1. From soil to script: the poet as Paysan de l’Ecriture

At the heart of Ma savane natale, Guadeloupean writer and political figure Ernest Moutoussamy reclaims the afterlives of the colonial habitation by transforming the savane where he grew up—an open grassy expanse of land often situated at the edge of former plantations—into a vibrant site of memory, poetic inspiration, ancestral presence, and cultural reparation. Today, his house and garden stand on a portion of this savane, and the land, once cultivated by his father, becomes both personal cradle and literary cosmos. As he recounts, “I was born in a savane, and my childhood took place in that savane,” “That savane is dear to me, because … my umbilical cord was buried there.”Footnote ¹³ Reflecting on the structure and philosophy of his savane, Moutoussamy writes: “I built an altar of gratitude composed of the seven foods with which you fed me. Dedicated to memory, to thought, to family, to work, to poetry, to love, and to ethics, it will tell posterity how great you were.”Footnote ¹⁴ Akin to islands, each of the seven areas appears as self-contained yet fluidly connected to the others within the vegetal archipelago of his garden.Footnote ¹⁵ The former habitation is supplanted by a poetic savane as Moutoussamy endorses the role of a paysan de l’écriture —a defining metaphor through which he assimilates agricultural and literary labour. Depicting his savane, Moutoussamy writes,

By personifying the savane and portraying himself as a paysan de l’écriture striving to make her voice heard, Moutoussamy fuses agricultural and literary toil into a decolonial literary practice, thereby revalorising the earth vilified through colonial exploitation. This vision is materialised in his garden by numerous signs and boards affixed to various trees or wooden huts, all bearing short texts or poetic lines through which the garden becomes a poetic space. One such inscription—painted over the wall of a wooden hut in an area of the garden dedicated to poetry—specifically mentions the phrase paysan de l’écriture, underlining its centrality to Moutoussamy’s oeuvre (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Boucan dont la poésie est la flamme— Paysan de l’écriture. Photograph taken in Ernest Moutoussamy’s garden, Saint-François, Guadeloupe, 12 May 2025. All photographs were taken by the author.

In Ma savane natale, he reflects:

This passage resonates with the image of the paysan de l’écriture that blurs the line between cultivation and education, rooting poetic identity in both land and literacy.

The term habitation refers to a specific colonial land “system of economic and spatial organisation established during the 1670s that endured until the rise of the sugar factories of the 1860s,” combining plantation infrastructure, social control, and coerced labour.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, Moutoussamy’s transformation of the savane—a residual zone of the habitation—takes on symbolic force: by reclaiming this marginal land as a site of memory and creativity, he reimagines it as fertile ground for cultural renewal. This reclaiming gesture echoes Catherine Benoît’s reading of the jardin de case —which she equates with the jardin créole —and the jardin vivrier—traditionally located farther from the house (or case) and where roots and bigger vegetables are grown—as domestic spaces of memory and reappropriation. Although enslaved Africans were violently uprooted and denied formal ties to land, what they cultivated were biodiverse ecosystems shaped by diasporic knowledge and practice. Therefore, these spaces offered a grounded form of rootedness that opposed the extractive logic of the plantation.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, Moutoussamy’s garden is a space of reappropriation, but the latter is not solely based on botanical biodiversity but on his literary transformation of the formerly colonised space. Writing becomes sowing; the poet’s labour is cultivation, memory, and repair, as he declares to his savane: “You made me a peasant of writing so that your memory would never bear the wrinkles of decay.”Footnote ²⁰ The savane is thus transformed in a living archive where voices and memory are preserved, especially through the invocation of ancestral knowledges and legacies.

This vision of the savane also evokes the “territorialisation” that Benoît analyses in her reflections on the jardin créole cultivated by slaves.Footnote ²¹ Benoît insists that they were unexpected sites of “appropriation” of the American continent by Afro-descendant populations—even though, in his more recent work, Malcom Ferdinand critiques such gardens as politically limited, arguing that only marronage enabled true ecological resistance.Footnote ²² Moutoussamy’s conception of the savane as garden of poetry expands these views on several accounts. His savane is a space where the historical distinction between “jardin de case” and “jardin vivrier,” discussed by Benoît, has been blurred—as is the case for most contemporary jardins creoles. Most importantly, in his garden, the cultural (re-) appropriation of Guadeloupe’s diverse cultural heritage includes the formerly marginalised Asian cultural memory and hinges on literary creation.

