Waste Matters

Urban margins in contemporary literature

Sarah Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317285960
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

How do those pushed to the margins survive in contemporary cities? What role do they play in today's increasingly complex urban ecosystems? Faced with stark disparities in human and environmental wellbeing, what form might more equitable cities take?

Waste Matters argues that contemporary literature and film offer an insightful and timely response to these questions through their formal and thematic revaluation of urban waste. In their creation of a new urban imaginary which centres on discarded things, degraded places and devalued people, authors and artists such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Chris Abani, Dinaw Mengestu, Suketu Mehta and Vik Muniz suggest opportunities for an inclusive urban politics that demands systematic analysis. Waste Matters assesses the utopian promise and pragmatic limitations of their as yet under-examined work in light of today's pressing urban challenges.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of English Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies, Environmental Humanities and Film Studies.

1 ‘Anything could turn out to be something’

Gleaning slum history in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco

In early February 2009, the Caribbean screening of an hour-long special news report exposing the ongoing industrial monopoly of ‘The Last Masters of Martinique’ catalysed the spread of a general strike from Guadeloupe to Martinique (‘Les Derniers Maîtres’).¹ The programme highlighted the neocolonial economic control of Martinique’s white Creole minority over the island’s key industries, adding racial tensions to workers’ existing calls for pay increases and reduced water and electricity bills. For over a month, gas stations, supermarkets and basic services were shut down on both islands. Martinique’s capital, Fort-de-France, became the theatre on which the strikers’ demands were played out with thousands marching through the city to voice their protests. The gradual accumulation of garbage in the streets caused particular offence to the hoteliers, travel agents and business owners who lost income due to cancelled tourist visits. These piles of stinking trash materialised the workers’ refusal to be cast aside by an economic and social system that devalues their skills and productivity. A number of the strikers’ demands were met with the signing of a resolution in March 2009, which granted salary increases to the lowest-paid workers.² However, rates of poverty and unemployment on the island remain high.

The strike points to Martinique’s ambiguous postcolonial status. First colonised in 1635, the island has never claimed full independence from France. In 1946, Martinique was designated as a French ‘overseas province’ (département d’outremer), securing its ongoing formal connection to the French state. Although departmentalisation has arguably contributed to better standards of living in Martinique by comparison with neighbouring Caribbean islands such as Haiti, critics argue that this arrangement has furthered the island’s cultural assimilation and economic dependence.³

Patrick Chamoiseau is one of a number of prominent Martinican activist-writers to challenge the island’s neocolonial status quo, the tangible expression of which he locates in its rapid urbanisation.⁴ In Écrire en pays dominé, an account of intellectual life in his ‘dominated’ home country, Chamoiseau laments the economic and environmental transformations that have been facilitated by French loans and investments, including: ‘constructions in king-concrete, windows, electricity, traffic lights, television, car mania, triumphant low-income housing, sewage, Social Security, welfare, planes, roads and highways, schools, clothing stores, hotels, supermarkets, advertisements’ (Chamoiseau 1997a, pp. 69–70, my translation). At first glance, this catalogue of developments seems to include many beneficial enhancements to the island’s transport, residential and commercial infrastructures. However, it is in precisely this apparently innocuous functionality that Chamoiseau finds the ‘furtive domination’ of the island by France (Chamoiseau 1997a, p. 219). Determined to a large extent by European economic interests, the form and feel of Martinican urban life is closely bound to the metropole. Everyday urban mobilities, activities and interactions are shaped from afar by distant stakeholders. If, as Anthony King argues, ‘how people build affects how people think’, French sponsorship of Martinique’s bétonisation (‘cementing over’) can be seen to extend France’s colonial policy of assimilation into the present (King 1984, p. 99). Based on the coerced integration of the colonised into the French nation, the assimilation doctrine demands homogeneity at the expense of preserving cultural distinctions. As Robert Young puts it, this model of colonialism ‘saw difference, and sought to make it the same’ (Young 2001, p. 32). Martinique’s recent urbanisation indicates the island’s profound structural and cultural ties to France, which extend far beyond a formal administrative relationship between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’.

