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The Camp de la Transportation in Saint Laurent du Maroni has over several decades been transformed into a form of cultural centre which not only engages with the history of the bagne and its role in the development of the town but also repurposes former camp buildings so that these now host multiple community and creative activities including a theatre, fab lab, media centre and the municipal library (as well as CIAP whose work is dedicated to the history and memorial of the Camp itself), named after the last living bagnard in Saint Laurent, Icek Baron.

In recent years, the Camp has offered artist residencies which conclude with a temporary exhibition housed in a building which runs alongside the Quartier de reclusion, the prison within a prison where convicts awaited trial (usually for failed escape attempts) in front of the Tribunal Maritime Spécial (TMS). The exhibition building houses the camp’s bell tower and while it can be accessed from outside the Quartier de reclusion, its windows give views directly onto the rows of cells that used to confine both rélégués and libérés. As such it is a kind of liminal space within the camp.

In its current incarnation as creative space, it exhibits work that is inspired by different aspects of French Guiana’s culture, history and geography beyond its role as penal colony. Previous exhibitions have included Léa Magnien’s Cartes postales de la Guyane and Au Royaume des Toulouous by Laure Chartefou and Anne Guillou. The current exhibition, Résister, vivre by Casimir Bationo (CasziB) has been timed to coincide with events commemorating the abolition of slavery in French Guiana. As a town, Saint Laurent did not exist prior to the arrival of the penal administration in the 1860s and thus did not bear witness to the slave plantations that predated the penal colony. This has led some to question the appropriateness of commemorating slavery at a site not directly implicated in the use of slave labour. At the same time there is also a danger in conflating two distinct historical moments in French Guiana especially via the all too easy misrepresentation of objects such as shackles at memorial sites. However, it is also important to emphasize the continuity between slave and convict labour and the persistence of racist ideologies that informed the evolution and ultimately closure of the bagne.

In Résister, vivre, CasziB shows us a disjointed and problematic history in which the fragments of the past are overlaid, in order to explore the nature of identity.  The exhibition comprises of paintings on canvas and fabric hung around the once walls of the prison camp, showing a broad range of colour and abstract faces – all somewhat sombre and liberated at the same time. The artist uses this patchwork colour style seemingly to understand the nature of human experience and how identity is not a linear progression of events, rather the overlaid colour seems to suggest a village of identity amalgamated in the individual to make them who they have become.

This bold technique functions excellently in the space, as not only does the dominant narrative of the bagne involve a fragmented and collective combination of different stories and histories (Papillion being the most renowned example), but there also a confusion on a global stage of the difference in time and history between slavery and the penal colony; this exhibition then plays with this melange of the past so it is not just a story of individual identity, but moreover the identity of French Guiana.

Another striking aspect of the collection is that many of the works are named after woman, femme 1 and so on. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, using the title femme to denote a patchwork image seems to not create a single identity, but rather pull it apart in order to tell a wider story of women within the history of slavery. If it is indeed an unmapping of a singular female identity onto the canvas then the artist risks undermining rather than showcasing the multitude of untold stories. On the other hand, it seems somewhat poignant to create a fragmented identity in order to piece together a female female narrative, often absent, from these periods. It is also interesting to bring the figure of the woman into the space of the Camp de la Transportation and, similar to the previous exhibition on the Touloulous, this move enacts a deliberate form of dislocation with the historically male space of the camp that challenges the idea of which stories get to be told and retold and in which spaces.

As the artist himself states in the exhibition catalogue:

‘La série de toiles exposées à l’occasion de cette commemoration dénonce l’innomable, des deportations en nombre mais aussi cette “force collective” permettant d’accéder à la liberté. Des visages singuliers viennent ponctuer cette exposition. Derrière cette foule d’individus déportés et réduits à l’esclavage, il y avait des hommes, des femmes, des enfants aux histoires et destins uniques.’

RS and SF

Between 10-14 June 2019 Sophie and I (Ayshka) travelled to the Île de Ré (et environs) to visit sites where former convicts were held before deportation to the French colonies. The island is popular with French tourists and retirees profiting from the peaceful surroundings, we saw a number of couples exploring the island en velo during our visit. In conversation with one of the local museum’s curators, we learned that many visitors are unaware of the island’s penal heritage and are even more surprised to learn that Île de Ré’s links with the penal system are not only historic, since the site also houses a large Maison Centrale for inmates completing lengthy sentences (see Sophie’s recent blog post for more information about this modern day prison).