2. The garden as living archive of Indianité

Moutoussamy’s garden possesses the key features of the jardin créole—biodiversity, subsistence, ritual and medicinal uses, ornamental flora—but grounds them in a poetic vision shaped by Caribbean Indian heritage and an ethics of relation. In his garden, one finds tubers emblematic of Creole biodiversity—such as Colocasia esculenta (madère), Xanthosoma sagittifolium (malanga), Manihot esculenta (cassava), Abelmoschus esculentus (okra), and Cucurbita moschata (calabaza or West Indian pumpkin). He also grows vegetables including Brassica rapa (white turnip), Lactuca sativa (lettuce), Spinacia oleracea (spinach), and Solanum melongena (aubergine), alongside fruits such as Syzygium malaccense (Malay apple), Ananas comosus (pineapple, introduced by the Kalinago), Malpighia emarginata (acerola cherry), and Punica granatum (pomegranate). His garden also contains Theobroma cacao (cacaoyer), Terminalia catappa (locally known as pyé zanmann), and the poyer—Ziziphus mauritiana, often called Antillean pear. Medicinal plants also feature prominently, like Ti bom (Lantana invoculatra), which functions as both spice and medicine and is used in the ritual Hindu rice pudding in Guadeloupe. As with other rimèd razié, the Creole name Ti bom encodes the plant’s healing function. Ornamental plants, including Ixora coccinea, Etlingera elatior (torch ginger), Cananga odorata (ylang-ylang), and Catharanthus roseus (rosy periwinkle), to quote a few, complete this vegetal cosmos. Among his many majestic trees, one particularly stands out for his uniquely round leaves, the Coccoloba uvifera (seaside grape tree). Moutoussamy carefully tended the tree, so its five branches grew upright (Figure 2). He interprets them as symbols of the five continents—while the tree leaves resemble the globe—thereby echoing his vision of the savane as a universal space of rhizomatic relations where botanical biodiversity reflects the mixity of peoples and cultures. It is through this vision of the savane as a place of cultural encounters that historically obscured Asian cultural components are reasserted.

Figure 2.

Seaside grape tree with rounded leaves and five branches symbolising the globe. Saint-François, 27 August 2024.

Earlier research on the jardin créole tended to overlook Indo-Caribbean contributions. Gustave Samut gestures to these in the Cahiers, noting the jardin créole’s synthesis of “Caribbean, African, European… and even Indian” influences.Footnote ²³ Yet, the teaching sequence he offers in his article omits any specific Indo-Caribbean focus—an absence that mirrors wider silences. Recent scholarship has examined how discourses on Caribbeanness and creolisation have excluded the Asian presence be it in the Anglophone or Francophone Caribbean. Thus, Atreyee Phukan argued for a “contradictory Indianness,” thereby pointing out that Indianness forms an integral part of Caribbean creolised identities and cultures, while Ananya Kabir has underscored how the Indian presence’s centrality to creolisation processes could be reassessed through transoceanic readings connecting the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.Footnote ²⁴

Moutoussamy’s garden aligns with these perspectives as it materially foregrounds Indian cultural components. First, it does so with a variety of Indian plants and trees like vèpèlè (Tamil veppilai, neem tree)—the most representative of Indo-Caribbean botanical heritage on the island—Moringa oleifera, Piper betle (pawoka), Ocimum basilicum, Tamarindus Indicia (tamarind tree), and Curcuma longa (turmeric). The latter two are also ingredients in colombo (from Tamil kozambhu), a curry-based dish that can be vegetarian, or served with meat, such as goat or chicken.Footnote ²⁵ Colombo is the most popular dish in French Caribbean food culture. For Moutoussamy, the dish does not merely satiate physical hunger, rather it epitomises the adaptation and creolisation of Indian culture as well as a philosophy of life and a spirituality brought with the indentured ancestors during the second half of the 19th century. This is what Moutoussamy contends in his analysis of Indo-Caribbean cuisine as a culinary art “grounded in an ethic of respect for nature” that “creates a timeless art of living by embracing a spiritual approach.”Footnote ²⁶ He further underlines how indentured migrants—largely vegetarian Hindus relying on vegetables, fruits, herbs, and spices as staples—adapted their cuisine to the harsh plantation environment in which they lived while maintaining a reverence for nature inherited from Hindu traditions. The colombo dish perfectly illustrates the dual process of preservation and adaptation, as an originally mostly vegetarian dish became one served with meat such as “beef, pork, or goat.”Footnote ²⁷ Colombo is also highly symbolic in Moutoussamy’s writings, especially in his poetry, where its main ingredient—the blend of massalè spices—is often associated with the cultural mixing he praises.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, the writer considers colombo as a dish that not only encourages a respectful relation to nature but also brings together the whole Guadeloupean population, regardless of ethnic and cultural differences. In addition, the dish is seen as one that “should be respected” because mandja (Creole word from Tamil mañcaḷ), another word for turmeric, is used not only for its medicinal properties but also for Hindu rites. Given the multiple virtues associated with colombo, Moutoussamy even considers it as part of the “world’s cultural heritage.”Footnote ²⁹ It is, therefore, not surprising that his tamarind tree should bear a sign reading “I preserved your colombo for you”—as he pays homage to the tamarind for alleviating his hunger and nurturing his mind, while at the same time evoking its role as natural food preservative and memory keeper—legacy of indenture—through the polysemic term “preserve.”Footnote ³⁰ Significantly, Moutoussamy also describes his garden as shaped by “four hands: the cinnamon hand of the Amerindians, the snow hand of the Europeans, the ebony hand of the Africans, and the mandja hand of the Asians” (Figure 3).Footnote ³¹

Figure 3.

