Crusoe's footprint by Patrick Chamoiseau – the symbolic return to precolonialism

Vol.38,No.1(2017)

Damian Masłowski

https://doi.org/10.5817/ERB2017-1-9

Stable URL (handle):
http://hdl.handle.net/11222.digilib/136495

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Abstract
Patrick Chamoiseau is not only believed to be the inheritor of Daniel Defoe. Most of all he is considered an author who continues Michel Tournier's postcolonial literary tradition or Saint-John Perse's insular and anti-urban attitude. The notion of the city is used in Chamoiseau's fiction as the metonymy of colonial civilization. Analogically, we suggest the concept of insular "microcity". In Crosoe's Footprint, the nearest environment built by the protagonist reflects at the same time colonial urban influence and one before the arrival of Europeans in 16th century. We would like to read this novel not only in terms of allegorical attempt to restore a connection between ex-colonized people and their regained paradise, but also to build a civilization (including the concept of micro-cities), homolog to the occidental one. In our paper, we will attempt to prove that Patrick Chamoiseau, in his novel Crusoe's Footprint (2012), seeks to attain the project of a symbolic return to the pre-colonial times in Martinique. The post-colonial and antislavery questions concern, figuratively, the migrations of colonized people from The New World towards the Old World and their comeback to the historical land. The native protagonist, disappointed by living in Western civilization and unable to migrate between old and new worlds, becomes insane and, afterwards, he is thrown out of the European civilization. Left on a desert island, he is forced to appropriate the place. The choice of the temporality of the diegesis (approximately 1635–1659) is relevant in terms of the pre-colonial dimension of Chamoiseau's work. What is more, bearing in mind that previous works of the author concerned Martinique, it seems possible that the Caribbean Islands are the setting in absentia in Crusoe's Footprint – what is anyway explained in the novel. In his allegoric narrative, the Martinique author wants his protagonist to disinherit himself of European burden and to live in accordance with the concept of tabula rasa in the new unfavorable environment.

Keywords:
Chamoiseau; Crusoe; postcolonial literature; environment; posthuman writing

Pages:
101–112
References

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