City air makes you free. This medieval German maxim referring to the city as a haven from the harsh laws of feudal vassalage might serve as an ironic epigraph for Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco. Near the beginning of Chamoiseau’s third novel, his narrator, the so-called Word Scratcher, writes that “to escape the night of slavery and colonialism, Martinique’s black slaves and mulattoes will, one generation after another, abandon the plantations, the fi elds, and the hills to throw themselves into the conquest of the cities.”1 In Texaco the powerful matriarch of a squatter camp, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, recounts the epic battles she and her ancestors fought to gain a home in the city. This struggle has helped shape urban space, creating a highly cosmopolitan but also extremely polarized social geography in the Martinican capital of Fort-de-France. The fragmented geography of urban space described in Chamoiseau’s novel ensures that the freedom of the city will be alloyed with suffering, its cosmopolitanism shot through with inequality and unrest.
