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Literary Plundering and Bridges: The Circulation of Creole Tales Between Martinique and France

Soraya de Brégeas
Traduction de Julia Mc Laren
Cet article est une traduction de :
Recels et passerelles littéraires. Circulations de contes créoles entre la Martinique et l’Hexagone [fr]

Résumés

Au sein de l’espace (post)colonial francophone, les oralités autochtones ont souvent été placées au cœur d’entreprises d’affirmation culturelle et politique, dans une optique de décolonisation littéraire. En Martinique, de tels projets ont cependant pu susciter un sentiment de dépossession chez les conteurs locaux. Les écrivains de la créolité, comme Raphaël Confiant ou Patrick Chamoiseau, se sont en effet souvent dispensés de mentionner les noms des conteurs dont ils reprenaient les créations ou de solliciter leur autorisation préalable. Écrit à partir d’entretiens avec les conteurs, cet article, qui vise à leur rendre leur « part d’auteur », montre la nécessité de les citer lorsque l’oralité entre dans le régime de la propriété intellectuelle. Dans ce contexte, la figure littéraire du traducteur peut constituer une ressource pour repenser l’auctorialité en situation (post)coloniale.

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Texte intégral

1“The elders felt robbed.” This is how storyteller Dédé Duguet (interview, August 26, 2023) comments on the uses made of Martinique’s oral heritage by créolité writers. Such an assertion may come as a surprise, given that the attention paid to this heritage from the end of the nineteenth century onward (Hearn 1978 [1926]) was mainly driven by a desire to revalorize Black cultures. By embracing the path opened up in Martinique by the journal Légitime Défense (1932) and then by Édouard Glissant (2002 [1981], 310–19), créolité writers were part of the vast movement of literary decolonization that aimed, in the (post)colonial French-speaking space, to have indigenous poetic traditions recognized on a par with European poetic traditions (Casanova 1999, 122–25). Could the act of promoting a minority culture also be an act of dispossessing its original protagonists?

  • 1 The Groupe de Recherche en Espace Créolophone, founded in 1975 at the University of Antilles-Guyane (...)

2Beyond the ambiguity inherent in the literary or anthropological cultural translation process, constantly finding itself caught between two shores, never escaping the risk—or the chance—of transforming its raw material, the question reminds us that a gesture of appropriation involves not only works of art but also social protagonists, themselves caught up in unequal social and/or cultural relations. The debate, which has recently taken center stage in the media, was not unknown in Martinique in the 1980s. The GEREC1 Charte culturelle créole (Creole Cultural Charter) (1982, 4), for example, urged against “anthropological plundering in the service of individual interests” and for a “reciprocal” relationship with “the rural and urbanized masses, custodians of the oral tradition.”

  • 2 “Lebielle and I had to decide to record some of them without their knowledge,” Confiant (2024) admi (...)
  • 3 The Kontè sanblé (United Storytellers) organization, founded in 1982 on the initiative of primary s (...)
  • 4 In 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (art. 31) recognized th (...)

3Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau have published essays, collections, and novels under their own names in major Parisian publishing houses, containing oral material—or a discourse on oral material—that has raised major reservations: these authors have frequently mythologized their meaning; they have equally often refrained from referencing storytellers’ and collectors’ names or seeking their prior authorization before recording or using their works;2 lastly, they have not taken any action in their favor, whether in terms of including them in copyright or supporting a local initiative designed to promote their art.3 It is striking that such criticism cuts across all sections of the legal definition of intellectual property: economic rights, linked to the commercialization of the work, and moral rights, which include authorship rights, but also the right to respect for the work. In Martinique’s (post)colonial context, however, they give this definition a twofold inflection: on the one hand, a relative expansion of intellectual property rights on a community scale;4 on the other, a new tension among several cultural authority regimes, between which negotiation is essential.

4This article, by exploring the interplay between orality and writing in Martinican works based on a year’s fieldwork, followed by occasional visits and interviews with storytellers on site and remotely, seeks to restore their “share of authorship” (Hindenoch 1997, 55–56), as well as to examine authorship in a (post)colonial context, from an ethical, legal, literary, and anthropological perspective. We shall see that the transition from Martinique’s oral tradition to French literary modernity involves a change in authority regime, calling into question intellectual property based on individual rights. We will then examine two cases of literary appropriation, one involving the storytellers’ intellectual property, bordering on literary plagiarism, and another that also involves that of the community. Finally, we will demonstrate the relevance of the translator as a literary figure when considering authorship today.

The Centre culturel de Fonds-Saint-Jacques, Father Labat's former home devoted to the spoken art, Sainte-Marie, Martinique, s. d.

The Centre culturel de Fonds-Saint-Jacques, Father Labat's former home devoted to the spoken art, Sainte-Marie, Martinique, s. d.

Photo © Antoine Renaud / Agence Morris & Renaud Architectes.

“The elders felt robbed”

  • 5 He was anthropologist Ina Césaire’s main contact and collaborator. Best known in Martinique as a fu (...)
  • 6 Duverger recalls that he first told stories on stage at the invitation of Lucien “Loulou” Boislavil (...)

5The issue of intellectual property emerged in Martinique with the arrival of Western modernity. The rural exodus and collapse of the sugar economy in the 1960s, combined with the lure of assimilation and campaigns led by the Church, profoundly changed the conditions of oral transmission. Storytelling, a ritual genre hitherto practiced at funeral wakes, declined in its traditional form. Amid an anti-colonial intellectual climate, a new generation of storytellers—including Gros Morne–based storyteller, actor, and director Al(a)in Légarès (b. 1947)5 and Foyalese storyteller, actor, and politician Jean-Claude Duverger (b. 1948)—took to the stage in the 1970s,6 at a time when writers, under the aegis of Édouard Glissant, were turning to oral forms and material.

Alin Légarès, “Life & Death” series, Trinité, Martinique, 2022.

Alin Légarès, “Life & Death” series, Trinité, Martinique, 2022.

Photo © Adeline Rapon

  • 7 State education in Martinique did not become widespread until 1945, under the impetus of deputy may (...)

