A very young literature
The 16th century had barely begun when Vasco de Gama discovered the Seychelles, which he named Amirantes. Mentioned again by the English sailor John Jourdan in 1609, it wasn't until the mid-18th century that the islands were colonized, first by pirates and then by the French, who gave them their definitive name, a tribute to Jean Moreau de Séchelles, comptroller of finance in the service of Louis XV. Ceded to the British in 1814 following Napoleon's defeats, the Seychelles did not become independent until 1976.
The Seychelles were therefore a very young state, and their literature was still in its infancy. It is discovered through the idioms in use: English, mainly for administrative purposes, French for communication (press), but above all Seychellois Creole, intrinsically linked to local culture and one of the three official languages since 1981. It was invented by the slaves of African origin who worked on the plantations. It is essentially inspired by French, but borrows vocabulary from other origins, favoring phonetic transcriptions and metaphors, such as the mous dymiel for bee.
While the rules remain more or less the same - no articles, no genders, no plurals and three tenses of conjugation past/present/future - there are several distinct levels of language, with the "fine Creole" of the bourgeois class making less use of anglicisms than the "gros Creole" of the working classes.
Celebrated since 1985 at the annual Kreol festival organized by the eponymous Lenstiti in Anse aux Pins (Mahé Island), this dialect was the subject of L'Esquisse d'une grammaire-textes-vocabulaire written in 1977 by Annegret Bollée, who went on to publish an Etymological Dictionary of French Creoles, the first volume of which was devoted to the Indian Ocean. This eminent German professor also took an interest in local tales and legends, in which we are amused to find a whole bestiary in which certain species, such as tigers and elephants, are clearly not endemic.
In fact, it was animals that inspired the first known written work, as Rodolphine Young transcribed a Creole version of La Fontaine's famous Fables in the early 20th century. This indefinably charming translation, for example, opens Le Loup et l'Agneau with these three lines: " Dans temps l'autrefois, ein p'tit mouton ti après boir di l'eau au bord la rivière / Ein gros Loulou y sòrti dans bois / Y vine boir, li aussi. Lé dents loulou ti fine rouyé à force la faim ", making the Anse Boileau schoolteacher the archipelago's first female writer. She is also said to have written a Creole catechism, but this has not yet been found.
Attachment to local culture
If Rodolphine Young is considered the mother of Creole literature, her male counterpart - even if we could mention the poet Daniel Varigault Valenfort, born in April 1886 to a mixed Reunionese and Seychellois couple - remains unquestionably Antoine Abel (1934-2004).
Although he was born into a family of modest origins and began his career in masonry work, he was awarded a scholarship to study in Switzerland, later flying to England. On his return to the archipelago, he in turn became a schoolteacher, and later took up the post of higher education teacher. The first collection he published in 1969, Paille en queue (Straw in Tail), nicknamed after the phaeton bird, recalls his youth and memories. But the author is a jack-of-all-trades, and in addition to the three national languages he uses without distinction, he also enjoys writing plays(Restan kamira) and essays on pharmacopoeia, trying his hand at the complex art of the comic strip script(Tizan, Zann ek loulou) or the demanding art of the short story, which coincides so well with his sober yet concise pen.
His works appeared in magazines in the 1970s, before being published in Paris at the end of those years(Coco Sec, Une tortue se rappelle!, Contes et poèmes des Seychelles). In 1979, he received the Prix des Mascareignes, a distinction awarded by the Association des écrivains de langue française from 1965 to 1998, but declining health forced him to slow down his literary output in the 1990s.
In a welcome turn of events, an award now bears Antoine Abel's name and is presented at random during the Kreol festival to works of all styles written in Seychellois Creole; another distinction evokes that of Rodolphine Young. Production in the country's heart language is encouraged, albeit timidly, no doubt also to combat the English language, which has dominated education since 1970.
Schoolchildren have access to English- and French-language books, but reading or writing in Creole safeguards their own culture from too many foreign influences. The Alliance française, which they can join, encourages them to do so, and since 1988, the Lenstiti Kreol has been a publishing house, fulfilling the expectations of authors who previously had no choice but to resort to the costly process of self-publishing, and publishing works aimed at young people in particular. In 1993, a National Arts Council was created: working in conjunction with the National Library, its priority mission was to facilitate this production, for example through training courses.
From 2008 to 2018, adults had the pleasure of being able to consult the literary magazine Sipay, which for ten years offered up-and-coming poets a salutary space of freedom that can still be visited online. This digital approach is similar to that taken by poet Magie Faure-Vidot, born in 1958 in Mahé, who in 2012 co-founded an electronic magazine, Vents d'alizés, as well as an online publishing house, Edisyion Losean Endyen. Last but not least, because Seychelles has an oral tradition of literature, and all the children still look forward to the wakes that begin with " Alors en zour...", theater has carved out a place for itself, especially through playwright Christian Servina, who devotes himself entirely to it.
