ARAF BOOKS (ARAF BOOK! Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French A. james Arnold, General Editor Kandioura Dramé,Associate Editor In a superb translation, selected essays from Glissant's rich and com‑ plex collection examine the psychological, sociological, and philosophi‑ cal implications of cultural dependency, Dash has also prepared a valuable introduction in which he relates these essays to Glissant's “WE/S am poetry ‐ L.W. Yoder, Davidson College, for Choice Edouard Glissant is putatively one of the most prominent writers and intellectuals of the Caribbean whose oeuvre comprises several vol‑ umes of fiction, poetry, drama, and critical thought and reaches readers well beyond the region. English translations, however, have not kept pace with Glissant's growing reputation. For that reason the present volume is particularly welcome. ...A new post‐négritude generation of/Vlartinican writers and intellectuals who call themselves Créolistes, has already acknowledged its indebtedness to Glissant's seminal thought, whose import is likely to increase with time. Pro‑ fessor Dash, in addition to his attentive translation of the text, has provided a superb introduction, thereby making Glissant's thought eminently accessible to the Anglophone reader. ‐‐juris Silenieks, Carnegie Mellon University EDOUARD GLISSANT, founder of the Institut Martiniquais d'Etudes and the journal Acoma, was born in I928 in Sainte-Marie, Martinique. His early education was at the Lycée Schoelcher, where he was greatly influenced by the teaching of Aime Cesaire. In I946 he left for France on a scholarship. From the l950s to the |980s his theory of Caribbeanness evolved as a response to negritude and Afrocentrism. His publications include La Lezarde; So/eil de la conscience; Le quatriéme siecle; Malemort; Mahagony; Monsieur Toussaint; and La case du commandeur. I. MICHAEL DASH is Reader in the Department of French, Uni‑ versity of the West Indies. ISBN 0-8139-1373-X 90000> UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA Charlottesville and London I 9 780813 913735 r -m 7 a- VA1-5.- C 5 Caribbean Discourse SELECTED ESSAYS By Edouard Glissant Translated and with anIntroduction by J. Michael Dash CARAF BOOKS University Press of Virginia CHARLOTTESVILLE <:\‘\">\ ‘ CT\ [3.) in \ Q. \'\f\'L This isatitle in the CARAF BOOKSseries To describe is to transform. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF VIRGINIA Le Discours Antillais Copyright © Les Editions du Seuil 1981 Then Chaka shouted to them: “You murder me in the This translation and edition Copyright © 1989 by the Rector and Visitors hope of taking my place after my death; you are mis‑ of the University of Virginia taken, that is notto be, for Oum’loungou (the white man) is on the move and hewill be the one to domi‑ First published 1989 nateyou, and you will become his subjects.” Firstpaperback edition 1992 Thomas Mofolo Secondprinting 1996 Cbaka, Bantou Epic Congress Data Library of Cataloging-in-Publication Between Europe and America I see only specks of dust. Glissant, Edouard, 1928‑ Attributed to Charles deGaulle [Discours antillais. English] on a visit to Martinique Caribbean discourse : selected essays / by Edouard Glissant : translated and with an introduction byJ. Michael Dash. But the most powerful language is the one in which all p. cm. (CARAF books) is said without a word being uttered. Translation of: Le discours antillais. Jean-Jacques Rousseau ISBN 0-8139-1219-9 (cloth); 0-8139-1373-X (paper) Essay on the Origin of Language 1. Martinique‐Civilization. 2. Martinique‐Dependency on France. 3. Blacks‐Race identity. 4. Nationalism and literature‐West Acoma fall down, everybody say the wood rotten. Indies, French‐History‐ZOth century. 5. Caribbean literature Martinican proverb (French)‐I-Iistory and criticism. 6. West Indies, French‐Relations‑ France. 7. France‐Relations‐West Indies, French. I. Dash,]. A black manis a century. Michael. II. Title. III. Series. Martinican saying F2081.G5313 1989 972.98’2‐dc19 89-5469 An enormous task, to make an inventory of reality. We amass facts, we make our comments, but in every writ‑ CIP ten line, in every proposition offered, we have an im‑ Printed in the United States of America pression of inadequacy. Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks Contents Introduction xi Introductions 1 From a “Dead-end” Situation, 1 From This Discourse on a Discourse, 4 From a Presentation Distant in Space and Time, 5 From Tracks Left Yesterday and Today, Mixed Together, 9 From the Landscape, 10 From the Lack of‘ Speech and from Creole, 11 The Known, the Uncertain 13 DISPOSSESSION, 13 Landmarks: The Chronological Illusion, 13 Reversion and Diversion, 14 In the Beginning, 26 Dispossession, 37 Land, 51 THE CARIBBEAN EXPERIENCE, 53 Sardonic Interludes, 53 Land,59 HlSTORY‐ HISTORIES‐ STORIES, 61 The Quarrel with History, 61 Carifesta 1976, 67 History and Literature, 69 Landmarks: Missed Opportunities, 87 v i i i ix Contents Contents Partitions and Periods, 88 A Caribbean Future 221 History, Time, Identity, 92 TOWARD CARIBBEANNESS, 221 The