I will focus on the works of four writers, Paule Constant, Pierre Michon, Claude Simon and Tierno Monénembo, whose scenes of departure (from the characters’ native village in the Creuse or Limousin or the cities of Lyon or Paris) and arrival (in Africa or the Americas) are saturated with tropes of yearning and despair that simultaneously conjure up exotic fantasies and deep-seated anxieties of displacement and alienation. The decision to leave for the colonies is often prompted by complex social and economic circumstances. Stripped of their agency and eager to re-establish it, metropolitan subjects undertake the trip to the colonies as a last resort.

Through a series of close readings and comparative analyses I underline the rhetorical and stylistic strategies employed by these four very different writers in their articulation of a similar verbal and ideological connection between the colonial journey, on the one hand, and the sense of individual and collective destiny, on the other. These two diptychs manifest an array of attitudes, positionalities, values and beliefs associated with the liminal moments of the colonial journey, its beginnings and endings. Beyond the obvious reference to Said's theorization of the term “beginnings”1 as the novelistic production of meaning and cultural difference, the plural signals the constant mirroring and reduplication of the origins in their retrospective, and often belated, narrative framing. Furthermore, I contend that current texts filter the historical past through the subjective perspective of a contemporary individual whose connection to the narrated time and events is at once tenuous and permanent, mediated by an intimate or official memory chain forever imprinted in the subject's own memory. In Pierre Michon and Paule Constant's fiction, the colonial imaginary is a distant mosaic, a literary re-membering of fragmented and shifting family stories, framed by incantatory phrases and magical relics (a bundle of letters, a bag of coffee beans) passed on through generations. These material objects transcend the status of “imported objects” while evincing a similar duality to that of their counterparts in the novels of the nineteenth century: they serve as a “magic” sublimation of money, “but [they act] simultaneously as a reminder that such sublimation is impossible” (Yee 31). For Claude Simon and Tierno Monénembo the colonial experience is a rewriting of an established genre – the historiographic novel – bound by formal conventions, moral codes and value systems.