Four hands: Amerindian, European, African, and Asian. Photograph of a drawing showing the map of Guadeloupe shaped by four hands, symbolising the archipelago’s diverse cultural roots. In the foreground, part of the food garden is visible, with eggplants, West Indian pumpkins, turnips, and other vegetables and tubers. Saint-François, 12 May 2025.

Figure 3. Long description

In the foreground, dense green foliage of West Indian pumpkins and other vegetables fills the bottom half of the frame. Behind the plants is a large wire mesh enclosure. Mounted on the left side of the mesh is a blue rectangular mural titled MA DEUXIÈME MAMAN. The mural depicts a map of Guadeloupe formed by the silhouettes of four hands in different skin tones: a white hand at the top, an orange-toned hand to the right, a dark brown hand at the bottom, and a light brown hand to the left. Red text on the left side of the mural lists cultural values. To the right of the mural, a smaller blue wooden sign is mounted on the mesh, containing several lines of yellow text in different languages including Tamoul and Lingala. A few chickens are visible inside the wire enclosure behind the signs. The top of the structure is covered with dry vines and green climbing plants.

Such cultural interweavings appear in Olivier Malatchoumy’s creole garden as well. A political ally of Moutoussamy, Malatchoumy is also a descendant of indentured workers who pridefully showcases his Indian cultural heritage through his gardening practices and literary endeavours. In his autobiographical book On Zouti Filé, prefaced by Moutoussamy, Malatchoumy’s garden becomes a page where “melon vines and watermelon trails are lines of text,” where vegetation becomes scriptural inscription.Footnote ³² Like Moutoussamy, Malatchoumy equates cultivation and writing as acts of cultural affirmation. While his garden displays a wide variety of plants and trees—and even animals like chickens—Indian plants and vegetables such as avelka, pikenga, and pawoka—important to vegetarian Indian Guadeloupeans—stand prominently in his plot. Moutoussamy’s support to his initiative reflects his broader commitment to the promotion of Indianité, a political and cultural movement valorising the contributions of Caribbean people of Indian descent to Antillean identity. The term gained early visibility in the 1970s, with preliminary discussions in Soleil indien, a journal founded in 1974 by Gilbert Francis Ponaman.Footnote ³³ It was further theorised by Michel Ponnamah in 1985 and gained programmatic form in Moutoussamy’s La Guadeloupe et son indianité (1987), where Indianité emerges as a plural, relational identity embedded in créolisation. Footnote ³⁴

In addition, Moutoussamy’s garden draws on his personal interpretation of Hindu thought—understood as a philosophy of coexistence, inclusion, and shared humanity—to imagine the savane as a transcultural site of communion. Raised in a rural Guadeloupean world “touched by Hinduism,” he associates this philosophical legacy with the possibility of non-exclusive belonging.Footnote ³⁵ Significantly, Moutoussamy has placed on a small archipelago of his garden—named “savane of the apostles”—statues or mounted photographic portraits of three figures—Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Abbé Grégoire. Chosen as inspirational spokespersons of non-violence and harmony across ethnic, racial, and community divides, these three figures’ co-presence enacts Moutoussamy’s ideal of cross-cultural fraternity, as they, respectively, stand for Asian, Black, and White people. They are also positioned to form the three pillars of a triangle, which visually and symbolically brings their political, philosophical, and spiritual beliefs and voices into resonance. Their presence, therefore, contributes to Moutoussamy’s imagining of the savane as not merely a material reality but also a privileged space for reflection and moral elevation. A semi-rigid signboard mounted in this zone bears a message in Guadeloupean Creole: “Sonjé yo pou dèmin pli bèl” (“Remember them for a better tomorrow”). The use of Creole here stands out, as most of the other inscriptions—whether presenting Moutoussamy’s poetic lines or identifying portrayed figures with various trees—are in French. The Creole phrase, placed at the heart of the savane of the apostles, affirms the role of Creole language not only as a marker of cultural identity but as a poetic and philosophical mode of relation. In this context, Moutoussamy’s choice to weave together French and Creole inscriptions within his savane aligns with a longstanding tradition of approaching the garden not only as a site of cultivation but of linguistic and cultural expression. A statue of Ghandi also features in another part of his garden, dedicated to “ethics.” Thus, the Indian thinker occupies a central part in Moutoussamy’s philosophy. Nonetheless, his presence is included within a wider relational and intercultural universe.

The linguistic layering of Creole and French in Moutoussamy’s garden also resonates with the broader association between Creole gardens and Creole speech, especially in pedagogical contexts. In educational jardin créole initiatives, teachers often use songs, proverbs, and Creole phrases to connect pupils to the cultural meanings of the plants they tend.Footnote ³⁶ This echoes oral traditions—such as work songs and rhythmic speech historically linked to agricultural labour—documented in Mina Adèle Roy-Belleplaine’s ethnographic study of Martinique.Footnote ³⁷ Several contributions to Les Cahiers créoles du patrimoine de la Caraïbe highlight this phenomenon, from life stories in Creole to pedagogical projects using proverbs and analyses of music and dance integrated into garden-based education.Footnote ³⁸ This multivocal symbolic register extends to the garden’s commemorative dimension, where acclaimed figures from several parts of the world contribute to its function as a living academy or what Moutoussamy calls “académie universelle de ma savane.” In this light, the jardin créole becomes not only a site of ecological knowledge but a medium to reclaim neglected cultural inheritances—agricultural, philosophical, spiritual—linked to Indian presences but embedded in a creolised, multicultural landscape.

