Agency-achieving Shifts and Patterning form off Content: The Chameleon in Chamoiseau's Texaco

Abstract

The chameleon is a trope many authors have found fascinating in articulating the contradictory and hybrid space of Caribbean identity and reality. Not only do characters teeter between an identity that draws from Africa and Europe and Asia, authors, themselves product of the same space, reflect this chameleon-like reality in the narrative strategies they employ in their novels. Patrick Chamoiseau, for example, in his magnum opus, Texaco, achieves agency by shifting between opposing emblems, representative of African and European ancestry. In reality, the author also conveniently mimics whichever ancestry he chooses, much as a chameleon in fable adjusts to the particular colour of its environment. This mimicking the author carries to the level of how he orders his novel, patterning form off content and  using the disorderly structure of the novel (Texaco) to mimic the town's (Texaco's) structure and infrastructure. And yet the disorder proves to be a camouflage for ordering the novel much as, within the disorderly nature of the town, order can be found.