« À l’exemple des Abeilles » : Daniel Thaly poète-apiculteur

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to introduce the West Indian poet Daniel Thaly (1879-1950), who was both a poet and a beekeeper. In his collection of poems L’île et le voyage, Thaly devotes the Fourth Chant to "La maison aux abeilles" (The house of bees), in which he celebrates the insects he cares for, which teach him both an art of living and an art of poetry. Thaly’s example shows how the practice of beekeeping informs poetry, particularly by renewing man’s relationship with the landscape. Beekeeping and the observation of bees also led the poet to set up these insects as poetic models: the motif of the bee is frequently used in poetry to represent the practice of innutrition. Like the bee, the poet gleans inspiration from his readings to produce his own honey, the poetic result of his influences. The case of Daniel Thaly is an interesting one, since we are dealing with a French-speaking poet in a colonial situation marked by the influence of Western literature and the force of assimilation. Thaly and the apiary metaphor invite us to examine the notions of imitation, innutrition and originality in the context of West Indian colonisation. Here, the prism of beekeeping offers a fresh look at a form of writing that for too long has been relegated to the category of servile imitation and stigmatised by critics as regionalist, exotic and doudouist literature.