Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  For a while the party would fizzle on. The night would throb away, the lights would crackle and the rain would guzzle down the streets. It was always more a sensation than a spectacle. Cayenne could be fabulously flashy one moment, but then it would all vanish at the touch. This, I suppose, was partly because there was never much there to start with. The city was trying to have a superpower party with the population of a tiny country town. Often I’d rush out in the hope of a carnival, only to find the square all quiet, Le Roi des Frites packing up his stall, and the chair-o-planes whirring emptily overhead.

  But what bothered me was not that there wasn’t a party but that it was going on somewhere else. Everyone seemed to have spectacular hangovers, and yet I was never there when they got them. Few of the restaurants ever seemed to open, and even when they did the waiters looked as though they’d been up all night, and the service was dreamy and languid. Obviously Cayenne was not a town for outsiders. The real action seemed to happen deep inside or well out of sight. I noticed that it was supposed to be an island, but whenever I went in search of the sea, all I ever found was mangrove and pungent, sticky swamp. Maybe this made it even more of an island, a world of its own.

  As to what people were celebrating, I never really discovered. Half the town didn’t have a job, and les métros ran everything from the sewers to the police. They also owned all the bars, cut the grass, made the water taste like swimming pools and built all the roundabouts. Apart from roundabouts, old Cayenne hadn’t seen much new building for 200 years, and with its wooden quartiers and chunks of fort it looked much the same now as it did back then. Among the twelve ‘monuments’ listed by the tourist office there was a roundabout, three squares, a fountain and a fruit market. Since the abolition of slavery little, it seemed, had happened. (Cayenne had never had the convicts, like St-Laurent, or the spacemen, like Kourou.) Perhaps that in itself was a reason to party.

  The festivities were continually starting and stopping. But it was the gaps in between that were always so surprising. In the heat and silence of the day les cayennais could be crapulously strange. No one would bat an eyelid at the sight of voodoo charms, straining spandex or unauthorised body parts breaking cover. I remember once seeing a man taking a bath in the old marble fountain outside the préfecture. He was enviably oblivious to the world around and had even brought a piece of soap and a towel. Another time, I came across a girl high up on the ruins of Vauban’s fort. She was about sixteen, white, freckly, creepy and conspicuously pregnant. ‘J’adore Cayenne,’ she said. ‘Je me sens une femme’ (I love Cayenne. It makes me feel like a woman). Perhaps strangest of all was the Musée Départemental, which was like a collection of all the weirdest moments in Cayenne’s past. Among the exhibits were a crucifixion scene etched on a skull, a mutant palm tree with buttocks, some bottled toads, and the plaster cast of a condemned man’s foot, made under torture.

  At this odd feast there were plenty of skeletons, and as an outsider I often seemed to find myself among them. Usually, they just hung around the square. Most were drunks, whites and blacks, levelled by undiscriminating drink. But others were Guyanese who, with no claim on the largesse of Paris, were candidly wasting away. The Cayennais had a way of looking through them (‘Never give them anything,’ I was told, ‘they don’t forget a face’), but it was not a skill that I ever came to terms with, and so whenever I crossed Les Palmistes I had an escort of skeletons and waifs. Of all the people I met, it was they that troubled me most, because everyone wanted them gone. ‘I’m hungry,’ one of them told me, ‘but I’m never gonna steal.’

  A few blocks away was a whole quarter of rejects and outlaws. It was called La Crique or ‘Chicago’, and sat on a narrow, muddy river that led off into the bush. Originally this was where the Indochinese settled at the end of their sentence. In the water I could see fish like ghosts, with huge white eyeballs and thin, translucent bones. Just as I was wondering how these little wisps of gristle survived, I felt some one touch my sleeve. ‘You don’t want to be round here,’ said a voice.

  It was one of the fishermen, an Indo-Guyanese.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  His head wobbled. ‘There’s a lot of bad people here …’

  ‘Bad people?’

  ‘This where the drugs come in. Not even the police is here.’

  I thanked him again and picked my way back through the shacks.

