Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

  © 1997 by Gallimard

  English translation © 2018 by Linda Coverdale

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Originally published in France as L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse by Gallimard, Paris, 1997

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2018

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Chamoiseau, Patrick, author. | Glissant, Édouard, 1928–2011, contributor. | Coverdale, Linda, translator.

  Title: Slave old man / Patrick Chamoiseau; with texts by Édouard Glissant; translated from the French and Creole by Linda Coverdale.

  Other titles: Esclave vieil homme et le molosse. English

  Description: New York: The New Press, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017032533 | ISBN 9781620972960 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ3949.2.C45 E8213 2017 | DDC 843/.914—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017032533

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  Composition by dix!

  This book was set in Centaur MT

  Printed in the United States of America

  24681097531

  To Miguel Chamoiseau,

  who might know where the Stone is.

  P.C.

  DOES THE WORLD HAVE AN INTENTION?

  Contents

  Translator’s Note

  Cadences

  1. Matter

  2. Alive

  3. Waters

  4. Lunar

  5. Solar

  6. The Stone

  7. The Bones

  Translator’s Afterword: Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau

  Notes

  Translator’s Note

  Histoire means both “story” and “history” in French, and through this story of a slave’s flight into the unknown, Chamoiseau offers a cryptic history of the Caribbean, where many African peoples, stolen from their homelands and plunged into a Babel of tribal and European tongues, had to patch together what became Creole languages. Plantation owners used their own languages as a weapon of control over their traumatized slaves, who then turned that weapon against the oppressor: plantation storytellers said more in their homemade Creoles than their listening masters could ever understand, taking care, as Chamoiseau says in his Creole Folktales, to speak in a way “that is opaque, devious—its significance broken up into a thousand sibylline fragments.” Which, if you think about it, is a fine definition of poetry.

  Chamoiseau’s novel offers loving and mischievous tribute to these Creole languages. In this novel are words and references from the history, culture, and natural world of Martinique, as well as both creolized and arcane French, because Chamoiseau is a free-range writer. “My use of French,” he writes to his translators, “is all-encompassing.” French readers are more familiar with this background material than are English speakers, however, so while the author does not want any Creole dimension of his work spoiled by the reductive ideal of “transparency,” a translation must sometimes shine some light on these sibylline fragments for them to mean anything at all for the Anglophone audience. I have tried to make any explanatory material unobtrusive, while moving this text into English with the least possible distortion.

  The majority of such Martinican Creole and creolized French words remain intact in the translation, either easily understood in context, or clarified by me with a descriptive word or two, or paired with an English meaning: “djok-strong,” for example. For more complicated words or a short phrase, the English will appear next to the italicized original text. Some words, as well as almost all the deeper background references (customs, places, etc.), are marked with an asterisk and explained in my endnotes, all listed by the number of the page on which they appear, in case any readers prefer to check batches of endnotes in advance.

  Here is a look at the creolized French in the novel’s opening sentence: “In slavery times in the sugar isles, once there was an old black man, a vieux-nègre, without misbehaves or gros-saut orneriness or showy ways.” In Martinican Creole, neg means both “man” and “people.” It is the default term for any Creole person of color. It also means: a black man, any mixed-blood person, a servant, a friend, and has many compound forms, such as neg-lakanpay, a country fellow, and gran-neg, a pretentious fellow or uppity youngster. The Creole vié-neg is not necessarily derogatory—vié means “old,” as well as “ugly,” “horrible,” “shoddy,” even “diabolical”—and here simply means an “old man who is black.” Gros-saut looks like “big-jump” in French, but the Creole gwo-so breaks down as follows: gwo means “big” (among other things), and so can mean a bucket, a hard tumble, a waterfall, and the kicking of a harnessed horse. The expression fè gwo so refers to that last meaning, and its figurative sense is thus “to kick, lash out at, be ornery.” So: the context suggests the interpretation.

