Sounds of Caribbean Surrealism: Patrick Chamoiseau, Sélène Saint-Aimé, Aruán Ortiz, and Anaïs Maviel in Conversation

Born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau is a leading figure in Martinician literature and in postcolonial literature globally. His widely-translated works include plays, novels, fictionalized memoirs, and other aesthetic explorations of creolization, postcolonial poetics, and Martinician identity. In the 1980s, Patrick was a founder of the créolité literary and intellectual movement. His influential 1992 novel Texaco won France’s highest literary honor, the Prix Goncourt, described in The Guardian as a “masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Césaire's Return to My Native Land."

On November 23, Patrick will lead a conversation with three artists, Aruán Ortiz, Anaïs Maviel, and Sélène Saint Aimé, whose recent works and broader artistic practices take up creolized musical forms and the legacies of negritude and créolité. This event is part of Transatlantik, FourOneOne’s two-day performance series featuring Aruán Ortiz and Anaïs Maviel’s Reimagining Tropiques project; Sélène Saint Aimé’s Creole Songs; KāFOU (Val Jeanty and Cassie Watson Francillon); the Renald St. Juste Drum Ensemble; and Patrick Chamoiseau, the Martinican author and a founder of créolité. 

Aruán Ortiz and Anaïs Maviel's Reimagining Tropiques: Then and Now, performed on November 22 at Greenwich House, integrates Afro-Caribbean rhythms and chants, contemporary classical music, jazz improvisation, poetry, and spoken word. The project, which also features Aliya Ultan, explores writing on negritude, creolization, and transatlantic Surrealism published by the iconic Martinican magazine Tropiques from (1941–1945), and the wider community of artists and writers who gave voice to the aesthetic and philosophical negritude movement. (Tickets & more info.)

On November 23, also at Greenwich House, the Martinique-born bassist, singer, composer, and poet Sélène Saint-Aimé will present Creole Songs, a performance with her NOLA band, mixing New Orleanian jazz and creole music with Martinican genres and her own music and poetry. The band emerged from Sélène’s “Éritaj” project, which explored African, Afro-Indian, and Caribbean influences on New Orleans’ musical culture. With trumpeter Steve Lands, tenor saxophonist Gladney, sousaphone trombonist Miles Lyons, pianist Shea Pierre, and drummer Alfred Jordan, Jr., Sélène mixes New Orleanian jazz and creole music with Martinican genres and her own music and poetry. This event marks the band’s debut performance in New York. (Tickets & more info.)

Translator: Nicholas Elliott.