The Masson family had left Normandy in May 1940 to escape the German occupation of Paris. They waited for visas to be issued in Marseille until March 31, 1941, when they boarded the cargo ship Carimare bound for Martinique. In Fort-de-France, Masson met up with Breton, artist Wifredo Lam and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who also made a stopover on the island before leaving for New York. He also met a number of writers, including Aimé and Suzanne Césaire. Around this time, Masson and Breton wrote Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (published in 1948) in the form of a poetic conversation: "The forest envelops us; we knew it and its spells before we came. Do you remember a drawing I entitled "Délire végétal"? This delirium is here, we touch it, we participate in it". The title of the collection is borrowed from Douanier Rousseau's famous painting, La charmeuse de serpents (1907), "that fascinating painting in the Louvre. Since we've been here, we've come across it every day on our way. It has lost none of its mystery and attraction". The text is entirely illustrated by André Masson.

The Martinique period left its mark on André Masson's work, primarily in the form of Indian ink drawings. The island's wild plant profusion fascinated the artist; Masson's images of Martinique see the leaves completely invaded by trunks and foliage, in a kind of horror vacui. Masson's art is an art of metamorphosis and the primordial erotic forces of the earth. In Le Balisier, the plant is transformed into the human in a transmutation recurrent in the artist's work. The earth, always generative, always erotic, caresses the feminine figure of the balisier, a metaphor for flowering and germination.