Caribbean Creolization

Patrick Chamoiseau was born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. The son of working-class parents, Chamoiseau studied sociology and law in Paris before moving back to Martinique, where he became a social worker. His third novel, Texaco, won France's top literary award, the Prix Goncourt, in 1992, making him world-famous. The novel was eventually translated into more than twenty languages. Chamoiseau continues to live in Martinique, where he writes novels as well as short stories, screenplays, autobiography, childhood memoirs, and texts for pictorial histories.

Despite the publication of other novels such as Solibo le magnifique and Biblique des derniers gestes, Texaco remains by far Chamoiseau's best-known work. The novel traces 150 years of postemancipation Martinican history through the eyes and voice of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the aging daughter of a freed slave. It is Laborieux's encounter with an urban planner, and her attempt to convince him to abandon his plan to raze, in the name of progress, the shantytown of the title that provides the framework for this episodic story of struggle and resistance. This structure, and its trademark of creole existing alongside and transforming the French language, allows the key nuances of ethnic and cultural exchange and linguistic wordplay to assume pride of place in a portrait of Martinique's creolized society.