Erica L. Johnson

“ENVIE ET SURVIE”: THE PARADOX OF POSTCOLONIAL NOSTALGIA IN PATRICK CHAMOISEAU’S CHEMIN-D’ÉCOLE

Abstract The first section of Patrick Chamoiseaus autobiographical novel, Chemin d’école (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), is entitled “Envie,” while the second section is “Survie.” As Chamoiseau recounts his youth in Martinique, he tempers his nostalgic longing for a childhood full of brilliant discovery with a deft and comic portrait of the ironies of his colonial education. The initial joy he takes in learning to write is so absolute and essential that writing is nothing less than “emprisonner des morceaux de la réalité dans ses tracés de craie” (31). However, his fond memories of coming to language are contained among those of a schoolteacher who seeks to disinherit his students from their Creole language. Herein lies the paradox of postcolonial nostalgia, for even as Chamoiseaus remembrances mock his colonial education, he makes is clear that the mere survival of the artist as such is jeopardized by an institutional assault on language. The structuring themes of “envie” and “survie” are connected by the authors “Répondeurs,” a chorus of voices that occupies the contact zones between memory and forgetting, between the childs innocence and the narrators experience, and thus enables Chamoiseaus ambivalent longing for a past that he had to survive.

Book Review: The parallel lives of women and cows: Meat marketsHalleyJ. (2012). The parallel lives of women and cows: Meat markets. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 188 pp.

Jean O’Malley Halley’s The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets is an astonishing book, both in its meticulously researched presentation of the origins and development of the American beef industry, and in its approach to that subject through trauma memoir. If Upton Sinclair famously “aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident . . . hit it in the stomach” (p. 130) with The Jungle, Halley’s work continues the tradition of powerful exposé while achieving his original goal of moving her readers on an emotional level. She does this by interspersing archival research about beef, the Irish famine and subsequent waves of emigration that sent her ancestors across the Atlantic, and the conquest of what is now the Western United States, with the affective archives of her own memories. And because the memories she explores are those of trauma, the entire book is shaped as a trauma narrative, shaped by the violence Halley experienced as a girl and that with which she and her abusers were surrounded on the cattle ranch where she grew up. Like the memories, which loop and repeat around barely representable experiences of sexual abuse and exposure to cruelty, the story of cattle becoming capital circles back on itself to fold in such layers as migration, race, conquest, and dehumanization. From the outset, Halley explains,

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This chapter presents the critically and commercially successful memoirs of Patrick Chamoiseau within the context of Martinique ’s status as a French Department (departement et region d’outre-mer). Approaching the memoirs through two theoretical texts that Chamoiseau wrote concurrently with them, the essay shows how he engages in a form of memory work in his creation of intimate archives that run counter to the colonial archive. Chamoiseau establishes particular modes of life writing that openly confront memory as a political process and a commercial venture, and that foreground memory as an agency itself rather than as a transparent lens to the past.

The Intimate Archive of Patrick Chamoiseau

Jean O’Malley Halley’s The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets is an astonishing book, both in its meticulously researched presentation of the origins and development of the American beef industry, and in its approach to that subject through trauma memoir. If Upton Sinclair famously “aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident . . . hit it in the stomach” (p. 130) with The Jungle, Halley’s work continues the tradition of powerful exposé while achieving his original goal of moving her readers on an emotional level. She does this by interspersing archival research about beef, the Irish famine and subsequent waves of emigration that sent her ancestors across the Atlantic, and the conquest of what is now the Western United States, with the affective archives of her own memories. And because the memories she explores are those of trauma, the entire book is shaped as a trauma narrative, shaped by the violence Halley experienced as a girl and that with which she and her abusers were surrounded on the cattle ranch where she grew up. Like the memories, which loop and repeat around barely representable experiences of sexual abuse and exposure to cruelty, the story of cattle becoming capital circles back on itself to fold in such layers as migration, race, conquest, and dehumanization. From the outset, Halley explains,

Book Review: The parallel lives of women and cows: Meat markets by Halley J

Jean O’Malley Halley’s The Parallel Lives of Women and Cows: Meat Markets is an astonishing book, both in its meticulously researched presentation of the origins and development of the American beef industry, and in its approach to that subject through trauma memoir. If Upton Sinclair famously “aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident . . . hit it in the stomach” (p. 130) with The Jungle, Halley’s work continues the tradition of powerful exposé while achieving his original goal of moving her readers on an emotional level. She does this by interspersing archival research about beef, the Irish famine and subsequent waves of emigration that sent her ancestors across the Atlantic, and the conquest of what is now the Western United States, with the affective archives of her own memories. And because the memories she explores are those of trauma, the entire book is shaped as a trauma narrative, shaped by the violence Halley experienced as a girl and that with which she and her abusers were surrounded on the cattle ranch where she grew up. Like the memories, which loop and repeat around barely representable experiences of sexual abuse and exposure to cruelty, the story of cattle becoming capital circles back on itself to fold in such layers as migration, race, conquest, and dehumanization. From the outset, Halley explains,