Refuge for the wretched

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

The tiny Caribbean island of Martinique has bequeathed to the world great thinkers and writers. Most prominent, at least in Africa, is Frantz Fanon, one of the most important thinkers of the past century, whose text The Wretched of the Earth is routinely described as the “bible of decolonisation”. Then there is poet and politician Aimé Césaire, who, with the late Senegalese president Léopold Sédar Senghor, is a cornerstone of the black movement Négritude.

No Easy Path Through the Embers

by Richard Pithouse, CounterPunch

In Texaco, his novel about the history of a shack settlement in Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau writes of a “proletariat without factories, workshops, and work, and without bosses, in the muddle of odd jobs, drowning in survival and leading an existence like a path through embers.” But Texaco is also a novel of struggle, of struggle with the “persistence of Sisyphus”- struggle to hold a soul together in the face of relentless destruction amidst a “disaster of asbestos, tin sheets crates, mud tears, blood, police”. Texaco is a novel of barricades, police and fire, a struggle to “call forth the poet in the urban planner”, a struggle to “enter City”. It's about the need to “hold on, hold on, and moor the bottom of your heart in the sand of deep freedom.”

Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau's novel (1997) is an ambitious narrative history of the Caribbean island of Martinique, tracking the growth of a shanty-town named 'Texaco' after a nearby oil depot. Chamoiseau tells the story of the epic struggle of the Creole underclass to carve out of an uncaring and unfair society their own unique place. The story moves backwards and forwards in time, comprising the narrative of radical activist Marie-Sophie Laborieux, her freed-slave father Esternome and his many loves. Straightforward history - the rise and collapse of the plantation system, the coming of the oil companies, a formal state visit by de Gaulle in the 1960s - is interwoven with fragments of Creole legend and folk wisdom.