Chemin d'école

Patrick Chamoiseau, Chemin-d’école, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, 188 p.

« Ayant dépassé l’Antan d’enfance, abandonné l’activité de suceur de tétée, le négrillon, lancé dans l’infini de la maison, en éplucha toutes les ressources. Bientôt, il se mit à buter contre l’unique obsession : aller !
Aller.
Nouvelle traversée. Le Maître comme capitaine «voguant immatériel sur les cimes du savoir universel», grand pourfendeur de sabir créole, négateur des fastes de la culture dominée. «Ô vertige mi ! Tête perdue !» Le négrillon aura «des temps de blonde enfance, rouge aux joues et yeux bleus». Retour à la langue-manman quand il fallait lâcher l’émotion, balancer un senti, s’exprimer longtemps. Retour au pays natal et à la parole de Gros-Lombric, un petit bougre, noir bleuté, maître-force en magie créole qui, jour après jour, ramène des confins de l’en-ville des contes de zombis, des Chouval-trois-pattes, les bels passages de l’oiseau glanglan, les vertus des poules-frisées, les coups-de-cervelles de Ti-Jean-Lorizon. Gros-Lombric, le double, écolier marron de l’École coloniale.
De la confrontation de ces deux trajectoires, le négrillon tirera la substance de son écriture.
(Quatrième de couverture)

TAGIROVA, Tatiana A., « Patrick Chamoiseau’s Construction of Creoleness: Creole Folktales and School Days », Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, vol. 9, n° 32 (avril-juin 2004), p. 269-277. +++ Article de revue

SHELLY, Sharon L., « Addressing Linguistic and Cultural Diversity with Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école », The French Review, vol. 75, n° 1 (octobre 2001), p. 112-126. +++ Article de revue

AUB-BUSCHER, Gertrud, « Une enfance créole Revisited : Language in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école », Essays in French Literature, vol. 41 (novembre 2004), p. 1-16. +++ Article de revue

GATARD, Lucie, « Négritude et créolité : la quête identitaire de l’enfant créole dans La rue Case-Nègres de Joseph Zobel et Une enfance créole de Patrick Chamoiseau », mémoire de maîtrise, faculté des lettres et des langues, Université de Poitiers, 2002, 141 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

LE GALLO, Hélène, « L’écriture de l’enfance de Patrick Chamoiseau, dans Une enfance créole I et II et dans Scènes de la vie d’un jeune garçon de J. M. Coetzee », mémoire de maîtrise, faculté des lettres et sciences humaines, Université de la Réunion, 2005, 134 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

PERSSON, Ann-Sofie B., « Tracing Childhood : The Poetics of Autobiography in the Writings of Maria Wine, Patrick Chamoiseau and Nathalie Sarraute », thèse de doctorat, Department of French and Italian, Ohio State University, 2001, 464 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

###Abstract
The present study explores how three authors of different geographical and social origin, race, sex and culture, approach the problem of narrating autobiographically the elusive part of their pasts which is childhood. It focuses on the stylistic and narrative strategies used by Maria Wine in Man har skjutit ett lejon [On a tiré sur un lion, my translation], Patrick Chamoiseau in Antan d’enfance and Chemin d’école, and Nathalie Sarraute in Enfance.

In Chapter 1, the metaphorical image of the author as a caged lion informs the reading of Wine’s autobiography. Through different images of prison - the orphanage, the family, the name, the body - this global metaphor expresses her problematic relation to the world, the others and the self. The stylistic features used to describe the child’s universe from her perspective, convey her entrapment and liberation through metaphor and metamorphosis. Finally, I argue that Wine inscribes, metaphorically, a certain poetics within the narrative, which allows to grasp a poetic vision of existence.

Chapter 2 studies Chamoiseau’s use of partly ethnographical methods to depict and preserve the creole world of his childhood. The oral dimension introduced in the writing, and the myth of paradise and hell which serves to establish a contrast between home and colonial school, dominate the investigation. The child’s play with words and lies reveals a conception of the autobiographical project.

