Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  Each day his boatmen took us out on the river. Once we went swimming in the rapids, which was like plunging into a washing machine that’s rinsing out old trees. But most of the time we went on forays into the jungle. I always liked the idea that this was only the edge of a wilderness, and that beyond it lay 90 per cent of Suriname, barely explored. Even here creatures lived their lives largely unmolested. Some were so surprised to see us that they didn’t even move. Poison dart frogs just sat there, waxy and orange, tempting us to touch. (‘So deadly,’ said Zaahid, ‘they can only be handled with gloves’.) At one point we also came across a labaria, peering over its coils with a look of slight disgust. Everything was fabulously toxic. Even the trees had their own sophisticated weapons. One was covered in tiny brittle needles that sheared off in the skin. It took me hours to pick out all the pieces, which was, I suppose, one way of ensuring you’ll never be forgotten.

  Nature was still bidding for attention back at the camp. In the shower block there was always a tarantula up in the rafters, like a thin, hairy hand. Elsewhere things sang, copulated, stank, ate each other, whirred, preened and glowed. I shared my hut with two tiny rival frogs, who would belch at each other for hours. Then at the end of these brutal librettos they’d launch themselves into the darkness, collide softly with my mosquito net and tumble back to the floor to start all over again.

  On our last morning, the chief paddled over to say goodbye. The island is being washed away, he said. Soon we must move.

  ‘Maybe you could live in France?’

  The chief shook his head. They’d lock him up. Two weeks in jail.

  ‘Two weeks?’

  Two months if you go back again.

  ‘But that’s terrible …’

  No. It’s good food. Everyone likes the appetisers.

  ‘But where will you live, and how will you survive?’

  Most of the men had a girl across the river.

  ‘And how does that help?’ I asked.

  It’s France. If you have babies there, they give you some money.

  9

  THE LAST OF THE

  COLONIES: GUYANE

  ‘Let us make for Cayenne,’ said Cacambo, ‘we shall find some of those globe-trotting Frenchmen there, and they will be able to help us.’

  Voltaire, Candide

  Cayenne was unfit even for a dog … [and] is now a blot on Guiana and a danger to the other colonies.

  J. Rodway, Guiana

  You feel as though you are entering the kingdom of the Sleeping Princess. It’s dead country.

  Raymond Maufrais, Journey without Return

  BACK IN ALBINA I hired a pirogue to take me over the river. It was three miles across, and ahead I could make out a town and a crinkly, black sliver of forest. I could also see a haze of canoes, swarming over the water, and some tall brown studs, like columns of rust. As we got closer, I could see that they were wrecks – Victorian wrecks of steamships and barges. One of them had even sprouted palm trees, like some ludicrous hat for Carmen Miranda.

  The sight of it all still made the boatman laugh.

  ‘Une cimetière,’ he squealed, ‘pour les français!’

  This river has seen plenty of disaster but nothing so odd as the long, slow suicide of Raymond Maufrais. The probability that French Guiana would kill him was so great that he’d recorded it, in the style of a novel. Although it would shape the views of a whole generation, there was no science to Maufrais’s journey; he set out with only a back pack, a canoe, a rifle and little dog called Bobby. His travels would prove only that, in the heart of Guyane, you either miraculously survived or, more predictably, you died. It would be a thorough death, a complete disappearance. Guyane is a forest a sixth the size of France and is ploughed by hundreds of rivers, three of which are as big as anything in Europe. For readers of Maufrais the only question is: what would get you first? The loneliness, the hallucinations, or the surfeit of geography? Maufrais discovered all these things and perhaps little else. Here is his tale.

  Maufrais begins his journey here on the river, almost exactly sixty years ago. He’s only twenty-three, and there’s already something about him fatally heroic. A vicious war still haunts him, and the bombs and the Gestapo return each night. He was a boy when he got his croix de guerre, and he will often reflect on the violent currents that have brought him here, and on the fighting in Indochine. He still wears his paratrooper’s uniform and has a soldierly disregard for the frailty of life. Within months of arriving in Guyane, his boots and watch have perished, and he’s sold his best gun to pay for food.

