SOURCE: "One More Sea to Cross: Exile and Intertextuality in Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal," in Yale French Studies, No. 83, 1993, pp. 176-95.

In the following essay, Rosello compares the theme of exile in Maryse Condé 's "Notes on a Return to the Native Land" and Césaire's early poem.

 l'exil s'en va ainsi dans la mangeoire des astres portant de malhabiles
grains aux oiseaux nés du temps
—"Birds" in Ferrements 

The people of Martinique and Guadeloupe will perhaps never recover from their exile, will perhaps never even succeed in defining it.¹ Exile will thus be, for a long time to come, the raw material of the texts of Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and of many others. Like their books, these writers, born in the Antilles and educated in metropolitan France, fall outside the traditional classifications in anthologies of literature, eluding...