Postcolonial Writers and Multiple Audiences: Hybridization, Linguistic Bivalency and (Resistant) Translations in Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique

Postcolonial writers are often torn between a desire to write for a local audience, foregrounding their regional identity, and the temptation to seize on the visibility afforded by Western literary markets. This tension is illustrated by the work of Patrick Chamoiseau, who pursued the image of Martinican anticolonial writer, imbued with Creole language and culture, while publishing his work in mainland France. How could Chamoiseau keep up this contradictory position? This article shows how his novel Solibo Magnifique (1988) rejects and, at the same time, welcomes the non-Martinican reader through a series of (meta)linguistic strategies that sharpen and blur the boundaries between French and Creole. Intratextual translations and calques serve a range of seemingly contradictory goals. (Mock) translations bridge the gap between the French and the Creole worlds of the novel, as well as its multiple readerships, while simultaneously reaffirming their irreducible differences. Likewise, the use of calques, through which Creole words are recast in a French orthographic mould, blurs the boundaries between French and Creole, providing the non-Creolophone reader with a hybrid language that is at the same time familiar and unfamiliar, overall accessible but nonetheless opaque.