“School Days” by Patrick Chamoiseau

Welcome to our blog! As you will see, we have provided a summary, character blurbs and a description of some themes – with several questions posed throughout. Feel free to answer one or several questions or comment on a classmate’s blog. Thanks for stopping by! J

SUMMARY

School Days is a captivating narrative based on Patrick Chamoiseau’s childhood in Fort-de-France, Martinique. It is a revelatory account of the colonial world that shaped one of the liveliest and most creative voices in French and Caribbean literature today.

School Days is a novel recalled through the eyes of “the little boy”, a young Chamoiseau, living in Martinique who yearned to reach a world outside his home, to go to the mystery place called school his brothers and sisters attended during the day. After much insistence, Mam Ninotte, his mother, the head of their household, agreed to let him go to school. His first experience with learning and education was enjoyable because he was positively reinforced as being “lovely, clever and brave” (p. 28). From this experience he felt his world had finally expanded beyond his home only to learn that this new world took him as far as pre-school. It was not until he attended primary school that he discovered how different his world would become.

The little boy’s experience in primary school was uniquely opposite to his experience in pre-school. We (the readers) meet the Teacher, a black Francophile man intent on banishing the children’s native “uncivilized” Creole and replacing it with the “universal” and therefore civilized French language and culture. Students were either labeled as pets or demeaning terms such as “shameless monkeyshines” (p. 45). The light skinned and fluffy haired pets were generally “Fresh-from-France” children who had already learned to reject the Creole culture from their parents. Regardless of their mistakes, they were praised for their efforts nonetheless. Meanwhile, the other students were punished, insulted, humiliated and beaten for lapsing from French to Creole. Any correct answer from them was begrudgingly accepted or ignored. A classmate of the little boy, Big Bellybutton, became the scapegoat target for the Teacher because he epitomized Creolity through his lack of proper pronunciation and “appalling” lifestyle. Nevertheless, Big Bellybutton, much to the awe of the Little Boy maintained his confidence and core-self through outside school activities more inclusive of his culture. To the little boy he brought hope and Creole-rooted imagination through his oral stories of magic, vampires, voodoo etc. – a stark contrast to the French images, examples and references portrayed in the classroom.

However, Big Bellybutton eventually lost his motivation to try, and resigned himself to the Teacher’s perspective, that of a barbarous uncivilized child. The little boy on a daily basis continued to internally battle with his identity in the dominant colonial French school. Paradoxically, through his own hunger and enthusiasm for words, does the little boy learn to love words and literature from listening to the unconscious love of language his Teacher brought forth during class. Without support or help from the education system, he cultivated a love for learning through his own intrinsic motivation and curiosity.

Question: Does this story matter to me and why?

CHARACTERS

Mam Ninotte

The head of the household, Mam Ninotte put up with Little Boy’s robust and super-active imagination, and remained a silent comfort to him, where he was able to “open up like an umbrella […] at home” (p. 132). She “seemed to confer supreme authority upon the school […and…] tended to the scholarly requirements of her children with such loving care that you’d have thought it was her sole purpose in life” (p. 74). She even tried to bestow upon him the potency of “slimy brain salad” (p. 133) to “boost the powers” of his intelligence (p. 132).

The Father

The father had a small yet a significant role, as he represented the silenced opposition (by virtue of the small role) to colonialism. He recognized the detriment of being ‘civilized’ and the propaganda infused in Eurocentric teaching. He was always reserved about colonial ‘education’, claiming that “you went in a sheep only to come out a goat” (p. 30).

Siblings

He had four siblings: Baroness, the eldest sister; Marielle, his second sister, Jojo the Math Whiz, the eldest brother and Paul the Musician. Baroness gave up her childhood to take on a providing yet firm role in their education while Jojo the Math Whiz was honest about the realities of the Little Boy’s experience with education.

Mam Saliniere

Mam Saliniere, a motherly, gentle, and patient Creole-speaking pre-school teacher represented the possibility of inclusive education. She opened up Little Boy’s eyes to a new world, stimulated his mind, and created an environment where his “enthusiasm was boundless, fearless, unquestioning” while offering congratulatory “Braaaaavo’s” as priceless rewards (p. 27). He loved her very much as she made school fun.