6The Kontè sanblé (United Storytellers) association, set up in 1982 on the initiative of schoolteacher and ethnologist Marcel Lebielle, is helping to revive opportunities for storytelling. The first nuit du conte was organized in Sainte-Marie in 1985. The association, which brought together a number of academics, including Raphaël Confiant, helped open up a meeting space for storytellers and the literate elite. Patrick Chamoiseau, born in Fort-de-France, discovered the veillée (storytelling session) on this occasion (Chamoiseau and Steinmetz 2022). Two cultural authority regimes come together: the old generation of storytellers, from an older, rural and illiterate milieu,7 and the new generation of writers, from a younger, urban, and literate milieu.

7Under Martinique’s traditional authority regime, based on the quality of the performer, the latter had no prerogative over the oral material. A seasoned storyteller could enjoy an occasional local privilege in interpreting the tales in his repertoire, but they did not belong to him alone. Each storyteller was free to draw on oral tradition to compose his tales, giving rise to the coexistence of a host of variants, presented on specific occasions. What was at stake in majolè (masters of the air) sparring was the spoken word itself, not the body of tales. Storytellers also served a ritual function but did not constitute a professional body: they were not paid for their art.

When you’re at a veillée, you are competing: a young storyteller can’t arrive at a veillée and tell the tale of an elder without being put in his place. The storytelling space is the same as with the ladja [fight]: you come to win. It’s not a question of ownership; it’s a question of skill. There’s no ownership because everyone has their own version of the tale; everyone transforms it. [. . .] There was no fear of someone stealing a tale, because that didn’t mean anything. That fear came later. We lost sight of the big picture. (André “Dédé” Duguet, known as Misyè Lasous [born 1962], storyteller, actor, and farmer from Sainte-Marie, interview, August 26, 2023)

8The modern French authority regime, based on individual ownership, attributes authorship to the author of a work, to which he or she holds moral and economic rights. Everyone remains free to draw from the common pool, allowing several literary variants of the same myth to coexist, as with Jean Anouilh’s Antigone (1946) or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Antigone (1993 [1936]). The myth itself remains common property; only its original form is protected. Nothing a priori forbids writers, in one cultural authority regime or the other, from taking on oral material. However, this action transforms the nature of the works, which become commercial goods, the nature of the relationship between performers and their variants, which are now subject to copyright, and the nature of the audiences for these texts, who are now predominantly from mainland France. This raises two closely related issues for storytellers: that of their own authorship and that of the community’s authorship.

  • 8 While Martinique is a French département, considering its heritage as part of French heritage is do (...)
  • 9 French law protects works regardless of their medium, provided they are the result of a creative ef (...)
  • 10 Storytellers’ “strategic anonymity” (Chamoiseau and Confiant 1999 [1991], 79), which in (neo)coloni (...)

While there is no reason not to draw on the common pool, this pool must be common.8 Providing a literary variant of a well-known and widely collected French West Indian tale, such as Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers (1997 [1970]), does not overshadow its oral intertext. But what if the oral material has never been recorded? What happens when the literary work finds its source in the singular variant of a storyteller, borrowing his own idea, composition and formulation?9 There is a great risk in such cases of overshadowing storytellers’ voices and covering up a little-known cultural heritage with an author’s name. The desire to promote a minority culture and extend the storytellers’ gesture ironically threatens to become its opposite: their erasure and spoliation for individual gain.10

Confiant and Chamoiseau are very thieving. What they do may not be bad, but they are very thieving because they don’t provide references for what they take. You can’t say it’s yours! You can’t put a name to tradition. Storytelling doesn’t belong to anyone: it belongs to the community. (Alin Légarès, interview, September 10, 2023)

9Other storytellers, who did not wish to be exposed here, highlighted the lack of citing storytellers or collectors, whose own work or personal stamp is thus obscured.

  • 11 One notable exception is Les Maîtres de la parole créole (Confiant 1995a). However, this is an anth (...)

10While many writers from the French-speaking (post)colonial space, such as Birago Diop (1960 [1947]) or Djibril Tamsir Niane (1960), have introduced a system of plural authorship by including in the title or preface the names of the storytellers whose work they have expanded, it is remarkable that créolité writers, whose essays and literary works are full of intertextual references, never refer to their oral sources by name.11 Yet mentioning storytellers is of major importance in a (post)colonial context: this enables both recognition of the first interpreters of local traditions and of the very traditions themselves.

11Dédé Duguet believes that the transition to Western modernity should have been regulated:

The elders felt robbed. They should have been supported to the point where they could have been recognized as artists, could have registered their tales with the SACD, leaving something for their descendants. There was no discussion. (Dédé Duguet, interview, August 25, 2023)

  • 12 The performance was recorded at Tropiques-Atrium, Fort-de-France, in June 2020: https://tropiques-a (...)
  • 13 On the circulation from the written to the spoken word, and on this tale in particular, see Brégeas (...)

12Although there is no consensus among Martinican storytellers on the need to protect their oral works—some, like Alin Légarès, refuse to register their variants, while others, like Dédé Duguet, are keen to protect their “share of authorship”—they all agree on the need to cite the storytellers as soon as the works fall within the scope of intellectual property. Dédé Duguet registers his variants with the Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques (SACD), mentioning the names of the storytellers who passed them on to him. His wonderful version of Twa frè (“Three Brothers,” created in 2016),12 in which he reinterprets Aimé Césaire’s poetry within the framework of a traditional tale, reworking the former into raggamuffin, transfiguring the latter by purposely expanding it with episodes that revolutionize its ending,13 is thus explicitly created from texts by Césaire and Serge Bazas (born around 1945), storyteller, musician and farmer from Sainte-Marie. While it is, of course, impossible to trace the chain of transmission indefinitely, citing the storyteller(s) from whom the story is taken is more than a tribute; it is a duty to the storyteller himself and, through him, to the original culture.

Voices Behind the Literature

13We will deal with two cases of literary appropriation here: Raphaël Confiant’s collection Contes créoles des Amériques (1995b) and Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Biblique des derniers gestes (2002). In the former, Martinican culture is mentioned, but the storytellers have been anonymized, even though the literary reworking process, which is particularly discreet, borrows more than their own theme, composition, and formulation. The literary reconstruction process is obvious in the second but is based on an oral intertext that is concealed and unknown to the author’s target readership, thus questioning both the authorship of the storyteller and that of Martinican culture.

