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Orality, History, and "Creoleness" in Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Folktales

2002; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mat.2002.0027

1536-1802

Lewis C. Seifert,

Migration, Identity, and Health

Patrick Chamoiseau's Creole Folktales (1988) makes a concerted effort to reproduce the oral storytelling of the Creole slaves of the French Antilles in order to explore and promote the cultural and literary notion of Creoleness. In his collection, Chamoiseau reworks the themes of hunger, dreams, and speech so central to Creole oral narratives. But Creole Folktales is anything but a collection of folkloric transcriptions. By rewriting Creole folktales, Chamoiseau valorizes the orality of the Creole past as a means of unsettling the fixity of writing as defined by the colonial and postcolonial West.