I 'Contes de la nuit': dal 'Maitre de la parole' all'écrivain

The culture of French Antilles is the result of successive waves of migration of people arrived from the four corners of the planet (Amerindians, Africans, Europeans, Indians), especially during the process of colonization.The cultural heritage of the population of these territories – formed by the intersection of different cultures - was originally safeguarded and transmitted, from generation to generation, thanks to the memory and to the determination to fight against the process of cultural annihilation enacted by the colonizers. It’s in this context that born the Creole conteur or maître de la parole, a wise man who helped to preserve, and especially to set - against the colonial system of plantations - another version of history, diametrically opposite to the official one spread by settlers. During the period of slavery, at nightfall, the maître beké granted to slaves to meet together ... and the tale… could finally begin. The time devoting to the folktale constituted, for slaves, a distraction. The tale seeped into the consciousness assuming the function of an instrument of resistance to oppression and a way to express and to affirm the values of West Indians.After the abolition of slavery, this practice has almost completely disappeared. Fortunately, nowadays, this tradition has been recovered thanks to the work of certain writers who have decided to assume the task of marqueurs de paroles in order to revive the 'oral word' - replaced by writing imposed by the settlers – which tied in memory the native culture. The disappearance of the ‘oral word’ risked to erase with it the traces of the original chaos that gave birth to the Creole culture.