"I stood at that very gate looking up at those words - `Arbeit Macht Frie' (Work
Makes Free) which have become a potent symbol of Nazi genocide."
But Chamoiseau is much more than a punster: As Ti-Cham or Chamzibie, the tape-wielding "pretend ethnographer" turned humble "word-scratcher," he constructs a precarious, multi-layered diglossic edifice that
makes free with literary genres and narrative conventions of all kinds.
He adds invective to his rhetoric of satire and irony, striving to generate recognition that the prideful independence of Protestant and imperial versions of human autonomy, because it
makes free will and objective conscience impossible, also makes virtue and justice impossible.