Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau’s third novel, Texaco traces the parallel destinies of a woman and a country: Marie-Sophie Laborieux (born around 1913, daughter of a freed slave and founder of the Texaco quarter of Fort-de-France) and Martinique itself. The author of Chronique des sept misères and Solibo magnifique pursues a vast ambition here: to convey two centuries of his country’s history through the resistance of illegal settlers on the site of the future quarter of the same name, where an oil depot still stands today, deeply embedded in the island’s history and imagination.

Chamoiseau describes himself as a “marqueur de paroles,” standing on the fragile and complex border between oral and written literature. Better than anyone, he moves in perfect balance along this border, seeking to overcome “the fascination-repulsion that the values of the victor exert upon the vanquished.” He forged a language which, as Hector Bianciotti observed, “without departing from the laws of French rhetoric, found its own veins of gold, and its own metaphors, like a flight of tropical butterflies over a garden by Le Nôtre.” A fine image indeed.