“Buds and rotting spots, seeds and broken blossoms, earthly night solar light - bound themselves together in one momentum.”Įach chapter begins with an epigraph from Édouard Glissant, another Martinican writer who, with Chamoiseau and others, counts among the luminaries of the literary movement called Créolité. “The world was born without any veil of modesty,” he marvels. His exhilarating flight evokes the shock of freedom with tactile immediacy. After nearly drowning in an ancient spring, he seamlessly assumes the novel’s narration, reborn in Adamic first person.īefore escaping, the old man is barely distinct from the sugar vats on a plantation where he goes by the name “Old-Syrup.” Neither his master nor his fellow slaves detect his dormant spirit, which erupts only after he locks eyes with the mastiff that will hunt him down. He battles a venomous serpent and a swarm of mangrove crabs, but also revels in the delicate beauty of a rare fern flower, the fresh taste of soil and the miracle of trees gathering their “phantasmal contraband” of light. The old man braves a nocturnal phantasmagoria of three-hooved horses, zombies with leafy heads, a demoness toting souls in an oxcart. Imagine Walt Whitman adapting “Apocalypto” and you might approximate the awe and adrenaline of Chamoiseau’s action pastoral. The world of slavery disintegrates in the elemental confrontations of the chase. Pursued by a vicious dog, he finds rejuvenation in nature’s wonders after a lifetime of mute obedience. One fluid action sustains its plot: The old man runs. The myth of Daphne and Apollo has an entrancing New World counterpart in Patrick Chamoiseau’s “Slave Old Man,” the tale of a plantation fugitive who disappears into the “forestine soul” of colonial Martinique.
SLAVE OLD MAN By Patrick Chamoiseau Translated by Linda Coverdale 151 pp.
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