Book dossier

The convict and the colonel

by Richard Price, Deborah Chasman, Sally Price

The life of Medard Aribot - Martiniquan artist, convict, madman, legend - spans much of the twentieth century. Born in 1901 when slavery was a living memory, Medard was banished to the Devil's Island penal colony because, people say, he carved the "impertinent" bust of a colonel hoisted overhead by rioters during a 1925 election-day protest that ended in massacre. Today, the miniature gingerbread-style house he built on his return to Martinique has become a popular tourist attraction. Richard Price draws on long-term ethnography, archival documents, newspapers, old love letters, cinema, street-theater, and Caribbean fiction and poetry to explore how one generation's powerful historical metaphors could so quickly become the next generation's trivial pursuit. Using the election-day massacre and the life of Aribot as emblems of Martinique's transition from colonialism to modernity, Price shows how the fishing village he encountered on his first trip to Martinique in 1962 has been transformed by a heavily assisted welfare-based consumer economy. And how Medard's art and life, once a subversive symbol of anticolonial sentiment, has been silenced by the contemporary rush to modernity...or has it?