Creole Buchmärchen

14In the preface to his Contes créoles des Amériques, Raphaël Confiant (1995b) offers the idea of an “original literary genre” whose purpose would be to “literarize Creole tales,” for which he finds the model in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Au temps de l’antan (1988):

The work we have set out to do is what might be called an attempt to literarize Creole storytelling. [. . .] Our hope is that, alongside faithful transcriptions of the storytellers’ words, and so to speak between them and literature proper, an original literary genre will emerge that draws on the riches of both orality and writing. (Confiant 1995b, 12)

15The idea is reminiscent of a romantic plan to rewrite oral tradition. The Grimm brothers are considered the inventors of the genre called Buchmärchen: “printed tale” (Rimasson-Fertin 2010, 1097–98). Although they claimed to be faithful to the oral material, they did not hesitate to merge several variants, rework their style and composition, or disguise their provenance (ibid., 1092–98; Martus 2013, 208ff.; Schmiele 2015).

  • 14 The collection was reissued in 2018, in a shortened version, under the title Contes des sages créol (...)

16In Au temps de l’antan, Patrick Chamoiseau (1988) draws inspiration from collections that made no explicit mention of their oral sources and references all of them in the bibliography of the first edition.14 The rewriting is also particularly sensitive, both in style and composition. Glan glan, l’oiseau craché (1988, 62–67) borrows from variants collated by Lafcadio Hearn (1978 [1926], 59–68, Soukouyan), Marie-Thérèse Lung-Fou (1979, tale no. 6, L’Oiseau aux plumes dispersées), and Thérèse Georgel (1994 [1957], 85–88, You glan glan), which he amalgamates to form a fourth.

  • 15 A brief tribute is paid to the collectors in the preface (Confiant 1995b, 10–11) but does not enabl (...)
  • 16 Lebielle is not among the collectors referenced in the preface.
  • 17 See notes 2 and 3.
  • 18 For Modock, these are “Tortue sème toute sa marmaille en chemin” (Parsons 1933: 181-186; Confiant 1 (...)

17In his Contes créoles d’Amérique, Raphaël Confiant draws, without citing storytellers or collectors,15 on collections in which the latter were named, supplementing the whole with tales he himself collected and anonymized (Confiant 1995b, 13). Of the ten tales in the Martinique section, there is one by the literate Rubimornese small plantation owner Félix Modock (1885–1942), collated by Elsie Clews Parsons (1933), and six collected by Marcel Lebielle,16 some recorded without the storytellers’ knowledge,17 and published the same year in a literal translation in Les Maîtres de la parole créole (Confiant 1995a), by storyteller and farm laborer Césaire Surbon, known as Sézè (circa 1919–?), storyteller, fisherman, and young naval officer Médarius Cabit, known as Méda (1920–?), Lorrinese storyteller, trumpeter, and farmworker Richard Ferraty (circa 1938–?), storyteller and young naval officer Franck Jean-Gilles (1924–2024), storyteller, bèlè commander, and small-scale farmer from Sainte-Marie Vincent Chevignac, known as Cholo (1923–2015), and storyteller, farmer, and Spiritan pitt (“gallodrome”) owner Isidore Bourbon, known as Kouraj (1928–2018).18

Henri Guédon, Moun mêlé (‘’Disconcerted’’), mixed media on wood, 77×81cm.

Henri Guédon, Moun mêlé (‘’Disconcerted’’), mixed media on wood, 77×81cm.

Photo © Anne Chopin. Avec l’aimable accord de la Succession Henri Guédon.

Dédé Duguet, aka Misyè Lasous, and his storytelling staff named “Tout-Monde", Pitons du Carbet, 2021.

Dédé Duguet, aka Misyè Lasous, and his storytelling staff named “Tout-Monde", Pitons du Carbet, 2021.

Photo © Lucas Pelus.

Dédé Duguet, aka Misyè Lasous. Pitons du Carbet 2021 (detail).

Dédé Duguet, aka Misyè Lasous. Pitons du Carbet 2021 (detail).

Photo © Lucas Pelus.

  • 19 It is customary in Martinique for each storyteller to sign his or her delivery with a trademark phr (...)

18Moreover, Raphaël Confiant’s rewriting is considerably more modest than Patrick Chamoiseau’s, the former remaining faithful to the storytellers’ framework and, for the most part, their wording. In each collection, the changes are essentially stylistic: the addition of creolisms, archaic or literary turns, the addition, transformation, or deletion of set phrases, subtle cuts or extensions, variations in punctuation, and the deletion of local or personal references. Images, wordplay, tongue twisters, assonance and alliteration, and personal opening phrases19 are conserved. No motif or episode has been added, moved, or deleted: the storyline is strictly identical.

  • 20 I am deliberately quoting an extract that refers to Confiant’s rewriting work. There are many more (...)

I’ve come to bring you the endless word. The word that has no wings to fly, no feet to run, no tail to swim, ladies and gentlemen. When my beautiful words fly away, all that’s left to gargle my throat with is a brew of “cure-all” leaves, with, whatever the cost, a shot of sweet mabi in a drop of August water that will enable me to keep going and reach you.
Hey krik ! . . . . Hey krak ! . . . .
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to tell you what happened to an ancient negress called Mamzelle Cétoute who lived in the Redoute on the Moutte Route, in the vault of a bunker. (Richard Ferraty, opening of Ti-Jean le magicien, collector Marcel Lebielle, literal translation Raphaël Confiant [1995a, 114])
I have come among you to bring you the word, for it has no beginning and no end. What’s more, when the beautiful word takes flight, all that’s left for me as viaticum is a brew of “cure-all” leaves with, whatever the cost, sweet mabi in a drop of August water to keep me going.
Yééé-Mistikrik!
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve come to tell you what happened to an old negress called Mamzelle C’est-Toute. She lived at the bottom of the Redoute river. (Raphaël Confiant, opening of Ti Jean le magicien [1995b, 51])20

  • 21 French law condemns not only slavish copying (reproduction) but also disguised counterfeiting, wher (...)
  • 22 From 1989 to 1997, he directed the Théâtre de la Soif Nouvelle (TSN-CDR), founded in 1982 by Aimé C (...)
  • 23 Does creative freedom justify copyright infringement? French law leaves little room for doubt: auth (...)

