Ritual and Contemporaneity Dismantling the Master’s House through Narrative Time Travel

Abstract

Inspired by Edouard Glissant’s “Fugitive Forms,” this essay takes up the style, rhythm, and ritual of Slave Old Man to explore its complex critique and transgressive analysis of Coloniality and African Diasporic Literature. I pursue a practice of “creolization” within the essay format, mirroring the structure of the novel while using its wordplay and poetics to complement the source text’s intention of being a mode of oral storytelling. By writing “with” my sources, I challenge the standard academic assemblage of meaning through argumentation toward synthesis against others who are discussing a similar subject, as I believe it is based in Hegelian dialectics, which are inherently Eurocentric and which this book is explicitly working to disassemble. By looking at the ritualistic style and performance in the structure of each chapter, in the seven narrative arcs, and the entanglement created by how the end of the book distorts linear time to make generative disruptions against the linear colonial project of brutal ordering throughout the text, I strive to sit with the unsettling power bursting throughout Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man.