Patrick Chamoiseau

Patrick Chamoiseau 2009

Patrick Chamoiseau (born December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France , Martinique ) is a French writer. In 1992 he received the prestigious Prix ​​Goncourt for Texaco .

biography

Patrick Chamoiseau studied law and social economy in France and initially worked as a social worker . After his return to the Antilles island of Martinique, he devoted himself to researching the Creole culture. From then on he published plays, novels, short stories ( Antan d'enfance , Chemin-d'école ) and several literary essays ( Eloge de la créolité , Lettres créoles ). In addition to the Prix ​​Goncourt , he received the Prix ​​Carbet and in 2002 the Prix ​​Spécial de Jury RFO . The translation of his novel L'empreinte à Crusoé into German ( The trace of the other) was shortlisted for the International Literature Prize of the House of World Cultures in 2015 .

Literary work

In his novels, Chamoiseau traces the origins of Creole culture. By créoles he understands all those inhabitants of the French Antilles who were washed ashore by enslavement, deportation or other circumstances in the course of colonization on the Caribbean islands. With the concept of créolité developed with his participation, he tries to give the inhabitants of this area, former slaves from Africa, Chinese coolies and Arab traders, their own cultural identity.

In Chronique des sept misères, for example, Chamoiseau describes a cultural peculiarity of everyday life in Martinique: the hard life of the djobeurs , who have always worked as goods carriers on the island's markets and through their skill and creativity, but above all through their orally passed on stories and anecdotes are part of Martinique's Creole culture. The ongoing integration of the island into the legal system of mainland France (Martinique becomes an overseas department in 1946 ) and the massive influence of France and the European Union on its own economy increasingly supplant typical features of Creole culture, such as that of the djobeurs .

The concept of créolité

In his third novel Texaco , Chamoiseau describes the story of the black inhabitants of Martinique, who were suppressed as former slaves or as runaway and wandering "marrons" by the "békés", the white landowners of the island, until the 19th century. He describes how the different cultures, African, European and Asian, have merged with one another over the course of history and contributed to today's Creole identity.

In order to realize his concept of créolité through literary means, Chamoiseau tries to translate certain characteristics of this Antillean culture into written form. The figure constellations (high proportion of mythical figures from the Creole fairy tale world), the interweaving of Creole words (from the Creole internalized as the “national” language) and in particular the literary concept of “oralité” play an important role. The fairy-tale character of the knowledge of the inhabitants of Martinique, passed on exclusively orally, with its numerous fable and mythical beings (such as the "zombis", wandering undead, or the "mentô", old shamans) should thus be illustrated in the novels of Chamoiseau and create a connection to Creole culture.

bibliography

• Maman Dlo contre la fée Carabosse , play, 1982
• Chronique des sept misères , novel, 1986
• Solibo magnifique , novel, 1988
• Éloge de la créolité (with Jean Bernabé and Raphaël Confiant ), essay, 1989, bilingual edition fr. and in English at Gallimard 1993
• Une Enfance créole I, Antan d'enfance , novel with autobiographical features, 1993, German Kindertage , Zebu, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-937663-08-1
• Lettres créoles: tracées antillaises et continentales de la littérature: Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane (1635-1975) , (with Raphaël Confiant ), essay, 1991
• Texaco , Roman, 1992, German: Texaco. A Martinique novel , from the Creole French by Giò Waeckerlin Induni, Piper, Munich; Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-03648-1
• Martinique , essay, 1994
• Guyane: Traces-Mémoires du bagne , essay, 1994
• Une enfance créole II, Chemin d'école , novel with autobiographical features, 1994
• Écrire en pays dominé , Essay, 1997
• L'Esclave, vieil homme et le molosse , fairy tales, 1997
• Elmire des sept bonheurs: confidences d'un vieux travailleur de la distillerie Saint-Etienne , essay, 1998
• Biblique des derniers gestes , Roman, 2002, Prix Spécial du Jury RFO
• Une Enfance créole III, À bout d'enfance , novel with autobiographical features, 2005
• Un dimanche au cachot , novel, 2007
• Quand les murs tombent. L'identité national hors-la-loi? (with Édouard Glissant ), 2007
• L'intraitable beauté du monde. Address à Barack Obama (with Édouard Glissant), 2009, German letter to Barack Obama. The indomitable beauty of the world , from the French by Beate Thill, Das Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-88423-378-8
• Les Neuf Consciences du malfini , Roman, 2009
• L'empreinte à Crusoé , Roman, Gallimard 2012
  • The Trail of the Other , Roman. Translated from the French by Beate Thill. Verlag Das Wunderhorn 2014
• Frères migrants. coll. Cadre rouge. Seuil, 2017
  • Migrants . Essay. Translated from Beate Thill. The Wunderhorn, Heidelberg 2017

Honors

• Prince Claus Prize 1999
• Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

literature

• Gernot Kamecke: The places of the Creole author. Contributions to a hermeneutics of postcolonial literature using the example of the identity fictions of Patrick Chamoiseau . Aisthesis-Verlag, Bielefeld 2005. ISBN 3-89528-499-8 .
• Britta van Kempen: The Antillanian imaginaire “in the mirror” of the story. The metahistoriographic fictions in the novel by Édouard Glissant, Daniel Maximin and Patrick Chamoiseau . Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation (IKO), Frankfurt am Main 2006. ISBN 3-88939-806-5 .
• Luciano C. Picanço: Vers un concept de littérature nationale martiniquaise. Evolution de la litterature martiniquaise au XXème siècle. Une étude sur l'œuvre d ' Aimé Césaire , Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau et Raphaël Confiant . Peter Lang, Bern 2000, ISBN 0-8204-5030-8 .
• Bastienne Schulz: The Caribbean between enracinement and errance: neo-baroque identity designs by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau , Ed. Tranvía, Verl. Frey, Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-938944-84-4 . (Free University of Berlin, dissertation 2012)

Web links

• Literature by and about Patrick Chamoiseau in the catalog of the German National Library
• Patrick Chamoiseau in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biography on auteurs.contemporain.info (French)
2. ↑ Shortlist of this year's Berlin International Literature Prize published , Deutschlandradio Kultur from June 1, 2015
3. ↑ Frankfurt Book Fair 2017: Boundless literature in French ( memento from March 1, 2018 in the Internet Archive ), Bayerischer Rundfunk, August 30, 2017
4. ↑ Prince Claus Prize Winner, 1999 ( Memento of the original from December 20, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ↑ List of appointments in January 2010 on culture.gouv.fr