Caribbean Creolization

On the surface, creolization would appear to be of a piece with criollo and mestizaje in Spanish, and with métissage in French. However, although each of these categories responds to the implicit pluralisms of the colonial encounter, each also reflects specific differences within the colonial experience that are not easily rendered in general terms. What the authors of the Eloge sought to convey above all was the abandonment of negative binaries in favor of the creative openness that lies behind any conception of the creole. "Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles" (Bernabé et al., p. 75). Indeed, their aim more specifically was to develop modalities for creative expression in the arts that would reflect and embody the multiplicity and complexity of the creole mosaic. "Our history is a braid of histories … We are at once Europe, Africa, and enriched by Asian contributions, we are also Levantine, Indians, as well as pre-Columbian Americans in some respects. Creoleness is 'the world diffracted but recomposed' … a Totality" (p. 88; emphasis original).

Thus the creole language serves as a fundamental metaphor for the key goals and tenets of French Caribbean creolization. As Chamoiseau and Confiant point out in their critical work Lettres créoles, this language was the product of the experience of colonization and slavery. Born and nurtured on the plantation, it was brought into being both by the interaction of slaves deliberately separated by ethnic group to forestall the possibility of communication that might lead to resistance and revolt, through the influence of Maroons (runaway slaves) and by the interaction of these groups with the colonial culture. The creole language thus symbolizes cultural continuity, resistance to oppression, and the richness of ethnic admixture; as such, it serves to valorize the region's oral tradition even as it reinforces the qualities of pluralism and transformation that sum up the heterogeneity of the French Caribbean experience in particular.