This is the story of an overlooked book.

Louis Timagène Houat’s Les Marrons can be deemed a tour de force—a work of great literary quality, as well as an exceptional testimony of nineteenth-century slavery in the Indian Ocean, revealing the struggle carried out within the colonies themselves, a struggle which would ultimately result in the abolition of slavery by the great colonizing powers.

And yet, this novel, published in 1844 in Paris, remained “absent” and unknown to the public for a century and a half until its rediscovery by Raoul Lucas, the Réunionese researcher who would shed light on its pages for a contemporary audience.

And this tells us a lot about the silencing power of those who write official history.

Les Marrons is probably the very first Réunionese novel. It was published at a time when Réunion Island, then known as Bourbon Island, and its neighbor, Île de France, now called Mauritius, played a key role in the West’s enrichment. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, these two islands situated in the middle of the Indian Ocean served as crucial waypoints for Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English ships—a vital stopover on the grand route to India, where they would acquire spices, silks, and various other goods.

Initially serving as mere resupply stops, the twin islands swiftly garnered recognition as promising destinations for settlement, offering opportunities for the cultivation of cotton, sugar, coffee, cocoa, and indigo. This, however, required a labor force. Thus, starting in the seventeenth century, a substantial slave trade was organized.

When speaking of the slave trade, which led, through the centuries, to the displacement of tens of millions of Africans reduced to a state of slavery, we tend to focus mainly on the transatlantic trade. For years, the focus of historians has been on the fate of the eleven to thirteen million people deported from Africa to the Americas between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By comparison, the Indian Ocean trade has been largely overlooked. In the span of two centuries, roughly four to five million African natives were captured and subsequently enslaved on the islands of the Indian Ocean—though this figure is likely underestimated, given that the region’s ship- and land-owners tended to under-declare their slaves to escape higher taxation and to avoid getting caught when, following the official abolition of the trade at the start of the nineteenth century, they continued illegally bringing African captives as slaves to the islands.

***

This is the story of an exiled book.

Exiled, like its writer.

Considered the first novel to come out of Réunion Island, Les Marrons was published in Paris, where its author, Réunionese writer Louis Timagène Houat, had been deported.

Houat’s destiny is an exceptional one—the kind nourished by those islands where history stirs life into a unique, fertile, volcanic disarray.

According to various documents, his surname originated from Ouattara, his father’s name. His father, a member of Guinea’s Bambara tribe, arrived in Île de France toward the end of the eighteenth century before eventually settling in Bourbon in 1806. It was on August 12, 1809, in Bourbon, that Louis Timagène was born. To contemporary observers, he is a mystery lying in plain sight: how could someone like young Louis Timagène, in this distant colony where those considered Black were not allowed to attend school until 1845, exhibit such remarkable brilliance from such an early age—to the point of wanting, at sixteen, to build a small school of his own by the river in the island’s capital city, Saint-Denis? Could family connections account for such precocity?

Indeed, Houat was the nephew of Lislet Geoffroy, himself an enigma to the intelligentsia of his time. Born on Bourbon Island in 1755, to Niama, a Senegalese princess enslaved at the age of nine, and Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, a French engineer, Lislet never went to school and yet became one of the greatest scientists of his generation. An illustrious astronomer, botanist, meteorologist, cartographer, and geologist, he was the first Black man to be elected a corresponding member of Paris’s Académie des Sciences, in 1786, under the direct patronage of the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a cousin of King Louis XVI. In the fight for the abolition of slavery and human rights, he was held up as a symbol in the progressive intellectual circles of the time, on the eve of the French Revolution.

Was Louis Timagène Houat inspired by this illustrious uncle?

In any case, he was quickly singled out by Bourbon’s settlers as a dangerous antislavery advocate—someone who needed to be promptly dealt with if the status quo was to be preserved. He was a man with a brilliant mind, who helped promote the circulation in Bourbon of the Revue des Colonies, a monthly paper printed in Paris by Cyrille Bissette, an abolitionist from Martinique who also founded the Société des Amis des Noirs.

