ABSTRACT
The poet's literary models are seemingly Lautreamont and Rimbaud, who had likewise forced the French language into describing previously uncharted territories of the psyche. The stunning verbal dexterity that Cesaire displays in the Cahier and in his later poems, which yoke together heterogeneous nouns and qualifiers into striking images, stems from the necessity of forging a language capable of rendering the complex, metisse minds and souls of the Caribbean people. Cesaire's is a poetry in which inner and outer worlds blend in unusual ways, mirroring patterns of feeling, thinking, and perceiving. Patrick Chamoiseau is the best known of the new generation of Francophone writers from the Caribbean. An engaging and warm-hearted introduction to Chamoiseau's world is the more intimiste autobiographical novel, Chemin-d'ecole—or School Days as it is called in its English translation by Linda Coverdale.
