Manuel Norvat holds a doctorate in literature from Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle University. A specialist of the work of Édouard Glissant, he teaches at the Université des Antilles, where he is a research associate at C.E.R.E.A.P (Center for Studies and Research in Aesthetics and Visual Arts). He is the author of Chant du Divers, introduction à la philopoétique d’Édouard Glissant (L'Harmattan, 2015) and Zwel lalin [Le Jeu de la lune] (Ibis rouge, 2002), a novel in French Creole. His works and teachings focus mainly on French and comparative literature, grammar and stylistics, as well as Creole languages and cultures.
The literary production of the Caribbean is seminally ascribed to the global form of migration which the slave deportation represented. This leads us to rethink the notion of transmission. I formulate the hypothesis whereby what is bequeathed, as suggested by Jean Métellus (La Parole prisonnière, 1986) and Roland Brival (Santo San, le maître des corsets, 2017), might be an original trauma and the possibility to ward off its deleterious effects–no longer in a direct way through an exorcism of the “black being”, but in an indirect way, as a detour through what I call “migrant literature”. These two contemporary novels do not stage a physical, geographic displacement, but an enunciative and referential decentering, a sort of auctorial anonymity, paradoxically allowing readers to refocus on the wound transmitted as a heritage: the obliterated, censored speech (Métellus), the alienated body, the “corseted”, movable property of the master (Brival).