  By now I was used to the idea of being uninvited. It was therefore even more of a surprise when someone tried to put me on parade. It was the old seamstress next to my hotel. She was also Guyanese, and on my last day I’d wandered into her workshop to see the costumes in progress. She immediately decided I was just what the carnival needed and started measuring me up for a ballgown and wig. ‘Oh my God, man, you gonna be perfect. I gonna make a Touloulou!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her, ‘my journey’s come to an end …’

  ‘Stay longer!’

  ‘I’d like to,’ I said, unsure if I meant it, ‘but I have to go home.’

  I think she was genuinely disappointed to see her plans fall apart, and so in a way was I. Since then, I’ve often wondered how I’d have fared as a carnival queen. A few days later I watched the parade on television. The first dancers to enter the Place des Palmistes were tossing a young woman high in the air. As they passed the grandstand, they seemed to forget about the girl, and she tumbled through their outstretched arms and landed flat on her face.

  Guyane’s most recent settlers are probably the most exotic of all. The new colonists had set out from here in September 1977, travelling by truck. They had a hard journey ahead, fifty miles into the hills. Les guyanais already hated them. When they’d heard they were coming to Guyane, they were out on the streets, shouting ‘Méo dehors! Métro déro!’ (Barbarians out! Down with the French!) They feared they’d be swamped and that their world would turn yellow. That’s why the new arrivals were travelling at night, protected by the army.

  They are curious people to encounter on this journey. They’ve been fugitives most of their existence. Nobody knows where they originally came from. Some say Mongolia, others Tibet or even Lapland. But it was in China that they were first called Miao, or ‘The Barbarians’. They appalled the Chinese, living in the mountains, sacrificing dogs and practising magic. For 2,000 years they were ignored and, left to themselves, they became the producers of opium. But then in the nineteenth century they fell foul of the Manchu dynasty, and thousands of them were forced to flee again, scattering south. They took with them their silver ingots and their neck-rings, and headed for Laos. There they settled in mountains even more remote than before and became known as the Hmong.

  The newcomers of 1977 weren’t the first Hmong in Guyane. They’d always been enthusiastic guerrillas, tormenting the French. In the Lao highlands they’d made the best knives and crossbows and home-made guns, and they even looked like an army in their black pyjamas and coloured bands. Their greatest uprising was in 1919 and was known as La Guerre des Fous, the War of the Mad. Many of them ended up in prison hulks to Guyane, and then on the road to the hills. These days nothing remains of the old pénitencier up there except a ring of stones. But in 1977 France decided on a new scheme. By a strange coincidence it also involved the Hmong, and so, once again, they were back on the road.

  ‘How do I get up there?’ I asked.

  No one knew. ‘Pas de bus. Pas de train. Rien.’

  In the end I departed from principle and hired a car. I’ve always hated cars, and this one was no exception. I’d rather meanly hired the smallest one I could, and it was like riding along on a sewing machine. I was also convinced that it didn’t have enough windows or that they were all in the wrong place. Everywhere I looked there were blind spots, all of which seemed suddenly to fill up with crows and tractors and trucks of legionnaires.

  Fortunately the traffic soon fell away, and in the slot up front a beautiful landscape began to take shape. It reminded me of a book I’d had as a child, a lavish edition
of Robinson Crusoe. There were well-feathered forests and tempting blue peaks, and clearings quilted with buttery yellows and strawberry pinks. Then I left the main road and began thrumming uphill. The way ahead now had all the makings of a mountain, and I don’t think the foresters had ever seen such a small car clambering over the ruts. But eventually I reached a ridge, and there – on the other side – was a pretty Lao hill station, known as Cacao.

  It so happened I’d been in Laos the year before. This was hard on the internal compass, tumbling over a hill and ending up back on the opposite side of the world. I recognised the black pyjamas, the big farms on stilts and, of course, the Hmong themselves, sturdy and squat. Most of the farmers had the same knobbly home-made guns, and rolled-down boots as protection from snakes. There were three stores, and they each stocked incense and rice steamers, and all the essentials of life in Laos. There was also a market that sold tapestries of either great battles or B-52s trickling bombs on people’s heads. Cacao even had an old cutler, grinding out knives in steel and bronze.

