Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau

First published:Texaco, 1992, in France (English translation, 1997)

Type of plot: Impressionistic realism

Time of work: The 1820’s to the present

Locale: Rural Martinique and the capital, Fort-de-France

Principal Characters:

• Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the narrator, an old woman who founded the shanty town of Texaco
• Esternome, Marie-Sophie’s father, a former slave
• Idoménée, Marie-Sophie’s mother, a blind woman
• The Urban Planner, an educated bureaucrat given the task of razing Texaco
• The “Word Scratcher, ,” Chamoiseau himself, who writes down Marie-Sophie’s story

The Novel

Texaco is an epic narrative that traces the history of the island of Martinique from the time it was a slaveholding French colony to its present status as a part of France under the sway of powerful cultural and economic outside forces. The historical perspective is provided by an account of Marie-Sophie’s family beginning in the 1820’s, well before the French abolition of slavery in 1848, and of her own life, which covers most of the twentieth century.

The novel is presented as a myth. Like the life of Christ, it begins with “The Annunciation,” or the arrival of the Urban Planner who is sent to “rationalize” and “sanitize” (that is, destroy) the slum, which was called “Texaco” because of its proximity to large oil tanks. It ends with “The Resurrection,” in which Chamoiseau tells of his meeting with Marie-Sophie for the first time, of the story that she and he managed to save from oblivion (just like Texaco was ultimately saved from destruction), and of her death, which supposedly occurred a short time before he wrote his final version of her account.

The bulk of the narrative recounts Marie-Sophie’s origins, telling of her grandparents, of her father’s long life as a slave, freed slave, and witness to the major events of Martinican history, and of her own life. Orphaned at a young age, she was old enough to learn history and the art of storytelling from her dying father, and then she had to survive on her own in the hostile environment of the “In-City,” the word used to describe the center of Fort-de-France. Forced to rely on others, she is taken in by a series of employers, one of whom teaches her the joys of French literature. After several negative experiences with men, she falls in love with Félicité Nelta, a restless dreamer who leaves her when she cannot give him a child, probably because self-performed abortions had made her sterile. The return of her loneliness makes her want to build a house. With inspiration provided by a “Mentoh” (a type of powerful spirit) who takes on the human form of an old man named Papa Totone, she creates her home on property owned by the Texaco oil company, and an entire community of poor, displaced former peasants is born on the outskirts of the city. In spite of the efforts of the oil company and the government to destroy it (culminating in the arrival of the Urban Planner), Texaco continues to grow.

The Characters

Texaco is populated by a series of eccentric individuals, most of whom would be considered insane, criminal, or at least marginal by European standards. The focus is on Marie-Sophie’s family, beginning with her grandfather, who as a form of revolt used to poison cattle on the plantation where he worked as a slave, and her grandmother, who was of mixed Indian and African blood, providing a genetic link to the Arawak Indians who inhabited the island before they became extinct as a people.

Esternome, Marie-Sophie’s father, is the second most important character in terms of the amount of space his story takes. After being granted his freedom for having saved his master’s life, he continues to live in poverty and servitude. The role of magic is especially apparent in his life: He is surrounded by spirits, including the zombie of his wife Ninon, who was killed in the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902. Saint Pierre, the city where they lived, was completely destroyed in the eruption, and Esternome moved in with Adrienne Carmélite Lapidaille, a woman of Fort-de-France whom he followed home one day because he knew she would give him some food. Adrienne turns out to be a witch, and she casts a spell over Esternome that is broken only when he makes Adrienne’s blind sister Idoménée pregnant. This is where Marie-Sophie’s story begins.

Marie-Sophie is born some time before World War I, a conflict that unexpectedly brings out Esternome’s French patriotism. From this point, the narrative focus switches from Esternome to Marie-Sophie, as she recounts her childhood, her apprenticeship with a milliner, and her flight from abusive families and men. Her life takes a turn when she lives in the home of Alcibiade, a pro-colonialist civil servant. When Aimé Césaire, the well-known poet and anticolonial activist, wins election as mayor of Fort-de-France in 1946, Alcibiade becomes insane and rapes Marie-Sophie. She is saved from this desperate situation by Félicité Nelta, her one true love.

Although he receives very little space in the narrative, the character of the Urban Planner is very important. He represents the assimilated Creole who has absorbed the speech patterns and values of the colonial power. When he arrives in Texaco to begin its demise, he is knocked unconscious by a rock thrown by one of its inhabitants. Marie-Sophie takes care of him, and she realizes that she must tell him her story in order to save the community. The Urban Planner becomes a convert to the community, and his scholarly sounding statements on the need to preserve the identity of Texaco appear as inserts in the narrative.

Finally, there is the “Word Scratcher,” the character of Patrick Chamoiseau himself, whose presence as the transcriber of the narrative is implied throughout. Marie-Sophie refers to him sometimes as “Oiseau de Cham,” a play on the author’s name meaning “bird of Shem” (Shem is one of Noah’s sons) or, possibly, “bird of the field” (champ). He speaks in his own voice in the final section (“Resurrection”), in which he claims to have interviewed Marie-Sophie up until her death and also to have used her diaries as the content of his novel.

Critical Context

Chamoiseau first gained attention as a Martinican writer whose main interest is in interpreting and promoting Creole language and culture in essays, fiction, drama, autobiography, and folk tales. Texaco, his most ambitious work, earned for him France’s most prestigious literary award for a novel, the Prix Goncourt, upon its publication. In addition to making him known to a wider audience, Texaco confirmed his status as one of the foremost contemporary authors of the French Antilles, alongside his mentor Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and others. Among its many accomplishments, Texaco is notable for having brought the native languages of Martinique into the mainstream of French and Francophone literature. Whereas the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (who appears briefly in the novel) championed the notion of a pan-African cultural identity expressed via the French language, Chamoiseau tries instead to represent specific, local cultural identities by mixing French and non-French linguistic elements. Francophone literature generally has shied away from using as much indigenous language and dialect as Chamoiseau incorporates into his novel, which therefore sets a new standard for the literary representation of cultures of which the spoken languages rarely appear in print.

Chamoiseau does more than create a linguistic mix that is relatively new to literature. The synthesis of lyricism and realism, exemplified by the vivid depiction of the interior lives and magical beliefs of his main characters, juxtaposed with a harsh analysis of their poverty and of the economic exploitation of the Martinican population, presents a major literary achievement. The character of the Urban Planner is symbolic of the novel as a whole. A simple bureaucrat who was sent by the government to sanitize and thereby destroy the shanty town of Texaco, he is mistaken by the inhabitants to be Christ himself come to save them. Under the strange spell exerted by this hybrid, decaying, yet dynamic world, he indeed becomes converted into a would-be savior. From a faceless agent of power, he metamorphoses into a human being who identifies with the marginal population he had previously deemed insignificant. In this way, he symbolizes the mix of French and Antillean, master and slave, future and past that the novel achieves on such a large scale.

Bibliography

Burton, Richard D. E. “Débrouya pa peché, or Il y a toujours moyen de moyenner: Patterns of Opposition in the Fiction of Patrick Chamoiseau.” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1993) 466-481. Appearing shortly after the publication of Texaco, this article does not actually include any detailed analysis of it, concentrating instead on Chamoiseau’s earlier works. However, it constitutes the best introduction to Chamoiseau and to many of the themes he would explore in Texaco.

Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse, translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. Written before Texaco, but worth mentioning as one of the best books written on French Caribbean literature, and therefore essential to anyone wanting to do further research on Chamoiseau.