ISLAND CONSERVATION-Seychelles loses Antoine Abel, poet and nature-lover |25 October 2004

I had already developed a passion for natural history then: living in the woods of La Rosière, behind the Roman Catholic Mission clock tower, I was revelling in outdoor life, collecting snail shells, seeds and pebbles, and observing the habits of insects and birds.

And, very much a bookworm, I devoured any reading material I could lay my hand on, including the natural history books that my mother, a teacher, supplied me with. I had quickly realised in frustration that the books I read, all published in foreign lands, did not have much to do with my everyday surroundings.

I lived among lagati and cinnamon trees, but I read about oak and willow trees. I saw mynahs, tenrecs and rhinoceros beetles, but my books were about robins, squirrels and red admiral butterflies. There were no books that said anything about the Seychellois natural environment.

Then came Antoine’s Paille en queue, with its forty pages of quaint little poems in French and English, many of them about fruit bats, corals, octopus, tortoises, cicadas and the southeast monsoon. Looking back at those often awkward first poems, touching in their naivety, it is not easy to explain their impact on me.

But reading Antoine’s work was a milestone in my intellectual development in that it validated, so to speak, my real-life experiences. Fruit bats, octopus and sardine fishing were talked about in a book. One could write about such things. And, moreover: Seychellois, too, could write books!

Years later, when I joined Radio Seychelles as a producer, I had the opportunity to interview Antoine many times. I can still see him as he was then, dressed in khaki trousers and a chequered shirt, and wearing plastic sandals and a straw hat that he would remove to reveal a mass of tight silvery curls. He was always bursting with enthusiasm for this or that project, or for life generally, and his writing was punctuated by similes and metaphors that drew heavily on aspects of the flora and fauna of Seychelles.

In Mon tann en leokri (1982), the first novel in Seychellois Creole, the police is humorously compared to a swarm of yellow paper wasps: “Nou reste bet ler lapolis i arrive koman mous zonn ki ou’n anvoy en pti ros dan son nik.” Chapter 18 of the same work contains an interesting scene where Nita questions her father about the habits of sooty terns.

She wants to know why their eggs are speckled with brown, and why they do not breed on Mahé. Her father, Régis, mentions hearing old folk tell of seabirds laying at Grand Police - but whether Antoine was actually told this or whether he inserted it for the purpose of the story, I do not know.

In 1977, Antoine became the first (and only) Seychellois writer to have works published in Europe when P.J. Oswald in France published Coco sec, Une tortue se rappelle and Contes et poèmes des Seychelles. Une tortue se rappelle is a fantasy that tells of a prehistoric Seychelles, “peopled” by intelligent giant land tortoises, with one of them, Moulapa, as the story-teller – of which the Réunionnais writer Jean-Louis Joubert has said: “…la tortue dont la mémoire enracine l'histoire des Seychellois dans les temps immémoriaux (et la rêverie de l'écrivain seychellois rejoint sans doute celle des Réunionnais et des Mauriciens imaginant les géants lémuriens: les géants des Seychelles ont seulement pris la forme des tortues sans âge...).”

I thought of all this last Tuesday on hearing about Antoine Abel’s death, less than two months before his 70th birthday. He who described himself as “un petit poète sans importance vivant sur une île de poésie” and who often wrote poems about departures (Au revoir, Le départ) is no longer, but for many of us he will not be forgotten – he was something of a mentor who set off a whole new way of looking at life when he wrote, in Mon poème natal, the ultimate summary of how we are bound to nature:

Je suis un enfant des îles…
Dès mes premiers vagissements
J’ai respire la mer
Je suis en même temps
Gravier, poisson, goémon, corail!