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I can do no more than crack open these books by Patrick Chamoiseau that lay on the bed. Then, a couple of paragraphs, a page or two at most, and it's all over. I want to sleep.
Yesterday I retrieved an interview with him that I had cut out of The New York Times earlier this year. My hope was that rereading the article might inspire me to plunge into the books but no dice. Nor have any of the reviews that I glanced at on the web. This Martinican writer has received lots of attention: first when his book Texaco (1992) won the Goncourt Prize in France and now with the publication of the English translation. But his writing doesn't seem to be holding mine.
In principle I'm favorably disposed toward Chamoiseau and the things that he's writing about, even his self-conscious celebration of the storyteller, the role of the tribal historian. So why can't I bring myself to enter these books?
I can think of two Northern Cheyennes who fulfilled these responsibilities. Jimmy King for one. There were other Cheyennes who probably came closer to the stereotypical oral historian, who may even have had some sort of tribal sanction. You can fill in your own candidate.
Jimmy's job wasn't proscribed like that of the Keeper of the Sacred Hat. But his passion for objects was akin to the Keeper's. Jimmy and the Keeper shared a vision of (and responsibility for) history as represented through material items.
How and why he became the curator of the museum would probably be a long story but the outlines of it seem clear to me: I think his circumstances favored it, which may be another way of acknowledging fate. An orphaned full-blood who was raised by the Petters, he was of and not of the Cheyennes. As a preservationist he won admiration from tribal members and whites alike. He had a place in the community. Of course his exhibits were not without controversy. The criticism of American Indian Movement members stung him to the quick. Their theft of some objects in his display so enraged him that he withdrew everything from public view.
Now I'm reminded of his wonderful laugh and his blinking eyes. In all the time I spent with him, I never met his wife, Lydia. She was a Navajo, that much I knew, but she rarely ever went out. The marriage was probably further evidence of Jimmy's precarious position in the Tribe.
Donald Hollowbreast, the remarkable journalist that used to write for the paper, is the other Northern Cheyenne storyteller that I knew personally. And he too seemed only partly of the people. In Donald's case his deafness, his silence, had separated him. What a fascination with words he had. This was also true for Jimmy in a more indirect way. Having watched Petter work on his translations, Jimmy was moved to enshrine the custom typewriter that his adopted father had used.
For both of them the work was a hard-won niche, a strategy in the real world, not some gilded ideal that got pulled out of a hat. And everything was staked on this pursuit.
In this light the prospect of reading self-conscious literary pyrotechnics doesn't move me. I'm not convinced Chamoiseau is risking much. Instead I'd rather daydream about those few years with the Northern Cheyenne and the onset of winter. Daydreaming? As if longing? No, just lost in thought...
What an unexpected obstacle! I had imagined that reading Chamoiseau would round off a francophone exploration. Apparently this won't happen. But there are other things that are also at work.
This drug I am experimenting with for instance. It has some properties that aren't part of the intended package. True, the world feels a little less weighty, but surely this delusion arises because it's hard to stay fixed on anything long enough to pass judgment. This is a journey like a butterfly's, erratically careening from flower to flower.
In spite of all this motion there are a few worrisome moments of profound estrangement, insights of "true-depth" psychologies: What does any of this matter? This must be a dream! My body is separate from my mind... Fortunately, unbearable fissures of this sort quickly give way to the relentless succession of being and there is little opportunity to wallow or soar in the implications.
So there are the disquieting effects of this drug. And the growing absence of that other drug... which this one is supposed to mask. Yet I'm experiencing these two drugged states--hypothesized as counteracting each other in a balance of antagonisms--simultaneously and independently, like ships passing in the night.
And there is that still waxing night. As the solstice approaches in the south I seem to be experiencing an ecstasy of despair.
It was exactly fourteen years ago that you wrote me from White Birney. Your letter made oblique mention that Laura had been fined for lying to the police when questioned about cattle rustling. It was snowing outside and had been for some time. The house was freezing cold and you had deliberately let the woodpile dwindle down. "The calendar just flipped to December," you wrote. "May is not right around the corner."
In that letter you said you planned to travel to South America. You closed by telling me you had subscriptions to both The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. Oh, and you were reading Mario Vargas Llosa's The Green House.
-December 16, 1997
