The Commission Culture is organising a monthly literary event: the Rencontres Littéraires. This new edition will take place on Wednesday 11 March 2020 at 6.30pm in the Amphithéâtre A.
Come and hear Pierre Appolinaire STEPHENSON present his book Nouveaux contes et légendes de Guyane. A cocktail will be served at the end of the presentation.
Following on from Fables de Guyane, the author continues to explore his country's oral tradition in this book. In this collection of 24 stories, a great deal of space is given over to the environment of French Guiana, which serves as a backdrop for its flora and fauna. Unsurprisingly, the flora and fauna are represented by the bees, the atipa, the howler monkey, the armadillo, etc. The reader is also invited to take in the entire territory, from north to south and east to west. This book highlights the moral and educational virtues of our tales and legends. For this reason, the stories of Mètbwa, chouval trwa pat, coup de poing monté and dent magique will serve as reminders, while those of Janao, Tonakri, Jabiru and Jigonbya will enable some to discover other facets of our oral tradition. At the end of this journey through French Guiana, the reader will understand the author's bias, for whom any anchoring in French Guiana requires knowledge of its environment and its people.
A few words about the author
Pierre Appolinaire STEPHENSON is a former teacher from French Guiana. An accomplished sportsman, he is very involved in community life. A former director of a training centre, he helped publish Traversée de la poésie guyanaise, a selection of Guyanese poets in 2004. He is also the author of the acclaimed collections Mots mêlés (2011) and Incandescences (2012), published by Editions du Panthéon. In 2014, he revealed his talents as a fabulist with Fables de Guyane and in 2016, Fables de Guyane, for children and their parents, in French and Creole, published by Orphie, which have just been reprinted following their continued success, both in French Guiana and elsewhere. In 2018, he published the acclaimed "Chasse et pêche insolites en Guyane, un livre de récits", also published by Orphie. Pierre Appolinaire Stephenson's "Nouveaux contes et légendes de Guyane" (New tales and legends from French Guiana) will come as a surprise to many. The author has resurrected some of the forgotten characters mentioned in the novel ATIPA, published in 1885, as well as others who are less well known. The writing is modern and the marriage of old and new tales is a success.
