The enchanted arrival: passage into West Africa in the travelogues of Blaise Cendrars and André Gide

Abstract

Blaise Cendrars’s collection of travel poems entitled Feuilles de route (1924–1928) and Andre Gide’s travel journals Voyage au Congo (1927) and Le retour du Tchad (1928) describe the writer-traveller’s arrival in West African port towns as a metaphorical relocation in another world that suggests a set of narrative and cognitive tensions that call for resolution. These scenes of arrival trigger the question of the language and means of description, pointing to the traveller’s need to transform geography, space, and the experience of encounter into the temporal structure of narrative. This article shows how the description of the arrival scene also requires the traveller to reflect on his presuppositions concerning the place where he has travelled and make apparent the way in which he conceptualises the meaning of his journey. What will be especially highlighted is the way in which the experience of the arrival inspires the writer to project the place of arrival as a possible world that is not only different from but marvellously other than the actual world of home.