  One last remark about Chamoiseau’s old man. In the original French title and novel, he is l’esclave vieil homme: “the slave old man.” He also appears in the story as le vieil homme esclave: “the old man slave.” The nuance is telling, and such labels continue to evolve as the tale progresses.

  Chamoiseau introduces each section or “cadence” of this novel with an entre-dire, an “interchange” that opens connections among French literary texts. Here these links are short, evocative passages from L’intention poétique (Poetic Intention) and “La folie Celat,” an unpublished text later revised in Le monde incréé, all works by Édouard Glissant, a fellow Martinican and a foundational figure of Caribbean literature. Chamoiseau thus opens a dialogue with Glissant about the nature of island identity in the West Indies. Glissant’s powerful writings speak vitally to this story, and readers unfamiliar with them will find broad guidelines in the endnotes and my afterword.

  Poetic epigraphs from Touch, an anonymous text, describe a meditative arc that moves ever closer and more clearly to the grand theme and climax of the novel.

  Writing with both studied care and fond disrespect for words, Chamoiseau is not only free-range, but free-form. His syntax, lexicon, and punctuation (or lack thereof) can even be technically incorrect in French but must be respected—in this disrespect—by the English. In this novel, language not only tells the story; it is the story, an enactment of the subversive action it describes, and as the slave old man moves into a disorienting but exhilarating new dimension, Chamoiseau’s parlance does too. As with poetry, the reader makes sense of the text, as an active audience for this storyteller. In the end, as Chamoiseau has said, créolisation is a matter of expressing a vision of the world, and my aim has been to make that vision accessible to the English-speaking reader in its moving and mysterious glory. Regarding the prickly counterpoint of sound and sense, and in homage to the voice of the Creole he champions, Chamoiseau sums up his instructions to his translators with triumpha
nt glee: “I sacrifice everything to the music of the words.”

  1. Matter

  There is, before the cabin, an old man who knows nothing of “poetry” and in whom the voice alone resists. Grizzled hair on his black head, he bears in the mêlée of lands, in the two histories, before-land and here-land, the pure and stubborn power of a root. He endures, he treads the fallow land that yields not. (His are the deeps, the possibilities of the voice!) I have seen his eyes, I have seen his wild lost eyes seeking the space of the world.

  Immobile dream of bones,

  of what was, is no more,

  and yet persists in the foundation of an awakening.

  Touch,

  folio I

  In slavery times in the sugar isles, once there was an old black man, a vieux-nègre, without misbehaves or gros-saut orneriness or showy ways. He was a lover of silence, taster of solitude. A mineral of motionless patiences. Inexhaustible bamboo. He was said to be rugged like a land in the South or the bark of a more-than-millennial tree. Even so, Word gives us to understand that he blazed up abruptly in a beautiful bonfire of life.

  Stories of slavery do not interest us much. Literature rarely holds forth on this subject. However, here, bitter lands of sugar, we feel overwhelmed by this knot of memories that sours us with forgettings and shrieking specters. Whenever our speech wants to take shape, it turns toward remembrance, as if drawn to a wellspring of still-wavering waters for which we yearn with an unquenchable thirst. Thus did the story of that slave old man make its way to me. A history greatly furrowed by variant stories, in songs in the Creole tongue, wordplay in the French tongue. Only multiplying memories could follow such a tanglement. Here, careful with my words, I can proceed only in a light rhythm, floating on those other musics.

  When this story gets under way, everyone knows that this slave old man will soon die. This conviction is based on no evidence at all. He is still vigorous and seems like an indestructible mineral, something djok-strong. His eyes are neither shining nor dull but dense, like certain backwaters struck by lightning. His speech keeps itself more elusive than echoes off a surfside cliff (and as inaccessible of meaning). He subjects his cabin to the maniacal housecleaning of the elderly, and his survival garden, scraped out beneath the trees, is a fine example of a fight against famine. So, nothing. Nothing suggests that his end is near except his incalculable age, which even the ancientest ledgers of the Plantation could not guarantee. The most wizened elders cannot remember the day of his birth, and no one still alive tasted the feasts at his baptism. Therefore, all are obscurely aware that his quarter hour upon this earth (that brief allotted span) has unraveled its last bit.