3. The Académie Universelle of the savane: muse and pedagogue

In Ma savane natale, Moutoussamy portrays the savane as both microcosm and world: “Remember, savane, how at the heart of your mixed-blood republic, tiny province of the world, you drew a universal cartography.”Footnote ³⁹ As concentrated metaphor for the globe—a “tiny province,” the savane holds plural histories, memories, and cultures, a spatial imaginary that enacts what Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Rather than competing, memories of Africa, India, Europe, and the Americas intersect, echo, and co-constitute one another. Thus, Moutoussamy’s savane becomes a poetics of relation, to borrow Edouard Glissant’s terminology—a constellation of rhizomatic entanglements.Footnote ⁴¹ This is mirrored in Moutoussamy’s conception of his garden as a creolised literary space that he names the académie universelle de ma savane (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Académie universelle de ma savane. Banner affixed to two coconut trees, displaying the names of personalities featured in this symbolic academy. On the left, a portrait of Rabindranath Tagore is visible. Saint-François, 12 May 2025.

Figure 4. Long description

A wide white banner is suspended between two coconut trees in a tropical garden. The banner reads ACADÉMIE UNIVERSELLE DE MA SAVANE in red capital letters.

At the center of the banner is a blue rectangular board displaying a world map with continents color-coded in red, yellow, and black. Above the main text, a small illustration of an open book with a tree growing from it is visible.

On the left side, a vertical panel lists the names Rabindranath Tagore, Maryse Condé, Victor Hugo, and Pablo Neruda. Attached to the left coconut tree trunk is a separate portrait of Rabindranath Tagore with his name printed above it.

On the right side, a vertical panel lists the names Wole Soyinka, Xu Yuan Zhong, Aimé Césaire, Saint-John Perse, and Derek Walcott.

In the background, lush green foliage and other smaller signs with French text are scattered throughout the savanna-like setting. In the foreground, a small blue wooden bench sits on the grass with decorative items on top.

The académie—which stands on the garden’s last area dedicated to “ethics”—unfolds as a vegetal tribute to universal values, articulating an ethics grounded in creolisation, remembrance, and cross-cultural fraternity. In this zone, Moutoussamy has placed the names and portraits of several international thinkers, writers, politicians he admires in the shade of trees symbolically connected to them; thus, he interjects the savane: “Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Rabindranath Tagore and Victor Hugo … inscribe their words in your ledgers.”Footnote ⁴² The symbolic landscape has been carefully designed: Chinese poet Xu Yuanchong is honoured under a litchi tree (Litchi chinensis), Bengali Rabindranath Tagore was initially honoured under a vèpèlè (Azadirachta indica), though the tree has since died; Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka was once represented by a logwood tree (Haematoxylum campechianum), also now dead. Martinican Aimé Césaire and Guadeloupean Saint-John Perse are placed under a breadfruit tree (Artocarpus altilis), French Victor Hugo under a sapodilla tree (Manilkara zapota), Chilian Pablo Neruda under a calabash tree (Crescentia cujete) (Figure 5), Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott under a coconut palm (Cocos nucifera), and Guadeloupean Maryse Condé under a vètèlé (possibly T. catappa).Footnote ⁴³

Figure 5.

Pablo Neruda beneath the Calabash Tree. A calabash and a conch shell symbolically link the Chilean poet to the Amerindian heritage of the Guadeloupean archipelago. An inscription quotes lines from Neruda’s La Verdad that inspired Moutoussamy: “Idealism and realism, I love you … light and root of the tree of life.” Saint-François, 27 August 2024.

This vegetal pantheon also operates as a listening chamber—as underlined by a conch shell affixed to each tree, serving as a natural sound amplifier—where the poet converses with the memory-laden voices of the trees (Figure 6).

Figure 6.

Vegetal and poetic pantheon—view of a section of the Académie de ma savane, where the poet attentively amplifies and listens to the voices of trees and the poets and thinkers who inspire him. Saint-François, 27 August 2024.

Figure 6. Long description

The installation is set in a lush, shaded area with several thin-trunked trees. Moving from left to right:

* On the far left, a tree trunk features a portrait of Wole Soyinka above a white plaque with text. Below it, a bright blue painted rock sits at the base of the roots.

* The next tree to the right displays a portrait of Aimé Césaire and a white sign above it that reads JE SUIS UN SOUVENIR QUI N’ATTEINT PAS LE SEUIL. A pink flower or fabric is tucked into the bark.

* In the center, a tree holds a portrait of Saint-John Perse with his name printed in red on a white board below. A second blue rock is at this tree’s base. Above this tree, a horizontal sign reads POÈTE TOUJOURS, CE REBELLE-NÉ, QUI REVENDIQUE DANS L’HOMME PLUS QUE L’HOMME. S.J.P.

