La Caraïbe et ses littératures migrantes : l’exemple de Sato San, Le Maître des Corsets de Roland Brival, et de La Parole prisonnière de Jean Métellus

Abstract

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).