The "Wounds of Locality": Living and Writing the Local in Patrick Chamoiseau's Ecrire en pays domine

Abstract

In the debate over the place of Caribbean culture in an increasingly interconnected, globalized world, the Martinican writers Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau could be deemed to occupy antithetical positions in spite of their avowed friendship and their numerous cross-citings and collaborative projects. 1 Glissant's concept of Relation, with its insistence on the process of creolization, represents for most critics working on the question of globalization in the Caribbean context an unqualified and salutary openness to the world. Chamoiseau's notion of Créolité or creoleness is, for its part, often cast as a retrograde and reactionary attachment to a fixed, mythologized Creole identity, a root identity. As with all binary oppositions, this one results in a simplification; here, it is Chamoiseau's views on the possibility and necessity of maintaining the notion of locality in an increasingly interconnected world that are subject to reductive readings. My aim here is to read beyond the caricature of Chamoiseau's Créolité, a model for viewing cultural change and fixity that he has been developing over the past fifteen years. I will also show that much of what Chamoiseau has had to say recently on the place of the local in a globalized world complements Glissant's notion of creolization, but does so from a different—which is to say, situated—perspective.