First stop on our itinerary was the Musée Nationale de la Marine in Rochefort. We were keen to see how the history of the bagnard was represented in this museum space, since Rochefort had functioned as a prison for just under a century, between 1767 and 1854, closing when overseas penal colonies were established. The town’s naval history was the primary focus of the museum and the ‘vie du bagnard’ did not feature heavily. There were a couple of information boards focusing on the daily life of the convict, accompanied by a small number of artefacts on display. Including the bell photographed below.

The connection between the bagnard and the town’s naval history was not explicit in the museum and the target audience seemed to be maritime enthusiasts keen to see model ships, the fairly extensive collection of figureheads, and the vessels moored outside. Reviews on Tripadvisor reinforce that the ships are the main attraction (‘It’s on boats!’ and ‘Boatiful’), as well as the bar/restaurant on the top deck of the final navire. Human narratives and life histories from former bagnards were absent and it was difficult to get a sense of what their prison experiences had been.

The lack of life history narratives from bagnards was also evident in our visit to the Île d’Aix the following day. Although the island is popular with tourists for day trips from the mainland, the population is only around 230 and there are no cars permitted. The island’s connection with Napoleon is celebrated – he famously spent his last days in France on the island in 1815, following his defeat at Waterloo – and the former commander’s house, commissioned by Napoleon and pictured above, is now a museum.

Fort Liédot, a semi-buried fortification on the north of the island, which was commissioned by Napoleon, houses a second museum promising to introduce the visitor to the soldiers and prisoners who were stationed and incarcerated there. The Fort held Communards in 1871 and various prisoners during the First World War and Algerian War. There was little evidence of prisoner’s narratives in the museum – there were no photographs, letters, or diary entries relating to those held there. As shown in the image below, the museum’s primary focus seemed to be on the island’s connection to Fort Boyard (both the gameshow and the edifice).

Life history narratives (letters, diaries, photographs) have proved particularly useful in under-documented areas of history, as the narratives ‘suggest hypotheses, provide personal details, reveal local colour, facilitate insights and preserve individuality’ (Kedward 1993:vii). They have also been mobilised effectively in the museum space. Including life history research in museums foregrounds unique life stories and provides personal examples of the broader political and cultural histories which are being documented. The absence of personal narratives in the museums in Rochefort and Fort Liédot meant that the visitor did not get a sense of life as a bagnard in either location. Instead, the dominant narrative in Rochefort focused on maritime vessels, human histories were largely absent, and in Fort Liédot, visitors were invited to discover ‘Les Mystères du Fort Boyard’ with tv screens showing the famous gameshow. The inclusion of some personal narratives from former convicts might be one way of broadening the memory narratives which are promoted at these historical sites to include the under-documented area of the penalscape in mainland France.

Bibliography
https://www.rochefort-ocean.com/en/explore/fort-liedot-in-aix-island
https://www.ohs.org.uk/information-for/museums/
https://criminocorpus.hypotheses.org/7388
http://en.musee-marine.fr/rochefort

Return to Guyane, March 2019

There are many objectives and narratives that recur in different prison museums and exhibitions all over the world. Notably these include objects like shackles and chains and other forms of restraint. Visitors are often invited to handle a chain or shackle (as is the case on the tour of the Camp de la Transportation) to get a sense of its weight. Other features of museum tours can include emphasis on the specific use of solitary confinement within a specific regime or institution. This is often intended to challenge common assumptions that individual cells constitute the default mode of imprisonment rather than being deployed as an extra form of punishment and segregation.

Another less documented example of prison life, are the narratives around food and nutrition within the prison or penal colony. Frequently, the diet of prisoners is recounted as evidence of poor conditions and, in cases where prisoners are expected to fund their stay, examples of the way in which class hierarchies persist within the space of the prison. Elsewhere, such as Abashiri prison museum in Hokkaido, Japan, mealtimes are reconstructed with the use of mannequins as a means of showing how prisoners ate together and were treated humanely. A similar approach is found, somewhat incongruously at the Jing-Mei human rights memorial in Taipei located on the site of the prison used during the white terror. On a tour of the recently closed HMP Dana Prison in Shrewsbury, the former guard turned tour guide told us how inmates were given an extensive choice of meals intended to cater to all religious and dietary needs. However, meal choices had to be made two weeks in advance. Freedom of choice is mapped back onto the disciplinary constraints of the prison timetable.

