Poetry and Peripheries Available to Purchase

The final chapter turns to the story of Henri Jean-Louis Baghio’o, a lawyer from Guadeloupe who worked as a judge in French Congo from 1923 to 1925. Over the next seven years, he traveled between Brazzaville, Douala, Dakar, and Paris, before returning to the Caribbean, where he developed a radical vision of decolonization. Almost all the writing he left behind, however, was rhyming poetry. This chapter explores the unique Fonds Jean-Louis to trace Jean-Louis’s journeys across the geographies and temporalities of decolonization, from 1950s Algeria to nineteenth-century Guadeloupe to sixteenth-century Mali. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s writing about peripheries, the chapter suggests that Jean-Louis’s poetry allowed him to carve a unique trajectory and reject a world divided into colonies and metropoles.