Seen this way, our Mauritius summer is no longer“ out of season”
Réfléchir
As a child, I used to think that our seasons stood a little to the side, somehow apart. Films, songs, and magazine covers made winter the stage of modernity, pushing us to the margins— summer bodies in an imaginary world wrapped in coats. Over time, I understood that this sense of inferiority came not from the thermometer but from the narrative: what is seen and told, what circulates and stays on the edges. The lack of reciprocity isn’ t climatic but symbolic. Our summers, tinged with the red of watermelons and lychees, rarely make it onto the screen, while white, snowy winters dominate the world’ s imagination.
The Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant taught me to shift my gaze— to stop thinking of the world in terms of center and periphery and to prefer relation: a constellation of islands and trajectories where every place becomes a center in itself, connected to others without dissolving into them. Seen this way, our Mauritian summer is no longer“ out of season.” It broadens our perspective. And reminds us that the planet has not one official season but a polyphony of climates and sensibilities.
The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed this idea in another way when she warned of“ the danger of a single story.” A single dominant season easily becomes a single way of inhabiting the world. Multiplying stories and allowing them to coexist is not a cultural luxury— it’ s a politics of perception. Our summers deserve to be told in their own right, without apology or translation into temperate images. Not in opposition, but in fidelity to what we live: long days of light, salty skin, tropical fruits, sweltering afternoons, and the anticipation of cyclones.
Glissant’ s vision of relation and Adichie’ s call for plurality both invite a conversation of asymmetrical reciprocities. We can read about other people’ s winters without giving up our summers; welcome their images, yet answer with our own.
From this reversed weather, a new relationship with the world unfolds. It acknowledges that there is no single center of time, only situated beings striving to understand one another. We move along many axes, brushing against and enriching each other— making space for all the world’ s seasons, so that everyone may say,“ my time is also at the center.”
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