Slave Old Man

by Patrick Chamoiseau

  The Storyteller has no Genesis, no History; his parlance comes only from a rebellious cry in that slave-ship hold, which “endowed that parlance with a hopeless audacity tied to all desires.” Seeking out the old conteurs’ jousting contests, Chamoiseau admires and records the wordplay, folktales, proverbs, riddles, insults, and especially the “beautiful jubilation” of their Creole. Yet the conteurs are fading away, on an island in thrall to commercial powers and the mother country. “I had to write with this country, snatched up as a whole, redesigned with my dreams.” But in which language? Chamoiseau now feels he has absorbed the lessons of Malemort and Dézafi.

  “The dominant language, when learned as something outside oneself, keeps its distance: one manipulates it as a petitioner. Wanting to conquer it, one tries to master its orthodox element.” In this way, however, even defiant opposition becomes an observant ritual. “The colonial Centers had set out their languages like nets.” In trying to write, “We had found ourselves within them with our motherland languages and our barbarous parlances. Some of us pieced together our native languages to turn them into nets, too. Others tried to launch the triumphant net back at the dominant Center” with more-than-impeccable French.

  But “the languages of the colonial nations have drifted away from their sources and are no longer enough to designate a nationality, an identity, or even to delineate some sort of anthropological correctness.” The colonial community is now open to all languages, cultures, and peoples. “I, an American Creole, found myself closer to any other English- or Spanish-speaking Caribbean than to all other French-speakers like myself, wherever in the world we had landed. Two languages had been given to me, along with the Word of the Conteur and his oral literature, and literature with its centuries of writing. I had to call forth in each word, each phrase, that muddled richness, that Diversity within: what belonged to me.” Thus used, “the language in question explodes at the call of individual parlance.”

  However, this requires more than creolizing language, playing mix-and-match; it goes beyond “the solitary Word of the Conteur, even the primordial material of his Voice.” Chamoiseau must imagine his own Word, divine his own parlance in the language of choice, and so he appoints himself a Word Scratcher, “to evoke how much I was setting out across a constant state of fluid change.” Each book he writes becomes an “unfinished stage of useful explorations,” and his continuing education in world literature leads him to promote himself to Warrior of the Imaginary: “Hardly more lucid, but lucid regarding the mirage of his lucidity.” (“The old warrior gives me to understand: . . . ooo, you amuse me, you amuse me! You, a Warrior!”) Such a Warrior “brings the ambiguity of the real back into the opening-up of the text, the complex of each sentence favoring many an awakening,” so that all readers will encounter their own individual text, for “Writing is not certainty, but discovery.”

  The old warrior weighs in at the end: at the heart of life’s contrary forces, “let us be careful to establish our resistances, meaning our equilibria, to better safeguard the spirit above our Earth, in its superb idea, touched by the distant hum of the Galaxies, and henceforth, for ourselves, in the murmur of a sweet beguine,* let’s take our time asking the only worthwhile question: DOES THE WORLD HAVE AN INTENTION?”

  —Linda Coverdale

  Notes

  The terms in question are often given within the entry in their Creole/Kreyol form, to show the difference with French or creolized French. Any translations of quoted French texts are my own.

  4 diablesses Like most spirits, the she-devil appears at night. She waits in lonely places or goes to dances looking for men to seduce, or sometimes races along a road in a stolen oxcart, shrieking and singing, hunting for souls. Ravishingly beautiful, a djables wears long dresses to hide her telltale clattering animal hooves (and is often seen on riverbanks washing huge mounds of white petticoats). When through with a man, she might steal his spirit and break his neck or toss him off a cliff. Survivors of any amorous encounters claim to have awakened hugging skeletal remains. To ward off a djables, smoke a cigarette.

  5 Maître-béké A béké is a white Creole born in the French West Indies, a descendant of the slave-owning colonists from the seventeenth century, and the word is still in use today. A Met-bétjé is the master of a plantation. The first permanent colony in Martinique was established by Pierre Bélain, Sieur d’Esnambuc, and the nobiliary particle de proclaims him “Lord of Esnambuc.” In the French text, the author uses the terms Maître-béké and Maître interchangeably at first, but after the plantation owner’s first use of the mastiff, he is referred to only as the Maître. To simplify the English text, the Maître-béké will be called the Master from now on.

