Otherness and identity, Acadian exiles as witnesses

The theme and location of the Congress, diversity and Canada, invited the author to reflect upon the idea of exile. Like many of the Acadian settlers in Canada, she is from Poitou, on France’s Atlantic coast. This community, subject to much back-and-forth migration over the centuries, invented a system of exchanges symbolically linking the two locations. Convinced that there is no such thing as a “return from exile,” the author applies the experience of the Acadian exiles to a current reality: that of today’s displaced persons, who are confronted with both “the collective man” Jung writes of, and a psychic reterritorialization.