Published in art press, no. 229, November 2000
"What I call Creolization is the encounter, the interference, the clash, the
harmonies and disharmonies between cultures in the accomplished totality of
the earth-world." So speaks the Martinique writer Edouard Glissant, whose latest
essay, Le Traité du tout-Monde (Gallimard), pursues his inquiry into the "Creolization"
of the world. In its call for relation and participation as part of the process
of constituting the identity both of peoples and individuals, Glissant's work
seems to be inventing a genuine deviation of Eurocentric thought
I have chosen to unify a body of work that branches out into every genre (poetry,
theater, novels, essays) around the symbolic image of a tree, the mangrove:
that tentacular and pioneering plant which inaugurates dry land and reclaims
It from the salt of the sea in Martinique as in Florida (in the space of the
plantation) by sending out roots from its trunk into the sand. It is a moving
sight, this plant throwing its shoots offshore, into the shallows, with an illusory
fragility and precariousness: soon, an island, an archipelago will rise up where
before there was only the surface of the sea under the crushing tropical humidity.
It defies hurricanes with a patience that is liminary.
For Glissant has brought himself into being in his own archipelago of writing
by a decision, a gesture, an inaugural courage: taking up his pen in a literary
territory that no model had ever colonized. And anyone who reduces his oeuvre
to a series of external determinants (slavery, colonial status, land, poverty,
influences) just doesn't get it: Glissant exists only by being detached from
any environment-even if this may mean returning to one in order to reveal that
fact. He thereby mimes the violent separation from the motherland of Africa
that the ancestors, the slaves, experienced, in blood and terror. In order to
name the lost origin, to baptize what nobody had perceived, a radical excision
was necessary. This was the price to be paid for the power of naming.
And now names grow in abundance, a luxuriant, virtuoso canopy of foliage, "names
arising, not swollen in the memory of these hundred and fifty years fallen into
the chasm, but, as if engendered by the slope, or perhaps secreted in the hole
of the world's silent eye, or springing from the bottomless well where cannonballs
turned into pearls in the entrails of the drowned" (Malemort)
There was no legitimate father, and therefore no son or daughter either. "He
asked you who is your father and the father of your father all the way to the
seventh line, and not one could answer, not one could say here is my descendant
and the descendant of my descendant unto the time this earth turned into food
and fertility." (Malemort). No matter, a fictional one can be found, a first
ancestor, a rebellious slave; "Odono, who came ashore in 1715" (Mahagony), whose
patronymic is both a giver of meaning and the question mark that hangs over
any genealogy. There was no longer any village, any landscape, or family, only
the plantation shacks stingily apportioned by the master. No matter, they can
be invented, through and despite the suffering and munificence of serfdom,
through and despite the irrevocable pleasure and horror of being the master.
And so, by a paradoxical reversal, the Cabin becomes the place of the commander.
There was no longer a Time06 Before: not to worry, it'll come back, more exact
and more precise than any archive lost in the ineffectual manipulations of
an administration. To decry the subsidized alienation of the islanders, and
to pull clear of its oppressive legacy, we shall inaugurate new spaces of the
whole world in a gigantic Babel, where men exchange babbled sounds in all island-tongues.
There was, it is true, a Word, the great Word of Aime Cesaire and a few others.
But still other names had to be invented, all names had to be rewritten and
spoken anew And, suddenly, all the defeats of existence are turned inside out,
like a glove, in the pleasure of writing. There is, in this regard, no more
optimistic a gesture than Glissant's: by crafting his oeuvre, he proves the
infinite possibilities of a word that transcends its limits and he makes a gift
of it for others to come.
The Very Figure of Subversion
The advocates of social-realism are always faulting these texts for their "obscurity":
what they want to read is the reproduction of a "Martinique reality," a denunciation
of the oppressor, an exaltation of the victim, the picturesque pineapple'n'cane
sugar genre holding hands with a humanism that universalizes and assimilates.
Instead, they find opacity that is asserted as such, a track leading to the
world-less being that eludes all naming: a linguistic virtuosity worthy of Proust,
of Céline, of Faulkner (that American, double/brother who produced the most
profound images of the world of the plantation-see Faulkner, Mississippi);
a totally new "Creole" syntax that turns our grammatical habits on their head.
Speaking of which, few seem to notice that "French" literature always renews
itself by an operation carried out on syntax-see Montaigne, Racine, Céline-rather
than on vocabulary-even if it is true that in Glissant's work Creole names are
invited to a merry bout of copulation with those from metropolitan France: "Understanding
perhaps in the future that it, would be necessary to hear change the word'
and without trembling or caesura undertake the new language-which one?-and with
labor and sweat and pain and in the drunkenness of the descent toss off its
syntax in the grass on either side." (Malemort). They find, these condescenders
of tradition, a poetic practice and theory that aim at once to equal, and sometimes
to take on, the greats.
And there is the rub: this obstinate refusal to go for "local color," for murky
realism, for social-realist censoring, for supermarket exoticism; this wrenching-away
from all determinisms, except those of the poetic languages brought into play;
this attention to the gesture of writing (but beware: here is none of the corseted
formalism beloved of academics, but something much more complex and monstrously
vital); this fully assumed obscurity which multiplies a hundredfold the possibilities
of the language and the most subtle resources of an existential earthquake.
