“The overseas system has generated a chicken coop syndrome, where no brave hen or rooster has the heart to fly”

Lhe President of the French Republic should take advantage of his meeting, Wednesday, September 7, with the presidents of non-hexagonal communities, regions and departments, to set ablaze with fireflies this darkness of archaisms and aberrations that is the ” overseas system.

Since the call from Fort-de-France [le 17 mai, les présidents de plusieurs collectivités, régions et départements d’outre-mer avaient solennellement appelé l’Etat à un changement profond de politique ultramarine]these elected officials, faced with insurmountable difficulties, have in essence demanded from the government more ” responsibility “ domiciled. The phenomenon is unusual enough for France’s highest political official to take up the call. Usually, the unanimous interpellations at this political level relate more to relief, tax exemption, subsidies or catching up with a millennial delay. This is therefore an opportunity for France to clean up its relationship with these distant lands, to rebuild the reigning container economy, but above all, in my opinion, to re-oxygenate the foundations of its presence in the world as a great nation. . To circumscribe the issue, let’s ask ourselves about the terms “overseas” and “responsibility”.

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The so-called overseas countries are for me people-nations without a state. They are administered remotely by a transversal sub-department, which implements repetitive development plans. These composite peoples – more than 2 million people –, bringing together almost all the imaginations of the planet, appeared in colonization. Their fight against protocolonialism had endowed them with an embryo of political thought which disappeared from the radar after the so-called “departmentalization” law of March 19, 1946. This brought them back into this fiction that is the notion of “ overseas departments and territories”, which installed, in the absence of territorial continuity, a fantastical extension of identity between France, maintained as a “metropolis”, and its survivals from colonialist expansion. This narrative fiction precipitated them into another fable of the same sadness: that of the “outermost regions” of the European Union.

“Friendly Geographies”

To use the terms “overseas”, “metropolis”, “ultra-periphery” without precautions is to maintain active a colonial paradigm; it is to proclaim the negation of the magnificent precipitate of cultures, languages, phenotypes, historical encounters, heroisms, resistance and courage that these countries represent; it is to support the idea of ​​a solar center governing in its shady orbit a cluster of minor populations; it is to sweep, in the same spirit, the extraordinary variety of situations in various oceans, within rich and variegated “cordial geographies” [expression de l’académicien Georges Duhamel] ; it is, finally, to reduce the native lands of Césaire, Perse, Fanon, Glissant, Damas, and so many others!, to the handicaps of a “periphery”.

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