Afterword

Summary

In the transition that has been traced in this monograph, from an æsthetics of re-collection and transcription to a poetics of materiality, the body has emerged as a primary site of both fictional and autobiographical memory, an archive and an active witness. It is appropriate that this study should end with further consideration of Biblique because, as we have seen, this novel focuses on the body to an unprecedented degree, and because the text exemplifies many of the tensions which have lain at the heart of my analysis more generally, such as the fraught borderline between nostalgia and ‘authentic’ memory, or the disconnection between contemporary Martinique and its buried slave past. The novel at first sight seems to explore a further tension, identified by Mary Gallagher as being one of the most persistent preoccupations in French Caribbean writing, ‘the tension between reaching out and looking within’. But the sense of nomadism, displacement, or Glissantian errance which the text appears to espouse is in the end more apparent than real, for in this novel Chamoiseau reaches out only in order to look in more intently. Biblique may well be the only Chamoiseau novel to date which extends in any significant way beyond the geographical confines of Martinique, so that the hero moves through many of the most notorious sites of imperial aggression: Vietnam, the Congo, Algeria.