Comme une odeur de fruits un peu suris : écocide mortifère et espace écologique en changement dans le Fort-de-France de Chronique des sept misères (1986) de Patrick Chamoiseau

Abstract

The writer and theorist of Créolité, Patrick Chamoiseau, is widely recognized for works that are grounded in the landscapes of Martinique, and for developing a literary approach that reshaped how the island had long been imagined and represented within the Francophone canon. Several recurring motifs in his writing lend themselves to a study of the relationships among bodies, the natural world, and the ongoing ecological crisis. Tracing the fragrant trail of Chronique des Sept Misères (1986), I will argue that the novel’s olfactory evocations are far more than baroque embellishments in this context. Rather, I will show how Chamoiseau draws on Martinique’s olfactory culture as a way of grappling with the complexity of social relations at work on the Island (Perras and Wicky, 2017), while at the same time contributing to the emergence of a renewed poetics of Créolité. I will ultimately contend that a sustained attention to the olfactory ecology of literary texts could benefit ecocritical inquiry more broadly, and open up new ways of thinking about the sociology and history of our ecological environments through and alongside literature.