French Guiana
Memory Traces of the Penal Colony
French Guiana, showing penitentiary establishments
French Guiana
Memory Traces of the Penal Colony
PATRICK CHAMOISEAU
Photographs by
RODOLPHE HAMMADI
TRANSLATED BY MATT REECK
WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Middletown, Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown CT 06459
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
MEMORY TRACES OF THE PENAL COLONY / 1
Patrick Chamoiseau
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 colonization of a country that had proved (and would continue to prove) stubbornly resistant to imperial expansionism and settlement. The conditions were harsh, for convicts, warders, and colonial administrators alike, even on the supposedly more salubrious Salvation’s Islands where the impact of tropical diseases was reduced. Prisoners were moreover subject to a regime of doublage, meaning that convicts sentenced to less than eight years of hard labour were obliged to remain in French Guiana for a period equal to their original sentence whilst those sent for more than eight years were exiled for life.
The mortality rate was such that, from 1864, French metropolitan convicts were diverted to the newly established penal colony of New Caledonia. The bagne in the Pacific operated for little more than sixty years, with transportation to there ended in 1897 after only three decades. The penal colony in French Guiana continued to function throughout this time, receiving convicts from elsewhere in the French colonial empire. With the closure of the penal establishments in Melanesia,