  But it wasn’t all Laos. The opium days were over, and so were the wandering farms. I asked one of the farmers what he hunted. ‘Tatous et tapirs,’ he said, slightly bemused. Armadillos and tapirs.

  The settlement was also keenly Roman Catholic. Few people worried any more about Nplooj Lwg, the divine frog, or the poisonous caterpillars of Otherworld. The day after I arrived I went to listen to morning Mass. The farmers arrived in their best embroidered shirts, and the old ladies, after climbing the hill, hawked up the dust and spat in the bushes. Then there were psalms in Hmong, and a rich arpeggio of notes floated off over the forest. The priest didn’t understand the prayers but had an altar boy that did.

  ‘Sib Hawm Teev Ntuj,’ chanted the boy. Our Lady of Peace.

  ‘As les lus yas!’ replied the farmers. Alleluia!

  I stayed at the town’s inn, the Lotus d’Asie. It was popular with the farmers after work. They always tipped a little beer into the dirt, to propitiate the spirits. I had a room in a lean-to at the back, furnished with a car seat and some hooks for my hammock. The owner of the inn was called Madame Maysy Siong. She once showed me her mother’s dowry, a hoard of ingots and neck-rings. Her parents had spent much of their life on the run, she told me, and wherever they went they always buried the silver at night.

  René, her husband, was a hunter and had a crossbow he’d made himself. Soon after I arrived, he appeared with three huge fish and a small bak, or porcupine. As a child, he’d been brought up in refugee camps and could still remember his English. He said that people didn’t often talk about those experiences any more, but – over the next few days – this is the tale that emerged.

  I was born in lowland Laos in 1965. Our village didn’t have a name. We grew hill rice, and when the soil was spent, we moved somewhere else. But my parents were Catholics and fought for the French. They called us the montagnards, the mountaineers. I was too young to remember how the war began. But most of our men joined the fight, against the Pathet Lao. We had a general called Vang Pao, who wore a hat like a cowboy. My father said we also helped the Americans, picking up their pilots and doing hit-and-run. You say it was called ‘The Secret War’? It didn’t feel very secret to us. Our camp at Long Cheng was the second-biggest settlement in Laos, and the only city the Hmong have ever had …

  But then, when I was ten, we had to leave. The communists had won, and they started to hunt us down. We had to escape through the forest, walking for weeks. I’ll never forget that. There were a lot of landmines, and many people were killed. It’s a terrible sight, a person killed by a mine. Eventually, however, we got to the Mekong and crossed into Thailand. We then spent two years in the camp at Ban Vinai. That was my childhood really. It was a long time before they found us somewhere to live. Obviously we could never go back to Laos. General Vang Pao went to America, and a lot of us went with him. I don’t know how many, maybe a quarter of a million? Others went to places we’d never heard of, like Iceland and Bangladesh. But then, one day, some French missionaries turned up and said they’d found us a home. We were taken to aeroplanes and flew to Paris, and then on to Cayenne. I’d never been on a plane before, and have never been on one since.

  I’ve always loved Cacao. I suppose, with the jungle and the red soil, it reminds me a little bit of Laos. (What’s Laos like now? I heard they’re very poor.) We had to do a lot of work here, to make it what it is. By the end of our first year we’d built over a hundred houses, and had started to plant the fields. People even said Vang Pao should buy the whole country and make it a homeland for the Hmong. But there have never been many of us. Altogether about 2,000 came. We still make up only 2 per cent of the population. Still, we work hard. Almost all the fruit and vegetables in Guyane are grown by the Hmong.

