«The Honest Folk of
Guadeloupe » by Timothy WILLIAMS
I had never before heard of Timothy
WILLIAMS, crime novelist, but before reading his latest publication, I learnt from
Wikipedia that he is a dual British/French citizen, presently teaching English
language at one the main high schools in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe. Still being
for some weeks yet, before my imminent retirement, the Deputy Head of Mission
at the French Embassy in Castries, and working every day with the various
political realities of the neighboring Caribbean States and of our Overseas
Territories, I obviously enjoyed, from the very first page (even if English is
not my mother tongue), the crime novel titled “The Honest Folk of Guadeloupe “, which relates a
variety of crimes on the island through the eyes of a white French Algerian (a
‘Pied Noir’ - the family left Oran in 1958) investigative magistrate (juge
d’instruction), Mrs. Anne Marie LAVEAUD, serving on the island for about 10
years (and divorced, with two kids, from a local French national). The story takes
place in May 1990 (during the end of the tenure of President Francois
MITTERRAND), some months after the terrible Hurricane Hugo had destroyed a lot
of the infrastructure of the island and after some incidences of social unrest,
including riots.
The
structure of the book is based on 82 short chapters of 3 or more pages, easy to
read, and always using a title that is the key-word of the chapter: chair,
incense, wife, harassment, cane juice, car grease, breadfruit, les Messieurs de
la Martinique, etc…
On almost
every page, the reader can find French words or expressions: palais de justice,
madame le juge, lycee, gendarmerie, SRPJ, France Antilles, procureur, préfet, octroi
de mer, Negropolitain, etc… sometimes with a minor mistake in the spelling, such
as “une vieille macrelle” (page 117).
The plot of
the novel surrounds the day-to-day, step-by-step inquiry of the investigative
magistrate, regarding firstly the uncertain suicide of a high-profile
environmental activist and media personality (with a “womanizer” reputation but
ultimately genuinely homosexual), and secondly the discovery of the naked body
of a young, pretty white woman lying on a beach near Tarare, the nudist beach
of the island (“Mere Nature”). The descriptions of the secondary characters are
particularly successful, like those of the registrar (the clerk TROUSSEAU): a
citizen of India, fanatically Catholic (“The illustrated Bible lay beside the newspaper”),
with a moustache, married, but separated, and presently living with a white
woman in Paris, a breadfruit lover with a pig farm at Trois Rivières in the
south of the island; and the “gendarme” LAFITTE, rum lover, heavy smoker (with
tarred fingers), always grumpy.
Throughout the book, one discovers evidence of very accurate instances
of life in Guadeloupe, always with an extraordinarily well-perceived political
background:
-
One
still gets the feeling of a “colonial back-water” in Guadeloupe;
-
The
ongoing rivalry between the two sister islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe is
perfectly described and identified: “Martinique
likes to look down on Guadeloupe: “The Gentlemen of Martinique, the honest folk
of Guadeloupe. They considered us as peasants”, a part of this sentence,
you will note ( at page 152), giving
the title of the book;
-
The
recurrent immigration problem: “Too many
Dominicans and too many Haitians, due to the highest standard of living in
the Caribbean”(page 175);
-
The
origin of the names of the people after
the liberation of slavery: SIOBUD
comes from DUBOIS - it’s the same name but spelt backwards! Indeed, the telephone directory is full of
such examples.
-
“
Superiority of the white race, must manifest even in our family names” ;
-
“black
girls give pleasure but light-skinned girls give status” (page 213);
-
“When
Victor Schoelcher set the black race free, names had to be found for people
who’d been little more than beasts of burden” (page 182);
-
“Pointe-à-Pitre’s
full of typical mulattos, Guadeloupe is full of typical mulattos” (page 183);
-
The
dependence on the mainland : “Guadeloupe
can’t do without the help of mainland France” (after hurricane Hugo), page
185;
-
The
strength of cultural habits: “In this department,
schoolteachers strike children all the time. It is like cockfighting –
totally illegal elsewhere in
France”, page 186;
-
Local
cuisine: “pork tails with breadfruit” or local beauties: “negress rump”, “steatopygous women”, “a
woman needs a man just as a whore needs a pimp!”;
-
High
wages of the French civil servants : “ The islands are rich with all these
civil servants and their fat salaries” (page 202);
-
Difficulties
regarding attractiveness of tourism: “Prices are our number one obstacle in the
tourist industry. We can get the tourists from Europe or North America because
the airfares are cheap but, where we lose out is on the high cost of living.
Everything here’s some fifty percent
over the French price”;
-
The
origins: “ We are descended from the Ashanti in Africa”(page 213);
-
The
prisoners: “Six per cent of prisoners in high security are schizophrenics”
(page 234).
I could continue the list with a lot more
interesting remarks, always very well observed by the author, obviously a keen resident
of Guadeloupe, but suffice it to say it was really a great pleasure for me to
read this book in English in a very few days because I was so captivated by it.
There is no doubt that I shall move on to reading Williams’ previous book, “Another
Sun” and most probably - in English - as I await his next novel.
Gérard BILLET
Deputy Head of
Mission
French Embassy
Castries Saint – Lucia, West Indies
February 2015
