The practice of storytelling
Nowadays, folk tales have lost some of their original vigor. For a long time, storytelling was a favorite part of funeral wakes, when the storyteller would deliver his tale to his audience, preferably at night, without fear of being turned into a bottle or a basket, the fate that befell him if he allowed himself to break the legend and tell the tale during the day. The poor storyteller had indeed been persuaded that he would be condemned to the grip of this " modision" or curse in French. It was a Machiavellian ruse, playing on the often irrational beliefs of the enslaved. It was a devious way for the master to make the slaves understand that the day is reserved for work, and that they should not indulge in any idleness, such as storytelling instead of work.
As Patrick Chamoiseau tells us in Le Conteur, la nuit et le panier: "The tale will mobilize all the resources of laughter; the twists and turns of lightness, comedy and the grotesque; it will move without trembling from the sublime to the coarse; it will be amoral, not immoral, but the champion of a resourcefulness that refrains from anything that might support the dominant morality. The storyteller will draw on all the imaginary worlds and languages around him - Creole, French, vestiges of Amerindian and African languages, a smattering of Asian languages - to compose not just a style (which would have assigned him to the plantation order), but a language - I mean : a major relational tressailment that mixes dominant language, dominated language, and that raises (as Segalen would say) a vast desire-imagining... And, I don't want to make you feel sorry, but it happened to me to imagine, listening to our old tales, that this dear Rabelais, this father of language, this emergence of an extreme aesthetic catastrophe, most certainly came from a Martinique plantation. I think Rabelais is a Creole storyteller.
Oral culture
Oral culture has endured through the practice of storytelling in the West Indies. Derived from the original African tale, the West Indian tale enabled slaves, forced to leave their homes, and later their descendants, to express their feelings and revolts against colonial society. This tradition has endured, but in recent years it has suffered a marked decline in the number of wakes, which are no longer family gatherings, as condescending evangelism has led some to believe that kont sé bagay vié neg (storytelling is for people of low status), devaluing them in the eyes of their families.
Storytelling puts into practice what is known as oral literature, or oraliture. Unlike Western tales, the Creole tale is impregnated with the socio-historical context in which it develops, and so the ending is not a happy one; one might even say that the West Indian tale is amoral. The aim was to educate and warn the audience, made up of enslaved people, of the daily dangers they faced. Beliefs and the social system - in this case, the housing model - weave a web in which interpretation, in this context, allows us to grasp the tale and decode its underlying messages. The West Indian tale and its symbolic system provide knowledge, often through parables that are the very medium of teachings handed down from generation to generation.
A wake
It's rare, but it's still done: at a funeral wake, the body is laid out, the deceased's close circle gathers inside, and friends gather near and around the house. After the prayers, which last until quite late, storytellers follow one another into the night, telling children and adults stories and anecdotes about the life of the deceased. Between these stories in Creole, riddles called Titim in Creole are thrown. The wake doesn't last until daybreak, and everyone retires after a brief visit to the deceased.
To keep the audience's attention, the storyteller begins with a thunderous "yé krik!", to which the intercepted audience responds "yé krak!", then, still invitingly, he asks in French: "Est-ce que la cour dort? "Non la cour ne dort pas" was the chorus' response, prompting him to say, in a lilting, cheeky tune, "si la cour ne dort pas, réveillesz-vous pour entendre la suite de mon histoire! Yé krik!" And the storyteller continues his performance in Creole. He interrupts his tale with a resounding "yé krik! "yé krak!" and "yé mistikrik! "yé mistikrak!" and so on, throughout the tale, in a constant interplay of these interjections to which the audience continues to respond, for the strength of the storyteller lies in the attention his audience pays to him "yé mistikrik"! Creole storytelling is interdependent, and shows that intelligence is not to be found in a specific place, or only where it is expected.
The characters of the tale
The storyteller uses local and African characters and animals, such as the macaque fellow, the clumsy elephant fellow, the cunning and resourceful rabbit, and Tiger, the token idiot, to parody human characters in relation to slave society and, above all, the master. We also meet the Deviless, who has supernatural abilities. Depicted as a beautiful woman, she represents danger, a trap to be avoided. As beautiful as she is, we all know that with her goat's foot and horse's foot, she can also transform herself into a three-legged horse, but despite the possibility of flushing her out and deflecting her hold, fear possesses us. It represents the antagonist we must face obstacle after obstacle to become the hero who braves it.