19The texts are discreetly rewritten, adapted to their medium without significantly altering either form or content. Raphaël Confiant, who signs the publication, makes no secret of his intentions in his preface (1995b, 12–13), but it would be difficult in this instance not to hear the storytellers’ complaint: without prior authorization, the appropriation, not only of the theme, which is part of the common pool, but of the specific composition and wording, is tantamount to plagiarism.21 Yet a stylistic unity does emerge on reading Raphaël Confiant’s collection. Storyteller, actor, and stage director Elie Pennont (b. 1961)22 (interview, August 28, 2023) is right to point out that the writers’ trademark is recognizable. But is this reason enough to claim authorship of the work?23

Galfétè, Author of Biblique des derniers gestes?

  • 24 These comments were collected during an informal exchange during the interview, which the authors d (...)
  • 25 In Martinique, tales are “sung” (chanté kont). The tales are indeed told, but they are conceived as (...)
  • 26 These creation stories were inspired by myths, but were in fact cosmogonies or anthropogonies in th (...)
  • 27 One of them appears in Léonie and Jean-Mico Terrine’s collection (2007, 24–25).
  • 28 In any case, Galfétè seems to have left his mark on Creole authors: Confiant (1993, 6) was planning (...)

20Biblique des derniers gestes (Chamoiseau 2002), according to some storytellers,24 derives from a tale by Galfétè. In the novel, the narrator, a fictitious double of the writer, embraces a protagonist’s tale at the hour of his death and unravels the thread of his memories from the creation of the world. In Martinique’s oral tradition, the elders sang25 about the creation of the world or humanity at the time of the funeral wake, each performer giving his own variant,26 and Génius Marie-Sainte (1903–1978), known as Galfétè, the famous storyteller and tambourin drummer from Sainte-Marie, combined cosmogony and the big bang in tales of astonishing modernity.27 The scene in which Balthazar Bodule-Jules, the novel’s protagonist, recounts the “great cosmic loves” (Chamoiseau 2002, 54–58) is reminiscent of Galfétè’s art. It is not impossible that Patrick Chamoiseau, who met and recorded the storytellers in 1986 in Marcel Lebielle’s footsteps (Chamoiseau and Steinmetz 2022), heard this tale told by one of them—some storytellers continue to interpret it.28

21In Biblique des derniers gestes (Chamoiseau 2003 [2002], 54–58), Balthazar Bodule-Jules, in his own words, was born fifteen billion years ago, when the universe was but a “tiny dreaming dot” (ibid., 54) that exploded in time, space, and cosmos, spreading out into the void where clouds of gas formed galaxies, where the love affair between quarks and leptons, protons and neutrons, atoms and more complex entities gave birth to stars, planets, the solar system, the Earth, and the protagonist himself.

  • 29 Unfortunately, we have been unable to reproduce it: the relatively abstract drawing, with its domin (...)

22In Génius Marie-Sainte’s creation of the world (in Terrine 2007, 24–27), the deity in his single egg, the only light in the darkness, strikes the void and darkness between his hands to bring forth a burst of light, an aggregate of clouds, comets, and stars, in a great crash of lightning and thunder. When the divinity moves to observe his creation, he leaves a black hole in his place, a vortex threatening to suck the planets in. He then arranges them around the sun, the opposing force that stabilizes the system, and names them angels and archangels. Only part of Galfète’s creation of the world was recorded by his adopted son, Jean-Mico Terrine, but the latter’s illustration of it features the storyteller and tambourin drummer himself at the end, in an ovoid shape.29

  • 30 French law does not protect the idea but the form; from a moral point of view, however, the tacit b (...)
  • 31 The motif of the cosmic egg is present in many cultures: it is assumed here to be the result of a s (...)

23The syncretism between Genesis and modern physics, the creation of the world that is born and comes to an end with the storyteller’s words, and the context (or co-text) of the veillée leave open the hypothesis of a veiled borrowing from both the storyteller and the cultural tradition.30 The divinity may be no more than a “tiny dreaming dot” in Chamoiseau’s work, but the biblical intertext (it is indeed a “Genesis” [Chamoiseau 2002, 59]), already present in Galfétè, revives the mythical substratum. However, syncretism varies from one text to another, with Galfétè borrowing certain motifs from West Africa (the primordial egg of divinity),31 and Chamoiseau from ancient Greece—the love affairs of atoms, then of more complex bodies evoke Hesiod’s Theogony or the clinamens of Epicurus and Lucretius. The composition also fluctuates: the threat of the black hole, dissipated by the gravitational force of the sun, disappears in Chamoiseau’s work, replaced by the episode of “cosmic love,” which gives its name to the sub-chapter. Lastly, the style differs greatly, a consequence of the transition from oral to written form, but also of the two storytellers’ singularity. In contrast to Confiant’s Contes créoles des Amériques (1995b), the re-creation process in Biblique des derniers gestes is evident.

24Patrick Chamoiseau has created hie own cosmogony of storytelling, drawing on oral intertext to trace the “digenesis,” in the words of Édouard Glissant (2002, 36), of the history of the dominated: a history born in the ship’s hold, expanded to the scale of the world, with no other origin than the crossing itself. The slave ship’s hold, however, is only the protagonist’s second “Genesis,” in a narrative where the creation of the world itself becomes subject to variation. “In the beginning of an agony that is in fact a genesis, there remains this set of possible versions and this principle of uncertainty that will become structural in the whole affair” (Chamoiseau 2002, 33–34). As in the oral tradition, the cosmogony is well and truly told: no longer a founding myth, a figure of law that Glissant (2002 [1981], 262) opposed to the transgressive variation of the tale, but a gesture of (re)creation in the face of colonial deculturation.

