On Saturday, December 11 at 6:00 pm was held at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris the Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde award ceremony, organized by the Institut du Tout-Monde. Created in 1990 by Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, this literary prize “rewards each year a work of the Caribbean open to imaginary and multiple identities in resonance”.
This 31st edition whose theme was “What women have…” crowned the first collection of poems by Martinican Loran Kristian, entitled Les Mots de Silence (The Words of Silence), illustrated by the Martinican visual artist Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine and published by K. Éditions. Aged 44, this cultural engineer, currently in charge of heritage institutions in Martinique, studied history, philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Antilles-Guyane and then at the Sorbonne.
This first book was well received by readers, among them great names of Caribbean literature such as Raphaël Confiant. “And here comes to us, at the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, an original, powerful voice, nourished by the texts of his predecessors but subtly managing to surpass them… He “writes to the difficult”, according to the happy formula of Glissant, because literature is not intended to surf the spirit of the times but well to try to perceive the unspeakable, the unsaid of the said. Read “Les mots de Silence” ! A new great Martinican poet is born…”, wrote one of the founders of the Creolité movement.
For the author, in 2021,“poetry is a way of existing, a mode of existence, a way of inhabiting life in a free way. Some consider it as a useless and marginal matter, a preoccupation of disconnected dreamer, but it is probably also to experience the chaos (…)”.
A Special mention was awarded to Haitian writer Emmelie Prophète for her novel Les Villages de Dieu, published by Éditions Mémoire d’Encrier. “For the lyrical sobriety of the means used by the novelist to force us to look into the eyes of the tenacious horror of tragedies, and the baroque grandeur of resistance, through which Caribbean societies continue to challenge humanity”, said the jury composed of Ernest Pépin (Guadeloupe/president), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadeloupe), Nancy Morejon (Cuba), Évelyne Trouillot (Haiti)…
The literary event began on Friday, December 10 at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine with documentary screenings, literary meetings, book signing sessions.
The next Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde award ceremony will take place in 2022 in French Guiana.