  By September 1949 he’s on this river, known in France as the Maroni. Ahead of him lies 35,000 square miles of jungle, only delicately scattered with people. (Even now, there are only 202,000 people across the whole of Guyane.) ‘He’ll never come back,’ say les guyanais, but Maufrais shrugs them off and sets out into the bush. Within a fortnight he has no money left and only two cartons of food.

  It will be a remarkable journey on an empty stomach. Maufrais will haul his boat hundreds of miles inland and then set off on foot across the watershed, to the rivers of the east. Along the way he’ll eat iguanas and dried fish, and then lose it all in candid bouts of diarrhoea. His legs ulcerate, and he starts panting specks of blood. But even when he meets some Bonis, he refuses to turn back. ‘You’ll die …’ they tell him, but still he presses on. There will be no more people after that, and the walk will slow to a mile a day. By now Maufrais is eating raw snails, and little birds softened in gun oil. He is too weak to hold his gun steady, and most of his kit has rotted away. At night he sees the dead from Toulon, wrapped in thin white paper, and he weeps for his mother. Even Bobby is now feral with hunger, and so Maufrais kills him and sucks the meat off his bones. It does nothing for his dysentery and brings on a night of excruciating cramps.

  Despite all, however, Maufrais somehow crosses the watershed after seventeen days walking and reaches the rivers of the east. It’s still another fifty miles to the main artery heading back to the coast. He tries to build a raft, but the wood is sodden, and it just falls apart and sinks. Despite his malaria, Maufrais decides to wade down the river. He will strip down to his shorts and perhaps kill a caiman, using his knife. Before he sets out, he eats two tiny fish, and writes a message in his journal, which he leaves on the rocks. It’s a message to his parents, full of affection, and is dated ‘13 janvier 1950’. After that, he wades into the water and disappears for ever.

  A month later the diaries are found by an Amerindian, and a search begins. The rescue party discovers that somehow Maufrais had managed another thirty-five miles, but otherwise they find nothing. Only Maufrais’s father keeps hope alive. He gives up his job at the Toulon arsenal, and over the next twelve years he launches eighteen expeditions, covering over 7,500 miles of barely charted paths and rivers. It is an extraordinary gesture of paternal love, almost as forlorn as his son’s ambition. He pays for it all by publishing the diaries, just as they are.

  Aventures en Guyane horrifies France and remains in print today. For those who can still find Guyane on the globe, it confirms what Frenchmen have always felt: this land’s a white man’s grave, a green hell. L’enfer vert.

  Over in St-Laurent, however, it wasn’t notoriety that worried them but the prospect of oblivion.

  The boatman dropped me at a small metallic booth. It was like an inhabited fridge, and inside were two cold, pink officials. They were obviously French, and so were their uniforms and badges, and all their laws and rules. Even the booth had been shipped out from la métropole. By passing through it, I hadn’t just entered some scabby remnant of empire, but – politically at least – I’d tumbled down a rabbit hole and ended up in Europe. This wasn’t merely an outpost of France but one of its départements. Everyone here was therefore as French as the Gascons and Savoyards, even the Bonis. They could fight for France if they wanted, or pick up its benefits or settle in Cannes. They could even vote in its elections, and at any moment there were always two d
eputies shuttling backwards and forwards, being extravagantly Gallic. All this, of course, meant that Guyane didn’t belong here at all. Physically, it may have been South America’s smallest mainland territory, but administratively it belonged to another continent altogether, 4,000 miles to the north. In fact, it was now the largest chunk of the European Union detached from the whole.