On December 13, 1835, Houat, then twenty-six, was arrested. Allegedly involved in what would later be dubbed the “Saint-André conspiracy,” he was accused of having incited a revolt against the settlers, aiming to abolish slavery on the island of Bourbon and establish an “African Republic.” He spent eight months in jail awaiting his trial, an imprisonment he described in his Lettre d’un prévenu dans l’affaire de l’île Bourbon (Letter from a defendant in the Bourbon Island case), published by the Revue des Colonies in September 1836. The Revue also assiduously followed Houat’s momentous trial, which unfolded from December 1836 to June 1837, ending with him and four others sentenced to life behind bars.

Due to blatant violations of due process—a result of the governor’s grip on Bourbon’s judicial system—and thanks to an amnesty granted by King Louis-Philippe I in 1837, Houat’s sentence was eventually commuted to political exile: he would have to endure a seven-year banishment from the colony.

He thus found himself in Paris, where he sought the company of other abolitionists. In 1838, Houat published his first “literary” work: Un proscrit de l’île Bourbon à Paris (An exile from Bourbon Island in Paris), in which he offered a poetic account of his imprisonment and subsequent banishment from the colony. And then, four years before the abolition of slavery was made official in France in 1848, under the patronage of the Ebrard bookstore located on the Passage des Panoramas, Houat published his first and apparently only novel: Les Marrons.

***

This is the story of suppressed books.

Les Marrons tells the story of Frême, an escaped slave living in the island’s remote mountains with Marie, a White woman. In this regard, Houat can practically be deemed a trailblazer.

In 1781, under the pseudonym “Joachim Schwartz,” Nicolas de Condorcet published Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres (Thoughts on the Enslavement of Negroes), an essay denouncing slavery as a crime. In 1815, Abbé Henri Grégoire, a fellow member of the Société des Amis des Noirs, published De la traite et de l’esclavage des noirs (On the Trade and Enslavement of Blacks), a powerful antislavery polemic. However, literary writers seemed to struggle in tackling the subject.

Toward the close of the twentieth century, in 1994, on the French TV show La Marche de l’Histoire (The March of History), writer and critic Gérard Gengembre raised the question of why literature seemed to have failed to address the fundamental issue of slavery, despite the remarkable proliferation of texts inspired by the French Revolution. “One cannot help but be struck by the observation that while the condition of Black people in general and the specific issue of slavery are not entirely overlooked in Romantic literature, they remain relatively minor topics of discussion,” he said. “This may be one of the most significant contradictions within Revolutionary-era literature, as it failed to fully embrace its own revolutionary message. Perhaps this can be attributed to the Revolution itself falling short of realizing its guiding principles in their entirety.”

Despite the revolutionary assertion of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity) at the core of its 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, France hesitated to take a definitive stance on the matter of slavery. Despite the official abolition of the slave trade in 1794, Napoleon reinstated its legality in the colonies in 1802. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature reveals how arduous its authors found the task of writing about slavery. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre was one of the first writers to broach the subject in his novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia) in 1788, although contemporary readers may object that he did so from the point of view of the “good master.” Alexandre Dumas, celebrated for his Les Trois Mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers) and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), wrote a denunciation of slavery in his novel Georges, which focused on the fight led by a Black man against White racism toward mixed-race freemen in his native Île de France at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We may also mention Bug-Jargal, Victor Hugo’s first novel, published in 1826, which portrays the inhumane conditions imposed on Saint-Domingue’s slave population prior to the 1791 uprising that led to the creation of the first independent Black republic of Haiti in 1804. As Gengembre put it, “While we may find a number of works dealing with the topic of slavery, we also find that literary history, and its capacity for the institutionalization of our collective memory, has either neglected to acknowledge them or relegated them to relatively obscure realms.”

This same “obscurity” also proves relevant in the case of the United States. In Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup offers a firsthand testimony of his experience as a Black man born free in New York, but subsequently kidnapped and enslaved for twelve years in Louisiana, nearly a decade before the American Civil War. Despite being published in 1853 and extensively cited in the abolitionist debate, this autobiography was “forgotten” for nearly a century. It was rediscovered in the early 1960s by two Louisiana historians, leading to a reprint in 1968. Eventually, it gained further recognition with a cinematic adaptation by Steve McQueen, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2014.

A similar fate befell another novel, one that likely inspired Hugo in writing Bug-Jargal. The work in question, Adonis ou le bon nègre, anecdote coloniale (Adonis; or, the Good Negro) by Jean-Baptiste Piquenard, was first published in 1798. However, after 1836, it vanished from public attention for over a century and a half, until two successive reprints in 2005 and 2006. This is also what happened to Louis Timagène Houat’s Les Marrons.