  5 mastiff The French title of this novel is L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse: the slave old man and the molosser. Named after Molossus, grandchild of Achilles and ruler of the tribe in Epirus first known for the common ancestor of these animals, the molosser is an ancient type of large, well-built dog with heavy bones, a short, strong neck, and a massive head with a short muzzle and pendant ears. The modern breeds recognized as molossers include many mastiffs, the Great Dane, the Newfoundland, and the Rottweiler.

  6 genocide Colonial conquest soon wiped out almost all the indigenous Caribbean island populations through enslavement, European diseases, and active extermination, leaving behind place names like Guadeloupe’s Morne des Sauteurs (Jumpers’ Hill), commemorating legendary mass suicides of Amerindians leaping off cliffs into the sea.

  6 oil and vinegar Vinegar was used aboard slave ships to fumigate the fetid holds and mask the smells of sickness in the human cargo, who would be rubbed down with palm oil to make their skin look healthy before they were sold.

  7 raide Rèd is a Creole intensifier that can mean: striking; pitiless, callous; stiff, rigid; tense; tough; hard, difficult; etc. It can also be an exhortation to hang on, not give up, be brave.

  8 veillées The vey is a late-night storytelling gathering (or, more dramatically, a wake) at which the crowd sings, dances to drums, bears witness to the life of the deceased, and participates enthusiastically in the ritual performances of the skilled Creole storytellers, whose repertoire ranges from time-honored jokes to incomprehensible gabble, with sounds that are simply verbal vibration, brute opacity, or images in which the conteur describes seemingly nonsensical visions that yet have a method to their madness. When Chamoiseau’s Papa-conteur babbles on, for example, about the mastiff “at turning points and stream-boundaries[. . .] draped in leopard skins,” we would do well to remember that leopard pelts are the prerogative of African royalty, while folktales around the world see crossroads as gateways to the supernatural and waterways as impassable to malevolent spirits.

  8 danse-calenda The kalennda was described by Father Jean-Baptiste Labat, a Dominican missionary who at the end of the seventeenth century provided one of the earliest accounts of slave life in the Antilles. To the beat of drums, a line of women and a line of men would repeatedly advance toward one another and retreat, leaping and pirouetting with “lascivious” gestures and improvised songs.

  9 Mentor A Mentô is a senior quimboiseur: a magician, healer, and spiritual guide, and in the hell of slavery, the plantation quimboiseurs offered a vital, if tenuous, connection to all that had been lost during the Middle Passage. Quimbois, like Haitian vodou, is an animist religion, and the quimboiseur is a “master of knowledge” who deciphers what is occult, not immediately understandable. The superpowerful Mentô is distinguished by his ability to be, in his hidden resistance to enslavement, present yet absent, even within the plantation.

  9 the Before-land A nègre-guinée was a slave born in Africa, and many slaves believed that at death they would recross the Atlantic to ginen (guinée, “Guinea”), the African homeland they had all lost. Some even killed themselves to set out sooner. A certain idea of the “return to Africa” has its own history, notably with Négritude, the movement championed by the celebrated Martinican poet and politician Aim
é Césaire, author of the majestic and hugely influential Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

  10 Bêtes-longues According to a belief of African origin, saying the name of a snake can cause it to appear, so “the Long-beast” is used instead, and the most feared bet-lonng in Martinique is the deadly viper Bothrops lanceolatus, a fer-de-lance, the Unnameable. Père Labat wrote of a fer-de-lance nine feet long, but snakes that size are gone from Martinique, along with many other fauna and flora.

  13 marooning The French marron is an abbreviation from the Spanish cimarrón, meaning wild and unruly, from cima, mountaintop. A Caribbean mawonnè, a nègre marron, was originally a fugitive black slave, a Maroon, and the term is now used for the descendants of such slaves. Africans imported during the Spanish period may have provided the first runaways in Jamaica, and some Maroons there still live in isolated, self-governing enclaves in the rugged hills.