* On the right, a larger tree trunk features the name VICTOR HUGO painted in large red letters on a rustic white board, with a smaller portrait of Hugo and a quote below it. A white conch shell is attached to the bark near the bottom.

The background is filled with dense green tropical foliage and sunlight filtering through the canopy.

Writing, in this context, does not represent nature—it emerges from it. As Moutoussamy writes, “Each tree carries the breath and spirit of its confidant. … Thus, dear savane, your academy takes shape.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Acting as a “confidant,” each figure breathes their thoughts and philosophy into the trees, in symbiosis with them and through them. This symbiosis is visibly expressed, as each figure’s portrait is affixed to a tree native to, or widely found in, their homeland and in some cases associated with the figure’s personal tastes. For instance, poet Xu Yuanchong’s portrait is affixed to a litchi tree, whereas French Caribbean writers Aimé Césaire’s and Saint-John Perse’s portraits are mounted on a breadfruit tree. Thus, the garden is not merely the subject of poetry but its co-author. Moutoussamy’s literary homage is shaped visually and spatially: medium-close photographic portraits of each figure—framing the head and torso—are mounted on large wooden plaques and affixed to the trees with which Moutoussamy associates them. The tree becomes both a sheltering presence and a mirror of the values embodied by these thinkers. The result is a symbolic vegetal pantheon—one that is not strictly posthumous, as several of the personalities are still alive. Rather than naming trees after individuals, Moutoussamy places each literary or political figure in resonance with a tree species, chosen for its botanical, geographical, or affective significance. These vegetal avatars give form to the “breath and spirit of their confidants,” suggesting that poetry, like the tree, is rooted in the earth but reaches for the sky. That certain trees have died, or grown differently, also reveals the garden’s organic autonomy—its symbolic layout shaped as much by chance as by intent, mirroring the writer-gardener’s own desire to cultivate a universal savane.

Indeed, Moutoussamy’s imaginative grafting of literary lineages into his savane extends Caribbean creolisation into a universal imaginary. While several literary works have nourished pedagogical reflections on the jardin créole—including Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle by Simone Schwarz-Bart and Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau, both often referenced in literary analyses of the Creole garden—Moutoussamy’s garden is not merely a pedagogical tool or a source of sustenance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Rather, his garden is intricately linked to poetic creation; it is a muse, a medium, and a manuscript.

In an earlier poem from the collection À la recherche de l’Inde perdue (2005), Moutoussamy writes:

This vision of the universal garden bridges poetic ancestry with spiritual ecology. Through vegetal metaphors and mythological allusions, Moutoussamy constructs a literary space in which cultural genealogies—from India and the Americas—are not opposed but interwoven. Akin to a metaphorical forest of multicultural knowledge, the “universal garden” also speaks to Moutoussamy’s belief in an archipelagic poetics forged from relation rather than origin, inspired by Edouard Glissant’s vision of the Tout-monde, a framework that refuses cultural hierarchies and celebrates creolised imaginaries.Footnote ⁴⁷ Similarly, Moutoussamy’s Académie universelle honours difference through proximity, coexistence, and poetic sedimentation.

His académie universelle is not a conventional academic institution, as his garden pays tribute not only to celebrated figures—writers, revolutionaries, thinkers—but also to unnamed ancestors—who all converge into a site of poetic elevation. Such a garden differs from the classical jardin créole as described by Benoît’s historical typology distinguishing jardin de case, jardin vivrier, and jardin commercial.Footnote ⁴⁸ The jardin de case —or jardin créole,—often established near the home and traditionally tended by women, functions not only as a source of food but also as a site of protection, social interaction, and ritual transmission.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet, this gendered and Afro-Caribbean framing leaves out the post-abolition contributions of Indian indentured labourers, whose horticultural knowledge, culinary practices, and cultural imaginaries have enriched the Caribbean’s ethnobotanical landscape. As suggested earlier, Moutoussamy’s savane articulates this overlooked genealogy. But, most importantly, by drawing on Indian philosophical motifs, plants of South Asian origin, and a symbolic vocabulary shaped by religious and cultural interconnection, he reframes the jardin créole as a pluralist ecology of memory. Rather than a binary site of resistance or survival, the garden becomes a network of cultural entanglement. Therefore, his garden as a paragon of biodiversity and a pedagogue showcases diverse legacies, memories, cultures, and ancestral knowledges.