The rapid development of Martinique materialises the ongoing suppression of the island’s painful past. Although the French government has recently made public efforts to acknowledge the legacy of French colonial slavery in the Caribbean, Martinican history continues to be subordinated to metropolitan historical discourse. As Reneé Gosson points out, the industrial ‘cover-up’ of the island compounds the cultural alienation of its population by disrupting access to the landscape’s commemorative potential (Gosson 2006, p. 226). In Caribbean Discourse, Edouard Glissant emphasises the importance of this distinctive environmental archive to the creation of a unified Caribbean identity, explaining that ‘our landscape is all monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history’ (Glissant 1989, p. 11). As neocolonial industry, especially tourism, continues to estrange Martinicans from their physical surroundings, the historical record embedded in the landscape becomes even harder to retrieve.⁵

Chamoiseau’s 1992 novel Texaco redresses this historical impasse through its elaboration of a marginal urban imaginary that elicits an alternative archive of the island’s colonial past from the different forms of waste that proliferate in tandem with Martinique’s apparent development.⁶ Instead of retreating to an idealised or exaggerated rural environment, Chamoiseau consolidates Martinican identity by imagining the circumstances leading to the foundation of the eponymous slum Texaco, named after the oil company that owns the land on which the first of its shacks (or ‘hutches’) is built. In contrast to earlier social realist novels of Caribbean slum life, Texaco is a polyphonic and self-reflexive text that continually weaves together fictional and real-life events.⁷ Chamoiseau himself appears in the novel as his authorial alter ego Oiseau de Cham, who is deeply sympathetic to the plight of the Texaco slum-dwellers. He explains in his afterword that he discovered the slum in the mid-1980s while conducting research for a previous novel. The main body of the text is his transcription of the oral history of the slum as told to him by its founder Marie-Sophie Laborieux, an elderly and formidable femme-matador who has seen off many violent and bureaucratic challenges to its existence.⁸ She has already told this oral history once before to the unnamed ‘Urban Planner’ who was sent to survey Texaco before its planned demolition by the city authorities. By telling him the community’s history she successfully defends the slum from being razed to the ground. Excerpts from the Urban Planner’s notes are interspersed throughout the novel, in which he repeatedly expresses his admiration for the vitality and creativity of the slum-dwellers.

For those long stretches of Texaco’s history preceding her own birth, Marie-Sophie draws on stories that her father Esternome passed onto her before his death. Born into slavery on one of Martinique’s sugar plantations during the early nineteenth century, Esternome is freed when he saves the plantation owner from being killed by a maroon. He migrates to the city of Saint-Pierre, which is destroyed by the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902. This forces him to move to Fort-de-France where he meets Marie-Sophie’s mother, Idoménée, also a former slave. After her parents’ deaths, Marie-Sophie survives poverty, displacement and rape while performing many gruelling jobs in the city. She eventually founds Texaco in 1950 and fights against its demolition until her death forty years later. At the close of the novel, the Fort-de-France authorities formally acknowledge the slum through an organised upgrading programme that incorporates it into the city’s infrastructure.

Early commentators focused on the novel’s inventive language and experimental form, none more exuberantly than fellow Caribbean writer Derek Walcott whose ‘Letter to Chamoiseau’ in the New York Review of Books celebrated its ‘combined triumph of the Creole language and of French orthography’, before going on to compare Chamoiseau’s ‘masterpiece’ to Joyce’s Ulysses (Walcott 1997).⁹ Following its largely favourable critical reception on initial publication, Texaco was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt later that year.¹⁰ Its translation into English in 1997 opened the novel up to a wider readership, both academic and mainstream. The subject of numerous critical articles and frequently included on college literature syllabi, Texaco has entered the postcolonial literary canon. In recent years, three monographs dealing with Chamoiseau’s oeuvre have appeared, foregrounding his treatment of space, memory and form respectively.¹¹ This chapter extends all three emphases in its particular attention to Chamoiseau’s ecological narrative method, which highlights the inextricability of human and environmental histories throughout the novel.

Marginalised within the city and peripheral to the official French history in which that of the entire island is subsumed, Texaco’s struggle for inclusion in Fort-de-France bears metonymic relation to the unequal balance of discursive and economic power which binds Martinique to France. However, in his unique attempt to historicise slum existence, Chamoiseau depicts a local experience with increasing global resonance. While Fort-de-France is much smaller than many developing cities (the total population of the entire island is only just over 430,000), Chamoiseau’s portrayal of Texaco provides what critic Michael Rubenstein calls an ‘exemplary slum-urban vision’ that vividly conveys the material hardships faced by today’s ‘new urban subject’ (Rubenstein 2008, p. 35). Ashley Dawson concurs, describing the Texaco community’s displacement as ‘paradigmatic’ in an essay that highlights the direct connection between the deprivation of the slum-dwellers and the inequity of global capitalism (Dawson 2004, p. 18). With the continuing expansion of cities around the world, their residents face heightened pressures: an increasing gap between rich and poor, unstable infrastructure, precarious housing, industrial and domestic pollution, scarce employment, state and criminal violence. In his attention to the problems faced by the island’s internal diaspora – the displaced urban poor who struggle to attain not only shelter, but also a sense of belonging in contemporary Martinique – Chamoiseau depicts an increasingly common urban existence.

