Solibo Magnificent

Chamoiseau's Solibo is a response to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Solibo's fall is accompanied by a thunderous beating of a drum and not the long peal of thunder of the original - the author reproduces the sound of the drum in an appendix, rather than on the opening page of his novel, and the wake is wetted with rum rather than porter - the celebrants are not even aware of the hero's death, but take him to be marking a long pause in his tale. Finally they determine that his own speech has cut his throat - un égorgette de la parole.

The book is, at one level, about the tension between language and speech. If a language is a dialect with an army - and, above all, a system of writing, then parole, in Solibo's universe, is the breath of those who live. Chamoiseau, who introduces himself as a character in the novel, and who tries to see himself as bearing witness, attempts to note down Solibo's words, an endeavour that the master of speech regards with amused contempt, although it is the possibility of reducing his living speech to script that is, the reader understands, the ultimate cause of his death.

Solibo's death becomes official when the police intervene. The policemen, at first lead by the sinister brute whose name translates into English as something like Muddyarse, declare him dead and immediately begin a murder investigation. Suspecting a plot involving all the witnesses to the death, they are constantly hindered in their attempts to work out what happened by their insistence on using their officialese - a rudimentary colonial French - which is blocked by several of the witnesses who will only speak Creole - the language which Solibo himself spoke. For Muddyarse, even the dead man's name is inadmissable :

"Tu dis Solibo mais c'est pas un nom, c'est un nègrerie, son nom exact c'est quoi?"

Chamoiseau, like Joyce, writes from a periphery that is in many ways a centre. Just as Ireland was the first of England's colonies - unless we count England itself, suffering even today beneath the Norman Yoke - so Martinique, along with its other Caribbean possessions is at the centre of modern French history. Like Joyce, confronted with the power of colonialism, Solibo adopts silence, exile and cunning. His cunning is that of the magician, his silence is that of word-weaver, and his exile is imposed and unspoken. Chamoiseau himself seems to waver, but is tight-webbed between Aimé Césaire's négritude and Solibo's Christ-like retreat from both the language of the oppressor, and, in the end, from language itself.

Another large reference in the book is Rabelais. It is peppered with hilarious monsters - two of the policemen could step straight out of the world of San Antonio, and their first victim, Lolita (Doudou Menar) is a towering figure of female energy and power before they put an end to her - at their second attempt. They also resemble the fundamental spirits that are found in the constellations of practices and beliefs common to the African diaspora, the Martiniquan form of which is known as quimbois. Solibo himself has many of the characteristics of the quimboisier or shaman. He feeds a multitude with a single fish, brings about miraculous cures through his benign presence, confuses the spirits of the wrong-doer until they become docile enough to drown themselves in rum. Chamoiseau's writing is nothing if not eclectic.