Chameleon : authorial subversion and character survival in Mayra Montero's Del Rojo De Su Sombra, Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco and Raphaël Confiant's Mamzelle Libellule
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2022-11-22T16:19:22Z
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Abstract
This treatise probes doubling, camouflage, and ambivalence in Patrick
Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and Mayra Montero’s respective diegetic texts:
Texaco, Mamzelle Libellule, and Del rojo de su sombra. Chief Caribbean animal
metaphors, Anansi and Rabbit, fail to adequately capture these three fundamental
attributes in authors wrestling with colonisation’s aftermath. These writers
skilfully praise and undermine, while living off, the coloniser. In proverbial
language, they daringly “stay pon/ on Cow back and cuss/ curse Cow.” The
carrot-and-stick approach to Cow evokes the colour-shifting chameleon—a
fabulous, camouflaging, enemy-rerouting African trickster lizard—chosen as
dissertational cynosure for succeeding where Anansi and Rabbit fail.
Metaphorically, chameleon’s camouflage constitutes any signification-occulting
rhetoric by authors. On the character level, those who mimic and outwit
oppressors to survive resemble chameleon. In a nutshell, then, chameleon’s colour
alternation, for figuratively and ably capturing authorial ambivalence towards
oppressor and oppressed, renders the lizard suitable as rhetoric for subversion and
character survival around the thematics of Caribbean language, race, and
sexuality.
Postnegritude legend, Édouard Glissant, proposes ‘the detour,’ which grounds
chameleon’s rerouting camouflage. To contextualise obscure meaning, another
Glissantian term, opacité or density in expression, suffices. In light of Caribbean
hegemonic power relations, Postcolonialism intersects Postnegritude.
Accordingly, mimicry from Homi Bhabha, Postcolonial intellectual, importantly
anchors chameleonic simulation.