“Le regarde du fils et la vision de l’Étranger”: Between Paris et la Martinique, from Césaire to Glissant

Abstract

The comings and goings between the French West Indies and France that I will evoke are both human and textual. Words have traveled from one continent to the other, accompanied by their authors, or accompanying them on journeys (sometimes physical, sometimes imaginary) that have given rise to some of the most significant works of Caribbean literature.
In this article, I will discuss two reference texts of this literature, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and Édouard Glissant’s Soleil de la conscience, which deal precisely with these comings and goings, between France and Martinique, which are above all symbolic of the comings and goings between places that are not only physical but also of the mind, between here and elsewhere, self and Other.
These two texts derive directly from the encounter with Paris of these two Martinican authors and thinkers, and from their vision of Paris and Martinique after this encounter. But there is another movement that I will try to underline, that of “textual fluidity”, that is to say the journey of these same texts between languages and between times, through their translations and their rewritings, because in this double migration, the textual dimension and the human dimension merge, blur and inform each other.