School Days: Language

        By forcing the children to speak a language that was incongruent to their surroundings, the colonial school in School Days by Patrick Chamoiseau broke the children’s cultural ties to their homeland and taught the correlation between French and a higher-class society.  The only opportunity for education for Martiniquais was in a French colonial school that taught students to learn and accept French culture over their own.  Creole and Creolisms were banned from the classrooms, and the use resulted in harsh and violent punishment (Chamoiseau 65). Students mocked and bullied each other over their language, reinforcing the ideas pushed on them in the classroom. These actions taught the children that their native language and native mannerisms were below that of the French, and that if they could not speak in French, then their words were worthless. Fear and embarrassment caused many of the students to retreat into silence; “His inner voice grew ashamed; his chattiness deteriorated into an illicit activity” (Chamoiseau 65). The students began to relate Creole with vulgarity and delinquency (Chamoiseau 66). Fanon summarizes this effect, stating, “ Every colonized people…in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation” (18). Language is a tremendous part of culture and the degradation of it leads to the loss of cultural identity. When taught that French is superior to Creole for so long, the Martiniquais students came to believe it and to surrender their identities to this belief.  The effect of colonizing the mind is so much stronger and lasts longer than colonizing a nation.  For many nations, even several decades after independence is declared from Empire, the process decolonizing the mind is still ongoing.

Richard Dowden, a British Journalist specializing in African issues, briefly discusses colonizing of the mind and the effects it has had on Africa's history. 

Professor Errington of Yale University speaks about the possibility of losing smaller, less spoken languages in place of more dominant ones. He says that many kids recognize that they must know the dominant language in order to get the jobs they want and to succeed in life. In School Days, the narrator discovers the same principle and decides to learn French, not to please his teacher, but so that he can do what he desires with his life. Errington expresses a fear that soon many small languages will die out and be lost forever.

Discussion Questions:

1.  Chamoiseau is an unreliable narrator and adds doubt to his story through uses of the word “probably” (29) and rhetorical questions (39). Does this add a realistic effect to his memoir or does it draw away from the overarching effect of a novel?
2. Chamoiseau often refers to the Repondeurs throughout the novel. What is the purpose of these voices?

Fact: Martinique, the country in which Chamoiseau grew up, is still not an independent nation. Instead it is ruled as an overseas department or a region of France.

Works Cited            
Cornevin, Robert. Martinque.  Encyclopedia Britannica, 10 May 2013. Web. 10 February 2014.

Recommended Literature
Black Skin, White Mask, "The Negro and Language" by Frantz Fanon