In what follows, I will further explore the forms of contact and interaction between the metropolitan individual and the foreign environment as they are permeated by colonial fortune tropes, paying particular attention to the subject's immersion into the natural surroundings of the colony, understood and felt by the metropolitan outsider as his or her adoptive land. In the novels of J. M. G. Le Clézio and Édouard Glissant a sense of predestination, destiny, estrangement and belonging defines this ambivalent process. Landscape becomes the imaginary and figurative locus of the colonial vocation's duality since “Grands Blancs” and “Petits Blancs” – that is, rich and poor whites – answer the calling to cultivate and exploit the virgin, “savage” land. However, the land, through its climate, conditions and inhabitants, manifests its resistance in forms that are simultaneously “tactical”, indirect and “strategic”, overt and sometimes violent, according to Glissant's use of Michel de Certeau's terminology, which undermines the colonists’ religious, historical and metaphysical mission. Frantz Fanon had already underscored the material and symbolic importance of the land for the anticolonial struggle in a passage from The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which links the female colonial subject with a specific, non-idealized form of dignity that precedes and supersedes the abstract principles of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution:

It is interesting to note the rhetorical commonality between Fanon's passage and Glissant's reference to women in his Caribbean Discourse, which elucidates the tactics of ruse and indirectness as ways of dealing with the obscured, camouflaged reality of colonial society, thereby undermining the myth of male heroism. In his discussion of Glissant's treatment of the landscape, Michael J. Dash stresses that “land is central to the process of self-possession” (Dash xxxv). According to Dash, Glissant positions Caribbean writers against European colonialism and suggests that the literary reclaiming of landscape constitutes a means of cultural resistance and a way to rescue histories of which they were denied authorship (Dash 105).