Father, Mother and Daughter are characters with their own specificities. Marie-Louise Mongis, in Un conte de tradition orale antillaise, points out that "in the West Indian tale, the female figure is often reduced to her physical dimension. Many tales emphasize the aesthetic character of feminine beauty as one of the main motifs enabling the action to take shape and unfold, providing a point of departure for the main character's adventures... Alongside the two figures mentioned above, the mother figure in the Creole tale is not qualified by her physical features, but subsists through the natural function of every woman, that of giving birth. As a result, she is only considered in this paradigm, that of procreation, and is the hero's mother, who is only important for having given birth to this hero... She has no existence of her own, and in this sense occupies a de facto secondary role. " Storyteller Duverger, on the other hand, asserts that the woman is there, very present, and that she is at once strength, power and intelligence, as she plays an important role with her family, whom she protects.
Like music, dance, carnival and lasotè, the Creole tale is part of our intangible cultural heritage. For the enslaved, it was a means of overcoming their suffering, a permanent resistance to the oppressor, a roundabout way of teaching caution, another way of expressing their tenacity and showing that they were human beings and not pieces of furniture.
The storyteller of today
For Jean-Claude Duverger, the modern storyteller is also a resistance fighter. He is less and less frequent at wakes, where he is hardly ever expected. Certain religious postures have ousted them from wakes, where storytelling has since been replaced by prayers, songs and litanies. Nowadays, the tale is heard in the wake of a person who has become aware of its heritage value.
Given the evolution of our society (new architectural designs, wake in mortuaries), it has been necessary to find spaces other than the shade of mango trees in the countryside to prevent the tale from dying. Bringing together storytellers of all ages, the now-defunct Kontè Sanblé association moved into new spaces. It enabled storytelling to adapt to its new environment, not only by finding new spaces for it, but also by encouraging other forms of grouping and encounters with new audiences. The modern storyteller goes to weddings, birthdays, family celebrations, takes to the stage, is invited to schools where he even tells stories during the day, without turning into a bottle or a basket... The mentality has changed a lot since then.
Proverbs, riddles and wonders
The Creole proverb. A proverb is a short, colourful sentence with no author. Commonly used, it expresses a truth of experience or a piece of wisdom to which the speaker refers. Different cultures have created or adapted proverbs in almost similar ways, often with virtually the same emphasis. In Creole, for example, " Pa jenmen filé kouto avan ou tjenbé kabrit la" ("Don't sharpen your knife before you've held the goat") has a French equivalent: "Don't sell the bear's skin before you've killed it". However, the diversity of these different sayings remains a rich source of inspiration, demonstrating the abundance of human thought: Pa ba woch kou sé lanmen'w ki kay pran fè ("Pain teaches us to know life better"). Collecting and writing down this knowledge for future generations is essential.
"In the languages and cultures of humankind, proverbs accompany, reinforce and enlighten everyday speech. In Creole, universal themes such as love, friendship, death, justice, work and money are found with a particular mark linked to the history that has shaped these peoples, such as slavery and domination, but also the aspiration to justice and freedom", emphasizes Georges-Henri Léotin in his book 850 proverbes créoles traduits et adaptées, co-produced with Térèz Léotin. The proverbs are grouped by theme: animals, fruit and vegetables, nature, life, movement and sentiment. Many of the proverbs are in Martinique Creole, but their equivalents in other Creole-speaking areas of the Caribbean are also listed.
Riddles. Riddles, called Titim or Tim tim in Creole, are short riddles, little puzzles to be solved. They are used as exclamations by the storyteller to hook the audience, who inevitably respond: bwa sek ! It's the magic expression, an essential introductory formula to get the story off the ground. Tim tim are mostly classics that everyone knows: " Toupiti man toupiti man ka fè zot dansé! " or "Si petit que je suis je vous fait tous danser"! Answer: the ant.
Les mervey (merveilles) créoles. It's a poetic and musical way of repeating the same sound without interruption, just for the rhyme. In Creole, these sonority games found in certain storytellers are called mervey (wonders). They were taken up by Marie-Thérèse Julien Lung-Fou in her book Contes créoles: Contes animaux. Proverbes. Titimes or riddles. Here's an example:
Pol alé lékol san fè wol fol (ol sound): "Paul went to school without playing the fool". A French equivalent: "Ernestine la coquine dessine avec Jacqueline une christophine" (ine sound).
