Le Mentô et son entour. Notes sur l’espace identitaire dans Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau
Le Mentô et son entour. Remarks on Space as the Source of Identity in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco

Summary/Abstract: The article analyses the manner in which a spatial identity is defined for the Mentô, in Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco, showing the symbolic charge that pervades, by means of stylistic devices, the description of the physical space this type of character inhabits. Upon a more thorough analysis, the space inhabited by this type of shaman or “wiseman” proves to be significant on a symbolical level: indeed, the first Mentô, the one which stands at the beginning of the quest that both heroes of the novel in turn will undertake, lives on a border – the one that separates the territory of the Plantation prison from that of the rebellious Blacks, hidden in the forests of the mountains; whereas the space inhabited by the second Mentô resembles a valley of paradise, which seems to be hiding somewhere in the interstices of reality as we know it; both spaces seem to pertain of sacrality, to be linked to a “Force”, but their secret, slowly revealed throughout the novel, proves to lie not in the way they are linked to the land, not in their defining a root like identity, but in the way they take root in the sacred speak itself (la parole sacrée).

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