Patrick Chamoiseau, a Martiniquan writer, is known for using the island’s creole in his creative works, and for juxtaposing passages of magical realism with testimony-like accounts. Chamoiseau’s politics permeate his writing in a very intriguing way. Linda Coverdale, the translator for Slave Old Man (The New Press), writes that Chamoiseau often says that he is more at home with Spanish and English speakers who share his cultural and historic backdrop than with French speakers from elsewhere. Chamoiseau’s vision for Martinique—and Caribbean identity in general—confronts the legacy of the forces which built his tropical island nation. In Slave Old Man, Chamoiseau vividly paints the brutality of a hunt for a slave gone “marooning,” while at the same time investigating the complexity and innate beauty of the land. In this way he calls for the modern nation of Martinique “to claim [its] sense of both place and collective memory,” rather than choosing alienation from a history of social injustice. Appropriately, I read much of Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco (Vintage) on a near-deserted beach in a provincial park at the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Texaco offers readers a colonial, mirage-like version of that BC beach by flipping the idea of Martinique as an easy-living tourist haven. Chamoiseau builds a world that interleaves the indigenous Carib culture with the more recent history of Martinique, a history from which most of the island community draws their stories. It is wonderful to see such productive storytelling emerging from the mass violence of a plantation-based economy built on the transatlantic slave trade, and later, on indentured servitude. The truths one gets from reading Texaco, even as an outsider reading an English translation, are the kind that are suspicious of easy answers; they are truths which challenge the clichéd convention of paradise as a sandy beach. —Anson Ching

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