  19 abolition Slavery was finally completely abolished in French territory in 1848. By act of the British Parliament, the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807 outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but slavery itself was not abolished there until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. In 1807, the U.S. Congress abolished the slave trade in the United States in the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, a federal law that took effect in 1808. Although President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, slavery in the United States did not end officially until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in 1865.

  20 basilic Basilic means the culinary herb basil; the basilisk, a mythical reptile with a deadly breath or gaze, hatched by a snake from a rooster’s egg; a mammoth cannon used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the green basilisk lizard of tropical American rain forests that can run on its hind legs across water. Your choice!

  20 hautes-tailles Named for the high-waisted gowns of the time, the Martinican haute-taille is a quadrille that was popular in Europe and its colonies from the late 1700s through the 1800s and was adopted by slaves for their own amusement. The dance is for four couples in a rectangular formation and is related to American square dancing. And as Chamoiseau has pointed out, it is a “dance during which the caller gives directions the dancers must follow.”

  23 chabines Reflecting a mix of white and black genes, generally with light skin, eyes and hair, chabin men and chabine women are sometimes stereotyped: they can be seen as “all good or all bad” and have a reputation for willfulness and stubbornness. Chabines are thought to be impetuous and a bit mean.

  26 pepper sauce A common punishment, even for things like stealing food, was whipping. Turpentine, hot pepper, salt pickle, lime juice, etc., were then rubbed into the wounds as antiseptics, but healing wounds were sometimes reopened to repeat the process as torture.

  27 sans manman To be mama-less is the worst of fates, so as a general modifier, sans manman means merciless, unscrupulous, lowdown, dirty, etc., while a sans-manman person is a heartless scoundrel, scum, trash, an outlaw, or whatever else the context requires.

  29 Krik-Krak A kontè kréyol—Creole storyteller—calls out “Kri?” to announce the beginning of his set and demand the attention of his audience, who respond “Kra!” to prove their vigilance in this ritual collaboration. Riddles, rhymes, proverbs, tales, wordplay of all kinds, inspired nonsense, “multi-entendres,” animal noises, sound effects, expert drumming, etc., are accompanied by the kontè’s histrionics, subtle touches, and mimicry, which deliver an improvised performance completely focused on animating the human voice in communion with the faithful listeners, who join in as their spirits move.

  36 chapeau-bakoua A bakwa is both the common screw pine and a conical, wide-brimmed hat made of its fronds that is so popular that when the Devil is in Martinique, even he wears one.

  38 Marie Celat In a sweeping series of novels, Édouard Glissant traces the complicated relationships between the descendants of two African men, one of whom betrays the other to slavers, who in 1788 ship them both on the Rose-Marie to Fort-de-France, where they are sold to rival planters. Longoué soon escapes, while Béluse remains in slavery. In Le quatrième siècle (The Fourth Century), the béké planter La Roche, who has hunted his slave Longoué for ten years, finally cedes him some land, sealing the pact by tossing him a piece of ebony bark into which the Maroon’s likeness has been incised, and a cask containing an accursed Bête-longue and some gunpowder originally intended to blow up Longoué. Passing from generation to generation, this cask becomes an increasingly mysterious archive of Martinican history, as characters yearning for a sustaining communal identity wonder what “ferment” really remains inside it, including, perhaps, “the color of their nightmares.”

  In the end the cask passes from Papa Longoué, a quimboiseur and guardian of his people’s collective memory, to Marie Celat (b. 1928), who in La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin) has a vision one night of the “unbearable absence of origin”: “She saw the bottom of a sea, the measureless blue of an ocean where lines of bodies attached to cannonballs descended dancing, and when she closed her eyes she descended with the drowned into that blue devoid of all escape.”

  Captives died in huge numbers along the African slave routes in journeys that could take from weeks to even years, while many died during long incarcerations in coastal prisons, but the number of deaths during the Middle Passage alone is usually set at around two million. In La case du commandeur, a narrative voice observes that about fifty million are said to have been tossed into the ocean to sink—or wash ashore as sea-foam.

