“A Prophetic Vision of the Past”: The Nature of War in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des Derniers Gestes (2002)

In Patrick Chamoiseau’s Biblique des Derniers Gestes, the protagonist Balthazar Bodule-Jules is “born in all eras, in all places, and in all oppressed circumstances” (Chamoiseau 2002, 27) and revisits multiple wars of colonial history by getting involved in armed conflicts in all four corners of the globe (including Indochina, South America, Grenada, Cuba, and Algeria). At the same time, references to nature and the environment (forest, trees, birds) ironically abound in the novel. These references do not, however, function as mere representatives of nonhuman, precolonial, resistant, or categorical forms of otherness. Instead, they operate as mediators between the human and nonhuman, nature and culture, and past and present. Birds, in particular, are represented in the novel as both biological and cultural instantiations of an infinitely creolized reality. Patrick Chamoiseau (whose last name itself points to the significance of bird symbolism in his novels) therefore reveals himself as the heir of a Glissantian metaphysics insofar as his ecopoetical geographies embrace processes of unceasing cultural transformation that do not merely overlap with or reproduce forms of natural hybridity in predictable ways. Instead, they question our critical and metaphysical tendency to look for stackable and predictable grids when it comes to the interactions between the natural and cultural worlds; they demonstrate the incommensurability of cultural and environmental hybridity in favor of a creolized model that is neither oppositional nor complicit. This chapter discusses Chamoiseau’s representations of the intersections and tensions between war and nature in both Biblique des Derniers Gestes in relation to Èdouard Glissant’s theory of opacity and creolization as well as in relation to representations of war and nature in other postcolonial texts.