***

This is the story of a silenced book.

In 1844, Houat published his novel Les Marrons, “accompanied by fourteen pretty drawings” by Félix, who is speculated to have been a Parisian wood-engraver.

It would seem, however, that the book quickly faded from the collective memory. Its literary quality was certain—what, then, could be the cause of such a disappearance?

Official records show that in September 1844, Martinique’s local authorities seized shipments of books declared “a threat to the public order” from two incoming ships. Over 150 copies of Les Marrons were among the confiscated books, alongside a critical essay by Bissette concerning a new law soon to be imposed on the slave population. After persistent complaints from the two men, the Minister of the Colonies finally stated that the books could not be sent off to any other French colony. It would take Houat and Bissette two years to retrieve their respective books, which they now understood to be subject to an implicit distribution ban.

But books have a life of their own, surpassing the will of men.

In his four-volume series called The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón posits that we do not really choose books: rather, we are chosen, adopted, by them.

This may be what Réunionese sociologist and academic Raoul Lucas felt after serendipitously rediscovering Les Marrons while conducting archival research at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, at the end of the 1970s.

One can only imagine the shock, the bewilderment, the stupefaction of “discovering” a forgotten book. And the thrill of bringing it back into the world.

In 1986, a copy of the novel’s first edition was found in the bequest made by the Barquisseau family to the media library of Saint-Pierre, Réunion. Raoul Lucas, in collaboration with the Centre de recherche indianocéanique (CRI), worked toward the book’s reissue. In 1988, Les Marrons finally made its public comeback. “Nothing in our preceding readings or in our ongoing research on the question of slavery, or, more generally, of the French colonization in Bourbon and Île de France, had prepared us for what came as a shock, a revelation, and a mystery. It took us many years along with other fortunate circumstances to collect everything we now know about the author and his work,” Lucas wrote in his preface to a subsequent reprint by the Association d’Insertion pour le Développement Économique et Social (AIPDES). Such is the way of silenced books.

While, in English, the verb “to silence” has been in usage for a long time, in French, it was only recently, in 2022, that it made its official appearance in the dictionary Le Robert.

The practice of silencing writers and their books, however, has a long-standing precedent, especially when it comes to writing official history.

Silencing the story, in other words, has always been a means of silencing history.

[. . .]

***

This is the story of a book that remembers.

Houat wrote his book with the explicit will to shed light, for the French public, on the horrific conditions that slaves were forced to endure under the French Empire, and on the treatment reserved for maroons under the Code Noir.

But to do so, he didn’t write a pamphlet. He wrote a novel.

He wrote through the prism of imagination, employing the tools of literary and linguistic creation.

The words we use matter. They shape our reality.

In 1838, Frederick Douglass fled from his master’s property in Baltimore and found refuge in Massachusetts. Seven years later, he published Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, wherein he spoke in great detail of his experience of enslavement. The success of the book unfortunately brought him a level of recognition that jeopardized his safety. Encouraged by his abolitionist friends, he left the United States for England, to avoid being captured and sent back into slavery under the Fugitive Slave Act. For eight years, and until he was re-bought by English philanthropists and officially declared a freeman on December 12, 1846, Douglass was considered a “fugitive slave.” Had his story unfolded in Réunion Island, he would have been called a maroon.

Topography also determines the conditions for freedom. In Réunion Island, the steep and precipitous terrain stands as a visible testament to the territory’s volcanic origins, providing us with a glimpse into the hardships that molded the lives of the fugitives. While in the United States, a number of slaves managed to flee the South and find refuge in the antislavery states of the North, the limited expanse of Réunion Island, consisting of only 2,500 square kilometers, left little room for escape. Therefore, escaping slaves had no choice but to take to Réunion’s heights, characterized by steep mountains and inaccessible calderas. There, they created what would later come to be known as the “Kingdom of the Heights,” or “Kingdom of the Interior” (as opposed to the coastal areas, occupied by the colonizers). In these untamed spaces, the wild offered its protection solely to the most daring, for the wilderness was rough.

