This paper will examine the representation of violence in Biblique des derniers gestes (2002). This latest novel by the prolific Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau is, at 787 pages, the longest novel in the Antillean tradition (if not the longest in Caribbean writing more generally). The novel marks a departure for an author sometimes criticised for overlooking the horrors of the slave trade, and indeed for celebrating the plantation as a locus of métissage and créolité. For in this excessive, chaotic, hallucinatory and frequently nightmarish epic, the crime fondateur of the Middle Passage infects history and inflects the narrative.

In the “navire mangeur d’hommes”, violence assumes an absolute and infinite quality: “C’est ce qui caractérise la traite des nègres et l’esclavage aux Antilles: son absence de limites”. Within the hold of the boat, life and death are unbearably coterminous: living bodies intermingle with dead flesh, living slaves are thrown to the sharks to lighten the load. This “explosion des hommes et [la] dilatation de leur être” disrupts any sense of a natural order, and inscribes violence and trauma at the heart of Antillean identity.

Threatened boundaries and permeable limits characterise the novel. The body offers no discrete, continuous or protective entity, and fails to act as guarantor of a coherent, stable identity. Characters – both male and female – frequently penetrate, melt into and fuse with each other, and identity itself breaks down (reflected, for example, in the merged identities designated by hyphenized names: Deborah-Nicole Timoléon; Sarah-Anaïs-Alicia). The descriptions of violence and trauma are localised predominantly in and through the female body: difficult births, infanticide, the dorlis, a supernatural spirit which rapes sleeping women.

At the end of the novel, the protagonist (who has, implausibly, participated in many of the anti-colonial insurrections throughout the world), returns to a now-departmentalised Martinique. The old warrior comments: “Dans ces opulences de surface, il ne voyait aucune violence contre laquelle il aurait pu sortir ses armes”. Ironically, the foundational violence of the Middle Passage and the brutality of slavery have lapsed into a passive dependence. While the DOM-TOMs have thus escaped “les massacres, les assassins […] les exécutions sommaires” of decolonization, the absence of revolutionary violence in contemporary Antillean culture is portrayed as a particularly damaging, debilitating void.