Chapter 3 discusses how Sarraute conveys her childhood experience through the use of the meta-narrative device of a double narrative voice, as well as the role of images and space in the process of remembering. I suggest different ways of reading the work as an anti-literary vocation narrative, as well as a manifesto for a poetics of autobiography through the use of tropisms.

In the concluding remarks, the comparative discussion of the three writers brings out common traits in their responses to the problematic of writing childhood, while underlining that the formulation of a poetics within the autobiography, a shared feature of all three texts, allows the authors to create a meta-commentary on what writing is or can be, inside or outside the autobiographical realm.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest###

WALSH, John Patrick, « What Children Say : Childhood in Francophone Literature of the French Antilles and North and West Africa », thèse de doctorat, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, 2005, 230 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

CROWLEY, Patrick, « The Etat Civil : Post/colonial Identities and Genre », French Forum, vol. 29, n° 3 (automne 2004), p. 79-94. +++ Article de revue

### Crowley, 2004, PDF ###

HOPPENOT, Éric, « Le miel de l’alphabet : l’autobiographie archipélique de Patrick Chamoiseau, renifleur d’existence », Présence Francophone: Revue Internationale de Langue et de Littérature, n° 81 (2014), p. 64-83. +++ Article de revue

RENNER, Vincent, « Les stratégies de traduction des antillanismes lexicaux dans School Days (Chemin-d’école, Patrick Chamoiseau) », Palimpsestes, n° 25 (2012), p. 155-166. +++ Article de revue

### Résumé
Cet article porte sur la traduction en anglais de divers antillanismes lexicaux du récit de Patrick Chamoiseau Chemin-d’école. La première partie analyse méthodiquement les choix de traduction des réduplications et des composés biadjectivaux, verbo-onomatopéiques, biverbaux et binominaux de Linda Coverdale dans School Days, distinguant quatre types de stratégies : le calque de structure, le transcodage structurel, le transcodage stylistique et la standardisation. La seconde partie revient sur certains de ces choix et propose d’autres traductions possibles, qui suivent plus fidèlement le principe chamoisien de « musique de la phrase ».

Abstract
This article examines the English renderings of various lexical Carribeanisms found in Chemin-d’école, a narrative by Patrick Chamoiseau. In the first part, I methodically analyze the translation choices of the text’s reduplications and adjective-adjective, verb-onomatopoeia, verb-verb and noun-noun compounds which were made by Linda Coverdale in School Days. Four translation strategies are elicited: structural calque, structural shifting, stylistic shifting and standardization. In the second part, I discuss some of these choices and suggest other possible translations that respect Chamoiseau’s ‘music of the sentence’ principle more dutifully.

Renner, 2012, HTML ###

JOHNSON, Erica L., « ‘Envie et survie’: The Paradox of Postcolonial Nostalgia in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école », Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, vol. 17, n° 4 (septembre 2013), p. 396-404. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
The first section of Patrick Chamoiseau’s 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 Chamoiseau’s 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 author’s “Répondeurs,” a chorus of voices that occupies the contact zones between memory and forgetting, between the child’s innocence and the narrator’s experience, and thus enables Chamoiseau’s ambivalent longing for a past that he had to survive.

Johnson, 2013, PDF ###

MURDOCH, H Adlai, « Autobiography and Departmentalization in Chamoiseau’s Chemin d’école : Representational Strategies and the Martinican Memoir », Research in African Literatures, vol. 40, n° 2 (été 2009), p. 16-39. +++ Article de revue

### Abstract
Purportedly a childhood memoir, Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école is inscribed in a long tradition of Caribbean autobiographical writing. As such, it inherits and expands upon the themes and tensions of autobiography, both as a narrative of selfhood and as a discursive tool of identity and culture in the Caribbean context. Patrick Chamoiseau inscribes a set of writing practices in Ecrire en pays dominé and Chemin-d’école, both aimed at illuminating the contradictory results of almost fifty years of French Caribbean overseas departmentalization. This double process of economic and cultural domination appropriates identitarian issues of ambiguity, belonging, and authenticity predicated on the departmental experience in general and its educational practices in particular, and inserts them into his re-presentation of his Martinican childhood. Ultimately, his work highlights the intrinsic paradoxes of departmental integration that, in bringing the départements d’outre-mer directly within the ambit of France, progressively erased their ethnic, linguistic, and cultural difference from the mainland.

