Guadeloupe - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 7

is a childish and primitive language, but it is a language, not merely pidgin-French, or petit-nègre , and
it has been almost static in its present form for two hundred years. It is spoken in all the French An-
tillean possessions; Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Barthélémy and French Guiana, though for some reason,
the Negroes of the French half of St. Martin speak English; and in most of the British Windward isles,
Dominica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent, that were formerly French colonies. The Créole spoken in Haiti is
almost the same, and in Mauritius, too, it has developed and solidified on similar lines, and it is even
spoken, I believe, in the tiny French island of La Réunion in the Indian Ocean; the easternmost point of
that peculiar journey on which Baudelaire was packed off as a young man, pour lui changer les idées .
It is an excellent language for the Negro songs of the Antilles, and is said to be a good medium for hu-
mour and epigram. Its sound is, above all, comic, a succession of heavy labial noises, nasal inflections
and loud quacks. I found that its difficulty gave it a sort of tantalizing charm—I always thought I would
understand what I heard, and scarcely ever did. It is, at any rate, full of life, and twenty times preferable
to what Coleridge's nephew, in his Six Months in the West Indies, calls the 'yawny-drawly way' in which
the Negroes in the British West Indies converse.
Even the Créoles themselves have been influenced by one strange characteristic of this slaves' lingua
franca: the complete omission of the letter 'R'. It is replaced by a W-sound, and is the same curious
distortion as that affected by pre-1914 English 'Nuts' in Punch jokes ('I say, Wonny old Fwuit, this is
a wegular wamp,' etc.), and goes one step farther than the mere omission of an 'R' as affected by the
Incroyables— 'C'est incoyable, ma paole d'honneu' —in the Paris of the Directoire. But here it is quite
involuntary. Many of Raoul's words and turns of phrase had a charming antique flavour, and his French
was notable for the almost total lack of the mildest contemporary slang, as though the language in these
remote islands had remained immovably lodged in its eighteenth-century mould. His colloquialisms were
all old-fashioned, and the 'R-W' substitution lent his conversation a singular, faintly macaronic distinc-
tion. The Créole pronunciation, he told us, had long been a source of amusement in France. ' Quand un de
nous autwes Cwéoles se met a pawler a Pâwis, c'est la wigolade généwâle.' I wondered if the Empress
Josephine, who was a kind of remote great-aunt of Raoul's, carried this quaint mannerism to France with
her other Antillean foibles. [1]
Raoul asked us endless questions about Paris, while we were busy questioning him about the islands.
We had all three been in Paris recently and told him all that we knew. I do not know why we were so sur-
prised to learn that, although he had travelled as far as New York to buy machinery for a sugar plantation,
he had never visited France. He was on the point of going to school in Paris when he was thirteen, but the
outbreak of war had held him in the islands, and since the liberation work had kept him a prisoner. (He
was manager of a sugar estate in the east of Guadeloupe.) Paris had to be postponed until the next year.
We sat talking until everybody in the hotel was asleep, and made plans to stay with him for a day and
a night as the prelude to a series of excursions. He drove away in a jeep at about midnight through the
downpour and slush of a particularly awful monsoon, and left us with the feeling that our stay in Guade-
loupe had taken a turn for the better.
Like the population and the language, the costume of the women of the French Antilles is a fusion of
Africa and France—in this case eighteenth-century France—and it is, without qualification, magnificent.
A multiplicity of underskirts and of lace petticoats of various colours is surmounted by an overskirt— La
gwan' wobe —of silk or satin or brocade. This is caught up at the waist on one side, or sometimes on both,
in a voluminous salient of pleats that derives with the utmost legitimacy from the panniers of Boucher