Patrick Chamoiseau, in his detailed account School Days, uses playful and colorful language to delineate the emotional struggles of a young schoolboy in colonized Martinique. Chamoiseau's creative and careful choice of words opens his reader's eyes to the internal struggle of the anonymous protagonist, who continually seeks to come to terms with his conflicting Creole and French identities. The different teachers with whom the “little boy” studies physically represent the opposing characters that he feels obliged to embody. Using these teachers as vehicles for the conflicting cultural expectations imposed on the "little boy," Chamoiseau successfully depicts the endemic and conflicting feelings that the "little boy" experiences as he confusedly attempts to understand his roots and his place in his two distinctive worlds. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original EssayChamoiseau clearly implies his young character's initial optimism about starting school, a mentality that the author makes you naive later in the story. Chamoiseau's description of the enthusiasm with which the "little boy" imagines his future academic life, and the almost animalistic way in which he constantly demands his mother's approval, intensify the extreme emotional connection he has with the 'idea of ​​being part of a bigger, more sophisticated image. The relationship that “little boy” forms with his first teacher fuels his happiness and comfort in the school environment. “Little Boy” flourishes in Ms. Salinire’s motherly ways, which speak to the comfort he finds in his family Creole roots: “School was fun. (“Little boy”) was always in a hurry to get there. Mam Salinire made everything fun. She was another kind of Mam Ninotte, equally good and generous with affection. His severity was not threatening but strongly protective” (Chamoiseau, 28 years old). The positive associations that the "little boy" has with the school are short-lived, however: when his brothers and sisters reveal that the school he attended is not considered a real school, but rather a simple immature nursery school, the center of the “little boy’s” world collapses. The total faith that the “little boy” has placed in school as a gateway to maturation and importance makes this news utterly devastating. The fact that the “little boy” now feels led to doubt his relationship with Mam Salinire, representative of a maternal figure, suggests that he cannot have confidence in an educational life intimately linked to his Creole foundations. The fear and uncertainty with which the “little boy” attitude of a boy at his new school contrasts with the carefree and positive attitude he had at his previous school. This profound change in mentality is clearly manifested in the titles of the different sections of the story: while the first school experience of the "little boy" takes place under the title "Desire", the entry of the "little boy" into school real is characterized as “Survival”. Here, the “little boy” must struggle to stay afloat in a barrage of confusing cultural contradictions and new paradigms. He loses all the comfort he once felt in Madame Salinire's class because he must meet expectations that he has difficulty understanding. Even the spoken language with which the “little boy” grew up changes abruptly and unnaturally: “…Now, with the Teacher, speech traveled very far on a single path. And this French road has become strangely foreign. The articulation has changed. The rhythm has changed. The intonation has changed.More or less familiar words began to sound different. They seemed to come from a distant horizon and no longer had any affinity with Creole” (Chamoiseau, 47 years old). The “little boy’s” lack of preparation both for the concrete learning of this new language and the criticisms addressed to him when he tries to learn lead him to question his academic identity. He finds himself forced to assume a foreign, but correct, persona that goes against all the familiar aspects of his traditional persona. Furthermore, the fact that the new educator of the “little boy” is called in a simple and ambiguous way “Master” implies the alienation of the young character in relation to his educator, an instrumental figure in his academic – and therefore personal – progress. His disconnection with his new school environment, generated by “Master,” prevents him from understanding how to integrate his familiar Creole culture into a society that demands of him strictly French ways of acting and thinking. “Little boy”, in this strong Frenchification. , is reminded of the implications of a life filled with Creole influences and thus begins to realize the deception inherent in his pure teaching of French. A substitute, replacing the teacher, conveys to the class the value of being Creole by downplaying, and sometimes undermining, the supreme importance of becoming French in all respects: "He taught us for a little over a week , and what we learned shook our world... He had read a poet named Césaire, whom he quoted constantly, and he spoke of something called Negritude... He claimed that our ancestors did not were not Gauls but Africans. He contradicted the Master with vigor, perseverance and fierce joy. But he never addressed the Universe or its world order. We never understood what he wanted from us” (Chamoiseau, 129.) Here, the objectivity with which the “little boy” was taught to consider the importance and seriousness of French teachings and to embody the perfectly French personality is completely contradicted. Not only does he discover that the historical information he was taught as pure fact is questionable and even refutable, but also that French ways of behaving and thinking are not necessarily singularly acceptable or ever superior. While the "little boy" had been exposed to both French and Creole cultures in different contexts, his young age prevented him from asking questions as either better, more moral, or more correct without the influence of his instructors. In this substitute teacher, the “little boy” understands the idea of ​​being proud of his roots, whatever they may be, and expressing it by rejecting ideas that contradict those roots. The "little boy's" confusion over his identity, as embodied in his experiences with teachers who embody the competing factions of his cultural makeup, is a common, even famous, experience among the peoples of the colonial-controlled Caribbean. This struggle, culminating in the triumph of some and the distress of others, is manifested in some of the literary and artistic works produced during this period. As author Gregson Davis describes in his autobiography of famous Martinican activist Aimé Césaire, Césaire had a strong affinity with his black Creole roots which he expressed through the ngritude movement: "Regarding (Césaire's) contributions to the development of a postcolonial ideology, his This name is indelibly associated with the founding concept of "négritude", a word that he is reputed to have invented and which would become a rallying point for several generations of young French-speaking blacks in Africa and in the Caribbean in their fight for.