  All down the long, hot road into town, St-Laurent proclaimed its Frenchness. Yellow triangles told the traffic what to do, and there were tight little rond-points, and boxes for dog poo. Most of the older houses were made of corrugated iron – but painted mock-Tudor as though this were Normandy, rendered in tin. Billboards depicted naked women holding yoghurts, and then there were blue vans for cops and yellow for the post. Even the public housing, or les bidonvilles, looked French, with its tubular playgrounds and cement coloured Revlon-pink. Eventually I came to the wide boulevards and fussy red-brick villas of the old colonial quarter. In here was a large sprawl of barracks, named after Marshal Joffre, and when I peered through the gates, there were the gendarmes, obstinately dressed in black.

  But Frenchness wasn’t only in the streets. It also got into all the shops and heaped itself up on the shelves. Everything was imported, every last Yop and Cola Zoulou. Guyane, I’d read, imported almost six times as much as it exported. But at least it was cool in the supermarket, and so I ambled around, lingering over the names. (Who, I wondered, had come up with Cat’s Tongues and Jellified Crocodiles?) In the end I settled for a lump of cheese, which I’d not seen for months, and which I paid for in Euros. Even the currency belonged somewhere else.

  Not everything, however, was French. I could often hear the tin yawning in the heat, and – beyond the town – the jungle, still whistling and whirring. Occasionally, huge lime-green iguanas came plodding up the street – the original Crocodiles Gélifiés perhaps. At the cemetery I noticed that many of the old colonial tombstones were now tottering, and that some had collapsed in the sand. Maybe St-Laurent’s Frenchness was like this, merely a scattering over the surface? In the weeks to come, I’d often feel that – with all its checkpoints and soldiers and bladders of fuel – Guyane was more a campaign than a settlement. I imagined that, if for a moment the importing ever faltered, the forest would rush back in and smother it within days. Perhaps that explained the exclamatory architecture and the stentorian French. It was just a fear of being forgotten.

  (Illustration credit 9.3)

  The French-American writer Albert Guerard once said that the French had colonies but no colonists, and that – even if they had colonists – they wouldn’t know how to colonise. ‘They import nothing into their overseas dominions except damaged officials,’ he wrote, ‘and they export nothing from them except the same officials, worse damaged.’

  Sixty years on, the imports might look different but there was still a torrent of officials. Almost one in every ten inhabitants of Guyane was born in metropolitan France. The Creoles call them métros, which I’ve always thought makes them sound dinky and effete, whereas actually they were part of a large army of technicians, soldiers, carpetbaggers, bigwigs, big shots and bureaucrats. Their task was to keep everything French. Sometimes, it seemed that the sole purpose of Guyane was just to be French. Ever since 1763, it’s been France’s only holding in the American New World, give or take the odd little island and a short stint in Louisiana.

  It’s now almost 400 years since France first started importing itself along this boiling, swampy coast. The results have usually been disastrous. The first wave of settlers, in 1613, unwisely picked a fight with the ‘savages’. The second wave, in 1635, went collectively mad and became savages themselves. The third wave, eight years later, looked more robust, under the swaggering Sieur de Brétigny. But then the heat got to him, and he started breaking his men on the wheel for offences such as ‘having a disturbing dream’. Eventually, however, the savages returned, and everyone died in a shower of arrows. The same fate befell the fourth wave, in 1652: 800 men cut down and eaten.

  But the most conspicuous imports of all were the settlers of 1763. There were 12,000 of them, mostly peasants who believed they were heading for a city of gold. They arrived in the wet season, and many of them would never again experience the sensation of being dry. This time dysentery devoured them. By the time the expedition pulled out, a year later, over 10,000 people were dissolved in the mire.

  Guyane would prove a hard mistress. For a long time the colony didn’t seem to produce anything except arrows and disease. It was also too far from the French Caribbean, and the trade winds were wrong. Worse, it didn’t have a natural harbour; the forest just seemed to continue into the sea. Even as late as 1947 freight from abroad was still being landed by lighter. But still France persisted, pouring in money and men. Nothing seemed to thrive. After three centuries the population was still only 25,000 souls, and all that had emerged was a new kind of pepper.

  These days even the drama was imported, as I discovered at The Star.

