Linguistic and Semantic Innovation in Chamoiseau’s Writing

Abstract

The suffering of colonized peoples is always expressed through language. For a writer who has experienced the subjugation of his land, his people, and himself, it is only through his manner of expression that he has been able to convey his thoughts as well as his deepest emotions. War and occupation thus become sources of both literary and linguistic creation.

In this regard, the Antillean writer Patrick Chamoiseau creatively conveys the full extent of the suffering brought about by war—one that is also, and above all, a war of souls, an intimate pain, an abyss of inner conflicts.

Our aim is to illustrate the linguistic variety that characterizes Chamoiseau’s literary production through an analysis of Texaco, Solibo magnifique, and Écrire en pays dominé. In these works, Chamoiseau addresses the question of writing itself, and even the position of the writer—and, indeed, of the self—within a condition of territorial submission, as well as physical and psychological annihilation.

This study seeks to explore the linguistic innovations—particularly lexical ones—of Chamoiseau’s narrative style, which manifests its originality in the fusion of existing words, in processes of suffixation, and in the blending of words belonging to different grammatical categories.

Even in this case, it becomes evident that human suffering gives rise to an infinite number of linguistic combinations which, rather than destroying the subjugated people, grant them renewed strength and power through the evocation of their identity and their language—the very vehicle of that identity itself.