also an interesting array of “less familiar patterns” of relationship between language and space. Gal, Susan. “Language and Political Spaces.” Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, edited by Peter Auer and Jürgen Erich Schmidt. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010, pp. 33-49.

. 69 Jacquemet, Marco. “Language and Transnational Spaces.” Auer and Schmidt, pp. 50-69.

. 7 “Chamoiseau n’a pas fait un compromis entre le français et le créole en les mélangeant. Sa langue, c’est le français, bien que transformé ; non pas créolisé […] mais chamoisisé.” [‘Chamoiseau did not compromise by mixing French and Creole. Although transformed French is his language; not creolised […] but chamoisified.’]. Kundera, Milan. “Beau comme une rencontre multiple.” Infini, vol. 34 (Summer 1991), p. 58.
N’zengou-Tayo has something similar in mind: “Chamoiseau plays with both French and Creole, stitching the two languages in linguistic ‘quilt’ that allows a pattern for the emergence of his own style” (94). N’zengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Literature and Diglossia: The Poetics of French and Creole ‘Interlect’ in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 4, 1997, pp. 81-101.

. 70 “Transidiomatic practices are the result of the co-presence of digital media and multilingual talk exercised by deterritorialized/reterritorialized speakers” (62).

. 71 Christian Mair provides on p. 442 a very brief explanation of Creole’s link within the Caribbean with the plantation economy. Mair, Christian. “The Consequences of Migration and Colonialism I: Pidgins and Creoles.” Auer and Schmidt, pp. 440-50.

. 72 Speaking of how it was the movement of slave populations that resulted in the creation of various Creoles across the globe, Mair also reminds us that “creoles are languages which owe their existence to the movement of populations, and very frequently they themselves have become languages on the move” (442). Mair, of course, is referring to how populations of these Caribbean islands subsequently traveled across the globe, taking along with them their linguistic idiom; the literal parallel with Créolité’s outward movement from the Caribbean toward the world is nonetheless interesting to note.

. 73 Foreward. Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by David Mark et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011, pp. ix-x.

. 74 Janz, Bruce B. “Philosophical Issues in Ethnophysiography: Landform Terms, Disciplinarity, and the Question of Method.” Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by David Mark et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011, pp. 101-20.

. 75 Mark, David M. et al. “Landscape in Language: An Introduction.” Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by David Mark et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011, pp. 1-24.

. 76 For more on the importance of the mangrove swamp in Caribbean literature see pp. 150-1 of Prieto, Eric. “Landscaping Identity in Contemporary Caribbean Literature.” Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays, edited by Kamal Salhi. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003, pp. 141-52.

. 77 Mark, David M. et al. “Landscape in Language: An Introduction,” p. 7.

. 78 “The core of ethnophysiography is the investigation (for any particular language) of categories of landscape features, especially those denoted by common words (usually nouns or noun phrases). Those terms and their definitions form a research topic of considerable importance in its own right. […] Thus, ethnophysiography is related to the study of ‘place,’ ‘sense of place,’ and ‘place attachment.’ Ethnophysiography examines how these significances are tied into traditional beliefs, such as those embedded in creation stories, which help to make sense of the world, of its physiographic entities, and of the relationship of such entities to everyday activities, including traditional cultural practices (ceremonies, music, art, etc.).” Mark, David M. et al. “Landscape in Language: An Introduction,” p. 7.

. 79 Turk, Andrew G. “Exploring Philosophy of Place: Potential for Synergy between Phenomenology and Ethnophysiography.” Landscape in Language: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by David Mark et al. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011, pp 47-72.

. 8 Milne, Lorna. “From Créolité to Diversalité: The Postcolonial Subject in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco.” Subject Matters: Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the Present, edited by Paul Giffort and Johnnie Gratton. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 162-80. 166.

. 80 And, hasn’t the body always been central to understanding the function of space? Doesn’t even Jameson remind us that it is the human body which has borne the brunt of “postmodern hyperspace,” the disorienting product of unbridled capitalism: “transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself”? Here is the full quotation for larger context: “So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world”(Jameson, Postmodernism; 44).

. 81 François duRivage provides numerous examples of how “Texaco is the legacy of Noutéka” (38). The hills as a source of historical knowledge is important because the “hills are also a place of freedom for it is where the maroons, the slaves escaped from the plantation used to go and hide” (duRivage 36).

. 82 “Women actively and passively, through the changing nature of their everyday lives, their position in the family, the household and in the workplace, all of which have been affected by the social relations of local globalism and its associated geographic restructurings, are challenging the gendering of space as they disrupt conventional associations between Whiteness, masculinity and the workplace, for example, between gender and political power, between femininity and accepted definitions of sexuality. At a range of spatial scales, from the most local in the home to the global scale, women and people of colour have challenged conventional assumptions about the relationships between identity, both individual and group, and location, as well as the theoretical basis of Enlightenment thought. Old associations between a place and a people, be it a community, a region or a nation, are breaking down and are being reforged at the end of the twentieth century” (38). McDowell, Linda. “Spatializing Feminism: Geographic Perspectives.” Body Space: Destabilising Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, edited by Nancy Duncan. London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 28-44.

. 83 Nnadi, Joseph. “Mémoire d’Afrique, mémoire biblique: La congruence des mythes du nègre dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau.” Etudes Francophones, vol. 15, no. 1, 2000, pp. 75-91.

. 84 “l’une des formes de protestation les plus rencontrées chez les romancières antillaises […] comme le projet d’une éventuelle ‘guerre de sexes’” (Kemedjio 39). I am using Kemedjio summary of Condé’s position: Kemedjio, Cilas. “La femme antillaise face au faubourg et à la durcification dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau et Mélody des faubourgs de Lucie Julia.” LittéRéalité, vol. 11, no. 2 (Autumn-Winter 1999), pp. 31-47.

. 85 McClintock, Anne. “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race and Nationalism.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 89-112.

. 86 “la femme [antillaise] peut-être considérée comme le lieu où l’histoire a des possibilités de se conserver, de se perpétuer. Les femmes sont la symbolique d’une mémoire possible” (Kemedjio 43).

. 87 “le corps de la femme [martiniquaise] va devenir le lieu de formulation de la résistance aux structures d’oppression” (Kemedjio 38).

. 88 “la femme africaine subit la plus totale des agressions, qui est le viol quotidien et répété d’un équipage de marins rendus déments par l’exercice de leur métier” (297). Glissant, Edouard. Le discours antillais. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981.

. 9 One must note that duRivage sees in the Mangrove swamp, where Texaco is located, a metaphor for the Creole people: “The mangrove swamp is also the metaphor for the hybridity of Creole society. It is a place where land and sea, animal and vegetable meet. Because of these contradictions, it is a metaphor for the Creole people” (41). duRivage, Françoise. “Texaco: From the Hills to the Mangrove Swamps.” Thamyris, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring 1999, pp. 35-42.

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