School Days by Patrique Chamoiseau

School Days (cont.)

Creole Cultural Logic

• concrete logic of Creole and cultural capital/knowledge–re: questions about testing
• they test cultural competence
• e.g., teacher tries to teach ethics via lesson about stealing apples
•  to rural children in Martinique about apples when trying to teach ethics?
• Why not choose an object familiar to them?
• Papa says–who could steal apples from a tree?  They're imported!
• Gwo Lonbrik: apple stealing is not comparable to another form of stealing
• and what about stealing mangoes?  Is it considered stealing?  Why or why not?
• This veneration of all things French and correlated disaparagement of anything Creole is counteracted by the substitute teacher (who temporarily replaces the teacher when he falls victim to Big Bellybutton’s wangas)
• The man re-wrote texts, inserting local flora and fauna for those of distant lands and climates to which the children couldn’t relate
• He was subversive; he venerated African and Creole culture
• He “spoke a subversive variety of French” which he called revolutionized
• He even gave the children permission to speak in Creole
• But they could not!  The teacher’s discipline had been successful.  They had internalized the message that Creole was base, vulgar, inferior.  They were tongue-tied and ashamed.  P. 130   
• They 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)

Pervasiveness of Creole

• Children did not only speak from a Creole base, they thought from it, too
• Their images and meanings were taken from Creole, highly descriptive, sonorous, word play, repetition p. 66
• So, the teacher had a double and impossible mandate which he vainly tried determinedly to fulfill
• he constantly polices both the form (i.e style, linguistic code, etc.) and the content of their language.
• He decries and derides their concrete, image-laden language in favor of more abstract constructions, as if abstraction were somehow superior and also value-neutral,
• • e.g.p. 127 “We don’t say, “He was stuck in a tar patch,” We say, He was in a difficult situation.
• also the role of the body in Creole utterances differs from French
• a corporal connection and grounding as opposed to a mental or psychic one
• • e.g., use of tèt, fè tèt,
• P. 113: “We don’t say, “I’m talking for my body,” (m pale pou kò mwen)
• • We say, “I’m talking to myself”
• P.  56: responding to example about stealing apples and being asked to apply it generally, Big Bellybutton cannot.  He cannot apply apples to mangoes.  Read p. 60.
• More examples on p. 66 “everything ugly was old...” 

Notion of time:

• Children arrive with a concrete, event and task-oriented notion of time
• teacher squelches it with abstract, linear concept in order to teach discipline
• c.f., EPThompson: transformation to wage labor, teaching them how to act, be like workers demanded change in concept of time
• “Order! Discipoline! Respect!” (P. 41)
• sad that children acquiesce to it, and start counting time, spending it not passing it
• waiting for the bell to ring
• See Foucault, Discipline and Punish
• People have to be taught to “know their place”
• Using education to teach discipline (turns children off to education)

Children's Clothing

• sigh of the abject poverty despite their parents’ “employment”
• rags–a punishment is having to wear them again without mending or changing clothes, even if cheecks of buttocks are exposed
• Gwo Lonbrik showed up one day in a burlap sack with holes cut out for head and arms
• GL's father arrives at the school
• gives peasant food as presents to teacher and M le D then beats his son mercilessly
• see comical description on p. 84
  

• she gives him sheep’s brains once a week to make him smarter (so the teacher will acknowledge him) and his sibling tells him that it will just make him bleat like a sheep.  He checks himself to see if his hair or skin are changing.  Meanwhile, he believes he is smarter on the day after the meal.  But the teacher doesn’t notice any difference....
• She also uses the weekly dose of cod liver oil
• Purpose is to clean out the insides along with the outside via in soap bath of the skin and hair

Big Bellybutton’s magic

1. cast a spell on teacher in Creole
2. language as a weapon
3. metaphor of maré, tying up p. 124-125
4. in forbidden Creole he mentioned the spirits, beings, things that had bad, magical powers p. 127
5. includes Makandal–a Haitian slave and sorcerer (poisoner) who was captured and burned at the stake by the colonizers
6. Suggests impt cross-currents, migration not just of people but of revolutionary ideas  between populations of the Caribbean

Education as discipline

1. How much is learning, how much is discipline?
2. How does it squelch curiosity, ambition, communal ethic
3. What does it teach?
4. Individualism, competition, perseverance,
5. What happened to the little boy and to Big Bellybutton?
6. Role of experience in the family, too. 
7. He starts hiding his fears, humiliation and pain at school from his mother
8. “it meat surviving, I say, and dying at t he same time”
9. Yet his reverence for learning nurtured at home.
10. Mother stored books in their two room apartment as thought they were treasures.
11. He pays homage to both the teacher and Big Bellybutton, to the Francophile mimic and the Creole magician, to the lover of books and writing and the lover of numbers and wit p. 128