The Season of Departures
August always has a special flavor in Guadeloupe. There's still a bit of the long holidays left: beaches, reunions, and last outings. But slowly, the back-to-school season begins to loom, and suitcases start to close.
Because here, going back to school doesn't always simply mean returning to classes or going back to work. For many, it also means leaving: to study, work, train, seize an opportunity elsewhere, or simply discover what exists beyond the island.
Some leave the land where they were born and raised. Others leave an island they encountered along the way, for a few years or even a few days. The experiences are not the same, but perhaps you know this feeling when leaving Guadeloupe: that you don't leave exactly as you arrived. Maybe there's no minimum duration for a place to leave something with us.
I was 17 when I packed my bags in 2018. This departure allowed me to discover elsewhere, but above all, it changed the way I looked at the place I came from.
When Leaving is Already Part of the Journey
The idea of leaving had been in my head long before I was 17. By choosing applied arts in high school, I quickly understood that pursuing my design studies after graduation would probably lead me elsewhere. At the time, training in this field was still very limited in Guadeloupe.
And I didn't mind. I wanted to discover other cities, other cultures, to see what existed beyond the horizon I had always known.
So I thought I was prepared. In hindsight, I was mostly prepared for the idea of leaving: finding a school, accommodation, packing my bags, learning to live far from my family. Much less for everything that leaving would challenge.
My first years in mainland France were marked by distance, but also by discrepancies I hadn't anticipated: references no longer shared, a way of speaking that intrigued, things perfectly ordinary at home that suddenly became peculiarities elsewhere.
I also discovered certain prejudices and racism. For the first time, parts of my identity that I had never needed to define were reflected back at me. In Guadeloupe, I didn't think about what it meant to be Guadeloupean. I just was.
Distance then led me to look differently at what I had always taken for granted.
I Had to Leave to See Guadeloupe Differently
Rediscover what we thought we knew
When something has surrounded us our entire lives, we don't necessarily think to question it. Certain traditions, certain words, certain dishes or certain stories were simply part of my daily life, without me necessarily knowing their origin or what they represented.
From a distance, I wanted to research and understand more. The more I learned, the more I realized how much I still didn't know. Distance didn't just create longing: it pushed me to consciously reclaim a history and culture that I had until then mostly lived instinctively.
I think this is one of the biggest paradoxes of my departure: I never felt as conscious of being Guadeloupean as after leaving Guadeloupe.
In the meantime, I too had changed. I had learned elsewhere, met other cultures, and developed new references. Over the years, I understood that a place could continue to be a part of us without us living there, just as we could become deeply attached to a territory where we were not born.
Becoming an Actress in the Narrative
When research enters creation
This reappropriation inevitably influenced my creative process. I no longer just wanted to draw from Guadeloupe as a repertoire of visual references: I wanted to understand what they represented, choose what I wanted to convey and how I wanted to do it. Creation allowed me to no longer be merely the heir to a history, but to also become an actor in it, on my own scale.
This reflection gradually found its place in GYN 1957, where I could bring the Guadeloupe I grew up in into dialogue with the person I had become elsewhere.
The Icole collection is one of the most personal examples of this encounter. It was born from the nostalgia of my childhood memories in Guadeloupe, at a time when I was asking myself many questions about my adult life. As I tried to understand the woman and creator I was becoming, I also returned, through creation, to the child I had been.
More recently, this reflection has taken a much more direct form with the Guadeloupe T-shirt and its embroidered archipelago map on the front. From its creation, the idea was to be able to wear Guadeloupe on oneself, to keep close the representation of a territory one is attached to, even elsewhere.
In a suitcase at the time of departure, worn thousands of kilometers from the island, or simply stored in a wardrobe among clothes to which we associate a memory, it becomes a way of maintaining a connection with Guadeloupe. Not just for those born there: one can wear this territory because it is the one of their childhood, because they lived there, because they return there, or simply because they encountered it one day and it left something with them.
This is also what I try to convey with GYN 1957 : a vibrant and contemporary Guadeloupe, which everyone can wear with their own story.
And then comes the question of returning
When elsewhere also becomes home
There's one thing I hadn't anticipated: by building your life elsewhere, that elsewhere eventually becomes familiar too. Years pass, you study, you work, you meet people, you form habits, and a life is built.
For a long time, I imagined leaving and returning quite simply: you leave Guadeloupe, you build something elsewhere, and then eventually you come back. Today, I find things much less binary, because in the meantime we change, and the territory we left behind changes too.
The Guadeloupe I left at 17 is no longer exactly the same, and neither am I. When I think of returning today, I don't imagine it as an attempt to find the life I left behind, but rather as the possibility of building a new chapter there with everything I will have learned and built elsewhere.
Leaving doesn't necessarily mean turning your back on where you came from, just as returning doesn't mean erasing the person you've become elsewhere. In between, there's everything you learn, what you rediscover, and most importantly, what you choose to do with it.
What we really put in our suitcases
To those who are closing their suitcases this August, I won't say that you have to leave to succeed or grow. Opportunities in Guadeloupe are evolving, and everyone should be able to build the path that suits them, here or elsewhere.
But if your path takes you elsewhere, whether you leave the island after a whole childhood, a few years, or simply a trip, you might discover that your suitcase contains a little more than what you packed.
Expressions, tastes, sounds, habits, but also a smell, a landscape, an encounter, or a memory you didn't expect to become so attached to. Somewhere between the places we leave and the ones we arrive in, we build our own way of belonging.
Because ultimately, leaving may not always mean leaving a territory behind. Sometimes, it's just discovering all that you've already carried with you.
Photo credit: @ggpiks - Model: @gihanesurlamelody
