The author of
Texaco,
Prix Goncourt 1992, is the great defender of Creole culture and Negritude dear to his masters, Césaire and Glissant.
He of course deserves infinite respect for his righteous fights, especially for the memory of slavery.
His committed lyricism, however, leads him to divert Baudelaire from his meaning, in an invitation to the "drive" (the Creole journey) which tries to make him the poet of jazz and of the victims of slave traders.
This is undoubtedly going quickly.
Because Charles Baudelaire was in love with Jeanne Duval, a mulatto prostitute, because he traveled to Mauritius and Reunion, Chamoiseau compares him to the slaves deported from Africa by boat.
It's like saying Blaise Cendrars was a Holocaust poet because he wrote about trains.
Baudelairean intoxication is no excuse for making him say whatever one wants.
M. Chamoiseau advances quickly in his poetic meditation, at the risk of excessive simplification.
So when he says...
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