Unusual suspects
When I was growing up in Philadelphia, the adults at our family gatherings told hilarious tall tales of their pasts in Haiti. These stories were told in Creole, usually with the unbridled theatricality of screwed-up faces, silly walks and mimicry verging on virtuosity. The grownups had all been educated in the rigid conjugations of the French language. But Creole was for them the language of laughter, camaraderie and, most importantly, stories. Martiniquan writer Patrick Chamoiseau achieved renown in the U.S. last year with the publication of his novel Texaco in translation. Now Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnificent, originally published in Creole in 1988, has been released in English. Like much of his other work, Solibo Magnificent is about the power of language, particularly Creole, to mesmerize.
In Solibo, Chamoiseau has turned police procedure into a tragicomic riff on the decline of the Creole oral tradition. It’s Carnival time in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Solibo Magnificent, popular man-about- town, bon-vivant, charcoal vendor and charismatic storyteller, lies dead at the foot of a tamarind tree, surrounded by a motley assortment of fourteen witnesses. Chief Inspector Evariste Pilon, a rare “policeman with a brain,” immediately suspects foul play, and hauls in the whole lot. In the time-honored tradition of the whodunit, we see the victimized raconteur from different post-mortem perspectives. As suspect after suspect describes Solibo, Inspector Pilon jots down notes and observes with the “big eyes of a bullfrog tracking maybugs in sugar cane during a drizzle.”
Soon enough, Pilon’s investigation leads to more nefarious complications and to an understanding of the deeper significance of storytelling. He discovers that Solibo “wanted to inscribe his words in our ordinary life, but our life no longer had ears nor hollows where an echo could abide eternal.” On multiple levels, Solibo’s days were numbered, yet paradoxically, perhaps, Chamoiseau finds vibrancy in a very funny requiem for the oral tradition.