In this regard, the savane offers what Moutoussamy calls a “pedagogy of the invisible,” an alternative to textual historiography grounded instead in embodied transmission. This idea is expressed when he asserts that he became “a peasant of writing who stood tall to safeguard, in your invisible hair, the dreams of your children, to embed in your sail the infant smile of your rising sun.”Footnote ⁵⁰ This extended metaphor of hair evokes both rootedness and continuity—memory here grows organically, not as a fixed past, but as the unfolding potential of a future carried through land and language. This also aligns with Moutoussamy’s claim that he is “a child of the tree,” someone who “grew up beneath an olive tree” in his “wooden hut”—a way of affirming the intimate continuity between life, nature, and writing.Footnote ⁵¹ This figuration resonates with Benoît’s concept of the jardin créole as a territoire-racine, or root-territory, in which history is inscribed not on monuments but in the cultivated landscape.Footnote ⁵² Yet, while Benoît’s analysis tends to focus on visible social practices and material sustenance, Moutoussamy’s prose explores the metaphysical layers of such rootedness—memory as breath, landscape as language. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes in her work on Caribbean provision grounds—plots of land historically cultivated by enslaved people—“The historical and metaphysical connection between humans and the soil seems to be of vital significance to the recuperative power associated with the provision grounds.”Footnote ⁵³ Her reading, which foregrounds the legacy of slavery and Afro-diasporic experience, offers a useful parallel, even as Moutoussamy’s savane extends the poetics of rootedness through a multicultural heritage. In his savane, knowledge is not extracted but received, the poetic garden being a living archive of multidirectional memory.

Here, memory is not a return to an intact past but a form of creative relation. Moutoussamy’s savane does not reconstruct lost origins; it assembles fragments of Indian, African, Amerindian, and European inheritances into new constellations of meaning. Derek Walcott famously described Caribbean cultural identity as a vase shaped by “the gathering of broken pieces,” a process that carries “the care and pain of the Antilles.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For Walcott, poetic creation is an act of reassembly: “the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.”Footnote ⁵⁵ While this metaphor celebrates the aesthetic and affective power of fragmented legacies, it also gestures towards a desire for wholeness—“the sealing of [the] original shape” of the vase. This impulse risks reverting to “the figure of the continent,” a fixed and totalising metaphor of identity.Footnote ⁵⁶ Moutoussamy, by contrast, embraces an open-ended model: his savane does not seal the fragments into unity but lets them resonate across time and difference. This gesture reflects what Malcom Ferdinand calls une écologie décoloniale—an ecology that contests colonial modes of extraction by grounding meaning in lived, ancestral experience.Footnote ⁵⁷ Moutoussamy’s savane functions as such a space of resistance through the quiet insistence of continuity, relation, and care, asserted by foregrounding the ancestral Amerindian legacy of the jardin créole.

4. Memory in bloom: retrieving the creole garden’s Amerindian heritage

In Ma savane natale, Moutoussamy describes the savane as a space that “opened the workshop of the living and the dead to its inhabitants. Through their huts, their canoes, and their hammocks, they carried with them a heritage and traditions. They filled kwi bowls with cassava, massalé, and mabi, gathered from the calabash trees of the centuries, and breathed new life into their savane and all it embodied: the richness of a time yet to come, when humankind, risen from suffering, would savour its creolised greatness, would shelter in the roots of its land to cultivate thoughts of wisdom and values, aspiring towards another tomorrow. All the timoun [children] watched for that day”.Footnote ⁵⁸

Here, remembrance unfolds through daily acts of planting, gathering, and transmission. The savane appears as a living classroom where ancestral knowledge and hope for collective futurity are rooted in the earth itself. Writing and planting become parallel acts of cultural regeneration, and the garden—at once mnemonic and visionary—emerges as a space of ethical cultivation. Significantly, this cultivation is rooted in indigenous knowledge and culture, with material elements such as the “canoes,” “hammocks,” and “kwi bowls”—kwi being a creolisation from Tupi, which refers to the Amerindians’ use of the half calabash as a container. The botanical metaphor of the “calabash trees of the centuries”—resonating with the allusion to the kwi—further grounds the present and future in ancestral Amerindian memory, emphasising both cultural continuity and transformation. This is no less than a creolisation process, as evidenced through the diverse food and beverages carried in the kwi—from the cassava (M. esculenta) reminiscent of Caribs’ and Arawaks’ food culture to the Indo-Caribbean massalè spices and the Afro-Caribbean mabi beverage.Footnote ⁵⁹ Tellingly, the quote ends on a Creole word “All the timoun,” a phrase which reinforces the idea of cultural mixing, echoing as it does the Glissantian concept of the “tout-monde.”

For Moutoussamy, memory is not a static archive but a lived relationship with place; the savane is not merely the landscape of his childhood but a literary matrix in which history, ancestry, and vegetal life intertwine.

