Antic Histories: Narrating the Past in a Martinican Novel and a Sumatran Mock Family Memoir

Abstract

Using the concept of the memory artist developed by Mary Steedly, and Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler, this paper offers an anthropology of print literature reading of a linguistically playful Caribbean novel (Patrick Chamoiseau's 1992 Texaco) in relation to an equally antic and language‐obsessed historical text from Indonesia (Mangaradja Onggang Parlindungan's 1964 Tuanku Rao). Contemporary Caribbean novels are generally analysed in terms of a Caribbean basin (and, sometimes, African diaspora) concept of Créolité cultural production, a field covering Creole literatures tied directly to Caribbean history, plantation slavery and the Caribbean's specific mix of Creole languages and metropolitan tongues, such as French or English. This paper, by contrast, proposes a comparative framework that reads novels like Texaco contrapuntally in relation to texts from a geographically distant, but socially resonant, other region: the former Dutch East Indies. Using close readings of passages from both books and relying on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a linguistically omnivorous genre, this paper argues that literatures of the former East and West Indies can be productively compared in terms of their rhetorics of memory, their language play and their similar penchant for literary hilarity.

Keywords:

• Anthropology of Literature
• Language Ideology
• Comparison
• West Indies
• East Indies

Notes

1. My three‐month Martinican fieldwork in 1972 was based in a north‐coast village, and concerned racial categorisation schemes used by families of mixed Black, East Indian and Béké heritage. My unpublished MA thesis from the University of Chicago records this information (Rogers 1973). My University of Chicago doctoral fieldwork in Indonesia was based, from 1974 to early 1977, in Sipirok, with follow‐up research there and in a nearby village and in the town of Padangsidimpuan for four weeks in 1980, three months in 1983, five months in 1985–86, two months in 1989 and eight months during a Fulbright research project in 1992. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Social Science Research Council in funding my 1974–77 research. Later shorter‐term stays, focused on southern Batak print literacy and literature, took place in 1995–96, and during a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship focused on turi‐turian books, in 2000–2001. See, for instance, Rodgers 1995, 1997, 2002, 2003, 2005.

2. For a related reading of other Indonesian materials (both oral personal narratives and print texts), see Florida 1996.