A relatively recent history
Reunion Island is said to have been known to navigators for many centuries, having served as a stopover for Arabs, Portuguese, Dutch and English. However, it was the French who decided to take possession of the island in 1642, naming it Île Bourbon in homage to the royal family. Louis Payen's attempt to settle there in 1663 can be found in Urbain Souchu de Rennefort's Relation du premier voyage de la Compagnie des Indes orientales en l'isle de Madagascar ou Dauphine, which can be read in a free digital version on the Gallica library website. After many ups and downs, Payen gave up two years later, giving way to twenty colonists who had embarked in Nantes a few months earlier, as Georges Azéma, a native writer and historian born in 1821, recounted in his famous Histoire de l'île Bourbon. But for the time being, the territory, which until then had been almost desert-like, was booming, especially from 1715 onwards under the patronage of the famous Compagnie des Indes, which set about developing the cultivation of coffee, an exploitation that unfortunately rhymed with that of men. The eighteenth century was a time of trial and error, when the vote to abolish slavery failed to materialize, and the name Reunion Island was heard for the first time before it was abandoned. And yet, through the work of two poets, a literary legend began to take shape that was waiting to be written.
Born just a few months apart, in 1752 and 1753 respectively, Antoine Bertin and Évariste de Parny had in common the fact that they left their native island at the age of nine. The former studied in Paris, the latter in Rennes; both embarked on military careers, met at court and forged a friendship enriched by their respective affinities for poetry. Antoine Bertin suffered from poor health, and died at the age of 37, having loved and written a great deal. His work, including his most famous elegies, Les Amours, is still available from Classiques Garnier and L'Harmattan, as is the more dense work of Évariste de Parny, who had the time to enjoy a long and distinguished career, culminating in his election to the Académie française in 1803. He is best known for his Poésies érotiques (1778), praised by Pushkin, and for his Chansons madécasses (1787), a prose adaptation of songs he called Malagasy, which also illustrated his rejection of colonialism. Of course, Bertin and Parny claim to be the first poets from Reunion Island, even though they lived there for only a short time, unlike Étienne Azéma, father of the above-mentioned historian, who was born there in 1776, lost his life there in 1851, and in the meantime praised the beauty of his native land in his various works, fables, plays and poetry. In those days, the island was a French province, albeit geographically remote, and its literature was written both inside and outside its natural boundaries, enjoying the influence of the capital, which it in turn influenced.
Round trips between the island and France
This is more or less the logic behind a text that is considered to be the first Reunion novel. Set in the Indian Ocean, Les Marrons was written by a mestizo but published in Paris. However, if Louis Timagène Houat (1809-1883) chose the French capital in 1844 for the publication of his book, it was hardly by choice, but because he had been expelled from the island where he was born, suspected of having hatched a plot against the ruling power, and above all guilty of having openly taken a stand against slavery, which would only be definitively abolished four years later. His novel is an ode to freedom and crossbreeding, and its title refers directly to the nickname given to runaway slaves. In fact, it tells of the love between a young black victim of the slave trade and the young girl to whom he had been "given as a gift", the lovebirds preferring to flee into the woods rather than suffer popular opprobrium. Deliberately forgotten for too long, this text has been republished in 2019 by the fine Arbre Vengeur publishing house. Louis-Émile Héry was born in Brittany in 1808. In a way, his life mirrors that of Houat, as he travels backwards, settles in La Réunion and opens a school there, a pious wish that had agitated his contemporary. The schoolteacher's role in the island's literary culture is significant, since he was the first to set down in writing a language that until then had only been spoken, Reunionese Creole, the filter through which he passed La Fontaine' s Fables to give birth to his Fables créoles dédiées aux dames de l'île Bourbon in 1828. The process was probably intended to be more humorous than scientific, but it can still be seen as an initiatory step in linguistics. Héry also met Antoine-Louis Roussin, also born in France, who had moved to Saint-Denis for military reasons and later settled there for sentimental reasons. The chance purchase of a lithographic press in 1846 was to influence his destiny, and he would put his art at the service of collaborative projects, albums and then newspapers, in which local authors such as Héry participated. It was also through the press that Eugène Dayot (1810-1852) took up the spoken word, making his poem Le Mutilé - a terrible title, as it illustrates the multiple sequelae of the leprosy from which he had suffered since his adolescence - his inaugural cry, which already had a political impact as it advocated freedom. Dayot soon asserted his support for human rights, but his abolitionist commitment got him into such trouble that he lost the newspaper he had founded, Le Créole. His love of his homeland and his distrust of the colonists were to find their way into other columns, as the serialized novel Bourbon pittoresque was published in Le Courrier de Saint-Paul. Reaped by an early death before he could finish, his masterpiece remained unfinished.
