Guadeloupe - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 6

silences and the rain falling outside were the stage properties of a Somerset Maugham scene that was all
set for tragedy. Something ought to have happened. Nothing did.
Returning next evening from a beach at Gosier, a few miles outside the town, Costa and I must already
have developed a kind of immunity to the gloom of sunsets. The day had been wonderful. The only pos-
sessors of the little bay, we swam for hours under the overhanging trees, and then lay smoking and talk-
ing until it was almost dark. The water had been as warm and as smooth as silk, and the only Negro we
had passed as we were walking back had waved and shouted bonsoir in a friendly way. Returning to the
Hôtel des Antilles, we found, waiting for us with Joan in the lantern light, a friend who was to prove our
benefactor throughout our stay in Guadeloupe. We had sent off our only letter of introduction as soon as
we landed, and the results had been almost instantaneous.
Raoul was twenty-one, and belonged to a Martinican family that has been established in the Antilles
for centuries, part of that tiny white minority which formerly owned the sugar plantations and were the
undisputed oligarchs of the island—the Créoles.
I must explain exactly what this term means, as it is one that will recur continually throughout the
topic. It derives from the Spanish word criollo , and applies, in the French Antilles, to a European born
in the West Indies of pure white descent. In the time of the slave trade, the term nègre-créole was in use
to describe a Negro born in the islands, as opposed to a nouveau-nègre fresh from the African forests;
but with the suppression of this traffic, the term became superfluous and has disappeared. The opposite
of a Créole—a Frenchman from France—is un Français de la métropole. For the past hundred years,
the white families have tended to leave the islands and settle, after their long absence, in Metropolitan
France, so that the remainder of this Créole squirearchy becomes every day a more compact and isolated
body.
'Créole,' when not applied to human beings, means anything (irrespective of colour) that is specific-
ally West Indian, like the cooking and, above all, the extraordinary language of the Negroes: the Créole
patois. During the early days of the colony, Raoul explained to us over dinner, the slave ships unloaded
blacks in the Antilles who had been bought or kidnapped all along the western seaboard of Africa in the
territories of a score of different native kingdoms, so that the majority of them were unable to commu-
nicate with each other; except, in time, by learning some of the language of their masters. But they only
learnt the nouns and the verbs, which they maimed out of recognition and cemented into phrases with an
ad hoc African syntax. Many of the French words they use— bailler, for instance, instead of donner, and
now by Créole adoption ba '—have become obsolete in French, and the tenses are differentiated not by
the verb endings, but by placing the three words té, ka and ké —indicating, respectively, past, present and
future—between the unchanging verb and its subject. Nouns that begin with vowels very often preserve,
even in the singular, the S-sound they would have when elided after les. A pin, in Créole, is une zépingle.
The complication of these mutilations, and the amazing order of the words, are too intricate to discuss
without launching into a whole thesis. Je vous crois in Créole is Moin ka coué ou , and Donnez-moi mon
épingle would be Ba' moin zépingle à moin. The vowels lose all their Gallic crispness, especially the
letter 'A' which is always pronounced as though it were roofed by a circumflex, and moin for moi in-
dicates the essentially nasal quality of the language. If the reader repeats the two phrases I have written,
in as deep a voice as he can, but through the nose, and opens his mouth as wide as possible, it will give
him some idea of the sounds that would ring in his ears all day long in the Créole-speaking islands of
the Caribbean. With the passing of time, one or two English and Spanish words have been absorbed. It