“ENVIE ET SURVIE”: THE PARADOX OF POSTCOLONIAL NOSTALGIA IN PATRICK CHAMOISEAU’S CHEMIN-D’ÉCOLE

Abstract

The first section of Patrick Chamoiseau's autobiographical novel, Chemin d’école (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), is entitled “Envie,” while the second section is “Survie.” As Chamoiseau recounts his youth in Martinique, he tempers his nostalgic longing for a childhood full of brilliant discovery with a deft and comic portrait of the ironies of his colonial education. The initial joy he takes in learning to write is so absolute and essential that writing is nothing less than “emprisonner des morceaux de la réalité dans ses tracés de craie” (31). However, his fond memories of coming to language are contained among those of a schoolteacher who seeks to disinherit his students from their Creole language. Herein lies the paradox of postcolonial nostalgia, for even as Chamoiseau's remembrances mock his colonial education, he makes is clear that the mere survival of the artist as such is jeopardized by an institutional assault on language. The structuring themes of “envie” and “survie” are connected by the author's “Répondeurs,” a chorus of voices that occupies the contact zones between memory and forgetting, between the child's innocence and the narrator's experience, and thus enables Chamoiseau's ambivalent longing for a past that he had to survive.