THE MEETING OF THE DESERT WITH THE SEA

THE WORLD-LITERATURE IN THE NOVEL UN PAPILLON DANS LA CITÉ, BY GISÈLE PINEAU

Abstract

In Un papillon dans la cité, Gisèle Pineau, from Guadeloupe, writes about the meeting of two children from seemingly different cultural backgrounds who end up meeting on the outskirts of Paris and building a strong friendship. Félicie, the protagonist of the novel and also its narrator, grows up in Guadeloupe, close to the sea, while Mohamed, although born in Paris, comes from a Tuareg family, a Berber people from the Sahara desert. This meeting will be essential for the construction of the identities of these characters who, in contact with the other, in the exercise of their otherness, end up discovering about themselves and transforming themselves in the relationship. Pineau's literature, therefore, is at the heart of the discussion on world-literature in French proposed by Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud (2007). However, believing that their definition of what would be a world-literature in French erases its own constitutive plurality, we also approach the discussion on literatures without a fixed abode by Ottmar Ette (2018) in order to think about the movements that Pineau's work can provide, like an archipelago literature that connects distant islands, like the sea and the desert.