Black Odysseus: Mediterranean ‘Blues’ and Clandestine Migration in Josué Guébo’s Songe à Lampedusa

Abstract

This article explores the eco-poetics of Josué Guébo’s epic poem Songe à Lampedusa, through the ways in which it reworks Homer’s The Odyssey, in order to reclaim Ancient Greece in its transnational cartography of immigrant desire and environmental injustice. The subaltern figure of the migrant, dramatized as the modern counterpart of Odysseus, becomes paradoxically the site where an offshore humanism is articulated, to borrow Paul Gilroy’s concept. Specifically, I argue that Songe à Lampedusa uses the sea in order to defamiliarize the concept of the land, and decenter a biblical, terrestrial cosmology in favor of a phylogenic, evolutionary approach that asserts an ontological link between human beings and the ocean. The terraqueous poetic subject challenges a concept of identity that remains siloed in land-locked nation-states. The water’s plasticity becomes the site of a global, trans-historical consciousness, which deconstructs old colonial binaries between the western and oriental shores of the Mediterranean. Finally, the tidal movements of the sea become an oceanic metaphor for the poet’s sense of loss. Against the current of discourses deployed by psychology and popular media, then, the sea functions as an eco-dystopian trope that deploys an aesthetics of haunting, staging the impossibility of catharsis.

Keywords:

• African eco-poetics
• clandestine migration
• environmental injustice
• oceanic studies
• offshore humanism
• non-western modernities

Notes

1 Soumangourou Kanté is most notably the object of an oral narrative by griot Abdoulaye Sako, edited and translated in English by Stephen Bulman and Valentin Vydrine as The Epic of Sumanguru Kante (Brill, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Imane Terhmina

Imane Terhmina is Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies at Cornell University. She holds a Ph.D. in French from Yale University. Her research lies at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Areas of specialization include: Francophone African literature and culture, postcolonial theory, affect theory, political philosophy, petrofictions / eco-topias, Non-western modernities.