This idiom defies classification; in and through the work, university taxo-maniacs
and third-worldist bourgeois (the same bunch) are hauled over the coals. Glissant
points the way to a very different, unclassifiable path; all revolts imply the
grandeur of a new language, and nothing is more upsetting for the false superiority
of the former colonizer than the absolute mastery of the artistic means deployed,
the tranquil assurance of a noble style that constitutes an implicit critique
of all cant. The work can be measured against nothing but its own shadow and
light and is thus the very figure of subversion. In this sense, any followers
it has are there by virtue of a misunderstanding: addressed to readers whom
it creates as it progresses, it spurns all thought of disciples, the schoolmasterly
rubber-stamping of critics. One by one, it takes us by the throat, like a boiling
fever. All these easy pigeonholes-national literature, "French" clarity and
plain good sense, the moaning of the victim and railing against oppression that
is simply the aspiration to be a master-all are thrown briskly out of court.
There are no characters here: landscapes take their place, described with meticulous
detail in their rhetorical efflorescence. The characters are defined only by
their voices: all are made poets in their special domain, and this, only by
obscure acts of approval or refusal. Like the novelist, those who people his
work are defined by an act of speaking that is far above the necessities of
communication. What is invoked here is the obsessional jouissance of existing
through poetry. And this insistence on speaking is no illusion, no "poet's dream"
or retreat into fantasy. On the contrary, Glissant shows that, if they are to
exist, worlds must be named. There can be no "poetics of relations," no immersion
in life's variety before it is all baptized. In this sense, Glissant is the
heir of the great logothetes of the Western tradition-starting with those of
the Old Testament-who have always known that saying had a founding function,
but also that its legitimacy can be proved only in poetics.
All the Languages in the World
What Glissant brings forth in the name of "Creolization" here provides both
practice and theory, the two being absolutely inseparable. But what are we to
understand by "Creole"? First of all, a language in its own right, with its
own syntax and grammar, unlike any other. Then, a language that had the vitality
to create itself in a very short spell of time (one thinks of the emergence
of vernaculars in the Middle Ages) and suddenly founded a community. From this
emergence/creation at the crossroads of several different cultures, Glissant
draws the necessity to make all the languages of the world dance together (Introduction
à une poétique du divers). Creolization is the collision of all cultures, a
collision with unpredictable results made possible by the globalization of
communication. In the optimism and generosity of his Utopia, Glissant proposes
a conversation between languages in which none has a privileged position, where
reciprocal exchanges constantly create a newness whose place is never calculated
in advance. That, according to him, is what distinguishes Creolization from
cross-breeding, the results of which can be conjectured: "But this exploding
sea, the Caribbean, and all the islands in the world, are Creole, that is to
say unpredictable. And so are all the continents, whose coasts are incalculable."
(Tout-Monde). Thus being is to be defined in terms of the practice of exchange,
of the rubbing-together of cultures, in terms of a self-assured poetics: "To
speak of the world, embrace a language of shatterings driven over the seas like
a silver net." (Malemort). Whereas imaginary identity has always been founded
on exclusion (a trait which is by no means the prerogative of the West: think
of Chinese or Japanese xenophobes, of the Pre-Columbian Sioux who called themselves
"human beings" and of course excepted from this definition all those who were
not members of the tribe, etc.), Glissant rises up to oppose the great fear
of the outside. In this he comes at the end of a long Christian tradition,
one to which he makes few references, but which enables him to move forward.
In him there is an unconscious Pentecostal spirit, a vigorous breath in which
every language is capable of truth: "To create, in any given language, presupposes
that you are inhabited by the impossible desire for all the languages in the
world. Totality is calling to us. All works of literature today are inspired
by it." (Poétique de la relation)
And so one thinks back to the troubadours of the 12th century, who blended their
tongues with others: of Raimbaut d'Orange, who mixed Latin and Provencal, of
Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (Provencal, Italian French, Gascon and Gallo-Portuguese);
of the founding texts of French literature which created ex nihilo the nobility
of a poetic writing, starting with a slave language, which is what Old French
originally was. One thinks, later, of Montaigne, that "half-breed, his ass between
two stools." Glissant proves himself the very worthy heir of these great founders
by poetically reviving the possibility of a limitless Word.
I shall conclude with a reservation. While in Glissant's work the motif of totality
and the relativism of all cultures may not derive from some sappy multiculturalism,
they still arouse the same worries in the reader. Not because it can be said
that Glissant is unaware of the suffering and violence of the world, but instead,
and primarily, because there is nothing that is everything. The project of embracing
the totality of beings necessarily belongs to the discourse of the Hegelian
master, one that all history has taught us to distrust. In addition, imagining
the dialogue of the whole-world, the co-presence of all languages, may be an
optimistic and noble notion, but it is mistaken in that it fails to address
the respective tolerance of cultures. When there is nothing to transcend cultural
particularities, we see murders provoked by the narcissism of small differences,
the class and race genocides that have become the very unfortunate specialties
of the 20th century. Once again, these historical mishaps are in no way peculiar
to Westerners. Glissant admits this when talking about Creole itself, whose
birth is inseparable from the violence of slavery (here, again, we see his Hegelian
penchant). This modest homage ends, then, with a question mark, addressed to
one of the greatest writers of the end of the millennium.
Translation, C. Penwarden