Black-Label and Une Flèche pour un Pays à L’encan : Marronnages and Ecopoetries in Léon Gontran Damas and Elie Stephenson
To "marronner" poetic texts to identify the different weavings and vanishing lines offered by these same works, this article attempts to explore through two Guyanese authors, Leon-Gontran Damas and Ellie Stephenson. On the one hand, Damas's Black Label, where the "imaginary of entanglement" proposed by Sandrine Bédouret-Larraburu and David Bérouret unfolds, and on the other, Ellie Stephenson, in her poetic work Une flèche pour le pays à l'encan. Bringing these works into dialogue with one another is part of the desire to forge intentional geographies of marronnage, to inscribe them in the "dynamics of lyannaj" proposed by Dénètem Touam Bona through the question formulated by Gramsci: "What to do, how to fight back, how to create alliances in the face of the fragmentation of subaltern forces brought about by all hegemony? In this way, we'll have to design this reflection around the shifting, contested territory of these brown works, according to the ever-renewed imaginary frontiers of exile and the quest for self.