  The Plantation lies in the north of the country, between the flank of a volcanic mountain and thick woods—woods of dark ravines bristling with the ruins of a forgotten time, woods of symphonic streams among the mosaics of rocks, woods of singing trees, peopled by opaline diablesses* summoned in a riotous crowd by late-night storytelling into the audience-circle of fears. Sugarcane fields surround the Plantation, then go off to softly carpet the sea swell of humpbacked hills called mornes. Up there, they blur into the mists of the heights, glittering like molten metal. Down below, against the wall of woods, they end clumsily in a seething of muddy straw.

  The Plantation possesses one hundred and sixty-seven slaves, women and youngsters included. Two mulatto commandeurs oversee the daily operations. The property belongs to a Maître-béké* whose family name boasts a nobiliary particle. He clothes his absolute power in white linen, and a pith helmet gives him the allure of a conquistador fallen from a fold in time. He makes his inspections astride a chestnut Arabian horse given in exchange for rocky land by some shipwrecked Poles anxious to anchor their exile in a scrap of soil. The Master’s wife and four children scrape by amid the mahogany redolence of the Great House, in the shadow of his unpredictable rages. His boys are pale and peevish; his daughter grows long honey-blond hair and flutters her lashes over staring eyes; his Lady amuses herself now and then with an ugly theatrical laugh that accents her mute melancholy. In his rare moments of leisure, and after Sunday vespers, the father fondles a formidable mastiff* used to hunt down foolhardy foubins who flee from servitude. No one has managed yet to foil the terrifying tracking of the animal. The Master doubtless adores it for that reason. The sudden sunshine of his smile breaks through only for this beast. And when, on his veranda, he saws away on a mother-of-pearl-inlaid mandolin, the mastiff sighs like an odalisque. The slaves in that area and those of the Plantation, as far away as they may be, give way to helpless gooseflesh at hearing that vile melody.

  The Plantation is small, but each link among its memories vanishes into the ashes of time. The bite of the chains. The rwasch of the whip. The rending cries. Explosive deaths. Starvations. Murderous fatigues. Exiles. Deportations of different peoples forced to live together without the laws and moralities of the Old-world. All of that quickly muddles, for those gathered there, the rippling of recollections and the depth-sounding of dreams. In their flesh, their spirit, subsists only a calalou-gumbo of rotting remembrance and stagnant time, untouched by any clock.

  Since the arrival of the colonists, this island has become a magma of earth fire water and winds stirred up by the hunger for spices. Many souls have melted away there. The Amerindians of the first times turned themselves into writhing vines of suffering that strangle the trees and stream over the cliffs, like the unappeased blood of their own genocide.* The slave ships of the second times have brought in black Africans fated to bondage in the cane fields. Only, it wasn’t people the slavers began selling to the béké planters, but slow processions of undone flesh slathered with oil and vinegar.* These creatures seemed, not to emerge from the abyss, but to belong to it forevermore. The colonists alone manipulate the carnal masses of this heaving magma (baptizing, murdering, liberating, building, growing rich), but the planters seem more like fermenting matter than like living people, and their eyes, dictating the actions of slavery, undoubtedly no longer blink in any way validated by innocence, decency, pity. A fig for those miseries so often illustrated, let’s put a name to this horror: the grandiose in-humanity that exploits human beings as an inert, indescribable density.

  The Plantation is—after the fashion of everything in those days—disenchanted, without dreams, without any future one might imagine. The old slave has bleached out his life there. And, at the bottom of this slop, his existence has had no apparent rhyme or reason. Simply the hypocritical aping of obedience, the postures of servility, the cadence of plantings and cane cuttings, the raide* marvel of the sugar born in the vats, the carting of sacks to the store ships in town. He has never been scolded for anything. He has never begged anything from anyone. He answers to a ridiculous name conferred by the Master. His own, the real one, grown useless, got lost without him ever feeling he’d forgotten it. His genealogy, his probable lineage of papa mama great-grandparents, is limited to the navel sunk in his belly, which zieute-eyeballs the world like an empty coconut hole, quite cold and with no age-old dreams. The slave old man is depthless like his navel.