According to some etymological sources, the term “maroon” comes from the Spanish cimarrón, derived from cima (summit), and meaning “summit dweller.” Alternatively, the word may have originated in Haiti, and more precisely from its first inhabitants, the Arawak Indians, who called the island Ayiti (meaning “the land of high mountains”). The Arawaks used the term símara to talk about animals, most frequently pigs, gone back to a feral state after having been domesticated. According to this theory, following Christopher Columbus’s 1492 colonization of the island, which he dubbed Hispaniola, the word cimarrón emerged around 1540 to refer to fugitive Indigenous people who resisted enslavement.

The tales of maroons vividly illustrate that throughout the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, men and women consistently defied the shackles of their enslavement. Such stories show that they have always, whether alone or collectively, fiercely fought to escape it. In some cases, they even refused, from the outset, to submit to the will of a master. Lislet Geoffroy, Louis Timagène Houat’s uncle, recounts that, during an expedition with the botanist Commerson to the island’s volcano in 1771, they came across a Black woman from Madagascar named Simanandé, and her son Tsifaron. Simanandé had taken refuge on one of the mountain’s peaks after successfully escaping upon her arrival on the island, before she could be taken to her future master’s property. The cold had caught her by surprise, and she had sought sanctuary in one of the mountain’s caves.

When sent to hunt down fugitives, maroon hunters did not always succeed in returning with their intended targets. If the slaves were killed in the chase, carrying their bodies over the uneven terrain would be too cumbersome. As a result, the hunters would often bring back only a severed ear, which they would then affix to a board displayed in the public square of their village to announce the capture.

Centuries later, bringing back a book about maroons holds a different significance—it symbolizes the retrieval of a voice rather than a mere body part. It amounts to re-membering history’s dislocated body.

***

This is the story of a pioneering book.

And that is why Aqiil Gopee and Jeffrey Diteman’s brilliant translation of The Maroons is essential.

It brings to the English-speaking world a previously unheard and yet crucial voice of the abolitionist fight.

In The Maroons, Houat shows that being a maroon entails more than simply escaping the confines of a plantation and employing extraordinary survival strategies. By establishing settlements in the elevated regions of the island, the maroons aspire to forge a new world—a world of freedom that upholds and empowers the inherent dignity of every human being.

In postabolition colonial literature, the character of the maroon was largely used to embody malevolent forces. For example, in Réunion Island lore, Kala, a maroon woman, became a witch figure invoked to frighten children into obedience. Contemporary literature, however, has reclaimed the figure of the maroon, making it an anticolonial metaphor for freedom.

Rediscovering The Maroons today participates in our awareness of the creolization of the world.

Houat not only presents the dream of an open society, where the fusion of races leads to peace and harmony, but also highlights the significance of racial blending occurring in Bourbon as a precursor to a global movement. Embracing this novel takes the reader on a transformative journey that transcends simplistic notions of race-mixing.

Édouard Glissant said that for creolization to occur, the cultural elements brought together should be “equal in value,” and not merely persisting in a relationship of dominance. 

Houat actively participates in this transformative process by centering his book on the maroons—their voices, their struggles, and their vibrant lives pulsating like a desperate heartbeat. In doing so, he restores them to our collective and individual consciousness in their fundamental essence as human beings. “Isn’t the act of forgetting through alienation, ignorance, or arrogance indicative of underlying serious unresolved issues?” This question, as formulated by Glissant in 2008, in Tous les jours de mai: Manifeste pour l’abolition de tous les esclavages (Every day of May: Manifesto for the abolition of all slavery), continues to ring true today. “As long as we will listen privately and individually to the world’s woes and joys, or that we will privately and individually express our own woes and joys, we will necessarily be shortening our own memories and will encourage the mis-knowing of that of others,” Glissant writes. He calls for “a conjoining of memories, a converging of generosities, knowledge that is fundamentally impetuous, and which we all need, individuals and communities alike, wherever we may stand. To pool memories, to use some memories to liberate others, is to open all paths to Global Relation.”

***

This translation of The Maroons contributes to this project. To remember our individual and collective memories, and in so doing, inscribe them lastingly into the mesh of a richer world—richer because it is less forgetful, less ignorant.

After Les Marrons, Louis Timagène Houat eventually settled in France, became a doctor at the king’s court, and published books on homeopathic medicine, of which he was an early proponent. Judicially exiled from his island for seven years, he was sociologically banished from the collective memory for over a century and a half. But the rediscovery of his extraordinary novel has made it possible to rescue him from that silence.

The vaults of history are full of voices still to be unearthed.