On this return visit to French Guiana, I started to attend more closely to the different narratives presented around convict diet as well as the origins of the food they were provided with. Much of the scholarship already published on the A.P. draws on archival material in order to demonstrate budget allocated on food and the problems of shipping large quantities of meat and other produce from France due to the absence of sustainable food production in French Guiana. Cited alongside A.P. archives are the convict narratives which highlight the gap between what each convict was officially allocated and what he or she actually received. Those sent to work in forest camps such as Charvein and required the highest calorific intake often had least access to the food distribution systems which saw suppliers, prison officials and convicts placed in administrative roles skimming at every level.

How might the museum or former sites related to the penal colony explore the question of what has recently come to be termed ‘food security’ not simply in terms of the daily rations of convicts but in terms of the penal colony and its camps as a model of unsustainable consumption and unequal distribution? How might such questions be mapped onto contemporary questions about sustainable food production and the unsustainable models of today’s prisons?

This seems a difficult task for various reasons. It is easier and perhaps more appealing to many visitors to be presented with rusting shackles and torture instruments which seem to bear little resemblance to today’s penal technologies (although this is not always true). Lists of rations often appear in prison museum displays but I wonder how useful such lists are. I find it hard to imagine what 800g of bread looks like. Moreover, where plastic, replica food is part of Japanese restaurant displays and thus does not seem particularly out of place in a prison museum like Abashiri, elsewhere museum displays favour authentic objects rather than replicas or reconstructions.

Bagne des Annamites, Montsinery

At the Bagne des Annamites site near Montsinery, about 40 minutes’ drive from Cayenne, a series of panels tell the story of the camp which was established in 1931. Very little remains of the original site (see earlier blog post) but the numerous toilets highlight the emphasis on hygiene in comparison to earlier sites. The panels offer a high level of detail yet do so in a way that is unobtrusive, acknowledging the different users of the site include those taking the path to the picnic site at Crique Anguille who might not necessarily want to be confronted with the dark heritage of the penal colony in their walk through the forest.

The panels reproduce a mixture of official documents, images, correspondence and maps. I cite their presentation of convict rations as well as the farming undertaken on-site as examples of how official documents are used to provide insight into the daily experience of convicts living and working in the camp, but which might require more work to produce a meaningful appreciation of what such rationing looked like in reality. Did the convicts receive what they were supposed to? Who controlled distribution? How was the calorific intake offset against the energy required in their daily tasks? Was food grown used to supplement rations or was it sold for profit? It is difficult to explore all these questions at a site like this, but I wonder if the state of ruination can actually create a useful setting in which to explore the gaps between official documentation and lived realities…

Musée du Bagne. Camp de la Transportation, Saint Laurent du Maroni

The extensive grounds of the former Camp de la Transportation in Saint Laurent du Maroni has been gradually turned into a multipurpose site with different buildings used for various cultural activities only some of which are related to the history of the penal colony and Saint Laurent, more generally. A small building which once comprised the former kitchen together with the anthropometric room and chapel has been converted into a small museum. The large central room which formed the kitchen is dedicated to various themes related to life in the camp and its surrounds. Elsewhere I have suggested that former kitchens, store rooms or bakeries are often repurposed as museums. This is perhaps due to the longevity of their structures, but they also appear as neutral rather than macabre and so are reused and maintained for other purposes before becoming heritage sites. However, if we consider questions of food security and sustainability, we might challenge the idea of a prison/camp kitchen as neutral but rather the site where the slow violence (to adopt Rob Nixon’s expression) of malnutrition versus the quick violence of corporal punishment is meted out.

On the wall by the chimney, the following statement appears:

‘Nourrir près de 1500 condamnés n’est pas une mince affaire et la cuisine est un lieu essentiel de la vie quotidienne. Les rations sont notoirement insuffisantes. Les vols, les détournements et la mauvaise qualité des aliments aggravent la situation de malnutrition, surtout pour les condamnés qui n’ont ni argent ni influence.’

