ABSTRACT
The tourist areas of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni and the Îles du Salut in French Guiana are, at the same time, places of paradise-like beauty, and historically, the penal colony’s key sites of incarceration. Visitors to contemporary Guiana are seduced by these beautiful locations, and by the violent past of the country’s history built on the confinement of prisoners from mainland France and its colonies. For the local population of Guiana, contemporary interest in the country’s heritage forces a confrontation with the area’s history of punishment as well as slavery. For many, this historical perspective poses the possibility of reducing the country’s historical identity and narrative to one of oppression and confinement. However, at the same time, it is impossible to forget this past. This reduction turns out to be ubiquitous: it is amazingly prolific in so far as stories of escaped prisoners and their adventures continually appear in literature and foreign depictions of the country. This chapter examines how it is that part of the national history can be denied by local populations through abandoning their historical sites and obscuring their collective memory, while it is valued so much in literature and the arts, whose epic stories and exoticist imaginings of this place themselves sublimate reality by conjuring up archetypes of human adventure with stories of suffering, escape, revocation and rehabilitation.
