Games

When I went to a different branch of the library the other day, I found a book -- actually a photocopy of a book -- of traditional games of the Creole population. It is so much fun to read. Basically, at night, before I go to bed, I read about five or six entries and I summarize them for the dictionary project. Every so often, I come across a game that I think would be fun for the U.S. For example, there's a game called Paganni ké poul roughly 'fox and hen', in which one player is a fox, one player is a hen, and everyone else lines up behind the hen and are her chicks. The hen has to move laterally, arms (wings?) outstretched, protecting the chicks from getting tagged by the fox. There's another one called Jwebar, a bit like capture the flag with no flag, in which you have two teams, and each team has their own side to defend. Each player has the right to tag (right to tag = bar) one other person from the other side when they come to the opposing side to liberate their previously tagged friends. The game ends when one team is fully captured (or recess ends).


There's other games, however, like poté which have exact correspondents in the U.S. Our correspondent is to poté is 'tag'. There's another game that works almost exactly like jacks, which, as it happens, is a very popular game in Haiti. I forgot to bring the book with me to the internet cafe, but there's also an equivalent to 'Eeny meeny miney mo' (except without the ugly racist history behind it).


In any case, as soon as I saw this book, I knew it was a linguistic goldmine, and French Guiana has tons of goldmines, as I believe I mentioned in Post 100. In fact, it was the gold strikes of the 1800s that first brought over the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians, and Antilleans that form much of the diverse community today. French Guianese society is so thoroughly mixed that when you see a last name like Tien-Long (the leader of the Regional Council) or Mam-Lam-Fouck (the most prominent historian of French Guiana), you should not be surprised when someone who shows no trace of Asian roots shows up. Anyhow, it is really the influence of the Antilles that shows up in the games, as every so often, I'll read one of the chants that accompanies the game and I'll see a word or two that is clearly not from French Guiana, but rather was imported from the Antilles. I geek out and write it down when I see things like that, because it's that type of mixture that I'm looking for in my dissertation.