As these precursors illustrate, the link between the island and the Hexagon goes beyond the simple rivalry that would set one province against the capital, since there is a relationship of domination of one part of the population over another. Although bloods mingled, the time was not yet ripe for the reconciliation offered by miscegenation, as Houat had dreamed, but still for discrimination, as suffered by Auguste Lacaussade (1815-1897), who was rejected by the Collège Royal because of his mixed origins. No matter, his studies in Nantes confirmed his precocious intelligence, which was to be further demonstrated by his future successes and the publications he obtained in the Revue des deux mondes and then in the Revue de Paris, highly prized by the Romantics. Crowned in 1850 with the Prix Maillé-Latour awarded by the Académie française and, twelve years later, the Prix Bordin awarded by the Institut de France, he was the acclaimed author of Les Salaziennes and Poèmes et paysages. Unfortunately, although his career was brilliant, it was overshadowed by that of Leconte de Lisle, born in 1818 in Saint-Paul, who was on his way to becoming Réunion's most famous poet. His work is protean, as he tried his hand at translations of ancient authors as well as theatrical writing, yet it was his three collections - Poèmes antiques (1852), Poèmes barbares (1862) and Poèmes tragiques (1884) - that earned him the reputation, perhaps excessive, of being the figurehead of a literary movement, that of the Parnassiens. Without calling his talent into question, let's admit that his poems did indeed appear in the three publications (from 1866 to 1876) that served as a showcase, even a manifesto, for the Parnassians, who advocated "art for art's sake", in Théophile Gautier's apt phrase. Descriptions of beauty and mythological references thus took precedence over his political aspirations. Influenced by Romantic themes, the stylist was praised by his peers, including his compatriot Léon Dierx (1838-1912), also a Parnassian. Leconte de Lisle went so far as to conquer armchair no. 14 in the Académie française in 1886, a few months after Victor Hugo's death had left it vacant, and with the blessing, he claimed, of the great man. The nineteenth century ended with this ultimate recognition, and the twentieth opened with a major coup: a Reunion novel written by four hands, but signed by a single pseudonym, won the Prix Goncourt in 1909.
Twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Two cousins born in Saint-Denis and Saint-Pierre, Georges Athénas (1877-1953), known as Marius, and Alexandre (Aimé) Merlot (1880-1958), known as Ary, disguised themselves as Marius-Ary Leblond. Their story, En France, follows in the footsteps of a young student, Claude, who leaves La Réunion to attend the Sorbonne in Paris. Their keen observation - and wit! - earned them a victory over Jean Giraudoux when the prestigious distinction was awarded. While their novel seems to have disappeared completely from bookshop shelves, there remains an essay - Écrits sur la littérature coloniale - which is still available from L'Harmattan. At the turn of the century, Reunion's literature was still influenced by the colonial empire, but no doubt thanks to the influence of the departmentalization law supported by Aimé Césaire and adopted in 1946, a turning point, and even a demand for local specificities, was asserting itself. This was so true that a literary movement was born, led first and foremost by Jean Albany (1917-1984), who gave it its name: "créolie". The man oscillated between metropolitan France and his native island, just as he oscillated between French and Creole, between writing and oral expression. His 1951 collection Zamal remains a milestone in this process, which Axel Gauvin, born in 1946, would follow in his footsteps, becoming president of the Office de la langue créole and initiating in 1996 the translation of his novel Faims d'enfance, published in 1987, under the title Bayalina. While the question of spelling has arisen - different codes have been successively adopted, Lékritir 77, KWZ and then Tangol - that of literary quality is beyond doubt, as confirmed by the creation in 2004 of the LanKRéol prize, which rewards works written in Creole. Whatever the language, this twentieth century has been a fertile one, with a new generation of authors, native to or imbued with their love of Réunion Island, contributing to this new lease of life. If we had to name just a few, the names of Jean-François Samlong, Alain Gili, Monique Agénor, Moniri M'Baé, Solen Coeffic come immediately to mind..
