Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain et l’équivoque du « retour »

Authors

Fritz Calixte, Université des Métiers, Guadeloupe

Abstract

This article adresses the issue of return in Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain’s works. These writers, like many other Caribbean writers, have the particularity to update the old dream of return to homeland of the slaves transplanted to the New World. They reproduce by fiction the uncomfortable legacy of colonial societies. But the authors depicting this theme, usually do so in the form of an obsessive search for an ideal life to realize somewhere else than here. Jacques Roumain is in this tradition with a few additions. Aimé Césaire for his part, proposes in his notebook of a return to analyze the desire for returning. He examines the reasons behind the desire for returning and attempts to establish the Caribbean as a master craftsman of his present. We explore and confront, in what follows, the two kinds of relationships to the notion of return.

Recommended Citation

Calixte, Fritz (2011) "Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain et l’équivoque du « retour »," Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature: Vol. 77: No. 1, Article 9.
Available at: https://crossworks.holycross.edu/pf/vol77/iss1/9