French Guiana. Patrick Chamoiseau

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      TRANSLATED BY MATT REECK

      WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

      Middletown, Connecticut

      Wesleyan University Press

      Middletown CT 06459

       www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

      English translation © 2020 by Matt Reeck

      Preface © 2020 by Charles Forsdick

      Originally published in French as Guyane: Traces mémoires du bagne © 1994 Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites.

      Photographs © 1994 Rodolphe Hammadi.

      Printed in the United States of America

      All rights reserved

      Designed by Richard Hendel

      Typeset in Quadraat by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Chamoiseau, Patrick, author. | Hammadi, Rodolphe, 1958– photographer. | Reeck, Matt, translator.

      Title: French Guiana : memory traces of the penal colony / Patrick Chamoiseau ; photographs by Rodolphe Hammadi ; translated by Matt Reeck.

      Other titles: Guyane. English

      Description: Middletown : Wesleyan University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A translation of the collaborative work Guyane: Traces-mémoires du bagne, by the Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau and the German-Algerian photographer Rodolphe Hammadi”— Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019053818 (print) | LCCN 2019053819 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819579300 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780819579317 (ebook)

      Subjects: LCSH: Prisons—French Guiana—History. | Prisons—French Guiana—History—Pictorial works.

      Classification: LCC HV9615.7 .C4813 2020 (print) | LCC HV9615.7 (ebook) | DDC 365/.9882—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053818

      LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053819

      5 4 3 2 1

      Maps: Carte de la Guyane française indiquant les établissements pénitentiaires, 1Fi50, used with permission of the Archives territoriales de Guyane; Îles du Salut, 14DFC 1054B, used with permission of the Archives nationales d’outre-mer.

      Contents

      FOREWORD Charles Forsdick / xi

      TRANSLATOR’S NOTE Matt Reeck / xix

       FRENCH GUIANA

      MEMORY TRACES OF THE PENAL COLONY / 1

       Patrick Chamoiseau

      PHOTOGRAPHS / 31

       Rodolphe Hammadi

       Salvation’s Islands

      Foreword

      CHARLES FORSDICK

      The absence of memorialization of the bagne is one of the most striking examples of postcolonial amnesia in the French-speaking world. Omitted—like most other locations relating to colonial expansionism—from Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory project (the seven volumes of which appeared between 1984 and 1992), the penal colony epitomizes the ways in which memories of colonial empire have been filtered, distorted, singularized, and often repressed. The bagne constituted nevertheless a carceral archipelago, a network of sites scattered across France itself (where prisons in the port cities of Brest, La Rochelle, and Toulon were complemented by penal colonies for young offenders), North Africa (location of the infamous “Biribi” or military prisons and forced labour camps), and elsewhere in the colonial empire (most notably French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam).¹

      French Guiana had served as the destination for political dissidents during the French Revolution, but it was in 1854 that Napoleon III signed a decree relating to forced labour that turned the South American colony into a formal penitential destination for civil transportees from France and the wider French colonial empire.² (They would as a result of legislation in 1885 be joined also by recidivists, prisoners guilty of repeated petty crimes.) The logic and function of the penal colony were clear: on the one hand, it permitted the location far from France or other colonies of those considered politically and socially undesirable; on the other, it provided the workforce for the СКАЧАТЬ