25The force—and poetic force—behind these storytelling cosmogonies and anthropogonies must be measured. Sung under the open sky on the night of the funeral wake, they recreated man and the world on the wreckage of the slave trade and slavery. The inclusion of this first “Genesis” in the novel, prior to the crossing, as well as the use of the biblical intertext, carefully studied by Valentine Eugène (2019), are less a sign of the desire to “(re)construct the original myth” (ibid., 163) than they are, like oral tradition, to underline the (re)creative gesture itself. The clinamen, that slight deviation of atoms that enables them to escape the pull of the void and create new bodies, thus becomes a possible figure of the story(re)teller’s art—as with Lucretius (1997 [1st c. BC] §250–290), a slice of freedom wrested from the laws of fate. This case, which is more ambiguous than the previous one, is also richer. Explaining the oral intertext sheds light on the meaning of the work, highlighting the art of both the storyteller and the writer, as well as Martinican culture.

26Patrick Chamoiseau, as with some contemporary storytellers, has made recordings of elder storytellers to feed his creative work, listening to their tales to immerse himself in their language and spirit (Patrick Chamoiseau interview with Delphine Perret, July 8, 1998, quoted in Perret 2001, 210). To what extent do they influence his literary work? Oral material that circulates in some storyteller’s or listener’s memory does not sit well with the legal and scientific requirements of proof. The older generation of storytellers has now passed away, so all we have to go on are second-hand accounts, echoes of a “theft” that, in the absence of more detailed physical evidence, is hard to know if it amounts to plagiarism or the drama of inspiration evoked by Jacques Derrida (2014 [1967], 265). What remains for these storytellers is a very real sense of dispossession. The fleetingness of the performance, which could weaken the argument, draws attention here to the heightened ethical responsibility of the writer in a (post)colonial context.

  • 32 Édouard Glissant (2002 [1981], 430) refers only to a “parody of genesis,” in which God is said to h (...)

27There is a major distinction between minores and majores, and, a fortiori, between oral and written intertext. Whereas the literate reader may be able to recognize an allusion to Rabelais or the Bible, who is able to discern in Chamoiseau’s prose a borrowing from West Indian oral tradition or from an obscure storyteller from the Martinican mornes (hills)? While Biblique des derniers gestes is overflowing with intertextual references right from the title—Joyce, Rabelais, Faulkner, Glissant, Saint-Paul, and the Book of Genesis (Pilorget 2008; Eugène 2019)—it is striking that the oral intertext is not highlighted. No storyteller is referenced by name, and no mention of the poetic (sub)genre is made in the text or peritext. No writer or anthropologist had, to our knowledge, brought to light the existence of such storytelling cosmogonies or anthropogonies until Léonie and Jean-Mico Terrine’s fine collection (2007).32 Biblique des derniers gestes goes beyond mere borrowing from an individual storyteller and relies on the tacit appropriation of cultural material that is unknown in mainland France and doubtless little known in Martinique. The stakes involved in quoting storytellers go beyond their individual intellectual property: the singularity of the culture itself must be asserted through them.

From Author to Translator

28“If one calls the necessity of borrowing [. . .] from the text of a heritage, which is more or less coherent or ruined, bricolage (tinkering), it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur (tinkered)” (Derrida 2014 [1967], 418). Hélène Maurel-Indart (2011, 349–50) proposes substituting the figure of the writer-engineer, who would be a creator ex nihilo, with that of the writer-bricoleur. By transposing the Levi-Straussian metaphor to literature, the researcher invites us to reflect on the relationship between creation and imitation. She reminds us that inspiration is always a “drama of theft” for Jacques Derrida (2014 [1967], 265). By drawing from an already constituted field—“a cultural field from which I must borrow my words and syntax, a historical field in which I must read as I write”—the subject of the statement discovers himself caught in an “irreducible secondarity” (ibid.). The dynamics of written verbal creation are thus singularly close to those of oral creation. After all, what is a storyteller if not a tinkerer, drawing on traditional texts to reinvent them as circumstances dictate?

Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, Blue Blue stellaire, 2014.

Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, Blue Blue stellaire, 2014.

Techniques mixtes sur bois, 200 x 122 cm.

Photo ROL. Avec l’aimable accord de l’artiste.

  • 33 For the French West Indies (Martinique and Guadeloupe), we should cite Alain Rutil’s Les Belles par (...)
  • 34 While Confiant and Chamoiseau (1999 [1991], 80) acknowledge that storytellers have a certain amount (...)

29While research over the last fifty years has dismissed any clear-cut partition between oraliture and literature, giving rise to a growing interest in storytellers’ repertoires,33 it is remarkable that Martinican theoretical thought, under the auspices of créolité writers, has continued to uphold the romantic distinction between an oral, popular, and collective “nature poetry” and a written, scholarly, and individual “art poetry.” “Literature is the antithesis of orality,” argues linguist and writer Jean Bernabé (2000, 640), barring the mechanisms of “literary procuration” (ibid., 641) inherent in French West Indian writing.34

  • 35 On Herder and translation, see: Pénisson 1992. On Naturdichter, see: Tonnelat 1912, 64.

30The argument was undoubtedly primarily strategic: following the example of Johann Gottfried Herder in eighteenth-century Germany, the aim was to challenge French hegemony by encouraging writers to reconnect with the local “popular genius” (Bernabé et al. 1993 [1989], 36). In contrast to what he saw as the artificial, aristocratic, and universalist “art poetry” of Enlightenment European hegemony, the German compiler urged writers to reconnect with the essence of “nature poetry,” which he saw as the repository of popular genius and which he felt modernity was destined to destroy (Pénisson 1992). Faced with a (neo)colonial policy of assimilationism and with the same sense of urgency concerning the disappearance of oral traditions, créolité writers pledged to “invest the legacy of [their] popular genius” and to “produce [. . .] a literature that in no way derogates from the modern demands of the written word, while at the same time being rooted in the traditional configurations of [their] orality” (Bernabé et al. 1993 [1989], 36). The Herderian Naturdichter (“nature poet”) was to emulate Homer and be valued less as an author than as a translator.35 Likewise, the créolité writers’ “marker of words” is affected with a “Homeric syndrome” (Bernabé 2000) that places him at the crossroads of both the individual and the collective. Literary decolonization thus appears, in the words of Pascale Casanova (1999, 117ff.), as a continuation of the “Herderian revolution” in other forms: writing orality becomes a means of shifting the criteria of literary legitimacy.

