Writing paths
On the new tracks of creolity, with Martiniquais Gerry L'Etang
Audio 03:43
An anthropologist by training, Martiniquais Gerry L'Etang is also a novelist.
He is the author of two novels: Fillette Lalo (2018) and Le désapparition, which has just been published by Project'iles.
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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow
5 mins
A newcomer to West Indian literature, the Martiniquan Gerry L'Etang imposes himself with his new novel
La désapparition
as an important voice of literary creoleness.
Questioning the future of his island in his mind-blowing story of truth, closer to fable than fiction strictly speaking, the novelist recounts whites and blacks, the vestiges of his island's slavery past and the battles to come.
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Anthropologist by training and professor of Creole ethnology at the University of the West Indies, Martiniquais Gerry L'Etang has just made a remarkable entry into the world of West Indian letters.
Qualified by Raphaël Confiant as "a
new voice of Creolity that is both singular and powerful
", the man made himself known by publishing in 2018, a first novel, written with four hands with the Haitian novelist Dominique Batraville.
Fillette Lalo
recounted the fortunes and misfortunes of Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, against a backdrop of ubiquitous voodoo.
La désapparition
, the second novel written by Gerry L'Etang which has just been published, is a much more ambitious work, halfway between the allegorical, the political and the anticipation.
It is less a novel than a poetic, dense and inventive story, whose ambition to reconnect with the Creole imagination and verve is affirmed from the title of the opus.
"
The word 'disappearance' is inspired by Édouard Glissant, who very probably forged this word from the Creole word "dézaparet", which means to disappear,
explains the novelist
.
And Édouard Glissant gives disappearance a special meaning.
By this he designates something which has apparently disappeared but not completely, of which traces remain.
And he takes the example of the Caribbean Amerindians who in Martinique have not disappeared, that they have disappeared, that is to say that they are somewhere in us, in particular through certain cultural traits that we have inherited from them
.
»
Disappearance or disappearances is the central theme of the brief novel by Martiniquais, which should be read as a premonitory tale of the end of the world.
Finally, from a certain world.
End of the world
The action of Gerry L'Etang's novel takes place on an unnamed island, but it bears a resemblance to Martinique.
Populated by the sons of slaves, this island could be Guadeloupe or Reunion or even Mayotte, exotic lands that produce nothing "
except illusion
", ironically the author.
Islands of abundance in the middle of oceans of misery and precariousness, these islands have in common their total dependence on Europe.
They survive thanks to remittances and food exports carried out by European cargo ships.
However, one day, imagines the novelist, the freighter of the Company in charge of supplying the island, although leaving from There, is slow to arrive.
It's chaos.
Cut off from the world and its food, the island plunged into scarcity, hunger, life-and-death struggles for survival, "
which recall
, writes the author,
the violence of the slavery era
".
“
I've always wondered what would happen if, if no ship supplied us,”
says Gerry L'Etang
.
It's an obsession that's been bothering me for a long time and that I've turned into a novel.
A political allegory,
Disappearance
is intended as a ferocious critique of the overdependence of the French West Indies on the outside world, which have not been able to think of themselves as an independent nation.
The narration of the geopolitical cataclysm to come leads the novelist to revisit the past of his island in parallel, in particular the struggles of Aimé Césaire during the colonial era.
The poet of
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal
is mobilized here in his capacity as a tutelary figure, who in heroic times knew how to "
free
" the enslaved people from "
their mire
" and "
raise the standard of the race
".
The poet has since died.
Faced today with abandonment by the motherland, the common people call him to reclaim his Promethean word, but the bard is immersed in his doubts, and his despair.
“
I did what I could, it may not have helped.
What did my people do with this fight?
he wonders, accusing his people of having become arrogant beggars, indecent beggars.
Creole
We will read
La désapparition
also for the intelligence of its writing which brilliantly combines regional French and Creole to express the lush and crazy realities of Creole society.
This novel brings up to date the mythologies of the past and draws its inspiration from nostalgia for the plantation society, in the crucible of which the Martinican soul was forged over the centuries.
The author has made it his mission to restore the scent and flavor of this past.
" I write,
"
he says, "
because I belong to a generation, the one born in the early 1960s, which experienced the end of housing, that is to say the end of plantations as a structuring element of our Creole societies of the West Indies.
And I try to construct through my literature a testimony of that time and of the effect that that time had in our societies which, since the 1960s, have gone from completely to something else.
We are Frenchified today, but hey, that world is dying and perhaps won't die if we continue to exemplify and promote it.
»
It is undoubtedly on this nostalgia for the Martinique of yesteryear, for its men and women, immortalized in the pages of
La désapparition
through its characters as picturesque as they are tragic, that the filiation between the Chamoiseau, the Confident and the rising generation of Creole writers.
A filiation that Gerry L'Etang claims loud and clear, while renewing the themes and the aim of the writing of Creole, as evidenced by his resolutely political new novel.
Disappearance
, by Gerry L'Etang.
Project'îles, 130 pages, 15 euros.
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