[Feeding almost 1500 convicts was no simple matter and the kitchen was an essential location in the everyday life of the camp. The rations were notoriously insufficient. Theft, reappropriation and poor quality of foodstuffs exacerbated malnutrition especially for those convicts with neither money nor influence.]

 As I have become increasingly interested in the impact of the penal colony on a territory and, following Miranda Spieler’s excellent study Empire and Underworld (2012), the ways in which such an impact often takes the form of an absence rather than presence of traces, I have also started to think about the penal colony as an ecology. This is an ecology that is toxic on various levels. The penal colony in French Guiana is often described in early critiques as a form of ‘gangrene’ or rot. Such a metaphor contests the utopian vision of the penal colony as creating opportunities for regeneration and growth both in terms of the spiritual rehabilitation of convicts being transported and the development of land taken over by the penal administration with the aim of producing sustainable agriculture.

In thinking about the penal colony as unsustainable in terms of being able to support itself economically and, more specifically, in terms of food production, this tends to be posited as a failure. Not least because self-sufficiency based on the earlier Australian model was the rationale for establishing a penal colony in the first place. But to what extent might we consider its failure as part of the penal colony’s success? And to what extent is the narrative of unsustainability just one version of the story of the penal colony? Pascale Cornuel provides some interesting reflection on the farming projects which took place in the early 19^th century at Mana, a short distance from the most brutal forest camps including Charvein. A further example is Îlet la Mère located a short boat ride (about 13km) from the Dégrad de Cannes. After operating as one of the first sites for political deportees, the island was evacuated between 1867 and 1875 due to an outbreak of yellow fever. However, in 1923, former convict, Edmond Duez, and his wife rented the island and turned it into a prison farm with a certain degree of success. On his death, his wife returned to France and the island was abandoned once more until the 1980s when the Institut Pasteur used the site for breeding spider monkeys used in the study of malaria (and possibly also yellow fever).

Today French Guiana is still dependent on food imports from France. A bag of salad flown over from France is priced at 8 euros. Despite departmentalisation in 1946 which coincided with the closure of the bagne, France continues to perceive French Guiana in terms of a colony to be plundered for its rich mineral resources. This lack of sustainability, it seems, is one of the enduring legacies of the bagne. SF

References

Calmot, André, ‘Le Pénitencier de l’îlet la Mère (1852-1875)’, Revue Guyanaise d’histoire et de géographie 11 (Oct-Nov-Dec 1979), pp.38-52.

Cornuel, Pascale, ‘Guyane française: du “paradis” à l’enfer du bagne’,  in Le Livre noir du colonialisme. XIXe-XXIe siècle: de l’extermination à la repentance. Edited by Marc Ferro (Robert Laffont: Paris, 2003), pp.208-219.

Dedebant, Christèle and Frémaux, Céline, Le Bagne des Annamites: Montsinéry-Tonnégrande (Guyane: L’inventaire, 2012).

Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Spieler, Miranda Frances, Empire and Underworld: Captivity in French Guiana (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

At the disused well in the Camp de la Transportation in St Laurent du Maroni, I made two cyanotypes using plants I had just picked from the vegetation protruding from the well. I was interested in the plants as potential symbols – of the lives of the bagnards who had previously existed here. These cyanotypes are made using Sunography paper, the most readily available commercial light sensitive papers that I’ve found. This technique was borrowed, or serendipitous, just as was the idea to collect plants in the first place – Sophie had had some light sensitive paper that she had meant to pack for the trip but forgotten, and so asked me to see if I could get hold of some. As it turned out, I really got into using the papers and so it ended up becoming my ‘thing’. I’d bought a packet of paper to take to French Guiana, which contained six sheets, and so it felt appropriate to do the same in New Caledonia and create six images there as well. This was partly due to price considerations – we hadn’t allocated this in the budget, and personal money was tight. This chosen ‘scarcity’ of the material ended up making me so much more careful and deliberate in my choices about making the pictures, in contrast to how I was taking digital photographs where my attitude was to document as much as possible. Thinking back on it with this in mind makes it seem almost wanton to have made two cyanotypes in the one location – but if I recall, this was the last day in St Laurent and I had been holding back, wanting them to be good.

