The 19th century, the beginnings
As a general rule, each country can boast of having a founding work of literature with which is associated, quite logically, a writer. However, in Guyana, the 19th century was marked by two notable but distinct events: on the one hand, the birth of a future author who left his native soil at a very young age, and on the other hand, the publication of a text, under a pseudonym, which revolutionized the worldwide perception of the Creole language. Thomas Appoline was born in 1812 in Cayenne and died in Algiers in 1884 under another name, Ismaÿl Urbain. This change of identity is undoubtedly one of the keys to understanding the complex personality of a man whose mother was a freedwoman of mixed race and whose father, a merchant, only agreed to give him his first name as a patronymic, a man who joined the Saint-Simonians with whom he left for the Orient, and then who decided to embrace Islam at the age of 23. A translator and interpreter of Arabic, he was listened to by the powerful when he settled in Algeria in 1845. Urbain was above all a humanist essayist who used his pen to promote his anti-colonialist ideas, notably in L'Algérie pour les Algériens in 1861 and in L'Algérie française: indigènes et immigrants nine years later. If posterity has retained his commitment in the absence of his poetry, the novel that appeared in 1885 is above all literary, but not only. This emblematic work is also marked by a certain mystery, since behind the name on the cover, Alfred Parépo, officially born in Cayenne in 1841 and deceased in the same city in 1887, is hidden, according to the hypotheses still in force today, either Alfred de Saint-Quentin, who also published Introduction à l'histoire de Cayenne followed by a collection of tales, fables and songs in 1872, or Félix Athénodor Météran, a writer for the Navy, goldsmith and politician. But in the end, who cares, Atipa had a particularity that earned it its reputation, well beyond the identity of its author, it was indeed the first novel written in Creole, as such it was promulgated as a representative work of humanity by UNESCO. It is true that Atipa will only be truly acclaimed one hundred years later thanks to Auguste Horth who will quote it in Le patois guyanais which he will publish in 1949, nevertheless it is impossible to deny its impact or not to recognize its political force at a time when equality between the different populations that inhabited Guyana was still a utopia, especially since this story is a fine and droll criticism of a society in full post-colonial transition The nineteenth century, decidedly fertile, finally witnesses a birth whose circumstances already have the appearance of a legend. It is said that René Maran gave his first cry on the boat that took his parents from French Guiana to Martinique, and his birth was registered in Fort-de-France in November 1887. A first journey for a man who will know a thousand others, which makes him particularly elusive and certainly did not contribute to ensure his posthumous posterity, he who was the first black to receive the Goncourt Prize in 1921 for Batouala whose action took place in an African village.
The 20th century, the confirmation
In French Guiana, the 20th century saluted the work of two men who were to have a notable influence: the first was Constantin Verderosa, born in Cayenne in 1889 to an Alsatian father and an Italian mother, who wrote a dozen plays in Creole; the second was René Jadfard (1899-1947), a hyperactive jack-of-all-trades, who sublimated his country in Nuits de cachiri after having tried his hand at detective fiction in Drôle d'assassin. But it was above all his political acolyte who broke new ground in literature, although history has unfortunately forgotten him a little. Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978) was, as Aimé Césaire pointed out in his posthumous Hommage, "a poet of Négritude, undoubtedly the first of them all".
This term refers to the movement by which black peoples assert their own cultural identity in the face of the forced assimilation engendered by slavery and colonialism. Léon-Gontran Damas waged this struggle as a poet - his collections Pigments (published by Présence africaine) and Black-Label remain essential works - and Bertène Juminer (1927-2003) as a novelist, with the pithy title Les Bâtards (1961). In this semi-autobiographical account, he evoked his own experience as a doctor trained in France to denounce the persistence of relations of domination between colonists and the colonized in Paris in the 1930s.
This difficult and political issue will remain at the heart of the work of many writers, such as Serge Patient (1934-2021), professor and activist, who in Le Nègre du gouverneur (The Governor's Negro ) dramatizes the imbalances of the colonial order, or metropolitan André Paradis, born in 1939 near Paris, who worked for independence and drew inspiration from his homeland to write the collection of short stories Marronnages in 1998, or the novel Des hommes libres (2005, published by Ibis rouge), in which a Parisian discovers he has a slave ancestor.
It was history, too, that inspired Lyne-Marie Stanley to write. Born in 1944 in Cayenne, she published her first novel in her fifties, focusing on three generations of women from the same family. La Saison des abattis then became a pretext for highlighting the delicate issue of skin color, with all its consequences. Her work as an author, also for Editions Ibis Rouge, continued in 2001 with Mélodie pour l'orchidée, an evocation of the cultural effervescence of the 70s, and in 2006 with Abel... which resurrects the terrible bagne. Her husband, Élie Stephenson, chose poetry and theater to explore the vein opened by Damas, continuing to carry the famous "resin torch". Last but not least, one of the most famous contemporary Guyanese women is also involved in politics, since it was in her official capacity that metropolitan France first discovered Christiane Taubira. However, after publishing essays and an autobiographical story, Nuit d'épine, she is now a novelist, as confirmed by Gran Balan, published in 2020.
Also in 2020, the jury of the Prix du livre d'histoire des Outre-mer awarded a prize to ethnologist Michèle Baj Strobel for Les Gens de l'Or. The author, ethnologist and art history teacher lived for several years in Maripasoula. Through the object of Gold, whose myth is foundational in the cultural and geographical area covered, she also deals with the question of Creolity by building her own archives through interviews.