  • 36 Anthropologists and historians of antiquity have shown that the idea of a necessary transition from (...)
  • 37 It is not uncommon, in France, for Chamoiseau to be described as “Martinique’s last storyteller” (C (...)

31Créolité writers, however, update the romantic legacy not only as a model of contestation but also as a distinction, itself of evolutionist obedience, between a collective oral tradition and an individual literary modernity, which the “marker of words” must dismantle (Bernabé et al. 1993 [1989], 36; Chamoiseau and Confiant 1999 [1991], 257; Bernabé 2000). They claim to be the sole legatees of a heritage whose original protagonists are said to be dead or dying: orality is said to have, if not disappeared, at least declined with rural exodus and the irruption of French modernity in the 1960s (Bernabé et al. 1993 [1989], 35; Chamoiseau and Confiant 1999 [1991], 85–89 ; Chamoiseau quoted in Perret 2001, 208–10).36 Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel (1993 [1970]) had highlighted the dangers of tackling popular traditions in a way that repeats the violence that it kindles, while sanctioning the disappearance of its purpose. By turning the death of the storyteller into the myth of their own origins, créolité writers claim the legacy for themselves, thereby eclipsing the vitality of the art.37

  • 38 The anthropologist Diana Ramassamy (2016) highlighted this in Les Nouveaux Maîtres de la parole cré (...)
  • 39 On the ethnocultural referent of the Creole tale, see: Relouzat 1989 and 1998.
  • 40 On the transgressive dimension of storytelling in West Africa, see Derive and Garnier 2010.

32However, not only are storytellers alive and well,38 constantly renewing their art depending on the context—playing with the language in-between, interpolations of the oral and the written—but their art, which from the outset is transcultural, born at the crossroads of African, European, and Amerindian cultures,39 has never been static. While storytelling is always labile, “halfway between creation and reproduction” (Simonsen 1984, 40), variation is of singular importance in the French West Indies. The preference given to this genre, which acquires a dominant ritual value in Martinique, is due not only to a shift away from myth or saga, whose meaning and modes of transmission cease to be in touch with enslaved reality (Confiant 1998, 51; Césaire 2004, 4–5) but also to its subversive value.40 This subversive value is inherent in the narrative content, which thwarts the master’s authority and satirizes colonial customs through animal or divine masks (Césaire 2004), but also in the form’s lability: variations in a plural cultural text allow storytellers to subvert colonial material, particularly biblical, to invent new syncretisms—in short, to wrest a slice of freedom from a world of constraint. For Édouard Glissant (1981, 261–67), storytelling, unlike myth, derives its capacity for transgression from its unique lability.

  • 41 For Glissant (1996 [1995], 45, 122), translation goes so far as to become the paradigm of literary (...)
  • 42 Senghor 1967 [1961], 7; Jolivet 1993, 796; Derive 2004, 14; Diagne 2013, 71.

33The gesture of creation is therefore highly individualized: while the cultural text is common there is room to play around with it. Cosmogonies sung at funeral wakes were indeed told, with each performer giving his own variant. In this respect, créolité writers only ever follow in the footsteps of the storyteller by extending the gesture that was first his: following his example, they perform an act of language that calls into question established divisions: between the individual and the collective; between creation and imitation; between the poetic and the political. The literary figure of the translator, whose omnipresence among writers in the French-speaking (post)colonial space has been noted by critics and exegetes alike,41 takes on its full force here: far from being a token of modesty, or even coquetry,42 it conceals a subversive value. As the storyteller’s literate offspring, it desacralizes the author, not in order to destroy him, but to restore him to his effective action in the social and linguistic fabric on which the text is woven. Provided that the primary protagonists of local cultures—and through them, these cultures themselves—are given their due, neither the storyteller’s nor translator’s gestures should be underestimated, not just to ensure that they are valued as authors, but to rebuild authorship in their image.

* * *

34Créolité writers’ investment in oral tradition is part of a laudable movement of literary decolonization. Far from undermining it, the aim here is to extend it by restoring storytellers’ authorship and, through them, Martinican culture. The project of writing orality, driven by indigenous writers anxious to undo the hierarchization of languages and cultures, is widespread in the French-speaking (post)colonial space; it in no way implies ignoring storytellers. Decolonizing literature is not simply a matter of transposing orality into writing but of considering a plural poetic space where storytellers and writers also contribute to the renewal of traditional forms. In short, it involves moving from the “paradigm of the last” (Fabre 2010), in which writers and ethnologists are seen, in a romantic vein, as the ultimate transmitters of moribund oral traditions, to the “paradigm of the second,” in which they are never more than the literate interpreters of a perpetually reinvented heritage.

35The figure of the translator, as a means of thinking about authorship, takes on its full meaning here: neither genius nor copyist, the author now exists in a minor mode, a partial creator of a pluralistic work, which loses in sacredness what it gains in transitivity. The proposal is to renew the terms of intellectual property but not to abolish it: quoting storytellers, seeking their authorization or that of their successors is essential when a change in the authority regime from oral to written occurs. Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau did not respond to requests for interviews on the development of their collections or the oral intertext of their works. We would like to invite them to make their oral intertext public. Genetic investigation would not only add considerable value to our knowledge of their works but would also enable us to restore “authorship” to the first protagonists in Martinican culture. Like Jean Anouilh (1946, back cover) revisiting Sophocles’s Antigone, the “markers of words” could therefore say that they have slipped into the works of storytellers like thieves—but thieves who are “scrupulous and in love with their spoils.”

Henri Guédon, Portrait d’Edouard Glissant, 1979, mixed media on canvas, 73x60cm

Henri Guédon, Portrait d’Edouard Glissant, 1979, mixed media on canvas, 73x60cm

Photo @ Anne Chopin. With kind permission of the Succession Henri Guédon

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Notes

1 The Groupe de Recherche en Espace Créolophone, founded in 1975 at the University of Antilles-Guyane by linguist and writer Jean Bernabé, includes Confiant among its members. The GEREC published Éloge de la créolité, co-written by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant (1989).