I rinsed the papers under running water at the Camp’s toilets, and wanted to document them straight away in case the image faded away, as it had done the first time in the forest.
Obviously these images show no real details of the plants, and would be useless for plant identification. But perhaps that makes them slightly more suggestive of the metaphorical senses of haziness, not seeing clearly, imagining, that I am hoping to get at in relation to depicting the bagnards? This is completely indirect, setting up in my mind the idea that the weeds and incidental vegetation at our chosen sites can be made to stand for the lives of real people imprisoned in the penal colony; then picking those plants and so killing them; then turning their dying matter into the subject of a photograph; then treating that photograph as itself a precious totem of the bagne; as well as pressing the dead plant matter between papers and later scanning it to become a digital image file.

I am also interested in the reverse of the cyanotypes, and the enigmatic shapes that were produced here. This followed from having noticed a number of maps in the archive which showed a technique of painting in watercolour (‘aquarelle’) on the reverse of the map sheet in order to produce a gentler shading effect on the front. An example here is a plan of St Laurent showing the vivid colours, which make a composition of abstract shapes that still possess the appearance of a map, to my mind. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that this painting is unintended, since of course it has been made deliberately, but it’s not intended to be presented for viewing. There is also an interesting implication that we, as the viewer, are now looking ‘upwards’ at the underside of the town, which is brighter and more vibrant than the ‘correct’ viewing position using the cartographic view from nowhere looking down from ‘above’. CR

30 July 2018

In contrast to the foreboding Cathédrale Saint Joseph in the centre of Nouméa which closely resembles Notre Dame in Paris, the little church, Sacre-Cœur, in Païta is another example of a building project overseen by the Administration Pénitentiaire during the 1880s. It is a light and airy, welcoming building. Most striking perhaps are the stain windows which seem to embody an art deco style. Composed of fragmented coloured glass arranged mosaic style they perhaps also embody a discourse of rehabilitation occurring through the collective work of a series of broken lives. This may of course be reading too much into the design but the contrast with Saint Joseph forces a comparison. This also seems much more DIY perhaps partly due to problems with costs and other delays to the original completion of the building.

Today the church sits on the edge of the neat little town centre just behind the school. Opposite there are small memorials to both world wars. Although there is no signage recounting the history of the church either inside or out, a guide to the ‘traces du passé’ published in 1991 indicates that the font was carved by a bagnard using a single block of marble.

The construction of churches along with their decoration often suggests a neat synthesis between religious instruction and creative labour, together producing rehabilitative, redemptive effect on the bagnard. This is the story told about Bagnard Huguet who painted the murals in the church at Iracoubo in French Guiana. Francis Lagrange’s murals on Ile Royale which despite multiple attempts at restoration and preservation have not stood the test of time and climate, seem to offer in their present ruined form a riposte to this narrative. Lagrange’s own autobiography is far from a tale of rehabilitation but rather one of ongoing opportunism.

Moreover there is a certain irony that the main remnant of the administration pénitentiaire in Païta is its church. According to the curate of Païta, in 1892 the town represented an outpost of Noumea that attracted the worst forms of depravity and criminal activity. The account refers to ‘scandaleuses orgies‘ and ‘professions inavouables’ but leaves the reader to speculate on what these might consist of. What it does indicate is the way in which the penal colony extended across the territory but in ways that were irregular and complicated. The exil of the libérés from the centre of Nouméa also reminds us of the horrors of the doublage system as it produced above all a subclass of individuals who were no longer supported by the A.P. The opportunities for employment or the receipt of a concession were the exceptions that worked to simultaneously affirm both the potential of the bagne as successful form of colonial development and the myth of the irredeemable criminal (the fort tête) unable to seize the opportunity to improve his conditions of existence, demonstrating a disloyalty to France in his failure to contribute towards the building of its Empire.

Exploring further at presqu’ile Ducos yesterday, a large peninsula just to the north of Noumea, which used to be completely given over to the penal colony (as far as I can gather). We visited initially guided by Emmannuelle of ATP (Association Temoignages du Passe), and saw the conserved prison block at l’anse Undu (‘anse’ means bay or cove), the cimetière des gardiens (prison guards) at Numbo, and viewed the former location of Louise Michel’s hut from a vantage point up on the road, looking down towards what is now known to Google maps as ‘Entrepôt Petrolier et Gaz Total’, a large industrial site spanning the width of the presqu’ile at this point, rendering Koumourou, the tip of the peninsula, inaccessible to the public.

Returning to Ducos, I wanted to take a little more time and work out how the maps I’ve seen of the penal colony here ‘play out’ in the places as they are today. I used a map from the ‘Encyclopedie de la Nouvelle-Caledonie’, volume 9 ‘Sur les traces du passe’ by Marcel Petron and Philippe Godard:

I began at anse l’undu, on the southern side of the peninsula, where we had been guided previously to see the prison building, which is still standing and has been restored with a new roof. It doesn’t have any contextual signage and I was glad to have been shown it first, as it’s within a small community area that has entrance gates (open) and I wouldn’t have read it as somewhere one was allowed to go into if I’d been exploring on my own.

This is what remains of no.40 on the encyclopedie map, clearly showing a much more extensive set of buildings as part of the penal colony.

This is a map of Ducos made in 1885 by the Service Topographique:

Part 5. A guided tour with Daniel

28 June 2018

When reconstruction gets it right after all…

During this visit to Saint Laurent we have had the chance to spend a few days working at the Centre d’Interprétation d’Architecture et du Patrimoine (CIAP) located at the Camp de la Transportation and benefit from the expert support of the Centre’s archivist and conservatrice, Lydie Joanny, who has patiently sought out documents, maps, videos and objects linked to our enquiries. The archives are located in Case 3 which was the former bibliothèque during the Camp’s operation.

During one conversation about some renovation work done to the Quartier de la réclusion, I showed her a photo I’d taken of a plan of the quartier that was made in 1940 and now housedat the Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer in Aix-en-Provence. The plan (itself most likely traced from much earlier versions) was drawn up due to proposals for the construction of a new interior wall.

Looking at the plan, Lydie remarked that the rélégués and libérés sections were indeed together. They are marked as such on the walls in the camp but everyone, guides and historians included, has assumed this was inaccurate and the painting which was part of a reconstruction done in the 1990s for the film L’Affaire Seznec (1992) is generally explained as a misrepresentation of how the quartier was divided up. The plan, particularly because it was made in the final phase of the penal administration, suggests a different story.

Narrating the bagne

On discovering this, Lydie called on Daniel Mark, CIAP’s expert guide who takes a lot of school groups around. Where the tour guides employed by the tourist office veer towards a performance of the bagne and celebrate the more well-known and, indeed, sensationalist elements of the Camp’s history, Daniel is charged with inspiring a younger, often more local, group of visitors to learn more about the history as well as to challenge their assumptions and prejudices as to who ended up in the bagne and why.

To reward (or perhaps punish) us for messing up the longstanding narrative around the misrepresentation of the rélégués/libérés cells, Daniel took us on a very comprehensive tour of the Camp. He took us through the museum, the exhibition spaces and finally the quartier de réclusion. This was amazing as it allowed the opportunity to ask quite obscure questions about tiny details related to both the camp and its presentation. He explained to us how his own tours had evolved through a more comprehensive understanding of the Camp and its architecture. For example, there is a concrete circle towards the back of the Camp which has been thought to have been a second site for placing the guillotine. The guides from the tourist office often develop a long narrative around the guillotine and so continue it here with everybody gathered round. Daniel suggested that it was more likely to have been a well that has been filled in.

There is a door at the far end of the Quartier de réclusion which has led to a revised understanding about who was houses in the cases in the main area of the camp. It was previously thought no 3rd class convicts slept in the camp as they were all located out in the forest camps along the Maroni. But the door suggests easy communication between the two parts of the camp which would most likely have been used to punish and isolate difficult and badly behaved 3rd class convicts in the solitary cells in the quartier de réclusion.

History as rupture

He also showed us interesting aspects of the camps ruination. One side of the camp has deteriorated faster than the other. Although they are almost mirror images, perhaps one side had its foundations reinforced. There are also large cracks down the buildings located in the middle of the quartier. Daniel pointed these out and suggested that if there was an earthquake the camp might split clean in two. SF