Texaco

Texaco is a 1992 novel by French author Patrick Chamoiseau. Set in a shantytown on the outskirts of Fort-de-France (also the capital of the author’s home, Martinique), it is told by Marie-Sophie Laborieux, the daughter of a liberated slave. Marie-Sophie recounts her family’s history, starting with the 1820s and extending into the late 1900s. To construct such a long timeline, Marie-Sophie relies heavily on her father’s interpretation of the past and of the stories he heard from his ancestors. The novel is a fictionalized account of a woman Chamoiseau claims to have met while researching French history. Among its numerous awards, the novel won the Prix Goncourt, one of the highest honors in French literature, in the year of its publication.

The novel begins in Marie-Sophie’s present day, over a century after France’s abolition of slavery in 1848 and her earliest records of her family in 1920. Marie-Sophie frames her story as a myth similar to the Biblical coming of Christ. The first section, “The Annunciation,” describes the appearance of a city employee, the Urban Planner, who subscribes to the modernist urban theory that contributed to urban sprawl beginning shortly after the Great Depression. Marie-Sophie calls out the Urban Planner for thinking of the residents of the same slum he was supposed to improve as no more than vermin. The slum is known as Texaco, in reference to the many oil tanks in its vicinity.

In the middle section of the story, Marie-Sophie looks back at the American origins of her family line. Her father was a slave who was born to parents who were slaves. After many years working for white slave owners, he became free in 1848. Marie-Sophie’s father and mother both died when she was young, leaving her orphaned. As her father lay dying, he taught his daughter, who was too young to enroll in school but old enough to learn, about storytelling. When he passed, Marie-Sophie was forced to survive by herself in central Fort-de-France, which she knows as “the In-City.” Though she was terribly lost at first, she survived through the help of others. She took up several jobs as a child; one of her employers, a bibliophile, taught her about French literature. Literature became Marie-Sophie’s first inspiration.



As a young woman, Marie-Sophie had several unfortunate relationships with men. She became pregnant several times, ending the pregnancies through self-performed abortions. When she met her first love, Félicité Nelta, an ambitious and creative man, her faith in relationships was restored. However, Félicité left her in the dust once he suspected that she was sterile. Marie-Sophie suggests that she had accidentally damaged her reproductive system through her self-performed abortions.

Now lonely again, Marie-Sophie set her sights on building a house. She took advice from an elderly man, Papa Totone, whom she claims was really the corporeal form of a wise spirit called a “Mentoh.” She built the home on a plot of land owned by Texaco. Eventually, so many people built similar properties that a new neighborhood was formed; most of its residents were poor people who migrated out of the city. Even as the Texaco oil company and the government collaborated to squelch the burgeoning town on the outskirts of the city, the Texaco community thrived and expanded. This was due in no small part to Marie-Sophie, who became an expert advocate for Texaco and fought against the efforts of the Urban Planner to minimize its cultural value and destroy it.

The novel ends with a section called “The Resurrection,” referencing Jesus’s ascension to heaven in the bible. Here, Chamoiseau relates his memories of when he first met Marie-Sophie as a young writer. He explains that had Marie-Sophie not recorded the invaluable stories of herself and her family, they would have been lost forever. Though Marie-Sophie died shortly before Chamoiseau set to work recording her story in the form of Texaco, the author suggests that her life extends into her writings and her work for the good of her community.