La Belle Créole de Maryse Condé o cómo desexotizar Guadalupe

The Caribbean islands, to the extent that they embody a number of stereotypes “that define their specificity, strangeness and charm”, constitute what Staszak calls a “geo-semantic domain” born out of exoticism (2008; 20). Indeed, they appear in the Western imagination as islands of lush vegetation, a climate conducive to sensuality, and a certain Creole well-being associated with laziness, as exemplified, for instance, in Baudelaire's poem “L’invitation au voyage” [Invitation to the Voyage].Although exoticism is defined less as the characteristic of an object than as someone's viewpoint on it, certain territories have undergone a process of exoticization by the West, which, through conquest and colonial domination, has made London and Paris an “absolute here (...) against which an absolute elsewhere is defined” (Staszak: 2008; 9). Fortunately, there are strategies to overcome exoticism, as Staszak notes (2008: 28-29), some of which are employed by Maryse Condé in La Belle Créole [The belle créole]. Our goal here is to explore how the author goes about reversing the exotic gaze that weighs upon the island, or at least refocusing it with the aim of de-exoticizing it.