Joseph Zobel

Joseph Zobel (April 26th 1915, River-Salted - June 17th 2006, Ales) is a novelist and poet French of the Martinique, considered as one of the most significant authors of the West-Indian literature.

Born in a very modest hearth inhabitant of Martinique, it draws from its childhood a novel, the Street Box-Negros carried with the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1982.

Childhood

Resulting from a very modest family, Joseph Zobel is born the natural on April 26th, 1915, wire of an employee of house and a chauffeur. His/her mother not being able to occupy itself some by preserving her employment, the child is raised by her maternal grandmother, Amantine (called Man Tine ), agricultural worker working on a sugar plantation of Small Borough (Commune of Salted Rivière).

Raise shining, constant by the unconditional love of his/her grandmother, the young person Joseph Zobel obtains a modest purse allowing him to continue its studies until the baccalaureat. High-school pupil, it leaves Petit-Bourg to join his mother with Fort-de-France.

Joseph Zobel will draw from his memories of childhood the matter of the novel the Street Box-Negros , traditional of the literature published for the first time in 1950. The title will receive the Price of the Readers and will know a certain fame. He until is studied today by the French schoolboys.

Literary beginnings

Graduate, the young person Joseph Zobel sees his dreams of studies of Architecture to Paris broken by the colonial administration. No purse is granted to him, whereas its resources are non-existent. The first employment with the service of the Bridges and Chaussées makes it live in the villages of the Diamant and the Holy Spirit, in the South of the Martinique. In contact with the fishermen of Diamond, he discovers a different lifestyle, though impresses values of the rural world which he knew inside the grounds.

The Second world war, imposing a blockade on the French West Indies, prohibited any starting project towards the Hexagon. Joseph Zobel works then like candidate house master repeater then to the Schoelcher College. The artistic aspirations of Joseph Zobel find to be expressed in some news which it makes read with his friends. A professor of Physical education and Sportive will carry the texts to the newspaper the Sportsman , who will publish them with a certain popular success. The public inhabitant of Martinique appreciates that, for the first time, an author puts in scene his customs and habits, without to yield has an easy exoticism. Joseph Zobel fits then in the current of the regionalistic literature or “soil”.

Aime Césaire, young person aggregate of letters teaching in the same college, appreciates the first news of Zobel and encourages it to write a novel. Taking as a starting point its experiment in the village of fishermen of Diamond, Joseph Zobel written in 1942 Diab'-là , history of a peasant who decides to conquer his freedom by the work of the ground, near a community of fishermen of which it shares the life. Martinique being controlled by the Admiral Robert, representative autoritarist of the Vichy government, the novel is censured and will be finally published only in 1947.

The departure towards the Hexagon and the literary career

Benefitting from an administrative leave, Joseph Zobel joined Paris in 1946 to resume its studies. According to courses of literature, dramatic art and ethnology in the Sorbonne, he is at the same time assistant professor with the College François Ier de Fontainebleau.

Installed to Fontainebleau with his wife and his three children, Joseph Zobel devotes the Fifties to an intense literary activity, publishing in addition to the Street Box-Negros the novels the motionless Days , the Festival in Paris . In addition to his novels, Joseph Zobel writes poems that it déclame in various festivals in France, Switzerland and Italy.

The African experiment

In 1957, carried by his desire to know the Africa, Joseph Zobel benefits from his many relations among the Senegalese of Paris and is recruited by the Senegalese minister for Education, Amadou Matar Me bow, as director of the college of Ziguinchor (currently Lycée Djignabo) in Casamance. Installed finally with Dakar as chief supervisor of the college Van Vollen, it becomes a few years later producing of educational and cultural emissions to Radio operator of Senegal, from which it creates the culture section. The emissions of Joseph Zobel will be listened in all French-speaking Africa Occidentale. Some anecdotes of its Dakar-native life are reported in the collections of news Mas Badara (1983) and " And if the sea were not bleue" (1982).

The retirement, last publications

Installed in the village of Générargues (near to Anduze, in the Gard) since his retirement in 1974, Joseph Zobel continued his literary work in an original way by rewriting his novels: motionless Days becoming Hands full with birds and the Festival in Paris becoming When snow melts .

In 1995, Joseph Zobel publishes in account of author of Love and Silence , a book of art combining new poems, extracted from his personal newspaper and Aquarelles.

The last two books of Joseph Zobel were published in 2002: Gertal and other news gather five new news and of the extracts of its newspaper, held of 1946 to 2002; the Sun told me gathers its complete poetic work.

Literary importance

Joseph Zobel does not seem to have received academic world and arts persons the attention reserved to the authors of the movement of the Créolité (Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Ernest Pépin and Jean Bernabé).

However, an objective analysis of the topics and processes of its first works however reveal that it can be identified like one of the precursors of Créolité, on the one hand because of simple virtue of its project of expression of the popular heart inhabitant of Martinique, and on the other hand by certain processes of language appearing in Diab' the and Rue Box-Negros .

An example of this fact is the prolog of the novel Diab' the (1942), which is presented in the form of a conversation or an outline of oral narration. The process borrowing as well from the literature written than with creole orality is marked with the corner of as the promoters of Créolité call “oraliture”.

In addition, the originality of certain turnings, inspired by the Créole, prevented that its novel " Street Puts Nègres" is not published into 1950 with the Éditions Albin Michel. The successive versions of the text attenuated the party taken original.

Writing in a traditional language of invoice, Joseph Zobel knew to give to his texts a power of evocation which explains why its novels are aujourdhui considered as the traditional ones of the literature inhabitant of Martinique.

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