Language and les Répondeurs

While it is not my job here to like or dislike the text, the truth of the matter is that I am in love with Chamoiseau’s brilliant, powerfully evocative work, and in the following I will highlight two of the incredible craft strategies I witness him employing which provokes me into such a strong feeling about School Days.

1) Drama of Language

On page 106, Chamoiseau, writes, “The bottom line: a story is a lie only if you tell it

badly. That’s the tradition I follow.”

Here, and in a number of other moments in the text, Chamoiseau makes visible his active encounter with the shifty nature of memory, and demonstrates that his work is a self-reflexive act of reconstruction.

“…and now see, memory, how I confront you no longer, I inhale your shimmering spindrift hanging motionless in soaring flight… O silent tumult of a life going by… Did you laugh to see me attempt an embrace, like some mooncalf drooping over his own shadow?

…the idea is to remain anchored in oneself, in that esteem first praised by the poet, attentive not to one’s self but to its incessant movement, always imperceptible.” (19)

Throughout School Days he mobilizes an incredible deftness and creativity with language that signals precisely the profound work of reimagining inwards that School Days required. I would argue that it is through this maneuvering around with language that Chamoiseau hits deeply into an emotional core of truth, which develops trust in his fluctuating narrator, and in the narrative he is drawing itself.

Through the specificity of his word choice and the construction of rich imagery that

is both complex and uniquely childlike, the intensity of the world as it courses through the little body and the large, voracious, vivid, imagination, consciousness,

and perception of the little boy Chamoiseau, are set centre stage. Everything is high stakes. Everything is do or die. Everything is unparalleled drama. Everything is the beginning or the end of the world. Everything is a myth being constructed or destroyed. We are guided to recall our own calamitous reactions in childhood, our own flailing, and curiosity. The largeness of the language maps the largeness of the feeling, the foreignness of the world. Chamoiseau courts to the adult reader into this experience through the juxtaposition of word choice with the age of his protagonist. He gives language to what perhaps resided most as visceral physical feeling and emotion. He gives us a key back in.

So the little boy is the, “apocalyptic dust cloud.” (12)

And, “The day before the first day of school dragged on forever. Sun took its time to rise, then set out on a lackadaisical stroll.” (23)

“And to win such a gem, more than one player would have pawned his guardian angel, his First Communion cross, and probably his mama’s love as well.” (97)

The kinds of decisions the little boy is faced with, and the magnitude of impact they are afforded, demonstrates a powerfully developed characterization of the childlike mind.

“There were also silent dramas: should he save the last bit of chalk for his next masterpiece or eat it right up? So hard to choose!” (19)

Chamoiseau’s language choices also reflexively comments on the conflict that takes place in the site of language itself in the centre of this work. Language here functions as a symbol for culture, identity, belonging, the imagination, the self, the community, and illuminates the struggle to resist the violence of French colonial values and social order. The act of re-membering and expressing the depth of a childhood consciousness which was steeped in the Creole language and cultural system, through the vehicle of complex, unique, and imaginative French language, seems to assert a challenge in and of itself to the racist assertions about Creole language and culture that the little boy, and his peers faced. The abundant language is like a testimony of the survival of imagination and freedom, an act against erasure. It is an act of re-humanization. Documenting what it to preserve one’s imagination, one’s ability to speak, to fight against the forces that left the little bot, “No longer trusting and open with others, he fluttered his lashes over the treacherous innocence of his eyes, learning to leave some space between what his heart felt and what his mouth said. It meant surviving, and I say, dying at the same time.” (74)

2) Les Répondeurs

And just briefly, I am interested in the way in which Chamoiseau mobilizes les Répondeurs within this work as a mechanism to superimpose a musical pattern of call and response into the work.

Stolen from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_and_response_(music)

“In music, a call and response is a succession of two distinct phrases usually played by different musicians, where the second phrase is heard as a direct commentary on or response to the first. It corresponds to the call-and-response pattern in human communication and is found as a basic element of musical form, such as verse-chorus form, in many traditions.

In Sub-Saharan African cultures, call and response is a pervasive pattern of democratic participation—in public gatherings in the discussion of civic affairs, in religious rituals, as well as in vocal and instrumental musical expression. It is this tradition that African bondsmen and women brought with them to the New World and which has been transmitted over the centuries in various forms of cultural expression—in religious observance; public gatherings; sporting events; even in children's rhymes; and, most notably, in African-American music in its myriad forms and descendants including: gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, jazz and hip hop.”

In the case of this work it seems to me that the rhythm of conversation – between past and present, between the limited context available to the little boy, and the broader social dynamics at play in the world around him, are played out through the relationship with les Répondeurs who in different moments as function as the equivalent of the court jester, peanut gallery, the provocateur, the definer, the adult Chamoiseau, the heckler poking fun and at times jeering, ass the ghost of Christmas future foretelling events to come, elevating themes, emphasizing words, feelings experiences, offering comic relief and energy, ultimately heightening the dramatic and playful tone of the work even as it documents profound violence. I think a key element from the Wikipedia definition is the piece around democratic participation and the way in which Les Répondeurs within this work signal the multiplicity of voices implicated in these stories.