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Solibo Magnificent Essay

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The storyteller who has so long used his position to speak to the experiences of his audience utters his last words, a declaration of his own pain and suffering at the unavoidable and rapid obsolescence of his craft, and no one hears him. The writer endeavors to tell his story, to write his elegy, and finds his efforts to be utterly lacking in comparison to the alternative, now presumably dead, medium of the spoken word. Yet, the irony of it is that in attempting to make this case for the supremacy of the oral tradition of storytelling, in his novel Solibo Magnificent, Patrick Chamoiseau has created a work of literature that is at once intensely emotional, playfully satirical and almost heartbreaking in its capacity to empathize with the experience …show more content…

Though it is easy to take Solibo Magnificent solely on its word – that the death of Solibo is analogous to the death of expression and of the oral tradition, of the identity of Martinique – the book itself, through Chamoiseau’s masterful storytelling and beautiful prose, stands as a testament for the legitimacy of the written word as a suitable, if not necessarily superior, replacement for the oral tradition. The thread of mourning for the spoken word that runs throughout the entirety of the story finally culminates in the last pages of the Chamoiseau-narrated portion of the novel, as he declares once and for all that the death of Solibo is representative of more than just the death of a single man. In an interesting parallel, Chamoiseau’s final words of the novel come just …show more content…

He is crippled by the fear that he will do it wrong, “that to write down the word was nothing but betrayal, you lost the intonations, the parody, the storyteller’s gestures” (158). There are things about the very nature of “oral” tradition that just cannot be replicated in writing and will be lost once the memories of those who experienced Solibo directly are lost to time. In fact, it is his memories of Solibo to which Chamoiseau returns as he struggles with the transition: “I’d spend weeks recalling what the Master said, searching out his tone, the look in his eyes, the moments when his amused expression belied the gravity of his sentences and those times when the fear that danced in his eyes only fed the flowers of laughter” (158). Again, the frustration of knowing exactly what it is he wants to express while being entirely unable to do so comes through clearly in Chamoiseau’s words – somewhat ironically, as he has found a way to express something deeper than just the surface meaning of his words while wringing his hands over being unable to do just

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