You can read him as an African-diaspora genius, like Quassi Graman, who discovered quinine, or like Equiano, who wrote The Interesting Life . Or you can read Pierre Baptiste's life as a journey toward a more magnanimous sense of possibility, a journey into a new New World. But let's back up and take this a step at a time. In biological terms, Pierre's impregnation is an infestation, a parasitic appropriation of his person. Yes, Pierre is himself a parent, but he is a very lonely man, after all, a lonely man sustained by the hallucinatory aspects of his powerful pantheistic, animistic, syncretistic religion.
Children do, they do eat up their parents' lives, and particularly their female parents'.
Nature in some aspects is a rapist and a parasite, then. Much like Pamphile, though Nature has many redeeming characteristics, while Pamphile is almost unrelievedly vile. Yet, though Pierre murders Pamphile in the name of their shared humanity, he respects Pamphile's corpse. He will not appropriate it, will not eat the eyes. Pierre insists on the transcendent value of the human, despite the mystical sense of oneness with Creation that suffuses his vision and his science.