2 “Lebielle and I had to decide to record some of them without their knowledge,” Confiant (2024) admits, because “storytellers of the past weren’t easy to talk to and [. . .] didn’t readily answer questions about their art.”

3 The Kontè sanblé (United Storytellers) organization, founded in 1982 on the initiative of primary schoolteacher and ethnologist Marcel Lebielle, and of which Confiant was a member, has been hailed by storytellers because of the commitment of its instigator, who was the first in Martinique to promote storytelling. The collection Les Maîtres de la parole créole, signed by Confiant (1995a), who oversaw the publication and literally translated the texts, is the result of Lebielle’s collecting and the continuation of his determination to give voice and a face to the storytellers. While the storytellers are referenced here, with biographies and photographs, thus providing important symbolic retribution for some, for others, recorded without their knowledge, as in the case of Vincent Chevignac (1923–2015), according to an unnamed source at his request (interview on September 26, 2023), it felt more like theft. The publication’s intellectual property also remains questionable for the storytellers: Why isn’t Lebielle a co-signatory?

4 In 2007, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (art. 31) recognized the right of indigenous peoples to collective intellectual property; although this is not applied in the French West Indies, where there are no longer any “indigenous peoples” in the strict sense, it does call into question the idea of strictly individual intellectual property. Martinique’s storytellers are not concerned with restricting access to a cultural heritage considered to be an integral part of humanity’s world heritage but with ensuring that it is given the recognition it deserves.

5 He was anthropologist Ina Césaire’s main contact and collaborator. Best known in Martinique as a funeral wake storyteller, he has also worked extensively on theatrical creations in Latin America in collaboration with director Jean-Marie Binoche.

6 Duverger recalls that he first told stories on stage at the invitation of Lucien “Loulou” Boislaville, director of the Grand Ballet de Martinique, in the 1970s (interview, April 28, 2021). Légarès also began storytelling on stage in 1978 (interview, April 27, 2021).

7 State education in Martinique did not become widespread until 1945, under the impetus of deputy mayor Aimé Césaire. Storytelling was the main means of transmitting knowledge in rural areas. The older generation of storytellers was aware of the value of their heritage, even if it was underestimated.

8 While Martinique is a French département, considering its heritage as part of French heritage is doubly problematic: on the one hand, the gesture threatens to renew a form of (neo)colonial cultural annexation; on the other, it amounts to considering that Martinique’s heritage is effectively known in France, and thus conceals the dominant relations that minimize it.

9 French law protects works regardless of their medium, provided they are the result of a creative effort (art. L 111-1 and L 112-1 of the French Intellectual Property Code). However, it does not protect the idea, but rather the form it takes, which includes composition and expression, unless these derive from the subject matter. Two biographies or two rewritings of a myth cannot be reproached for having an identical plot, nor can the authors of historical or regional novels be reproached for borrowing from the language of the place or time. But to what extent is the form of a tale borrowed from tradition? And how original is its literary reworking?

10 Storytellers’ “strategic anonymity” (Chamoiseau and Confiant 1999 [1991], 79), which in (neo)colonial society enabled them to escape possible reprisals, no longer seems appropriate today—and presupposes, a minima, that the main parties concerned are consulted.

11 One notable exception is Les Maîtres de la parole créole (Confiant 1995a). However, this is an anthropological collection in which the tales are presented in literal translation, rather than as a literary reworking. This collection itself raises a whole series of questions (see note 3).

12 The performance was recorded at Tropiques-Atrium, Fort-de-France, in June 2020: https://tropiques-atrium.fr/le-mois-laminaire/dede-duguet-conte-twa-fre/.

13 On the circulation from the written to the spoken word, and on this tale in particular, see Brégeas, “Césaire conté ou la lettre actée” (to be published).

14 The collection was reissued in 2018, in a shortened version, under the title Contes des sages créoles, this time without mention of sources.

15 A brief tribute is paid to the collectors in the preface (Confiant 1995b, 10–11) but does not enable the tales presented in the collection to be connected to them.

16 Lebielle is not among the collectors referenced in the preface.

17 See notes 2 and 3.

18 For Modock, these are “Tortue sème toute sa marmaille en chemin” (Parsons 1933: 181-186; Confiant 1995b: 17-30; Corinus 2021: 84-103), for Surbon “Araignée et Tortue au festin de Compère Bondieu” (1995b: 31-34; 1995a: 34-37), for Cabit “Ti Jean la ruse” (1995b: 41-50; 1995a: 66-73), or Ferraty of “Ti Jean le magicien” (1995b: 51-58; 1995a: 112-118), for Jean-Gilles of “Ilotin et Dangélé” (1995b: 59-64; 1995a: 88-93), for Chevignac of “La Bête-à-sept-têtes” (1995b: 65-74; 1995a: 58-65) and for Bourbon of “Compère Cheval sert de monture à Compère Lapin” (1995b: 81-87; 1995a: 94-99).

19 It is customary in Martinique for each storyteller to sign his or her delivery with a trademark phrase at the start of a performance (Césaire 2004, 38–39).

20 I am deliberately quoting an extract that refers to Confiant’s rewriting work. There are many more literal borrowings. See, for example, the opening of Cabit’s Ti-Jean la ruse, where only the punctuation varies (1995a, 69; 1995b, 41).

21 French law condemns not only slavish copying (reproduction) but also disguised counterfeiting, where cheap imitation is intended to conceal borrowing (Maurel-Indart 2011, 223–24, 228–29, 272–74).

22 From 1989 to 1997, he directed the Théâtre de la Soif Nouvelle (TSN-CDR), founded in 1982 by Aimé Césaire. His Ladja de paroles (created in 1992) was a great success in Martinique.

