In these chapters I propose to engage with the seminal scene of the departure for and arrival in the colonies, which signify in the eyes of the European colonist the means to a better life or the chance to create a new identity. I analyze the intimate and multifaceted relation between the colonial destination and the modern Western belief in the interconnectedness of individual and historical destiny. For the average Frenchman of the interwar period, when the French empire was at its height, “the colonial image, if any, was that of a grinning black man advertising a sweet chocolate drink: Banania” (Weber 180). The colonies were an inviting, challenging and fascinating place waiting to be discovered, tamed and civilized. Colonial writing exudes a sense of the phenomenon Stanley Cavell calls “to view the world unseen” (Cavell 40), insofar as looking at the colonies from home presents the subject with a triply enticing and challenging, almost cinematic, “elsewhere”: it holds the promise of a destiny fulfilled, it is fraught with peril and it represents a black hole for knowledge but a glory hole for the imagination. However, what some experience as a liberating adventure of conquest and self-reinvention others, whom Marguerite Duras calls “les indigènes coloniaux” (Duras and Porte 17), or poor white trash, accept it as a last resort, an exile forced upon them by necessity, poverty and a lack of prospects in the Metropole. The texts in this chapter are born from the encounter of different forms of oppression and human misery blindly mirroring each other.

Jane Bradley Winston draws out an interesting parallel between these two types of colonial writing through the comparison of Richard Wright and Marguerite Duras: