Autobiography and Departmentalization in Chamoiseau’s Chemin d’école: Representational Strategies and the Martinican Memoir

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.