The 19th century, the beginnings
As a general rule, each country can boast of having a founding work of literature with which is associated, quite logically, a writer. However, in Guyana, the 19th century was marked by two notable but distinct events: on the one hand, the birth of a future author who left his native soil at a very young age, and on the other hand, the publication of a text, under a pseudonym, which revolutionized the worldwide perception of the Creole language. Thomas Appoline was born in 1812 in Cayenne and died in Algiers in 1884 under another name, Ismaÿl Urbain. This change of identity is undoubtedly one of the keys to understanding the complex personality of a man whose mother was a freedwoman of mixed race and whose father, a merchant, only agreed to give him his first name as a patronymic, a man who joined the Saint-Simonians with whom he left for the Orient, and then who decided to embrace Islam at the age of 23. A translator and interpreter of Arabic, he was listened to by the powerful when he settled in Algeria in 1845. Urbain was above all a humanist essayist who used his pen to promote his anti-colonialist ideas, notably in L'Algérie pour les Algériens in 1861 and in L'Algérie française: indigènes et immigrants nine years later. If posterity has retained his commitment in the absence of his poetry, the novel that appeared in 1885 is above all literary, but not only. This emblematic work is also marked by a certain mystery, since behind the name on the cover, Alfred Parépo, officially born in Cayenne in 1841 and deceased in the same city in 1887, is hidden, according to the hypotheses still in force today, either Alfred de Saint-Quentin, who also published Introduction à l'histoire de Cayenne followed by a collection of tales, fables and songs in 1872, or Félix Athénodor Météran, a writer for the Navy, goldsmith and politician. But in the end, who cares, Atipa had a particularity that earned it its reputation, well beyond the identity of its author, it was indeed the first novel written in Creole, as such it was promulgated as a representative work of humanity by UNESCO. It is true that Atipa will only be truly acclaimed one hundred years later thanks to Auguste Horth who will quote it in Le patois guyanais which he will publish in 1949, nevertheless it is impossible to deny its impact or not to recognize its political force at a time when equality between the different populations that inhabited Guyana was still a utopia, especially since this story is a fine and droll criticism of a society in full post-colonial transition The nineteenth century, decidedly fertile, finally witnesses a birth whose circumstances already have the appearance of a legend. It is said that René Maran gave his first cry on the boat that took his parents from French Guiana to Martinique, and his birth was registered in Fort-de-France in November 1887. A first journey for a man who will know a thousand others, which makes him particularly elusive and certainly did not contribute to ensure his posthumous posterity, he who was the first black to receive the Goncourt Prize in 1921 for Batouala whose action took place in an African village.
The 20th century, the confirmation
In Guyana, the 20th century salutes the work of two men who will have a notable influence, the first is Constantin Verderosa, born in 1889 in Cayenne of an Alsatian father and an Italian mother, who will write a dozen plays in Creole, the second is René Jadfard (1899-1947), a hyperactive jack-of-all-trades, who will sublimate his country in Nuits de cachiri after having tried his hand at detective stories in Drôle d'assassin. But it is above all his political acolyte who took a new step in literature, although history has unfortunately forgotten him a little. Léon-Gontran Damas (1912-1978) was indeed, as Aimé Césaire pointed out in his posthumous homage, "a poet of Négritude, undoubtedly the first of them.
Under this term is designated the current by which the black peoples will claim their own cultural identity and will assert themselves against the forced assimilation generated by slavery and colonialism. A struggle that Léon-Gontran Damas led as a poet - his collections Pigments (Présence africaine editions) and Black-Label remain essential - and that Bertène Juminer (1927-2003) pursued as a novelist with a pithy title, Les Bâtards (1961). In this semi-autobiographical account, he evokes his own experience as a doctor trained in France to denounce the persistence of the relationship of domination between the colonists and the colonized in the Paris of the 1930s.
The question, difficult and political, will remain at the heart of the work of many writers, like Serge Patient (1934-2021), professor and activist, who in Le Nègre du gouverneur will stage the imbalances of the colonial order, or the metropolitan André Paradis, born in 1939 near Paris, who will invest for independence and will be inspired by his host country to write the collection of short stories Marronnages in 1998 or the novel Des hommes libres (2005, Ibis rouge editions) in which a Parisian discovers himself a slave ancestor.
It is this story that will awaken in Lyne-Marie Stanley the desire to write. Born in 1944 in Cayenne, she published her first novel in her fifties, in which she focused on three generations of women from the same family. La Saison des abattis then became a pretext for highlighting the delicate issue of skin color with all its consequences. Her work as an author, also for Ibis Rouge, continued in 2001 with Mélodie pour l'orchidée, an evocation of the cultural effervescence of the 1970s, and in 2006 with Abel... which revives the terrible prison. Her husband, Élie Stephenson, chose poetry and theater to explore the vein opened by Damas , continuing to carry the famous "resin torch". Finally, politics is also invited to one of the most famous contemporary Guyanese since it is in its official functions that the metropolitan have first discovered Christiane Taubira, but it - after publishing essays and an autobiographical story, Nuit d'épine - is now a novelist as confirmed by Gran Balan published in 2020.
