Tennessen


French--it was, in fact, called a "corrupted French" in
the 1934 edition of the Quillet dictionary--and was
long thought to have been invented by the master in his
dealings with his slaves. A close look at early writings
such as those of Pare Labat, however, tells us that white
planters and their families learned Creole from the
slaves and not the contrary (Labat 1743).

 It would appear, then, that those early Creole
speakers found themselves in a curious double bind:
in order to survive they had to resort to the language
of the opposition, i.e. to the prevailing authoritative
discourse. Yet if they did this and did it well, then
they condemned themselves to speak an alien tongue which
only drew them closer to the enemy. Their unique
solution to this dilemma was to confiscate the language
of the master and learn to use it against the master,
that is, to distort and "de-construct" that language
until it became their own.

 Thus Creole, says Martinican writer Edouard
Glissant, arose as a creation of the uprooted African
who, faced with very limited linguistic tools, chose to
limit those tools even further, to take language, in
this case the French language, and warp it to make it
his/her own. Creole developed as a sort of secret pact
whose true meaning was hidden from the master, claims
Glissant, who also suggests that in the very unrolling
of the Creole sentence is heard again the syncopation
of drums and that the meaning of a sentence is sometimes
concealed in "accelerated nonsense rumbling with
sounds," a nonsense which "ferries the true meaning while
keeping it from the master'sear" (Glissant 1976: 97).

 Glissant's theory also emphasizes the fact that
French and Creole are two distinct languages, not two
varieties of the same language. Historically, Creole,
as spoken by some six or seven million people in the
Caribbean region and on the islands of Reunion and
Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, is an idiom based on a
French-derived vocabulary and a syntax which mixes
African structures from the Sudanese with speech habits
from 16th and 17th century Norman sailors. Admittedly,
the use of Creole today varies a great deal from island