Here, memory germinates in sensation and grows through the poet’s intimate dialogue with the vegetal world. The word “boucan”—commonly used in Guadeloupe to depict a fire made of branches and leaves—is a reminder of Amerindian heritage, since it originates from the Tupi term mukém, via the Spanish barbacoa. Historically, boucan refers to a traditional wooden framework used by Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and South America to smoke and preserve meat or fish. Central to pre-colonial subsistence practices, the technique was then adopted by 17th-century French boucaniers. In ethnobotanics, the boucan is also associated with specific fuelwood species chosen for their aromatic or preservative properties. Moutoussamy’s use of the term thus anchors his memory and dialogue with the savane in Amerindian ancestry. In addition, in one area of his garden, Moutoussamy has erected a small altar to love—symbolised with a concrete structure shaped as the lingam of Shiva and the yoni of Parvati. The area dedicated to love also includes a small representation of the Taj Mahal—an Indian mausoleum to marital love (Figure 7). The combination of major figures of the Hindu pantheon—Shiva and Parvati—on the one hand, and of a world-renowned jewel of Islamic Mughal architecture—the Taj Mahal—which blends multiple Indian traditions and incorporates Indo-Persian cultural elements, on the other, demonstrates the diversity and syncretism of the Indian heritage Moutoussamy claims. Significantly, he has also placed conch shells around the concrete altar as natural amplifiers. While symbolising Moutoussamy’s desire to “make the trees speak” and voice vegetal memory, these shells are also reminders of Guadeloupe’s Amerindian heritage, thereby making the islet dedicated to love yet another powerful example of the entanglement of Indian and Amerindian cultures on the island.Footnote ⁶¹

Figure 7.

The golden triangle of voluptuousness. Saint-François, 27 August 2024.

Figure 7. Long description

A wide shot of a multi-tiered outdoor installation. At the top, a blue metal roof covers a platform with a sign reading LE TRIANGLE D’OR DE LA VOLUPTE. Below the roof, a central white wall features a detailed drawing of the Taj Mahal. To the left of the drawing, the wall is painted blue with a yellow circle. To the right, the wall is white with red handwritten French text citing Tagore, Neruda, and Ernest M.

In the mid-ground, a blue ledge is lined with pink and white seashells. The ledge is labeled LINGAM DE SHIVA on the left and YONI DE PARVATI on the right. Two small golden domes sit on a stone path in the foreground. The entire structure is surrounded by lush green tropical foliage under a cloudy sky.

This small islet—among the seven that compose Moutoussamy’ garden—perfectly exemplifies how Indian and Amerindian cultural inheritances converge in his poetic reinvention of the Creole garden.

While early historical and anthropological scholarship on the jardin créole mentioned its Amerindian origins, the latter are being reclaimed in recent gardening practices, as testified by the pedagogical project of Ichali garden launched by political scientist Dr Pamela Obertan on the Fouillole campus in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, in 2019 within the framework of a class on political ecology. Her project resonates with wider pedagogical initiatives carried out on the island over the past few years, especially Jaden an nou —an initiative of the Conseil Départemental supported by the Rectorat encouraging the implantation of creole gardens in secondary schools. What distinguishes the Fouillole garden is its deliberate focus on Amerindian heritage. As Dr Obertan explains, her master’s students elected the name influenced by their reading of recent scholarship like Ferdinand’s Ecologie Décoloniale and their research into the origins of the creole garden. Cultivating land together fostered group dynamics and social cohesion among students from across the Guadeloupean archipelago and beyond.Footnote ⁶² Tellingly, an annatto tree (Bixa orellana) (Figure 8), widespread in pre-Columbian South America and Caribbean and associated with Amerindian heritage—used for body paint and ritual marking, food colouring and seasoning, and medicinal purposes—is planted at the entrance of the garden.

Figure 8.

Annatto tree (B. orellana) from the Ichali garden, established by Dr Pamela Obertan, Fouillole Campus, Pointe-à-Pitre, 12 May 2025. (a) Top left: open annatto fruit. (b) Top right: closed annatto fruit. (c) View of the tree at the garden entrance, partly intertwined with other plants including a banana tree.

The annatto tree can be found in several creole gardens on the island, in Moutoussamy’s, in the Cabidoche family’s garden Sweet Om—which, as its name indicates focuses also largely on Indian (medicinal and ayurvedic) plants—or in Hugues Occibrun’s garden.Footnote ⁶³ Founder of the association 100 per cent Zèb located in Petit-Bourg, Occibrun advocates Creole agroecological resilience based on ancestral knowledge and biodynamics.Footnote ⁶⁴ In his garden, plants and trees freely entwine with limited human intervention, a phenomenon he likes to describe as botanical “marriage.” His annatto tree is no exception: intertwining with a kaloupilé (Murraya koenigii, or curry tree), it cradles a pineapple plant (Figure 9). This spontaneous vegetal alliance metaphorically echoes the cultural mixing and creolisation characterising the island.

Figure 9.

Annatto, curry leaf, and pineapple. View of a section of the garden established by the association 100 per cent Zéb, run by Hughes Occibrun in Lamentin, Guadeloupe, 14 May 2025. The spontaneous entwinement of plants of diverse cultural origins exemplifies the “marriage” principle he advocates.