In order to survive, the Texaco slum-dwellers must learn to live in and from the urban waste to which they have been condemned by their historical legacy and the neocolonial economy. They do so by appropriating the rural practice of gleaning for their urban existence. Based on the inventive reuse of discarded or forgotten material, gleaning provides them with second-hand materials for shelter and sustenance. Although some critics have noted an equation between the countryside and cultural authenticity in Chamoiseau’s early works, the slum-dwellers’ urban revival of this agrarian foraging practice diminishes a misleading city–country binary which falsely holds these two spheres in opposition.

Gleaning is not only a practical everyday necessity for the impoverished Texaco residents. The intertwined nature of Martinique’s rural and urban histories is further demonstrated by the slum-dwellers’ use of gleaning techniques in order to construct a legitimating historical account of Texaco’s evolution. As founder of Texaco, Chamoiseau’s principal narrator Marie-Sophie Laborieux is committed to defending the slum. Her diligent memory-gleaning resists the discursive disposal of its marginal urban history, serving as an effective mode of territorial reclamation.

Chamoiseau does not only thematise the slum-dwellers’ gleaning, but he does so using a composite narrative form that depends on the same revaluation of scraps, leftovers and remnants that is essential to the slum-dwellers’ survival. Often identified as an authorial bricoleur, Chamoiseau can be better understood as a gleaner of diverse narrative perspectives and styles. By revaluing that which has been discarded, rejected and overlooked, his formal appropriation of the slum-dweller’s foraging techniques demonstrates an inclusive form of cultural invention and identification. However, the enduring tension between Chamoiseau’s stylistic innovation and the marginal condition that compels it prevents the amnesiac recuperation of the slum. The ironic gap between the novel’s formal excess and thematic lack serves instead as an insistent reminder of the many losses and deprivations that precede Texaco’s eventual incorporation into Fort-de-France.

Urban gleaning

In crafting his detailed narrative of the Texaco slum’s emergence, Chamoiseau spotlights a frequently overlooked counterpart to the growth of Martinique’s cities and businesses. The wasted spaces, objects and people that are produced by industrialisation trouble the notion that urban and commercial expansion indicates linear progress for the entire island. Not everyone or everything benefits equally, if at all, from such shifts. The slum-dwellers’ reliance on gleaning for food and housing dramatises the inherent inequality of Martinique’s putative development, the origins of which Marie-Sophie traces back to the exploitative plantation culture imposed by early French colonisers in the seventeenth century.

Chamoiseau evokes the environmental and ethical complacency of neocolonial industry through Marie-Sophie’s description of the site on which the slum is gradually built. Early in the novel, she points to:

A fenced space where a smell of stale oil permeated the soul. Texaco, the oil company which used to occupy that space and which had given its name to it, had left aeons ago. It had picked up its barrels, carted off its reservoirs, taken apart its tankers’ sucking pipes, and left. Its tank trucks sometimes parked there, to keep one foot on the dear property. Around that abandoned space are our hutches, our very own Texaco, a company in the business of survival.

(Chamoiseau 1997b, p. 24)

Polluted and unused, the defunct depot bears the imprint of Martinique’s unwelcome dependence on foreign sources of energy and income. This was never a site of oil extraction, but rather importation and storage – like most Caribbean islands, Martinique has no oil reserves of its own. Industrialisation heightens the demand for fuel, but the small island market is evidently not enough to sustain long-term investment from the Texaco corporation. Contaminated by the literal trace of global business, this small space holds minimal appeal for anyone other than those forced into the role of trespassers with nowhere else to build their homes.

In naming the slum after the oil company, Marie-Sophie pays ironic tribute to the uneven global economy that has contributed to both her own poverty and that of her physical surroundings. Although the departed multinational was hardly a good custodian of the environment, Marie-Sophie refuses to idealise the slum-dwellers’ relationship to the same land. As increasing numbers of residents start to build their ‘hutches’ on the abandoned oil reservoir, their immediate practical concerns override environmental sensitivity. Marie-Sophie notes that Texaco’s new residents are themselves res...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Anything could turn out to be something’
• 2 ‘Suspended city’
• 3 ‘A new heightened sense of place’
• 4 Seeing the obvious?
• 5 The stakes of waste aesthetics
• Conclusion
• Index