  Sure, we had a bit of help from the French whites, the fabkis dawb. We never knew how much the blacks disliked us. They called us ‘le péril jaune’, and thought we were Chinese (who weren’t popular in 1977). They still don’t trust us, les guyanais. Personally, I don’t really understand it. They refuse to cultivate their own land, and have never fought for France. We lost 400,000 people fighting the communists …

  I don’t know whether there’ll always be Hmong up here. It’s not easy: the land here’s too steep for machines. It’s a constant battle with the jungle and the fire-ants. Even the children work one day a week. And now there are robbers, out in the forest. My parents found it tough – too tough – and left. They now live in France, near Rennes. Maybe others will leave. They can afford to now. Perhaps we’ll all go, and that will be the end of the Hmong in Guyane? We’ve always moved around. Our homeland is our money.

  My last few hundred miles of Guyane felt like a long goodbye.

  The people I travelled with were terrified of the forest ahead. I’d got rid of the car and found a minibus leaving from Cayenne. Most of the other passengers were heading for Brazil. There were three garimpeiros with their girls, and an Amerindian travelling with an enormous bale of Huggies. Had she already had her babies, I wondered, or was she planning on half-a-dozen? One of the miners had snakeskin shoes and a brand new jacket, with a label still on the cuff. His girlfriend was already hating this journey before it had even begun, and whenever the junkies came near, she hopped about like a little bird at the approach of a cat.

  She asked me if I was going all the way to St-Georges.

  I told her I was.

  Good, she said. Then we can all go together.

  But the journey was never as gruesome as she’d feared. The most serious threat was from the music, great shattering waves of brega that exploded from the speakers. The long ride through the forest did, however, bring something else to mind. It was like an affirmation of all that had happened, or perhaps a parting shot. The superlatives necessary to express the density of forest simply don’t exist. The roadside was like night-time, packed with spikes and armour. As for the canopy, it looked equally defiant, a thick phalanx of huge brain-like structures, riding at anchor. I’d lost count of the schemes and colonies that had foundered under this magnificent vegetable onslaught. It’s been a long farewell, lasting hundreds of years. Across the Guianas not a single railway or canal or cattle trail still functioned, and only one fort. Countless airstrips had come and gone, and thousands of plantations had vanished for ever. The sheer difficulty of living on this coast meant there were now as many ‘Guianians’ living abroad as there were here. And that’s only the coast. Inland there were thousands of square miles that had hardly been touched at all.

  During the construction of this road, in 1994, French ecologists protested that this was the beginning of the end. They said that the last primary Atlantic forest would be destroyed, with the loss of 450,000 trees. This time les guyanais reacted with anger. They said that, since slavery, France had never invested in Guyane, and that in 400 years it had laid only 260 miles of paved road. The ecologists were like slavers themselves and their science was rotten. The new road would absorb less th
an 0.001 per cent of the forest. The only endangered species were the Guyanese themselves. ‘We think we’re old enough to make our decisions,’ said one politician, and the road went ahead.

  It was an incongruous sight, a European road in the South American forest. It had metal barriers and neat little signs, all made in France. Occasionally we passed through road blocks set up by the gendarmes, or saw troops of soldiers training on the verge. Then, near St-Georges, we found something else: the roadsides cluttered with burned-out cars.

  ‘Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?’ I asked.

  But no one knew. The Brazilians seemed to think that the wreckage was more normal than the road. Maybe it was the Amerindians, said the bird-girl. This didn’t sound very likely, but at that moment the idea was pleasingly symmetrical: the Wild Coast, still as wild as ever.

  I was sorry to be leaving. During these few months in the Guianas life had become thrillingly arrhythmic. I was never able to look ahead or guess what was coming. Each time I emerged from the darkness, everything around me was different. Perhaps the soil had turned scarlet, or the language had changed, or a new race had appeared. It was always remarkable, and often chaotically beautiful. I don’t suppose that I shall ever see such dramatic rivers again, whether they’re gnashing with fury, or sliding along like a land in the mirror. I also love the idea that much of this world isn’t even known to those that live here, and that its creatures – mad, gaudy, toxic and exotic – are safer here than anywhere else on the planet. Other places may feel more magnificent than the Guianas, or perhaps even emptier, but nowhere feels quite so unconquered.