Abstract
In a recent lecture I attended, Patrick Chamoiseau spoke of the origins of his—Martinican, Caribbean, Creole—literature. He located these origins in the Antillean conteur or storyteller, the nineteenth-century slave or ex-slave who addressed an assembly of his peers to narrate, with improvisation and enhancement, the tales already heard and recounted many times over. It is not uncommon to attribute the origin of literature to oral sources. But Chamoiseau added a counter-intuitive twist to this common association: he claimed that this oral tradition has as one of its major sources a written text: the Bible. The tales told by the slaves or ex-slaves often hearkened back to the stories from the Hebrew Bible about the Garden of Eden, Moses and the exodus as well as New Testament stories. So, according to this genealogy, if we go back in time far enough, contrary to intuitive belief, the origins of storytelling are perhaps written rather than the other way around.
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Miller, P.B. (2016). Boukman in Books: Tracing a Legendary Genealogy. In: Vété-Congolo, H. (eds) The Caribbean Oral Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32088-5_6
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