From Camille’s Lakou (Moun Lakou)

Abstract

from Camille’s Lakou (Moun Lakou) Marie Léticée (bio) Translated by Kevin Meehan (bio) Translator’s Note Moun Lakou tells the story of a young Caribbean girl living with her single-parent mother in a 1960s urbanized neighborhood near Pointeà-Pitre, Guadeloupe, with additional opening and closing chapters that detail her adult life as a successful Caribbean migrant in Florida. This excerpt from the English translation, Camille’s Lakou, begins with the adult Camille dictating her memoir to Evelyn, her personal assistant, and it includes two chapters describing the life of the lakou. “Lakou” is a Kreyol word that readily translates to “courtyard” or, more colloquially, to “yard” in English, but the location and layout for what a lakou might look like and function vary across a spectrum in the region. In Camille’s Lakou, we encounter the Guadeloupean lakou as an urban space encompassing the house, the yard, the street, and sidestreet alleys branching off the main artery of Monbruno Court. —Kevin Meehan Monbruno Court Lakou Monbruno “For as long as I can remember, I have always disliked Monbruno Court,” Camille began. “I never felt like I was a part of that world. Yet wasn’t I among the poorest and most deprived of this district? Was I not a product of it? Mother had me there. Someone else’s pleasure robbed her of an innocent youth. And I was left inside her, sole witness to her pain, the only result of that unhappy rainy day when her only mistake had been to ask for ‘a little shelter from the rain, please, thank you sir, bonjour!’” She went on like that every day for at least two hours, continuing her story, planted in her favorite chair facing the orchard of tropical fruit trees (more than a hundred varieties) that Jean-Luc had planted along the lake that formed a border of their Chamberlain Estate property. She told her story and Evelyn transcribed it, page after page. . . . [End Page 70] ________ Narrow and filled with potholes, my street seemed like a serpent that stretched lazily from one end of the neighborhood to the other. It had the feel of a sassy woman, bouncing her butt cheeks up and down for one and all, moving to the beat of her market chant, “Some for you, some for me, some for you, some for me,” searching for the next prey, one who would fall victim to the numbing venom. Monbruno Court was neither straight nor crooked, it just had that look. From its hips, other smaller arteries stretched out and disappeared in all directions. It was a veritable spider’s web where many lives were lost, swallowed up in the hungry guts of poverty. The neighborhood street was flanked by little houses, all of them topped with corrugated tin roofs shaped like an inverted “V.” The men and women inside were like headless crabs whose eyes could only gaze backwards into their own impoverished life, and that roofing was all that separated them from the biting sun of Guadeloupe. There they all simmered in a dirty river of their own sweat, breeding with no hope of a better tomorrow. “Tomorrow, God-willing,” they all said, and, Heaven forbid, tomorrow always arrived. And so it was. And the children saw, and they heard, and they understood, and they accepted. And that was the being that would be! All of it like a toothless mouth opening up to reveal a few decayed stumps—that is how the lakou appeared to me with all its houses of poverty. The street seemed more welcoming when it reached the National Route. It seemed to invite you in. Its mouth opened wide, the better to swallow those who were unfortunate enough to linger there. Narrowing little by little, multiplying itself in the numerous little side streets, the path got so small that even the Citroen 2CVs could not get through. In this way, the lakou stifled its inhabitants, who remained its prisoners, so to speak. It was like a snake that swallows it prey little by little, bathing them in a paralyzing venom of poverty that sticks to your skin. The dusty little shop of Man...