RETRACTED ARTICLE: Two thinks at a time

Abstract

Creolismo, also referred to as “diglottism”, is generated from the internalized split between two languages: one high-literary; the other, low-oral. The long-held idea that it was somehow a lesser idiom changed when Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant founded a literary and cultural movement in Martinique in the 1980s. Their success meant that Creolismo was taught at school, so that this small Antillean island could claim a heritage that was hers in the first place. It is in this sense of a recovered heritage that contemporary militant Creolismo, which makes language the chief symbol of racial and anti-metropolitan pride and drives oral tradition toward writing, asserts its raison d’être. The work of Chamoiseau – in particular, his novel Texaco – brilliantly exemplifies this new creoliste poetics.