Dream, the Reality, 221 Cross-Cultural Poetics 97 Saint-John Perse and the Caribbean, 225 NATIONAL LITERATURES, 97 Cultural Identity, 231 Sameness and Diversity, 97 The One and Only Season, 233 Techniques, 104 v o I c E S, 237 LANDSCAPES, LAND, 110 From the Perspective of Boises (Shackles), 237 Forms of Music, 110 Seven Landscapes for the Sculptures of Cardenas, 238 Acceptance, 113 Scatterings, 242 Chile, 114 Concerning Literature, 244 The Cuban Landscape, 117 Event, 246 P o E T I C S, 120 OVERTURES, 248 Natural Poetics, Forced Poetics, 120 People and Language, 248 Cross-Cultural Poetics, 134 22 May, 251 “The Novel of the Americas,” 144 Resolutions, Resolution, 253 Montreal, 150 Poets from Here, 153 Appendix: Table of the Diaspora 257 On Haitian Painting, 155 Glossary 260 An Exploded Discourse 159 THE UNCONSCIOUS, IDENTITY, AND Sources of Documents Reprinted in This Volume 271 M E T H o D , 159 Poetics and the Unconscious, 159 LANGUAGES, SELF-EXPRESSION,171 On the Teaching of Literatures, 171 Quebec, 172 Pedagogy, Demagogy, 173 Creole, 182 Mangin-yin an zin, 191 THEATER, CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PEOPLE, 195 (In the Street), 195 Theater, Consciousness of the People, 196 Introduction I and We Either I am nobody or I am a nation. Derek Walcott, The Schooner Flight Edouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse is an unflaggingly ambitious attempt to read the Caribbean and the New World experience, not as a respénse to fixed, univocal meanings im‑ posed by the past, but as an infinitely varied, dauntineg in‑ exhaustible text. In its effort to plumb this deeper psychic truth of the Caribbean, Glissant’s work examines everything. Its reach extends from the trivial to the portentous,from wind‑ shield stickers to the first document promising the abolition of slavery. To this extent Caribbean Discourse follows in the wake of essays of similar scope and originality, which examine with equal attention the humblest artifact or the popular game of cricket or the familiar ritual of the fiesta, by intellectuals and artists such as Alejo Carpentier, Octavio Paz, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Aimé Césaire, Jean Price-Mars, and Wilson Harris. In a series of essays, lectures, anecdotes, and prose poems, which are often as scientific in conception as they are poetically digressive in execution, Glissant shifts our attention away from the conventional reduction of Caribbean history to a racial melodrama of revenge or remorse and to‑ ward a close scrutiny of the obscurities, the vicissitudes, the fissures that abound in Caribbean history from slavery to the xiii x i i Introduction Introduction present. In so doing he calls into question a number of re‑ tions of the structuring, transcendental ego: “man is not the ceived ideas on creativity, colonization, and the Creole lan‑ privileged subject of his knowledge; he gradually becomes its guage. In no area is his challenge more thoroughgoing than in object. ... He is no longer the mind probing the known‑ the revaluation of the notionof the self. Like somany modern unknown.” Or again: “The author must be demythified, cer‑ critics and philosophers, Glissant affirms that the era of naive ' tainly, because he must be integrated into a common resolve. faith in individualism is over. The collective ‘We’ becomes the site of the generative system, , Glissant’s oeuvre in general and Caribbean Discourse in and the true subject.” This demythification of the self-certain particular are predicated on adislocation or deconstruction of subject is remarkable in the ideological and aesthetic context the notion of individual agency in a post-Cartesian, post‑ of Caribbean writing. The point of departure of Caribbean Sartrean sense. There is a constant deflation of the solemnities literature has been the effort to write the subject into exis‑ of the self-certain subject in Glissant’s critique of the longing , tence. Its master theme has been the quest for individual iden‑ for inviolable systems and pure origins, the sovereignty of self‑ tity. The heroic prodigal, the solemn demiurge, the vengeful consciousness, the solipsism of the structuring ego. For him, enfant terrible, outspoken Caliban‐these are some .of the true beginnings and real authority are lowly,paradoxical, and pervasive images of the transcendental subject in Caribbean unspectacular. To this extent his work marks a significant de‑ literature. However, Glissant’s work treats the subversion of 5parture from the Caribbean’s fixaton with prelapsarian inno‑ the ordering ego and attempts to transcend the monomania of cence, an origin before the Fall of the New World. This is the Caliban. What Glissant emphasizes is the structuring force source of his criticism of Saint-John Perse, who is presented as of landscape, community, and collective unconscious. an example of the constructive subject who desperately at‑ Aimé Césaire was the first Caribbean writer to consciously tempts to impose order, structure, on a world in a continuous examine the notion of the subject as a disembodied self seek‑ state of flux.