Moutoussamy’s return to Amerindian ancestral knowledge is part of a larger cultural shift manifest in both Guadeloupe and Martinique, where words of indigenous origins are marketed in a variety of domains from food industry to car manufacturing, construction to agriculture, and so forth. Words like “Karukera”—ancestral Carib name for Guadeloupe—or “Kalinago” have seeped into everyday life. As I have argued elsewhere, what makes Moutoussamy’s poetry singular is how he brings together a hitherto marginalised Indian heritage and Amerindian ancestry.Footnote ⁶⁵ Rooted in a poetics of relation and creolisation, these entanglements expand prior acceptations of the Creole garden that privileged an Afrocentric perspective. This poetics also reflects Moutoussamy’s ethics of openness and togetherness—he explicitly refers to his Académie universelle as a space dedicated to ethics—one that does not minimise or deny any cultural contribution to the creolised landscape of the (French) Caribbean. In this sense, the Creole garden becomes a pedagogical model of creolised relation, holding the memory of the four civilisations that have shaped Guadeloupe—African, Indian, Amerindian, and European. Moutoussamy stages their co-presence through vegetal metaphor and poetic invocation. This conception diverges from the restorative impulse in Walcott’s Caribbean poetics.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moutoussamy does not seek to restore a lost wholeness but to sustain a dynamic polyphony. In his garden, the fragments remain visible; they are not reassembled into a unified form but allowed to coexist—each speaking in its own botanical idiom, which is why the poet makes “listening to the trees” one of his mottos.Footnote ⁶⁷ His literary praxis is, in this way, also an ethical one, the poet being responsible not only for the transmission of culture but for the cultivation of attention—to the land, to others, to the fragile equilibrium between the natural world and the human world.

5. Regenerating the creole garden: civic ecology and the ethics of relation

As demonstrated throughout this article, an exploration of Moutoussamy’s savane broadens definition of the creole garden, operating a paradigmatic shift. It first revalues the formerly marginalised Asian culture and highlights other minorised cultures, notably the Amerindian, thereby bringing forth a pluralistic view. This shift revives the poetics of creolisation inherent in the creole garden’s botanical biodiversity. What is more, combining a literary analysis of Moutoussamy’s texts with an exploration of the physical garden reveals that the latter is more than a space of natural resistance, resilience, and cultural memory. Rather, it also generates literary creation and imaginings grounded in interconnectedness between humans and the non-human, challenging anthropocentric perspectives. Moutoussamy’s garden thus reframes the jardin créole as a space of civic ethics, ecological solidarity, and cultural regeneration where histories, identities, and cultures are reactivated and transformed.

His savane, shaped by a philosophy of coexistence, serves as a metaphor for an ecology based on shared responsibility. This vision aligns with his longstanding political career as a deputy and mayor, promoting ecological and cultural heritage—including with collections of poetry dedicated to Caribbean flora and fauna, like the one inspired from his tenure at the Palais Bourbon, and Aux arbres les enfants! (2010), which opens with a call to future generations—with the poem “Plante ton arbre mon fils!”—and proceeds to dedicate individual poems to specific trees, weaving botany with memory and ethical injunction.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Ma savane natale, Moutoussamy insists on the value of cultivated land as a space of transmission—a land that fed us, shaped us, and must not be reduced to exploitation or neglect. This ethics of respect—towards land, trees, nature—anchors a political stance against extractive logics, asserting instead an economy of care. In this spirit, the symbolic architecture of his garden—commemorative signs, dedicated trees, cultivated paths—functions as a call for civic and planetary responsibility. Yet for this call to be heard, as echoed in his literary work, the garden must be approached in its “immaterial,” “spiritual” dimension—as a living relative to be honoured and carefully tended, especially amid the growing impacts of climate change and ecological disruption.Footnote ⁶⁹

While Moutoussamy’s académie universelle is unique in its literary scope, it resonates with contemporary efforts in Guadeloupe to reclaim the jardin créole as a space of social healing. Fieldwork I conducted in May 2025 highlights several community-led and institutional initiatives that use gardens to address economic marginalisation, intergenerational fracture, and social precarity.Footnote ⁷⁰ The association Pli Bèl La Ri, for instance, has developed an urban jardin créole in at-risk neighbourhoods of Pointe-à-Pitre helping residents reclaim and reanimate land affected by violence, insecurity, poverty, and disconnection. These gardens have contributed restoring neighbourly ties and foster conviviality. Elsewhere, jardin créole practices are being developed in care homes (EPHAD), where their sensory richness and memory-laden elements support therapeutic care, or in educational settings where students introduced to Creole horticulture hone their social skills, sense of cooperation, and responsibility. These small-scale gardens become spaces of affect and collective learning and confirm that the jardin créole is increasingly recognised not only as an ecological model but as a space of cultural affirmation, social resilience, and democratic pedagogy. They expand on what Benoît has called a “respectful friendship with the land,” reframing it in collective terms.Footnote ⁷¹ Moutoussamy’s savane contributes to this vision through its poetic inscriptions, symbolic plantings, and openness to public engagement. That is also why he occasionally hosts literary gatherings in his garden, opening the space to visitors and inviting readers to encounter the savane where poetics, politics, and ethics take root.

Although not explicitly framed in terms of ecopoetics, Moutoussamy’s practice of listening to the land, composing with its vegetal rhythms, and excavating memory and teaching from trees and soil aligns with a mode of ecological poetics. The relational engagement with the environment, exemplified by his savane, extends the legacy of the jardin créole into a living matrix of remembrance and care. Thus, the jardin créole becomes not only a space of resistance but a platform for reparation, regeneration, and the cultivation of potential futures.