Patrick Chamoiseau: “We must have the wealth of all the languages of the world”

Interview by Agnès Bardon
UNESCO
 

In Une enfance créole [Childhood], you describe how you were struck dumb when you discovered that a language other than your own, Creole, was imposed at school. How did this first experience, this confrontation with the dominant language, French, shape you?

It was a time when the absolute nature of languages had been imposed on us by the colonizers. To justify their exploitation of the New World, of human beings and of the living world, they had developed a justifying Grand Narrative in which the ideas of “civilization”, “progress”, “development”, “universal”, “identity”, held pride of place. To justify their contempt for other languages, they had made their own sacred. They had become the only means of access to civilization, culture, the universal, or even true humanity. 

The colonized had developed a counter-discourse, exalting in turn their own languages, the better to oppose them to those of the dominant. In so doing, they unfortunately endorsed the idea that languages could be ranked in a hierarchy. Our schoolteachers (very often alienated by this hierarchy) felt it was necessary to save us little black children from the Creole language, from our mother tongue, to enable us to access “civilization”, and surely “humanity”, through the language of the French master. 

In those days, mother tongues still functioned in powerful impregnations. Creole inhabited my mind, structured my imagination and formed the basis of my encounter with the data of reality. To suddenly forbid it was tantamount to lobotomizing me. I no longer had access to spontaneous expression; I was “under translation”, as the Moroccan sociologist Abdelkébir Khatibi might have put it. I had to translate my entire existence into French, under the threat and fear that the latter engendered. 

Furthermore, a large part of every language is untranslatable, non-communicable and inexpressible. This part is all the more significant in a dominated language, as Creole was and still is in Martinique. So, for me, expressing myself in the dominant language meant transmitting only the transmissible part of my mother tongue, and all the rest fell into oblivion. You lose a bit of your soul, your creativity, your audacity, and above all the enthusiasm that makes expression powerful when it brings together the sayable, the unsayable and the inexpressible. 

What saved me was that before I went to school, I was already reading books. Reading had developed, in a part of my mind, a French skill that was not oral but written. I'd gone from reading to writing, without going through the oral stage. I could write French better than I could speak it. I had become a kind of schizophone, as our great Haitian poet Frankétienne would have said. This linguistic tragedy has been the lot of all the world's colonized peoples, but it has also been the irreplaceable ferment of their literatures…

How does one succeed in bringing out a true, inventive and free way of speaking in such a situation? How does one manage to find one's way, one's voice, in this “pathless journey” that is writing?

What I've learned from this painful experience is this: we don't have to rank languages in order of importance, quite the contrary. We must have the wealth, concretely or poetically, of all the languages of the world. No language can flourish alone – it needs the collaboration of other languages that it invokes, welcomes and respects.

Finally, we need to abandon the monolingual imaginary of the colonialists, and move towards a multi-trans-linguistic imaginary, which has nothing to do with a polyglot faculty, but which tends towards the desire-that-imagines of all the world's languages, whether we know them or not. With such an imaginary, no one language would be able to dominate others, and no language would be threatened anywhere without a planetary protective impulse.

This poses many challenges in terms of education and cultural action. As far as writing is concerned, the multi-trans-linguistic imaginary calls for the mastery of language. The use of words is the taking possession of any language: an authority. It's not about defending or illustrating any one language, but about expanding every word, every sentence, every meaning, every image, so that they can call upon, signal, invoke, the possibility of the world's other languages.

Their living use breaks down the pride of languages, their academic sanctification, to open them up to their inadequacies, to their inexpressible elements, to the turmoil of their own failure, and thus to force them to desire the presence of other languages around them. The Irish writer James Joyce often said he’d gone as far as he could go with the English language. Martinique poet and novelist Édouard Glissant stated: “I write in the presence of all the world’s languages”. As for the writer Rabelais, the father of language in France, he already had a prefiguration of this imaginary world in the 16th century. He fed his lightning bolts of words and joy with every language, idiom, jargon, idiolect, gibberish, song and parlance, popular or technical, authorized or not, that came his way. He opened a door that is still open to us...

We know the poetic power of the storyteller in the Creole imaginary and literature. As a writer, how can you reconcile the oral with the written?