  41 Ti-sapoti The “Li’l sapotillas” are goblins who live in groups in trees and play mean jokes on people, whom they enjoy keeping awake at night with their shrieks and racket.

  41 soucougnans Soukliyans remove their skins at night and hang them on a nail at home, then fly as balls of fire through the sky to the homes of their victims, slipping through cracks or keyholes to drink human blood, leaving behind telltale bruises. In a pinch, animal blood will do. Experts claim they are always women, for only a woman’s breasts can change into wings.

  41 coquemares Named after the French word for nightmare, cauchemar, these creatures attack sleeping people and are the relatively harmless spirits of babies who died unbaptized.

  43 nail barrel Plantations made free use of the ever-popular torture (read “The Goose Girl” in Grimms’ Fairy Tales) of cramming a victim into a nail-studded barrel and rolling it down a hill.

  48 the Trace As in the Natchez Trace, this North American and West Indian word refers to a beaten path or small road, which here was a track in Martinique first used by Jesuits in the seventeenth century to link Fort-de-France with Saint-Pierre. What is now the N3 crossed the rugged interior of the island, covered with tropical forest now showcased in the botanical park of Balata, and a section is still called the Route de la Trace. The Pont de l’Alma is a small bridge where the route out of Fort-de-France begins to climb to the wooded heights of Balata.

  In Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse), Glissant evokes the heady fragrances of his childhood, the smell of wild lilies along La Trace, but “all those flowers have disappeared, or almost,” and the country seems to have “renounced its essence” in favor of sterile appearance. And the Route de la Trace, of course, also embodies the difficult quest for the occulted past of the island.

  50 bon-ange This “good-angel” is the part of the soul that reflects someone’s individual qualities, their personality, character, and willpower.

  54 three-hooves It is rank bad luck to see the diabolical chouval-twa-pat, for this three-leg-horse pulled a hearse in life.

  54 silk-cotton trees Spirits love to live in the ceiba pentandra, also called the giant kapok, a huge tropical deciduous tree much prized by quimboiseurs for its magical properties.

  54 Agiferrant In Culture et société aux Antilles françaises (1972), Jean Benoist recorded this information from an uneducated old man: “The Moon is a ball of water. A man named Agiferrant has lived there a long time. He r
efused to carry Christ’s cross and was condemned to travel all over the Earth. One day, tired of being insulted, he took refuge on the moon. At least that’s what my father told me.”

  54 treasure Many Caribbean islands have stories about béké treasure buried at night in a hole that becomes the grave of the slave who dug it, who is thus bound to protect his master’s riches until set free by a successful treasure hunter. Chamoiseau’s Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows tells the tale of a market porter in Fort-de-France who in the end makes friends with Afoukal, a lonely zombie who rides his treasure jar up to the surface of the earth at night to chat with him. When the porter goes gold-crazy and breaks open the jar, bones and jar crumble to clay and dust, and as he fades away, Afoukal sorrowfully tells his friend, now doomed to be eaten by a djables, that “not all riches are gold: there is memory . . .”

  54 Ti-cochons-sianes In May, nights can be noisy when a pack of these little pigs runs around and around a house yapping and squeaking. If the householder opens the door, the pigs vanish, but there stands a big strong man without head or arms.

  54 dream Dreaming about pigeon peas means you’ll soon find some money; dreaming of having a tooth extracted means a close relative will die; dreaming at midnight is a sign of death; dreams about bread warn of misfortune.

  54 Pamoisés These people are so mean that they can turn into dogs, and their crooked thumbs give them away, because the nails look like dog claws.

  54 Dorlis This creature is a succubus/incubus without any well-defined physical form and may take the shape of an animal or be invisible. The Dorlis forces itself sexually on sleeping men or women, and the only way to be safe is to leave some peas, beans, pebbles, grains of sand, etc. in a container or scattered on the floor, as the Dorlis will be compelled to count them and must leave by dawn.