23 Does creative freedom justify copyright infringement? French law leaves little room for doubt: authors of translations, adaptations, transformations, anthologies, collections, or composite works are protected by the French Intellectual Property Law, subject to copyright of the pre-existing work (art. L. 112-3 and L. 113-4 of the CPI). A translation or composite work requires the authorization of the original author. It should be remembered that while economic rights are limited to seventy years after the author’s death, moral rights are imprescriptible (art. L. 123-1 and L. 121-1). Even once a work has fallen into the public domain, it remains imperative to cite the author, unless prior agreement has been reached. (In the legal sense, a composite work is a new work that incorporates a pre-existing work [art. L. 133.2.2].)

24 These comments were collected during an informal exchange during the interview, which the authors did not wish to discuss here.

25 In Martinique, tales are “sung” (chanté kont). The tales are indeed told, but they are conceived as part of a musical universe. Traditional tales also take the form of chantefables (songfables).

26 These creation stories were inspired by myths, but were in fact cosmogonies or anthropogonies in the telling; as Alin Légarès points out (interview, September 24, 2023), each storyteller had his own creation of the world or of humanity.

27 One of them appears in Léonie and Jean-Mico Terrine’s collection (2007, 24–25).

28 In any case, Galfétè seems to have left his mark on Creole authors: Confiant (1993, 6) was planning to devote a novel to him, Galfétè mô.

29 Unfortunately, we have been unable to reproduce it: the relatively abstract drawing, with its dominant colors of light blue and bright yellow, sometimes circled in red, on a midnight-blue background, depicts, from bottom to top, the inaugural explosion, the expansion of light into darkness, the formation of the solar system, and finally, at the top, the storyteller and his tambourin drum. Depicted inside an ovoid form, the storyteller, thus assimilated to divinity, represents both the point of origin and arrival of the world’s creation, the drawing highlighting the creative power of words (Terrine 2007, 22).

30 French law does not protect the idea but the form; from a moral point of view, however, the tacit borrowing of an original idea is highly questionable.

31 The motif of the cosmic egg is present in many cultures: it is assumed here to be the result of a syncretism between West African cosmogonies and modern physics (Georges Lemaître’s primordial atom).

32 Édouard Glissant (2002 [1981], 430) refers only to a “parody of genesis,” in which God is said to have removed white people from the oven of Creation too early and the Black people too late—or, in another variant, white people and mixed-race people too early, and Black people just in time.

33 For the French West Indies (Martinique and Guadeloupe), we should cite Alain Rutil’s Les Belles paroles d'Albert Gaspard (1987) and Véronique Corinus’s Le Répertoire du conteur Félix Modock (2021).

34 While Confiant and Chamoiseau (1999 [1991], 80) acknowledge that storytellers have a certain amount of inventiveness, they confine it to expression, making structure take precedence over variation. As with Jacob Grimm (cited in Schmiele 2015, 20–21), only the form of the tales would change when their core would be intangible. However, the choice of tales and episodes, the perspective from which they are treated, and the modifications introduced are all acts of language that update the tradition based on the circumstances of its enunciation. The same criticisms that Dell Hymes (1985) leveled at Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural interpretation of myths could be leveled at créolité writers, with a few nuances: the erasure of interpreters and the circumstances of enunciation.

35 On Herder and translation, see: Pénisson 1992. On Naturdichter, see: Tonnelat 1912, 64.

36 Anthropologists and historians of antiquity have shown that the idea of a necessary transition from the oral to the written word has no scientific basis. See in particular: Finnegan 1977, 30–41; Dupont 1994. Glissant (2002 [1981], 319), for his part, envisaged a possible resurgence of orality from the 1980s onward, which would have gone hand in hand with a revival of literary creativity.

37 It is not uncommon, in France, for Chamoiseau to be described as “Martinique’s last storyteller” (Chamoiseau and Steinmetz 2022).

38 The anthropologist Diana Ramassamy (2016) highlighted this in Les Nouveaux Maîtres de la parole créole.

39 On the ethnocultural referent of the Creole tale, see: Relouzat 1989 and 1998.

40 On the transgressive dimension of storytelling in West Africa, see Derive and Garnier 2010.

41 For Glissant (1996 [1995], 45, 122), translation goes so far as to become the paradigm of literary writing. On the thematization of translation by French-speaking writers, see Combe (2019 [2010], 127–50).

42 Senghor 1967 [1961], 7; Jolivet 1993, 796; Derive 2004, 14; Diagne 2013, 71.

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Table des illustrations

Titre The Centre culturel de Fonds-Saint-Jacques, Father Labat's former home devoted to the spoken art, Sainte-Marie, Martinique, s. d.
Crédits Photo © Antoine Renaud / Agence Morris & Renaud Architectes.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 392k
Titre Alin Légarès, “Life & Death” series, Trinité, Martinique, 2022.
Crédits Photo © Adeline Rapon
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 404k
Titre Henri Guédon, Moun mêlé (‘’Disconcerted’’), mixed media on wood, 77×81cm.
Crédits Photo © Anne Chopin. Avec l’aimable accord de la Succession Henri Guédon.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,0M
Titre Dédé Duguet, aka Misyè Lasous, and his storytelling staff named “Tout-Monde", Pitons du Carbet, 2021.
Crédits Photo © Lucas Pelus.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 348k
Titre Dédé Duguet, aka Misyè Lasous. Pitons du Carbet 2021 (detail).
Crédits Photo © Lucas Pelus.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 780k
Titre Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, Blue Blue stellaire, 2014.
Légende Techniques mixtes sur bois, 200 x 122 cm.
Crédits Photo ROL. Avec l’aimable accord de l’artiste.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 888k
Titre Henri Guédon, Portrait d’Edouard Glissant, 1979, mixed media on canvas, 73x60cm
Crédits Photo @ Anne Chopin. With kind permission of the Succession Henri Guédon
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/docannexe/image/8636/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 696k
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Référence électronique

Soraya de Brégeas, « Literary Plundering and Bridges: The Circulation of Creole Tales Between Martinique and France »Gradhiva [En ligne], 38 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2025, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/8636 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/1451f

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Auteur

Soraya de Brégeas

Département de langue et de littérature françaises
Université de Genève / FNS
Département d’anthropologie
Université Lyon 2
Soraya.DeBregeas[at]unige.ch

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