It's an impossible task, because they are two different worlds. On the other hand, the oral artist and the written artist share something. They both live in a poetic state. The poetic state complements our mundane state, which provides us with security, drink, food, reproduction... However, in the poetic state, we live in the presence of love, madness, friendship, dance, song and, to put it simply, Beauty – all those useless things that are in fact the signifying purpose of the mundane. We should all develop within ourselves the poetic dimension of existence. 

But as far as our two artists are concerned, they push (as all artists do) the poetic state to a very high intensity in their existence, which makes them creators. The poetic state of the “creative” is far less powerful than that of the “creator”, and this is the basis of their difference in courage and power. Every artist, every creator, develops a “toolbox”, which is his aesthetic, his questioning relationship with Beauty. We can thus draw on the aesthetics of the storyteller or of the writer, to amplify the spaces of an aesthetic that brings them together.

Contemporary literary language is a product of both aesthetics. The use of language is where everything that concerns language (that which is before, after, and beyond it, the unspeakable, the non-communicable) converges and meets.

It is therefore the basis for the emergence of all new expression.

I think we've already won the battle to reconcile the spoken and the written word. The new horizon is to accept that all around us, in the living world, there exist languages of plants, insects, animals – multiple improbable alphabets that we have ignored and must now reintegrate into our poetics. This is part of the existential change we need to make in the face of the challenges of the contemporary world. In fact, it's connected to a new imaginary – post-Western, post-capitalist, vertical post-humanism – which is that of Relation. The principle of this imaginary is the connecting of everything in our existences that is separate.

The night was the place of the Creole storyteller, the moment his Word unfolded when the grasp of enslaving power was less strong. What is your relationship to the night?

The mundane is afraid of the night. The poetic sees in it a thousand possibilities, a source and resources. The primordial Creole storyteller lived in the vertical universe of slave and colonial discourse. All authorized possibilities converged solely on the plenitude of the masters... But the night loosened this stranglehold. It allowed the storyteller to open up, within himself and all around him, “lines of flight” as French philosopher Gilles Deleuze would have said, possibilities and futures.

The night inaugurated new creations.

At the dawn of any creative gesture, there must be a symbolic catastrophe, a breakdown of what governs our minds and imposes itself on us, filling up in advance the page we have to write on. So we have to empty the page, and take a leap into the unknown, which then opens into the new.

We've lost our links with the night, whether literal or symbolic, and we need to rediscover them. But, in a way, we must also fight to reinject, into the Western, capitalist day, the lights (to be kept flickering) of another possibility.

You've often talked about the key role played by Frankétienne and Édouard Glissant in your development as a writer. How do you see the question of language and literature for West Indian writers today?

We've overcome the paralysis we felt because of the sterilizing confrontation between our two languages, Creole and French. The poet to come must embody the poetics of the desire-imagining of all the languages of the world. Such poetics can only be initiated by the inaugural words of a great poet, for it is always poetry that inaugurates the new paths of our literatures. Frankétienne and Glissant opened the ways for us. They have remained open. Now we need to keep an eye on the horizons to see what will emerge. Because, today, literary fraternities are not defined by the old identity markers (my territory, my language, my skin), but by the structures of the imaginary, in other words, by our profound relationship to the preserved diversity of the world, what we have called Diversality. From then on, our common challenges, our fraternities, our shared futures, can rise up from anywhere on the planet.

You returned to the novel with Le Vent du nord dans les fougères glacées  [The north wind in the frozen ferns], after years away from this form of fiction. Why did you come back to it after all this time?

I came back with what I call a narrative organism. The living use of language had enabled us to be allies of all the languages of the world. The notion of narrative organism should help us get away from the literary partitions between novel, essay, theatre, poetry, fiction, non-fiction... But above all, it will enable us to escape from “narrative”.

Narrative is the basis of the imaginary of sapiens. It served to produce small, habitable “realities” in the face of the unthinkable terror of reality. Stories reassure and soothe us, simplifying unbearable complexities. We love happy endings. Narratives have even given rise to the totalitarian Grand Narrative that continues to threaten us today. Religions, colonialism, capitalism, fundamentalism and the return of fascism are all Grand Narratives that cut us off from the diversity of narratives, and therefore from the diversity of futures in the world. We don't want any more Grand Narratives! Just give us the open, joyful, celebratory encounter of all the world's narratives! This is the essential condition for that other world we need to imagine.