Third Text

ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau

Shaheen Merali

To cite this article: Shaheen Merali (1997) Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau, Third Text, 11:40,
109-110, DOI: 10.1080/09528829708576693

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829708576693

Published online: 19 Jun 2008.

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 109

that the matron succeeded in grasping him by

Texaco the neck (it's lucky for in those ill days,
thousands of blackwomen died of a baby who'd
turn back round and refuse to come out on the
by Patrick Chamoiseau pretext 2 that the times outside were not so
good)."
Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie
and Gabriel García Márquez, the author of
Shaheen Merali Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau, manages to
squeeze political liquidity out of everyday
occurrences; common-lore and philosophy are
bedfellows in his crippling insights into the
condition of the slave, the master (bekes and
Texaco is a novel brimming with content, white French) and the land. Chamoiseau
delivered with an amazing sense of vitality and deliberately details the ordinary, enlightening
depth. If Texaco is anything, then it is a the reader into the geography, the fauna and
postmodern, postcolonial novel, interrogating flora that inhabit the land, and the sociopo-
the notion of language to deliver experience as litical background of some two centuries that
directly as possible to the reader. Texaco is a he manages to traverse. Through this enterprise
fascinating insight into history, the history of the reader manages to grasp the reality and
two generations, their relentless struggle to interdependence of not only the populous but
exist in spite of it all, a history of the notion of of the land. Texaco above all is a journey about
a City as well as an extraordinary textural land, the meagre foothold that sometimes takes
revision, the Creole vision of the structure of up to two generations to manifest.
language itself. "The Creole language does not Texaco itself is a place, a dusty town, a
say 'la ville' ('the city'), but rather, 7' En-ville' quarter of the wretched, a minuscule inhabi-
('the In-city')."1 City thus designates not a tation of the disenfranchised. This settlement,
clearly defined urban geography, but on the side of a cliff neighbouring a oil depot,
essentially a content and therefore a kind of hence the name, Texaco, is of profound signif-
enterprise. And here that enterprise was about icance to the daughter of Esternomme, Marie-
living. Subsequently, this footnote is an Sophie Laborieux, born around 1900 in the 'Age
indicative signifier for the rest of the novel. of Crate Wood1. The book itself is divided into
The novel, originally written in French and these ages. From 'Straw', one graduates to
Creole, and subsequently translated into 'Crate Wood', to attain 'Asbestos' and finally
fourteen languages, is bound to lose some of its settle into the 'Age of Cement'. These materials
original fervour. But disregarding the provide security and solidity in an climate as
arguments for and against translation, Texaco Ninon, one of the partners of Esternomme
relocates the testament of a number of describes "....thought the world fit in her hands.
individuals and their passage of time in a Some just God, she thought, would harvest our
refreshing, uncompromising manner. The miseries and then divide human existence into
original text remains referential by the addition parcels of happiness, this is yours, that's your
of a Creole glossary as well as an 'afterword' by land, that's your home".3 Providence, hope and
the English translators, acknowledging the faith remain mere illusions, if one is a subject
notion of over-translating and the intermediary under colonial rule.
reader processing the text beforehand. France, the coloniser, encases these people.
The reader has to disregard these techni- Their bodies are no more than vehicles to
calities, with book in hand take this Babelian subjugate: "Marie-Sophie, my lump of barley
ambitious novel, to discover the joys and sugar, in Creole we know how to say slavery,
disgust of colonial Martinique. Texaco starts its or the chains or the whip, but none of our
recollection around 'The Age of Straw', circa words or our riddles 4can say Abolition. Do you
1800, with the birth of Esternomme Laborieux, know why, huh?...", Marie-Sophie Laborieux
the papa of Texaco's founder-to-be. His birth is writes rhetorically in her notebook. Freedom
described not as a biological passage but as the denied to the extent that even the slave can no
blackman's political status: "He took twenty-six longer consider an end to the misery, abolition
hours to come out, following waters that had remains an unattainable goal, superseded,
made him lose his way. Shown the way out, he drowned by the onslaught that the slave calls
said he had some slight difficulty turning but reality, a cruel offensive of tragedy. Texaco
110

intervenes in our received popular notions of the sweetness of liberty. As Marie-Sophie

Hollywood history, where the black subject comforts her battered father, reminiscing "...I
remains part of the happy furniture, a mask could hear his words kneeling in my ears...",8 so
that denies any emotion or personality to the the reader digests the magic and the realism by
black subject. Here we are presented with two words kneeling in their eyes.
generations who between them have suffered
and explored all possibilities. Texaco enlightens
others about their existence, their aspirations, 1 Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, translated from the French
needs, sufferings and joys. "The sap of the plant and Creole by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val
Vinokurow, Granta, 1997. Footnote, p 386.
becomes clear only5 once the roots have 2 Ibid p 42.
revealed their secret." 3 Ibid p 100.
These revelations by Esternomme and 4 Ibid p 100.
his daughter Marie-Sophie lead the reader into 5 Ibid p 34.
extraordinary journeys into the robust nature 6 Ibid p 293.
of love; the slave exhibiting human endurance 7 Ibid p 101.
beyond the mettle of the body, resorting to 8 Ibid p 200.
courageous encounters within the spiritual
world to mobilise the rootless experience of
mass exportation from Africa, dramas of epic
proportions and the destruction of the
community. The reader is thrown about like a
passenger on a dodgy sea-craft in a heady
storm. We can only respond by reading on,
finding it difficult to put the book down even if
it is well past our bed time. These rare
elevations! by a book deserves recommen-
dation.
Texaco is the winner of the Prix
Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Booker
prize. Milan Kundera, on the jacket cover,
states: Texaco is "Truly poetic ... the unbridled
improvisation of a storyteller who is swept
along by his own talking and who oversteps the
frontier of the plausible when he wants to —
joyfully, and with quite stunning ease." Texaco
is an extraordinary novel from the French
Caribbean; it is a storyteller's weaving of
history and fiction, an epic encounter of
memory, struggle, mythology and origins. One
of the strengths of Texaco is its ability to retrieve
and archive the growth of the City, throwing
new light on the architecture as the story of
individuals. "What is City? you say. It's the
bottleneck6 where all our stories come
together." This connection with the past is a
prerequisite for the appearance of a new and
self-confident future.
Texaco is an exacting book, but one
which is an essential to our understanding of
humanity, of memory and knowledge, in such
rudimentary terms as "Carrying freedom is the
only load that straightens the back".7 Texaco is
basically essential, just as the civil rights
movement in North America or Mahatma's
passive resistance in the Indian subcontinent,
or the anti-apartheid movement, or any revolu-
tionary struggle is essential to understanding