Even without contextualizing his memoir with explicit description of war, political control, or displacement Chamoiseau paints an intimate portrait of colonization in Martinique through the policing of language.
Chamoiseau's "little boy" narrator describes his inner conflict and shrinking into silence in the strict school environment where French is revered and Creole is derided as "barbaric", "worthless", and "brutish". The young boy learns quickly that French is considered"the language of wisdom, wit, and intelligence" while Creole is a "rank weed" for "bad guys, thugs, and delinquent crazy buggers" (64-65). Chamoiseau uses this juxtaposition to subject readers to the suffocating terror of classroom humiliation, of shame in one's native ways, an intimate and accessible way to feel the impact of oppressive authority and meditate on its large scale impact.
Likewise, Chamoiseaut invites the reader to delight in those rare times when the students leave the classroom for their homes or to pick fights and play marbles and they are at last free to speak their native tongue in an un-policed environment. Chamoiseau demonstrates the relief and exhiliration of this shift by describing the easily flowing Creole as "charged with hidden powers" and freedom to use it as indulgent as "pigs at a trough"(91-92).
Chamoiseau also cleverly reveals the enforcement of French-speaking at the school as strained (even among the enforcers) when the teacher breaking up the fight between the boss bully and Big Bellybutton lapses into an explosion of Creole as his most instinctual response.
The shifting narrative voices invite the reader to sometimes observe "the little boy", sometimes huddle in among the rest of the "we", or get called on directly to learn how to play marbles by "pretend(ing) you know the ropes" (99). The effect of these changes is a consistent engagement with the narrative from varying angles. In this way we travel from a society grappling with the confinement of their authentic expression, to children learning both humorously and tragically how to navigate their surroundings, to a private moment alone with a boy who is in love with words. In this way we reap meaning that is both universally pertinent and uniquely intimate.
you touch on some salient points and demonstrate how the swing of extremes takes place in this highly charged post-colonial atmosphere. it's true, he didn't have to say, this is martinique in this period....it was obvious by the juxtaposing of social groups and their exchanges. Very slick
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Claire, I also found those insurgent moments where even the teachers slipped into Creole powerful - as documentation of the multiple generations of linguistic/cultural/political violence. The first time it was mentioned I found myself surprised because due to his description of the teachers I had in my mind that they were French. These teachers in a sense then became the foil, the thing against which the little boy and his friends were fighting against as perhaps the epitome of internalization of the forces that shaped them - that absolute occupation of language, culture, identity. And yet he needs not say any of it!
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