10 June 2018

Restricted Access. Some reflections.

Tourism is often presented as a means of galvanising a community through economic development and, where tangible heritage is concerned, preservation and conservation initiatives. But tourism can also be divisive and maintain existing social inequalities. Tourism posited as heritage – natural, cultural, tangible, intangible, whatever… can often only be accessed by the elite, wealthy visitor with the time and money to do so.

I have been thinking a lot about these things following my third visit to the Îles du Salut last Sunday. Perhaps this attests to a three visit rule. The first visit I was simply excited to finally visit a space, or multiple spaces, that have been so heavily mythologized in the cultural and popular history of the penal colony. But there was not enough time especially on Île Saint Joseph and I left with the sense of having missed a lot of stuff. On the second trip I redressed that in part but I also learned more about the difficulties of managing penal heritage at sites like Île Royale and the futility and meaninglessness of seeking an exhaustive experience of the space. On the third trip almost a year since I made the last visit, the weather was less conducive to extensive exploration of the space. But things on Île Royale had also changed again. The chapel, which had been covered in scaffolding the year before, was now open again. The small museum housed in the restored Director’s House was also open where it was closed on my previous visit. These changes made the visit worthwhile from a documentary perspective but the main conclusions I have drawn concern the major limitations of a site like the Îles du Salut for both a critical engagement with the ruins of a former penal system and, at the same time, for sustained community engagement with the space. I also wonder the extent to which this might apply to other island sites once housing prisons that have since been turned into luxury resorts for wealthy tourists from elsewhere? Is this something that can be challenged?

Prison as island or island as prison perpetuates the idea of prison as an exceptional space which has little interaction with the everyday spaces occupied and traversed by the rest of society. If exile and abandonment is the overriding ideology of such spaces, there is also an obfuscation of the infrastructures and economies which link such spaces (even when located at a remove) to the mainland. To what extent does visiting a former prison island allow us to bracket out the idea of imprisonment as something exceptional and, especially in the case of the Îles du Salut, extreme rather than routine, banal, ubiquitous?

Access to the Îles du Salut is mainly by catamaran. There are two main tour operators that go there on a daily basis. The return trip is around €50. However, it is also possible to charter an entire boat for the day which costs about €1500. On previous visits I have observed school groups who have done overnight trips to Île Royale. There is an auberge at the top of Île Royale where it is possible to get a room. There are also spaces where you can hang hammocks although camping is prohibited on the island. On my first and third trips, the tour group was almost exclusively white and there were only a couple of children. Half of the thirty visitors on the first trip were a group of young men aged between 25 and 35 and possibly stationed at the army base in Kourou. There was a different ethnic mix of visitors on the second trip which I took in early July 2017 and a couple of families on board the catamaran had children and small babies. All this really shows is that the demographic can vary significantly from trip to trip. However, speaking to people based in both Cayenne and Saint Laurent du Maroni, I have got the impression that the islands are a site visited exceptionally rather than regularly or even annually especially for people living in Saint Laurent.

Large cruise ships no longer visit the islands. There is no access to Île du Diable due to the condition of the coastline. There is a helicopter landing pad on Île Royale but I have not come across private helicopter tours presently operating. This therefore seems to be primarily for CNES activities. The Centre National des Études Spatiales took over jurisdiction of the islands in the 1960s when the original kineotheodolite telescope was installed (replaced in 1995 by a cinetelescope). It is from Île Royale that the CSG (Centre Spatial Guyanais) rocket launches which occur roughly once a month are watched and recorded. As the rockets pass directly over the islands, they are evacuated for launches.

There is no longer a jetty on Île Saint Joseph. This means access is either by dinghy or swimming from the catamaran. Not all tour operators will take you there and my overall impression is that access especially to Saint Joseph will become increasingly limited in future, reserved for the military barracks and the CNES operations based there. SF