on being locked into words

The feeling of death became even more present when I began to write about myself, and about Texaco. It was like petrifying the tatters of my flesh. I was emptying my memory into immobile notebooks without having brought back the quivering of the living life which at each moment modifies what’s just happened. Texaco was dying in my notebooks though it wasn’t finished. And I myself was dying there though I felt the person I was now (pledged to what I was going to be) still elaborating. Oiseau Cham, is there such a thing as writing informed by the word, and by the silences, and which remains a living thing, moving in a circle, and wandering all the time, ceaselessly irrigating with life the things written before, and which reinvents the circle each time like a spiral which at any moment is in the future, ahead, each loop modifying the other, nonstop, without losing a unity difficult to put into words?

- Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 322, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov