Monday 22 August 2011

I find Cayenne very charming

Cayenne, 2pm, mid august. I’m leaving the appartment a colleague from Collège last year has (very generously) lent me whilst he is in mainland France over the long summer holidays.

The streets of Cayenne are empty this time of day. Cars, and scooters buzz past occasionally. I’m walking up one of the big roads to Place des Palmistes. Tradional Creole houses and more modern buildings on each side.

Recently restored two or three story creole townhouses, colorful and charming, sounds of meals being prepared slip through slatted wooden shutters. Brick and wood are painted two tones, often pastel and a darker hue for highlights. More delapidated buildings have rusted corrigated iron roofs and drooping woodwork, the building hunched; faded and dirty walls blend with swelled, rotten frames; an overwhelming dull grey-brownness that suggests a structure nearing the end of its inhabitability.
These houses have balconies which, towards the evening, will be occupied by isolated old people surveying the street below, and steps up from the street to door-windows where people will cluster to drink and talk and sit at night.

The heat is oppresive and heavy. 

The three or four story skyline of the towncentre is dwarfed by the enormity of the vividly blue sky and its cloud-mountains, white and towering at this time of year. The more modern buildings of the town are dull and utilitarian; built in some period between now and when they discovered that concrete and breezeblock were great materials for building uninspiring functional buildings. Commercial buildings and domestic appartment blocks,they vary from brilliant white to ugly, patchy, tawny colour, presumably a variable of how recently they were built and the degree of climactic prescience of the architect. The embodiment of this is the obstinately un-majestic Majestic Centre, a building that certainly does have some Features but so uninteresting that I can’t remeber anything about it except that it is a mottled grey clour, very ugly.

The pavement is cracked and uneven. When I cross a road I step down heavily, the pavement is high and gaping drains open to rush away the water during the rainy season. In August, they just smell bad. Bad smells developing quickly under tropical heat is something the municipality has catered for in offering rubbish collectins three times a week, but there’s nothing to stop the stink of Cayenne’s drains in the dry season. It's not the overwhelming impression of the town though, just a detail of which you are occasionally and unpleasantly reminded of.

The street is not uniformly filled with buildings. Often there is an empty lot.
On the road between the apartment and Palmistes one of these has the skeleton of a small house, overgrown. The rest of the lot has long grass and detritus : a corroding air-con unit; empty Heineken bottles ; inexplicably, a dis-jointed red tractor, furry with rust.
Between houses, an ally held in by a wooden door or a corrugated iron fence leads to small, overcrowded one storey buildings or to yards rammed with mango trees and drying laundry.

In (Suriname capital) Paramaribo, the collonial buildings look fresh and maintained and pavements are either uniformly flat or quaintly cobbled. In Cayenne though, there is an air of past-its-bestness, yellow grey blurry, and vivid patches of green under the intense equatiorial sun. I find Cayenne very charming.

Place des Palmiste is a large, unevenly grassed square in one of the top corners of what makes the centre of Cayenne. At one point it had some collonial role, probably to do with slaves or prisonners. It used to have shitloads of royal palm trees, now it just has quite a few. At night lots of vans come and sell sandwiches and burgers, people meet and drink and eat and play music out of their cars. There are several metal gradins, that is, scaffold seats that people watch the processions from during carnaval and the rest of the year sit in the evening in groups to talk and watch children play on the go-carts that can be rented from the go-cart man.

In the daytime, however, the scene is of a banal urban park on the border of the administrative and commercial distrincts of town : sparse pairs of people in suits carrying files, a mother with a young child, civil servants’ cars bordering all tarmac. Cayenne touches- an addict gesticulating abstractly, sat in the shade of a palm.

Tuesday 28 June 2011

Le Fleuve

"Do you know where Emily lives?"
A bunch of kids are playing football in the road. "The third house along, in that road, you can see it from here, she has a dog called Dixie.''
We drive to the other road and the kids have run across the field to meet us. Looks like no-one's in, but the kennel has Dixie written on- this is the house the kids were talking about.
"Why do you want to see Emily?" ..We're going to stay with her and her boyfriend". Confused faces from the kids "There must be two Emilies..this one is 9 years old''. So, wrong Emily...


We're in Apatou, and unfortunately I forgot to ask Emily for her address before leaving. Luckily Apatou is pretty small.
The first people we asked were hanging round a car on the Maroni. We ask a guy with a monkey on his shoulder for help "I don't speak French" he replies in English. The bonnet is open and a guy is under the car.."does your car have a problem?" "No, I'm just looking under the car."

Apatou is on the Maroni river. The population is mostly Boni- they're a Bushiningue people descended from escaped slaves in Suriname (wiki tells me) . Until recently it took 2 hours of pirogue to get to Apatou from St Laurent, the nearest town, but last year they opened a road that gets you there in half and hour or so. Apatou's roads are tiny, so are a lot of the houses - and there's still a sign on the riverbank saying 'Welcome to Apatou'. The village is surrounded by rainforest and crowded onto the bank of the wide, fast flowing river (it's still the big rainy season so lots of rivers are more wide and faster flowing than at some times of the year). On the other side, Suriname - there are a couple of shops that can be reached by boat over there and you can hear the constant drone of the orpailleur's (goldpanners) barge that's anchored where the French police can do nothing, on the Suri side. All around, just the rainforest.

People in Cayenne often talk about St Laurent, Apatou, Maripasoula, and the other towns and villages along the Maroni as ''Le Fleuve'' (the river). The vibe is very different to Cayenne. For starters, there's a different language- in Cayenne, it seems like most everyone can speak French, or a loose Guyanese Creole. On the fleuve, people are more likely to speak Sranan Tongo or English. School is in French, but school is fairly recent in Apatou.

Cayenne is a creole town, from the architechture to the language to the food- Apatou is very different. The older houses are small and wooden, with thatch roofs, and sometimes you see painted or carved motifs of Boni art. People only spoke French when they were speaking to us, otherwise it was Sranan. Someone died recently, apparently that's why there was music all night long in a carbet in the centre of the village. The river has a stream of pirogues travelling up and down transporting goods to settlements further upstream; in the early evening cars were parked along the bank so they could be washed and earlier in the day the banks were where people washed their dishes, themselves, caught fish, where kids played.

We walked around the streets followed by lots of tiny children (they were wierded out by my mohawk) and settled by the river in the evening, drawing in a cahier and just eating the scenery. The other side is relatively flat- Guyane is mostly quite hilly- and the sunset was beautiful over the forest and the river and the cloud mountains.

Sunday 19 June 2011

Hot summer tracks

My top 5 tracks.. guaranteed heatwave! Some of these are tracks that get played here; some of them are just tracks that rock.

1. Buraka Som Sistema- Hangover (Bababa). This IS the best track you'll hear all year, turn your bass up.
2. Flavour - Nwa baby
This track from Nigerian Flavour Nabania is big here in French Guiana at the moment as a faster, more bootyshake-friendly remix. Here's the original:
3. Tonymix - pwent pye
A buddy showed me this. This is Rap Kreyol- Haitian rap. banger! Pwent pye means point your foot. I don't know what point your foot means.
4. Basic One & Jeon - Wak Su Bumper
It's not clever but it does make me dance! This track gets played lots on the music channels here, it's from a Dutch Carribean island I think.
5. Wayne Smith - Under me Sleng Teng
Not new or fresh but always a track I love to hear.

Saturday 21 May 2011

Rainy Season

Christmas to easter, petit été de Mars, then back from April to June.. Rainy season is long. Weather isn't just some changing background in your week.. It can decide days.

I'm sitting on the terrace. The air is heavy, the clouds huge and gray. The cloud breaks. I hear the rain begin proper as it hits one end of the roof. TATATAAATA above my head. TATATAATAA as it runs up one end of the corrigated plastic to the other end of the house. The rain surrounds everything. You can't talk. You can't hear music. Tatatatatatattatatatattatatatatttatatata. Heavy drops. 
When I'm riding, the rain hits me with such force; like a thousand needles being thrown. Soaked in seconds, even through my coat. I carry a change of clothes under my seat. 

You can't just ignore it. I've spent hours and hours waiting for the rain to stop some days. Sometimes it only lasts minutes. It can shape your day- you make arrangements; rain hits; plans fall through. Sometimes you wait for the rain to stop, delay, resign yourself to getting wet. So soaked. To the bones. After, that fresh smell of damp tarmac and earth. The roads dry. Puddles reflect the blue sky. The clouds here are beautiful; enormous. White, grey, deep blue purple. Towering, sky montains. They move quickly; you can watch them for hours without getting bored (I always tell them how beautiful the clouds are but I think my friends are not as enthusiastic).

Mangoes and watermelons are out of season, avocadoes are in. I've moved house, the mango tree next door is growing lots of new leaves and looks gorgeous. The new shoots are tinted a kind of aubergine red colour. Grass and whatever other things grow in the ditches get big so fast and surround with deep intense dripping green. At night, cars, frogs; crickets, the boom of the bass from neighbours' parties. In the day, the school bell ringing regularly from the playground next door, reprimands as la maitresse scolds and ridicules her pupils.
Cité Mortin; my new neighbourhood; is on the fringe of Cayenne, next to a swampy area. Clouds of mosquitoes. Mosquitoes that zip so fast you can't see them, mosquitoes that bite through your jeans, mosquitoes that you have to squish twice for them to die. The first night in my room I stayed up with the lights on watching them buzz along my mosquito net. There are three cats who appear at the door everytime I unlock the house to demand food, and neighbourhood boys come round to ask us for cigarettes.


Sista Sony, guyanaise musician