Introduction
Marie-Sophie Laborieux is a fictional character in the novel Texaco, written by Patrick Chamoiseau. She was born in the early 1900’s and passed away in 1989. Marie-Sophie Laborieux narrates the novel as an adult by retelling her family’s history along with sharing her own life experiences. For her familial history, she relies solely on stories her father, Esternome Laborieux, had told her when she was much younger. Many of her outlooks on life come from her father’s stories of being a freed enslaved person. Her own stories revolve mainly on the work she did to create and found the community of Texaco. The novel also includes excerpts from Marie-Sophie’s notebook, where she kept records of stories her father had told her, in addition to other thoughts and experiences of her own. These notebook entries help guide the reader through Marie-Sophie’s story of living in post-abolition Martinique, while also giving an insight into her independent and ambitious personality.
Marie-Sophie’s Narration
Although these stories do come straight from Marie-Sophie, there have been many opportunities for the story itself to become warped, causing the accuracy of her narration to come into question. She was the only one who knew the stories her father told her, and she did not write them down until an older age. The reader knows this because Esternome’s death year is estimated to be 1930, while Marie-Sophie’s journal entries are dated to be written in 1965. In one of the notebook excerpts, Marie-Sophie writes something she remembers her father telling her: “In what I tell you, there’s the almost-true, the sometimes-true, and the half-true. That’s what telling a life is like, braiding all of that like one plaits the white Indies currant’s hair to make a hut. And the true-true comes out of that braid” (Chamoiseau 122). Because the stories have been told from her Memory so many times, they have more than likely changed slightly over the years. However, somewhere inside of her stories is the truth about what happened, it is just a matter of finding it.
Marie-Sophie knows about her memory’s unreliability, and even mentions it in the opening section of the novel when she says, “And if it didn’t happen like that, that doesn’t matter…” (Chamoiseau 27). Even if the story she is telling is not entirely historically correct, it does not truly matter because she is the only one with the ability to tell it. There is no one to contest or support what she is saying. Right from the beginning, this causes the reader to question the reliability of Marie-Sophie’s narration. She is not trying to mislead her audience; she is simply telling what she believes to be the truth. Véronique Maisier explains the complexity of the narration by saying, “Chamoiseau…is getting several of these stories second-hand, sometimes third-hand, creating…interloping time frames. If the “I” of the narration corresponds mostly to Marie-Sophie looking back at her life, it is also used by Esternome and by the urban developer in his notes to Chamoiseau” (Maisier 135). Although Marie-Sophie is the main narrator, there are also times that the “I” being used in the story is referring to Esternome, or an urban developer threatening to destroy Texaco, or even the author, Chamoiseau, in which he refers to himself as “Oiseau de Cham” This exponentially increases the intricacy of Marie-Sophie’s narration of the novel. The retelling of these stories and the switching of who “I” refers to throughout the story increases the difficulty of thoroughly understanding this novel. This alludes to how the art of storytelling can lead to much confusion.
The Art of Storytelling
It is evident that Marie-Sophie enjoys storytelling, but the reader learns throughout the novel just how strong her drive to tell her own story is. The effort she went through just to be able to tell her story is admirable, but it did not come without complication, which is evident from the perplexity of the novel. The purpose of the complexity of the novel is to convey to the reader how storytelling may have affected what people in that time knew about their country’s history, familial history, or anything that they did not personally experience. Just how storytelling can confuse the reader, it also caused much confusion to the people in the novel. Although storytelling can cause uncertainty, it can also create very strong communities and connections between groups of people. From reading this novel, it is evident that the truth of a community does not lie in official written documents, but is rather a shared knowledge and understanding between the people themselves.
Impact of Marie-Sophie’s Life
Through Esternome’s stories, the reader learns what slavery was like in Martinique in the early 1800’s, and also once it was abolished in 1848. Through Esternome and Marie-Sophie’s lives, the reader sees how people created a living for themselves upon being freed from slavery or upon being born into an unfortunate situation. In the end, the community of freed enslaved people come together to create the small town of Texaco, a suburb of Fort-de-France, which Marie-Sophie worked to found. She seems to be the glue holding the town of Texaco together. The scholarly journal “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City” states, “The fragmented geography of urban space described in Chamoiseau’s novel ensures that the freedom of the city [Texaco] will be alloyed with suffering, its cosmopolitanism shot through with inequality and unrest” (Dawson 16). At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns that Marie-Sophie feels responsible for keeping Texaco safe from a seemingly impending doom; the town is at risk of being destroyed by urban development. From what the reader knows about who Marie-Sophie is as a person, one can assume that she would fight with her life in order to keep her community safe. Marie-Sophie’s storytelling enlightens the reader on the way of life in Martinique at that time, what it meant to be enslaved or freed, and how a community grew together to become one city, a “we,” that they can now call home.
Marie-Sophie Writing
Marie Sophie is a narrator in the story Texaco and the reason we know that is because of the stories she wrote about her father Esternome and the history of Texaco. You can see excerpts of her writing in the book. It is mostly about her childhood memories of her father and what happened to Texaco. Marie Sophie didn’t start writing about her memories of her until 30 years after because she was worrying about how she would forget her father, so she decided to write to keep her memories of her father alive. This quote from the book explains how Marie-Sophie feels about her writing: “my Esternome only understood in his old age the meaning of these frivolities. With necklaces and jewels, ribbons and hats, they were erecting in their soul the little chapels which would at the right time stir up the fervour of their short-lived rebellions” (Chamoiseau 81). This quote was a loving memory that Marie Sophie has of her father that he will never forget that he was an enslaved person and how he was going to move forward. According to Maisier, “the notion of events accumulating haphazardly is emphasized by the fact that Esternome and Marie-Sophie cannot tell their stories chronologically, thus adding to the lack of direction in their lives. Chamoiseau, at the end of Texaco, explains how he had to ‘re-order’ the story from thousands of pages so that it would make more sense, literally and figuratively speaking” (132). This article talks about Marie Sophie’s writing; it is important to Texaco because she is the only one who has the memories of the history as well as life experiences, the good and the bad.
Works Cited
Chamoiseau, Patrick. Texaco. Trans. Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Dawson, Ashley. “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City.” Social Text, 2004, pp. 17-34.
Maisier, Véronique. “Patrick Chamoiseau’s Novel Texaco and the Picaresque Genre.” Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 57, 2001, pp 128-136.
Editorial Collective
Lena Juenger, Anayah Lyons, Rebecca Loftus, Brooke Simpson, LaRae Bigard, Bailie Rabideau, Allison Rieser