  He has known all the stages of the sugar industry. In his latter days—not because of failing strength but through vast experience—he deals with the sugar cooking, a delicate operation he performs without seeming to deploy any expertise. In the gleam of the boilers, his skin takes on the texture of the cast-iron buckets or rusty pipes, and at times even the coppery yellow of crystallizing sugar. His sweat dots him with the varnish of old windmill beams and gives off an odor of heated rock and mulling syrup. Sometimes, even, the Master’s attentive gaze does not distinguish him from the mass of machines; they seem to keep going on their own, but the Master goes off again with the feeling that he is there—a feeling comforted by the correct aroma of the rising sugar and the oiled tempo of the turbines.

  One never sees him dancing at veillées.* There slaves exorcise their own death through rhythm and dance, and tales, and fights. He has stayed in his corner, for year
s on end, sucking a pipe of macouba tobacco that sculpts his face in its severe glow. Certain dancers and tambouyé-drummers reproach him for his apathy. Everyone spends their nights bringing their flesh to life, waking up their bones, and, above all, shoving their bois-de-vie—staffs-of-life—into the shady spots of the négresses drunk on danse-calenda.* They all thus project, into their feverish wombs, a future renaissance, like a different version of their own existence. But this crafty move aiming to survive death did not seem to interest our fellow.

  The commandeurs take little notice of the slave old man, and have pièce raison, no reason at all, to do so. Bound to the Plantation like the air and the earth and the sugar, more ancient than the most ancient of ancient trees, and of no conceivable age, he has at all times insinuated himself into spaces of mindless motion. He does not serve (like certain vieux-corps old-timers, on other Plantations) as a memoir on the origins of the domain; has no opinion on the fertility of the different fields; announces neither weather forecasts nor harvest estimates from a simple sight of the first sprouts. The Master, questioning him, has indeed tried to make him into a voice of wisdom. Has even called him Papa as his father did, and his grandfather, and like his eldest son, who now does it too. But the antique slave wheedles no advantage from this, departs not a whit from correct servile behavior. Remains unalterable. No words, no promises. Compact and infinitely fluid in the gestures of labor that alone engross him in a faceless, locked-in life.

  Even the slaves attempted to make a Papa out of him. A conveyor of Promised Land. An old-timey fount of wisdom and history. A guide, like the stake of manioc wood planted to pilot new shoots. A Mentor.* Often they questioned him about the Before-land,* the meaning and direction of the pathway ahead, the need to kill the Master, his offspring, his Lady, and burn the Great House. Rebels have sought his blessing right before their flight through the woods and their tracking by the deadly mastiff. But he never said anything or gave anything or offered the slightest hand to such magical expectations. His silence stirs up their fire: folks attribute powers and forces to him. They treat him as a knower, able to best the venom of the Bêtes-longues* and wrest from plants the contradictory qualities of the remedy-for-all-ills and the perfect poison. He can, they swear, purge maladies, strip away the sorrows of life, postpone the grip of death itself, whose crony he seems to be. Hemmed in by their entreaties, he places his palms on mortal pains, or puts his lips to the knotted forehead of a dying man, or holds the stiffened claws of a sufferer heading off in agony to the Before-land. He kisses newborns, or touches the hams of someone seeking the nerve to run away. But he never does more. Even if certain miracles occur, even if he confers by chance through these gestures some strength, a courageous contre-coeur, a flicker of manly hope, his eyes still won’t light up, or his skin give a shiver. Definitive, he takes on the opaque substance of that mass of men who are no longer men, who are not beasts, who are not, either, like that oceanic maw all around the country. They are a confusion of ravaged beings, indistinct in something formless.