The Teacher

A black Martinician teacher assimilated into the French language, educational system, and culture, was on a severe mission to obliterate his students’ supposed worthless and ignorant Creole identity manifested in their speech. As a Francophile, he gave lectures on Alexander, Napoleon, and European fairy-tales, painting foreign pictures of snow and apples, as he rrrrrolled his R’s. He claimed the superiority of Western civilization declaring it as the Universal Order. He “bestowed his commendations, ridiculed mistakes, passed judgment” and used education to discipline (p. 119). His strictness and austerity can be interpreted as a defense mechanism to his insecurities – he was, afterall, Creole himself. The angrier he got at his students’ Creolity, the more his own Creole betrayed him. “In his frustration, the Teacher himself might relapse into Creole …but he’d catch himself in a flash…and his flickering language would grow even more painstaking, guarded, distrustful of itself…in his desperate desire to be articulate, he embellished his speech by…multiplying his rs…” (p. 64). He seemed to hate “Creole more than ever, seeing in it the root of these evils, the ball and chain that would keep children prisoners of ignorance” (p. 64). But he “loved to teach” (p. 134) literature, which was “communicated to [them] quite unconsciously” (p. 115) as he “himself would quickly become carried away; forgetting the world around him, he would embrace his text with an enthusiasm tempered by vigilance […] because he abandoned himself to an author” (p. 114). This “loving regard” (p. 128) was passed on to the Little Boy, who was forever grateful to him for such a gift.

Big Bellybutton

Big Bellybutton became the Teacher’s scapegoat as he typified Creolity through crude pronunciation and lifestyle, despite his aptitude for math, which didn’t “jibe with all the rest, with his hayseed air, his blackblackblack skin, his kinky wool, his flat nose, his Creole accent, his complete ignorance of French vocabulary, his chronic tardiness, his sweats…It simply didn’t make sense” (p. 78). Although at first, “Big Bellybutton hadn’t lost his ability to smile [depicting] how secure he was in the core of his being” (p. 77), his strength was eventually defeated by the infused self-shame of his Creole identity inflicted by his fanatic Teacher. He was smart, but school made him dumb! Nevertheless, to the Little Boy, he was the preserver of the underground spoken language, and the keeper of the Creole legend, “a repository of memories” (p. 129).

Monsieur le Directeur

Monsieur le Directeur “more or less anesthetized all life” (p. 44), representing the all-knowing “Universal order” as he laid down the law which everyone had to abide by– including the teachers.

Substitute

Teaching the students for only over a week, “what he taught [them] shook [their] world” (p. 129). The Substitute was rebellious as he valued the Creole culture, discussing the ideals of Negritude, describing images the children could relate to such as changing apple/pears to dates, changing Gaul to African, and White to Black. “Without using Creole himself, he tolerated ours to help us understand French” (p. 129). Like Mam Saliniere, he too, represented the possibility of inclusivity of education. Yet although he “belonged to the opposition” (p. 130), “he never tackled either the Universal or its world order” (p. 129). Additionally, his impact was not persuasive as the Teacher’s discipline succeeded in silencing the children through his repeated message of shame and failure. “The permission to speak Creole suddenly made us feel ashamed, like a confirmation of our hopeless failure, a willingness to be kicked aside into the gutter” (p. 128). Even though the substitute tried to include a different teaching style and he “belonged to the opposition”, the children still felt that he “conformed [them] in the same way” (p. 130).

Question: What feelings were evoked as you read this story?

Theme 1: Culture and Eurocentric Colonization

With the objective of cultural hegemony, the Eurocentric mentality claimed to hold the absolute truth – according to them, they were the instigators of civilization, “the founders of History” (p. 121), the light to the existing darkness: “when the colonists arrived, there was light. Civilization.

History.” (p. 121). “Christopher Columbus discovered America…who had been waiting just for him” (p. 122).

Displaying ethnocentrism, the French deemed themselves as the only ones with culture, thus set out to acculturate the population of Martinique, who supposedly lacked it. Colonialization was hence justified in the name of education, a gift or “golden opportunity, hard-won, not to be wasted” on those “fettered by ignorance and stupidity” (p. 49). The superior race felt they had a right and duty of civilizing the primitive race. They filled “our heads with a world so far from our own…its hierarchies of colors that assigned the shades of our skin to ugliness, and danger, and evil…” (p. 118). This created a dichotomy between good and evil, black and white, Creole and French.

Question: How can two different cultures co-exist without being right or wrong?

Theme 2: The Power of Language

Language can be a tool that can inspire, educate and motivate or it can be used as a form of symbolic domination, or in other words, as a form of social capital. The way one speaks can shape social power and status; it can imply you are “civilized” or not. Simply by virtue of the school children’s linguistic ability, they were either a pet: “a Fresh-From-France kid would proudly rise and rattle off the proper accent” (p. 62) or an imbecile, “this ponigger talk gums up your minds with it worthless pap” (p. 61). This labeling defined who they were and shaped their identity regardless of behaviour.

