This article attempts an anti-essentialist reading of Césaire’s ‘Cahier’, considered a founding manifesto of the francophone Négritude movement. It focuses on the spectrum of changing speaker roles with which the lyrical self defines its personal identity and collective belonging, and which differ in terms of ethnicity and cultural location. Instead of being an unchanging essence (‘essentia’), i. e. an identity in the strong sense, négritude thus appears only as the result of a temporary identification that remains dependent on the I’s movement between Europe and the Caribbean, i. e. an identity in the weak sense. The theme of identity dominating the ‘Cahier’ reveals itself to be intimately connected to the theme of the journey. The essentialist implication of the poem becomes understandable as the effect of a rhetoric that makes the journey appear as a return to the origin, notwithstanding the fact that the text reflects the origin’s nothingness. The reading presented here thus follows the self-deconstructive movements of the text itself.