The Geography of Identity in Suzanne Césaire's "Le grand camouflage"

In her 1945 essay "Le grand camouflage," Suzanne Césaire juxtaposes the plurality and disjunctions of Martinique's historical, linguistic, genealogical, political, and cultural realities with its commonly exotic or idyllic literary depictions. She builds from meteorological and geological representations of the area's tensions to explore its underlying violence and complexity. Rather than creating a false permanency upon which to build a myth of national identity, Suzanne Césaire thus constructs a self-hood that is defined by its very instability. Avoiding, however, the fragmentary divisions of identity so prevalent within Caribbean discourses, Césaire also stresses the relationships among the islands and their related continents in her call for a re-claiming of a colonized space by its inhabitants. This article argues that Suzane Césaire's essay marks an important transition in Martinican national identity as it is constructed in relation to place.