ABSTRACT
Solibo is dead. From the beginning, the title character is dead, “throat snickt by the word,” literally killed by the words he seeks to speak (Chamoiseau 8). During the opening of one of his tales, Solibo the storyteller shouted “Patat’sa!” and keeled over dead; the audience, believing his shout and immobility to be part of the story, responded “Patat’si!” and waited patiently for the rest of his tale, silently sitting for “eons (exactly three hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-two seconds, says the coroner)” (16). But Patrick Chamoiseau (as both author and metafictional narrator) locates these events in the novel’s diegetic past, and though his characters tell many stories of Solibo, the novel never offers any present tense narrative about him; his life and tale-telling are always already in the past. As an oral storyteller, Solibo appears to signal a kind of death of orality through his own demise. This event, however, spawns further storytelling, a struggle between the police’s written reports and the tales told by Solibo’s audience members. Thus, Solibo’s seeming death sentence for oral culture receives an extension (parole) through the untamed storytelling inspired by Solibo’s creative embrace of the word (parole).