This novel also demonstrated that meaning and power did not have to come from the written word. Oral or verbal speech is central in Creole culture. For example, “Everything that childhood holds of joy, happiness, true exaltation, radiant pleasure, delight, euphoria, serenity, milky ecstasy, blessed peace, beatific innocence was, at one time or another, pounded to powder by the hatchet of a bawouf” (p. 102). “The word bawouf was a fundamental part of an unwritten law” (p. 104). The children reverted back to their roots through language, as it has meaning and they identified with their language. “A special jargon flourished there, with its own codes, vices, and ceremonial expressions…[…]...This pecking order did not reflect hierarchy of scholastic excellence established by the Teachers” (p. 98).

Question: What is more credible, oral or written language? To whom?

Theme 3: Shame

Colonization occurs through individual and community marginalization. This process is demeaning, humiliating, produces shame and requires conformity. Through constant reiterations of the inferiority of the Creole culture, the children and the Little Boy grew embarrassed of their identity: “his little inner voice grew ashamed” (p. 65). The Teacher would shout, “you should be proud to have a name, you thoughtless boy, you should shout it out loud, because not too long ago, let me tell you, we were slaves and had no names at all. Pronounce it clearly!” (p. 36).

The school setting was used to discipline one’s citizens. School became the place where one “shed bad manners: rowdy manners, nigger manners, Creole manners – all the same thing” (p. 120). The children were simply “shameless monkeyshines” (p. 45) who had to learn to “speak properly and behave in a civilized manner” (p. 45), which meant one had to speak French, and only French as it was “the language of wisdom, wit and intelligence” (p. 64) and Creole was “the root of […] evils, the ball and chain that would keep the children prisoners of ignorance” (p. 64). Through this indoctrination and imposition of the Eurocentric view, many children would end up like Big Bellybutton – defeated, disgraced, ostracized, unable to “wipe out the failure of this childhood, these school days…” (p. 138) and silenced into shame.

Question: How can you help a student/person who has been defeated because a person in a position of power has shamed them?

Question: How much is learning, how much is discipline? Do you think the Eurocentric point of view would be as ingrained without the discipline and punishment? How is discipline used in schools today, and is it required? Is it effective?

Theme 4: Silence

Any opposition was silenced. Opportunity to refute was not given. Big Bellybutton’s competency with math and numbers was ignored, because it was not congruent with the Teacher’s ethnocentric view of him. “The Teacher decided not to call on him and, under the pretext of letting others have their turn, imposed on Big Bellybutton a silence that drove the child to a frenetic display of mute wriggling” (p. 78).

The Little Boy could not express himself in French because he hadn’t mastered the language, yet he could not speak in Creole either. “In an effort to spark discussion, the Teacher sometimes showed them pictures, any of which the little boy could have turned into a thousand words, but the Teacher had reduced him to a silence that only deepened each time he heard the now constant lament: “Oh, this Crreole brrood has nothing to say!” (p. 65). If the children spoke, their Creole identity would be exposed. “Speech became a heroic feat” (p. 63). “Opening your mouth had become a risky business” (p. 62). The Little Boy was hence, silenced.

Theme 5: Multiple Identities Exist in All of Us

At first, the Little Boy didn’t identify with anything but his family. In pre-school “he found himself carried away by an unfamiliar pleasure: the company of other little black children like himself (actually, they were multicoloured…but he didn’t notice), of the same size, height, and language, quick to understand him” (p. 26). But then in primary school, the Teacher crudely pointed out his Creole identity by contrasting it against something different, something ‘better’, namely the French identity. The Little Boy struggled to maintain his identity in an environment that ostracized everything he wasn’t. They children even “had policed one another. One dared not make a mistake in French. It was all or nothing. Better then to speak Creole than to falter in French and die of ridicule” (p. 65).

School Days is a double tribute to both worlds seen through the Teacher and Big Bellybutton. The Little Boy was able to acknowledge more than the fearsome and degrading side of the teacher as the Teacher simultaneously offered him the gift of words. Through Big Bellybutton, Chamoiseau paid homage to the spirit and imagination of Creolity while still valuing the literary French classics. “To the Little Boy, the Teacher’s books were like fountains of life, while the word of Big Bellybutton seemed often to take on… the aura of legend. …To you, dear Teacher, I owe my loving regard for books…. I’m grateful to you, Bellybutton, for your underground language” (p. 128).

Question: Does the development of identity require a ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ categorization?