Murdoch, 2009, HTML ###

UECKMANN, Natascha, « Autobiographik und Transkulturalität: ‘Une Enfance créole’ von Patrick Chamoiseau », Romanistische Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte/Cahiers d’Histoire des Littératures Romanes, vol. 33, n° 3-4 (2009), p. 383-414. +++ Article de revue

STRONGMAN, Roberto, « The Colonial State Apparatus of the School: Development, Education, and Mimicry in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Une Enfance créole II: Chemin-d’école and V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street », Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 16, n° 1 (novembre 2007), p. 83-97. +++ Article de revue

LARRIER, Renée, « Migrant ImagiNations: Can[n]ons, Creole[s], and Patrick Chamoiseau’s Chemin-d’école », Journal of Caribbean Literatures, vol. 4, n° 2 (automne 2006), p. 17-30. +++ Article de revue

### Larrier, 2006, PDF ###

KAYTON, Jennifer, « Finding the Oppressor Out : Constructions of Colonial Classrooms in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and Patrick Chamoiseau’s School Days », mémoire de maîtrise, Department of English, Colorado State University, 2011, 100f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
Jamaica Kincaid‟s Annie John and Patrick Chamoiseau‟s School Days critique the colonial education system as well as construct many ways in which the protagonists interact with that system at the psychological level. The colonial school acts as a physical and cultural manifestation of Empire, a catalyst for the protagonist‟s development, and a site for mediating relationships with peers and family members. The texts simultaneously construct the colonial education system and challenge its imperial foundation. The first two chapters of this thesis aim to study how the emerging narrative voices of Annie John and the little boy develop in relation to, and in resistance of, the colonial school system. The final chapter discusses the different approaches Kincaid and Chamoiseau utilize to appropriate the language and literature of the colonizers.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###

BORNE, Carole B., « L’identité créole dans la littérature antillaise », thèse de doctorat, Department of Romance and Classical Languages, Michigan State University, 1999, 266 f. +++ Thèse de doctorat / mémoire de maîtrise

### Abstract
The topic of this dissertation deals with the représentation of France in the Caribbean. It focuses on the struggle between assimilation and cultural integrity in the population on the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe and in Guyana, where France is omniprésent in everyday life. It aims to analyze the typology of the relationship between French and Caribbean culture from the viewpoint of the latter. Using post-colonialist critics like Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), Glissant’s Discours Antillais (Caribbean Discourse), Homi Bhabha’s Location of Culture (and his notion of cultural hybridity) and Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) by Barnabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant as a theoretical starting point, this dissertation attempts to reconceive Creoleness, and explores the dimension offered by the présent multifaceted relationships between France and its former colonies of the New World. Colonized in the 17th been French overseas departments (DOM) since 1946. The status of DOM, problematic and alienating, seems to be a continuation of the assimilation process into the dominant culture started in colonies. The autobiographical novels by the Martiniquean Patrick Chamnoiseau, Chemin-d’école (School Pays), and Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nèqres (Black Shack Alley) serve to illustrate the extent of French représentation and French values and culture as an interférence in the Caribbean through the éducation System. The novel La Fête à Paris by Joseph Zobel présents the experience of the Caribbean Üving in France, and Les Bâtards by Guyanese Bertène Juminer, their life in France and their attempt at returning to the native land. Finally, the specificity of the Caribbean woman will be explored.

La version PDF de la thèse est disponible pour les membres de communautés universitaires qui ont un abonnement institutionnel auprès de UMI - Proquest ###