  The Star was a small concrete hotel with a garden full of spines. Around the walls there was a thick growth of razor wire, and at night the owner used to drive his car inside and park it by the pool. Apart from that, The Star was entirely forgettable, which may explain why the French secret service had always enjoyed it. During the Hinterland War they were often here, stirring up trouble, and back in Suriname they’d be known for years as ‘Room Sixteen’.

  Rather less forgettable were the people round the pool. In the mornings there was always an American who was here to collect scorpions, which he sold as pets in New York. Then came the Pentecostalists, the Chinese and a sage-femme, who sat in the shade telling people’s fortunes. Occasionally soldiers appeared. These weren’t like the British ones, with their displays of nakedness and drinking, but ham-faced, Velcro-headed men who made fighting look like a job. They always swam up and down very fiercely, as though wrestling the water.

  Then there were the actors. They were a troupe from Lyon, and two of them I soon got to know. Jean-Luc was a magnificent smoker, and lived his life as though it were a movie, shrugging his way from scene to scene. His friend Zi-Zi had more about her of the kitchen sink, a sort of homely doubt and a large handbag containing everything she’d need for the disasters of the day. They’d been on the road all their lives, picking up government grants. Now their art had brought them to Guyane. They were part of the huge cultural army – like the postmen and soldiers – shoring up everything French.

  ‘It must cost France a fortune.’ I once remarked.

  Jean-Luc smiled and watched his smoke tumbling lazily into the air.

  ‘Chaque année,’ he murmured, ‘un milliard de dollars.’

  And did anyone think that it was worth a billion bucks?

  ‘It’s land’, he said, ‘and it’s French. We don’t often give that up.’

  I used to enjoy my walks around town with Zi-Zi and Jean-Luc. They never made light of anything when there was a drama to be had. Often we walked along the riverbank to the old Chinese landing, the Dégrad Chinois. Jean-Luc loved everything here: the shudder of drums, the maroons with their long knives, and the huge grey sea-monsters quivering away the last of their lives. In all that space and sound he was convinced something big was about to happen, and he was often almost right. Once we heard a sound like a meteorite coming in to land, and a huge object came crashing through the reeds and buried itself in the sand. It had black, lifeless windows, but the bodywork was still babbling away in electronic squeaks. I half-expected aliens to emerge, but all that got out were four little boys, none of them older than twelve.

  Another time a very old Chinese woman stepped out of the grass.

  ‘Cigarette, monsieur,’ she said to Jean-Luc, touching his sleeve.

  He rolled her a thick white finger of tobacco and gave her a light.

  ‘Tu me rappeles quelqu’un,’ she said tenderly. You remind me of someone.

  For a moment Jean-Luc was lost for lines, but she’d already vanished, back in the
grass. Perhaps his life really was a film, at least in Guyane.

  Zi-Zi was less happy. Being black herself, she’d expected to feel more at home among the Creoles, and yet she found herself more foreign. People were suspicious of her Frenchness, and her cold, improbable accent. It also pained her to find here the same sense of alienation as that back in Lyon. Wasn’t this supposed to be a land of black people? ‘NON A L’ECOLE POUBELLE!’ read the graffiti, ‘FUK POLICE!’ I could tell it upset Zi-Zi. It often feels, she said, as though slavery’s only just ended.

  In Guyane the end of slavery was famously untidy. Some say it was like the end of another experiment. There’d been a settler phase, an African era and even a sampling of Chinese. (‘White, black, yellow …’ as one wag put it.) But none of this had transformed the landscape. You only need to click on a satellite picture to see that there are no rectangles, no neat little oblongs of sugar. Even the coastal strip is still the bog it was when the French arrived. Slavery had added nothing except a tiny population, and a way of life that’s never been replaced.

  Looking back, emancipation ought to have been a glorious affair. The slaves were first liberated during the French Revolution, in the giddy, free days of the Terror. But then, as the economy collapsed, they were re-enslaved for another half a century. Eventually, however, in 1848, slavery was finally abolished, and within days the plantations of Cayenne had reverted to weeds. A new idea was needed.