Texaco

Marie-Sophie Laborieux tells an urban planner sent to raze her shantytown the whole 150-year history of her family and of Texaco, the improvised quarter she founded on company land above Fort-de-France, from slavery through emancipation to the modern city. Chamoiseau maps the real Martinique: the tin-and-timber quarter of Texaco clinging to the hillside, the city of Fort-de-France below, the plantations of the enslaved past, and old Saint-Pierre before Mont Pelée destroyed it in 1902.

Marie-Sophie

Texaco (the quarter)

The founding

On the steep ground above the city, on land belonging to the oil company, Marie-Sophie Laborieux and the poor build Texaco out of crates, tin and salvage, a whole living quarter conjured from nothing. When a planner comes to condemn it, she answers his bulldozers with the entire history of how it came to be, and wins it a reprieve.

The framing narrative

explicit Texaco is a real hillside quarter of Fort-de-France, named for the oil depot on whose land it grew; Marie-Sophie founds and defends the shantytown there, and it gives the novel its name.

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