Nager avec les piranhas: carnet guyanais by Michel Onfray (review)

This short text is a hybrid form that falls somewhere between récit de voyage and essai philosophique, the formal schizophrenia of which mirrors the author's analysis of the current embattled generation of native French Guianans. In the first part, Onfray explores the Maroni River as well as the precarious existence of the Amerindian communities that live along its banks. In the second, the author turns a perspicaciously critical eye toward Jacobin governance of French Guiana as it is expressed in a special parliamentary report written by two republican bureaucrats who the writer sardonically names Philaminte and Bélise, a disdainful reference to the characters of Molière's Les femmes savantes. Peppering his text with stereotypically Rousseauian idealizations of 'primitive' man in the state of nature, Onfray nevertheless manages to capture the complex ambiguities and paradoxes of the contact zone with his signature wit. According to Onfray, it is a confrontation wherein the fragile purity of tradition and decadent postmodern liberal-democratic autocracy (along with its handmaiden, global media) collide, with the latter ineluctably imposing its iron will to the detriment of the former's tranquil harmonious lifeways. The Rousseauian overtones are evident when Onfray describes an art project by the photographer Miquel Dewever-Plana that juxtaposes images of the same subject donning first Amerindian and then Western clothing. Onfray reads one boy's diptych as conversely constituted by the countenance of primitiveness radiating "la fierté, la détermination, la virilité, la superbe, la force, l'affûtage" and the face of modernity radiating "l'arrogance, la suffisance, le narcissisme, l'égotisme, l'insolence, l'avachissement" (Locations 176–83). The author problematically designates the first photograph as a depiction of a "little god of the forest" and the second as the physical incarnation of the stance of a "rapper." Throughout the second part, Onfray pits the shortsightedness of French administrative measures meant to stem the tide of adolescent suicides among the Amerindian population of the Overseas Department (tragedies which Onfray claims are occurring at ten to twenty times the rate seen in continental France) against a potential autochthonous agency with local and regional autonomy as its core aim. While Onfray points to the educational practices of one specific instructor as a possible model of a better-adapted educational curriculum for the French Guyanese, the text is mostly comprised of poignantly critical barbs that persuasively expose the inefficacy and cultural blindness of policies coming out of Paris. While Onfray's analysis of the failings of a one-size-fits-all politics for French Guiana is pertinent, his anachronistic perspective on Native identity in conversation with postmodernity as uniquely negative necessitates a more circumspective reading. While Onfray successfully raises awareness of many of the urgent issues faced by the original inhabitants of French Guiana as they relate to mainstream French politics, few concrete solutions emerge in Nager avec les piranhas.