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Countries / South America

French Guiana (France)

works
7
7 books
period covered
1861–1972
language of writing
French

In 1885 there appeared in Paris a novel of a hundred and twenty pages written entirely in Guianese Creole, with no facing translation, signed Alfred Parépou. The name is a pseudonym borrowed from a palm tree, as the title, Atipa, is from a fish. The author's identity remains debated. The book found no readers, neither in the colony, where literacy was rare, nor in France, where Creole is not read, and it had to wait until 1949 to be rediscovered.

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French Guiana was long written by those who did not live there. The penal colony operated from 1852 to 1953, received tens of thousands of convicts and supplied the metropolis with the essentials of what it thought it knew of the country: a captain degraded on an island, the great reportage of 1923 that weighed on the closure, later the escape narratives. During that time, the country was inhabited by Creoles, Amerindians, Bushinenge descended from the Maroons of Suriname, then by Hmong settled in 1977, Haitians and Brazilians.

Damas answered that in 1937 with a first collection that invents a short, scanned line in which repetition takes the place of argument. He followed it the next year with a report on the administration of the colony, whose print run the local authorities bought in order to burn it. He would be member of parliament for Guiana from 1948 to 1951, then leave politics. Bertène Juminer, a doctor, published Les Bâtards in 1961, about the assimilated man who returns and does not find his place again. The price, here, is thinness: two authors in the catalogue, a novel in Creole in 1885 left without a successor for a century, a publishing world that stays in Paris.

What awaits the reader is a poetry that counts its syllables as one strikes a drum, and a prose that looks at France from a French department where nothing resembles it. The collection that opens this page appeared in 1937, and it was seized when war was declared in 1939, as a threat to state security, because of its appeals to black soldiers.

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A way to begin

Pigments

Léon-Gontran Damas · 1937

Regarded as the first book of Negritude, before those of Césaire and Senghor: short poems against assimilation, seized in 1939.

The entry See the author

Short poems that tell what assimilation costs: learned shame, smothered culture, the European suit imposed on the colonised. They break verse, metre and metaphor, and make rhythm and the body weapons of resistance. One poem calls on the Senegalese riflemen to leave the Germans in peace rather than fight for those who enlisted them.

Timeline

  1. 1852–1953Penal colonyThe penal colony of Cayenne and the Salvation Islands supplies stories, memoirs and images to all France.
  2. 1937PigmentsLéon-Gontran Damas, born in Cayenne, publishes the collection that opens négritude with Césaire and Senghor.
  3. 1946DepartmentalisationThe status of French department frames school and publishing, in a country that speaks Creole.
  4. 1970–2015Guianese writingBertène Juminer, Élie Stephenson and their juniors write the river, the penal colony and assimilation.

Reading keys

1Names and kinship
  • Many Creole surnames date from the abolition of 1848, when the civil registry assigned names to the freed, sometimes drawn from antiquity, sometimes formed by anagram, so that a family name may be only six generations old.
  • Bushinenge names, Ndyuka, Aluku or Saramaka, refer to a matrilineal lineage and to a village on the river, and the administrative name in use does not cover the lineage name.
  • The Hmong families settled since 1977 bear clan names, Yang, Lo, Vang, which govern alliance and mutual aid.
  • Haitian, Brazilian and Chinese surnames signal recent migrations and a precise place in the local economy.
2What is said and unsaid
  • The penal colony is a family matter as much as a matter of history, since descendants of convicts, of guards and of released men live on the spot.
  • The place of metropolitan French people, the differences in pay and the cost of living are constantly present subjects.
  • Haitian, Brazilian and Surinamese immigration, illegal gold panning and mercury in the rivers entail immediate political positions.
  • The social movement of 2017 and the question of status, department or greater autonomy, divide, and a text that approaches them situates itself at once.
3Religion and the unseen
  • Catholicism is in the majority among Creoles, with its brotherhoods and its processions, while the evangelical churches advance among recent migrants.
  • The Bushinenge religions, with their obia and their possession rites, are institutions endowed with specialists and rules, inherited from the Maroon societies of Suriname.
  • The Kali'na, Wayana, Teko and Wayãpi Amerindians have their shamans, called piay, and a cosmology common to the Guiana plateau.
  • Quimbois and the practices of protection against ill fortune circulate between the groups, and a narrative may mention them without explaining them.
4Colours, rites, mourning, feasts
  • The carnival extends from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday and culminates with the touloulous, women entirely covered and masked who invite the men to dance at the paré-masqué balls, where they alone choose and cannot be recognised.
  • Vaval, the king of the carnival, is burnt on the last evening, which closes the season and often serves as the end of a chapter.
  • The awara broth, prepared at Easter, comes with the saying that whoever eats it will come back to Guiana.
  • The wakes gather songs, tales and riddles through the night, and mourning is marked by regulated visits more than by dress.
5Shared references
  • The 1885 novel in Creole, with its embedded proverbs and its street dialogues, is the claimed founding text of the written language.
  • Creole proverbs serve as arguments in conversation, and a character who quotes one closes the discussion.
  • The war of the Boni against the Dutch and their settlement on the Maroni in the eighteenth century is the common history of the Bushinenge on both sides of the river.
  • Damas and Negritude provide the political and poetic repertoire to which every Guianese text is referred, which the following authors have sometimes had to endure.
6Misreadings to avoid
  • French Guiana is a French department, with the euro, social security and French elections, and not an independent country.
  • Three neighbouring entities bear similar names: French Guiana, English-speaking Guyana and Suriname, the former Dutch Guiana.
  • Guianese Creole is not Antillean Creole, and the two are only partly mutually intelligible.
  • The penal colony closed in 1953 and says nothing about the Guiana of today, where the population is mostly Creole, Amerindian, Bushinenge and immigrant.
  • The catalogue counts only two authors, which is an editorial fact: contemporary Guianese production, poetry and theatre above all, exists and is little published.

Available in English 3

The books from this country that can be read in English, in the original or in translation.

  • NovelBatouala: A True Black NovelBatouala, véritable roman nègreRené Maran · 1921In Ubangi-Shari, a French colony in central Africa, forced labour and taxation are emptying the villages.Literature
  • PoetryPigmentsLéon-Gontran Damas · 1937In Paris, Black students from the colonies seek a poetry that refuses assimilation.Literature
  • NovelThe BastardsLes BâtardsBertène Juminer · 1961Students from the old colonies learn in Paris that they are expected to forget where they come from.Literature

A selection to begin with 6 / 7

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  • EssayL'Algérie pour les AlgériensIsmaÿl Urbain · 1861not translated into EnglishAn 1861 plea for an Algeria associated with France, by a Saint-Simonian interpreter born in French Guiana.Literature
  • NovelAtipaAlfred Parépou · 1885not translated into EnglishGuiana passes from the plantation to gold and the penal colony, while the school speaks only French to a Creole-speaking people.Literature
  • NovelBatouala: A True Black NovelBatouala, véritable roman nègreRené Maran · 1921In Ubangi-Shari, a French colony in central Africa, forced labour and taxation are emptying the villages.Literature
  • TaleLégendes et contes folkloriques de GuyaneMichel Lohier · 1960not translated into EnglishDevils, spirits and cunning beasts in the Creole tales of French Guiana, collected by a schoolteacher turned journalist.Literature
  • NovelThe BastardsLes BâtardsBertène Juminer · 1961Students from the old colonies learn in Paris that they are expected to forget where they come from.Literature
  • NovelLe Nègre du gouverneurSerge Patient · 1972not translated into EnglishA Guianese slave promoted to maroon-hunter, or how to rise without disowning one's people, in a colonial chronicle.Literature

See all 7 works