Amazon.com Review
Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau has long been a proponent of "Creolity," a literary movement that seeks to preserve the character of Creole language and culture against the threat of assimilation into French ways of speaking and thinking. In
School Days, the author transports us back to his childhood, providing a context for the artistic and personal choices he has made as an adult.
The lines are clearly drawn early on in this memoir; young Chamoiseau's teacher, a black Martinican who has adopted both the language and the attitudes of France, is contrasted with the rich cultural and linguistic traditions that thrive outside the school. At school, Teacher lectures on Alexander, Napoleon, the superiority of Western civilization; European fairy-tales about Cinderella and Merlin dominate the classroom while out on the playground, Creole children whisper illicit stories of zombies, water sprites, and flying sorceresses. Light-skinned children become favorites; dark-skinned ones are subjected to Teacher's ridicule; Creole equals shame. The students' sense of confusion is heightened even further when Teacher becomes ill and a substitute takes over the class for a week. This teacher, imbued with the ideals of "Negritude," replaces white with black, strawberry with calabash, Gaul with African, yet remains as dogmatic in his own way as Teacher.
School Days is a ribald, terrifying, ultimately joyful journey through Patrick Chamoiseau's formative years. At the end, the author's younger self begins to master French at last, but he also finds" bit by bit by bit the homey little Creole in his head was joined by scraps of French words, phrases...There was no looking back...." In these lines, Chamoiseau provides a glimpse of the man this boy will eventually become.
From Library Journal
A Prix Goncourt novelist from Martinique, Chamoiseau (Texaco, Pantheon, 1997), continues the narration of his immersion in the alien land of French primary education with what may well be the most moving book published in French in 20 years. Despite the harshness of his experience, self-pity is absent; nostalgia, unthinkable. Survival requires mastery of French culture; integrity requires preservation of Martinican Creole. The hero is the "little black boy" (negrillon), and his hangman/savior is a composite "Teacher." Chamoiseau, who is a collaborator of folklorist Rafael Confiant, achieves distance through the use of the refrain cues of oral storytellers. Translator Coverdale provides only as much of a glossary as the author allowed her and compensates by the clarity of English for the loss of the polysemy embedded in the French (e.g., the French title Chemin d'ecole suggests not only that there is a way to school, but also that "school" is the way to take). Our reading repertory is truly enriched with Chamoiseau.?Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghamton
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
