Poetic Posterities: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Dance Around Saint-John Perse

Abstract

Patrick Chamoiseau’s inter-generational fascination with the writing of Saint-John Perse (SJP) is sustained, intense, sentient, and highly generative. The focus on SJP amplifies the connective timbre of Chamoiseau’s own writing, confirming the relation to the “pays natal” and to the “tout-monde” as central to both writers’ poetics. Five moves constitute the high points of this particular realization of a Glissantian “poetics of Relation”: the SJP intertext in Chamoiseau’s childhood memoirs and fiction; the two-hander construction of SJP’s poetic persona in Lettres créoles (1991); the sentimenthèque disseminated across Écrire en pays dominé (1997); and, most crucially, the “Méditations à Saint-John Perse”, an oral presentation from 1995 which was eventually integrated into Chamoiseau’s 2013 book-length account of his “Magnetic Liaisons” with Césaire, Saint-John Perse and Glissant. The Méditations articulate a critique of criticism in favor of a demiurgic poetics of self-reflexive magnification and esteem even as they perform a dance of ethno-social and intergenerational convergence.

Keywords:

• Criticism
• poetry
• meditation
• generation
• estime
• convergence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The full pseudonym will sometimes be abbreviated to SJP, but use of the familiarizing abbreviation “Perse” as deployed by Chamoiseau will be reserved for citations of this usage.

2 Carrie Noland notes the “unalloyed homosociality” of French Caribbean literary preeminence (2015, 119).

3 See Mary Gallagher (2018).

4 The poet himself choreographed the entire volume of the Œuvres complètes, selecting the voluminous correspondence and himself authoring the extensive “biographical” preface and its annotations.

5 Emphasis mine.

6 See also “L’Étendue et la profondeur,” Glissant’s preface to Mary Gallagher (1998).

7 Emphasis mine.

8 The final line of the 1928 W. B. Yeats poem, “Among School Children.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Gallagher

Mary Gallagher has been working in University College Dublin since 1991. She studies the memorialization of European imperialism, especially European settler colonialism in life-writing in French. Her first books focused on Saint-John Perse—La Créolité de Saint-John Perse (Gallimard, 1998)—and on French Caribbean Writing since 1950 (OUP, 2002). She published thereafter on the legacy of colonialism and the poet(h)ics of postcolonial globalization as treated by a range of authors including Charles Baudelaire, Lafcadio Hearn, Paul Morand, Édouard Glissant, Emmanuel Levinas, Nancy Huston, Colette Fellous and Dany Laferrière.