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$ZDNHQLQJWRWKH:RUOG5HODWLRQ7RWDOLW\DQG:ULWLQJ IURP%HORZ 5L]YDQD%UDGOH\'DPLHQ$GLD0DUDVVD Discourse, Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2014, pp. 112-131 (Article) 3XEOLVKHGE\:D\QH6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV DOI: 10.1353/dis.2014.0014 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dis/summary/v036/36.1.bradley.html Access provided by Emory University Libraries (9 Jan 2015 03:52 GMT) Awakening to the World: Relation, Totality, and Writing from Below Rizvana Bradley and Damien-Adia Marassa Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; . Surely some revelation is at hand. —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” This study commemorates the work of scholar, poet, theorist, nov- elist and traveler Édouard Glissant, taking up an invitation in his writing to think the world anew. In the pages that follow, we will focus on the influence and implications of Glissant’s reflections on the poetic, theoretical, and geographic dimensions of the African diaspora that have advanced through the specific inscriptions of black thought in the development of the modern world. We will examine a broad range of Glissant’s work in order to highlight how Discourse, 36.1, Winter 2014, pp. 112–131. Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321. Awakening to the World 113 his reflections on African heritage and expression unfold across the various genres of his writing. Above all, we will seek to dem- onstrate how these reflections expand the theory, pedagogy, and practice of what we will refer to here as black writing. Glissant’s work highlights the specificity and diversity of the forms, contexts, and meanings of the graphic performances that proliferate in the Afrodiaspora, defining black writing not merely as a modality of alphabetic script but as an ensemble of life practices. In the con- text of the Afrodiaspora, as within the milieu of “the black radical tradition,”1 black writing thus emerges as a practice irreducible to the “particular context of its genesis.”2 Our study stems from this critical point of intersection between writing and practice, trac- ing modes of diasporic communication and performance—ones connecting Africa to Brazil, Haiti, and the United States—that are implicated in Glissant’s notion of Relation. Recasting the idea of Africa from “dark continent” to archi- pelago, Glissant writes in Caribbean Discourse that “We realize that peoples who are ‘manifestly’ composite have minimized the idea of Genesis.”3 Conceiving Africa not as a monolithic origin but as a birthplace of multiplicity, he views the geographic layout of the Caribbean as a generative ensemble of origins, a cradle of multiple diasporas that figures the African past itself as a set of diasporic practices:4 “There was an African diaspora millions of years ago, which gave birth to the various humanities,” he claims, “And there have been other diasporas—for example, the forced diaspora brought about by slavery and [those] caused by poverty and des- titution, emigrants and emigrations.”5 In Glissant’s reflections on the idea of Africa and the philosophy of its history, the idea and meaning of blackness as disseminated by black people is opposed to ideas about race that underlie essentialist understandings of human attribute and origin. “Caribbeanness” is therefore “an intellectual dream, lived at the same time in an unconscious way by our peoples [that] tears us free from the intolerable alterna- tive of the need for nationalism and introduces us to the cross- cultural process that modifies but does not undermine the latter.”6 Through the cross-cultural “poetics of Relation” expressed in the everyday life of the Caribbean and in Glissantian thought, we come to glimpse the contours of black writing as an expression of the life practices that take shape within the complex totality that we call the Afrodiaspora. As Glissant states in an interview with Manthia Diawara, “the truth that is increasingly coming to light about black reality in the New World is the truth of multiplicity, the truth of the step toward the other. Relation is the moment where we realize that 114 Rizvana Bradley and Damien-Adia Marassa there is a definite quantity of all the differences in the world.”7 It is in the spirit of elaborating a Glissantian reading of the ongo- ing relational practice of diaspora itself that we turn our attention to divergent geographical expressions of reading and writing in order to conceptualize black writing as a graphic encounter with differences. To read such differences in epistemology, geography, ontology, and cosmology from which Afrodiasporic displacements and fugitive New World constructions erupt reveals blackness as something both ontological and transitive: here and beyond here, in the break, “present and unmade in presence.”8 As a practice of cross-cultural relation, blackness can be thought not through facile notions of origin (those of parentage, ethnicity, skin color, racial phenotype) but as a figure of performed relations within and radi- cally outside of the place of memory. For Glissant, Caribbean life is an “explosion of cultures . the violent sign of [whose] consensual, not imposed sharing”9 serves as the pivotal foundation for the concept of relation in his writings. The Caribbean forms a geographical dialectic through a “shifting play of archipelagos.”10 Echoing the textual geography through which Relation emerges as a way to think the world anew, Anto- nio Benítez-Rojo has written that “the Caribbean is not a common archipelago, but a meta-archipelago . , and as a meta-archipel- ago, it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center.”11 Neither writing nor geography are reducible to their ostensibly dis- tinct textual or respective topographic forms. The Glissantian the- sis of the archipelagic field and diasporic flow of the Afro-Antillean region glimpses the deterritorializing movements of black life and writing beyond the ostensible horizon of the Caribbean. This study focuses on the contraband movements and fugitive modes occasioned by collective black life within the transatlantic milieu, focusing on specific techniques and possibilities associated with passage and flight in black writing. Disforming conventions and canons,12 black writing evidences the ongoing conditions for a grammatology of African diasporic writing avant la lettre. The sacred performance of texts and literatures that issues from black writing unfolds from the systematic interdiction against myth and ritual, ancestral history, and forms of belief that are presumed to develop outside Western conceptions of inscription. Glissant’s phi- losophy of diaspora as archipelago serves to transform hegemonic colonial cartographies of the black world by choreographing new relations between the Caribbean and the New World centered in the widening gyre of the black diaspora. For if the Caribbean is posited as an exceptional geopolitical example, this exception proves the rule of the diaspora itself as a nonunitary expression Awakening to the World 115 of archipelagic sociality. Glissant’s theory of Relation compels just such a reordering of colonial cartographies of the New World from continental centers to archipelagos of difference. We will begin by examining the biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, who was born in Benin, sold to European slave owners, and transported to Brazil in the 1850s. His Biography, con- sidered the only existing Brazilian slave narrative, is a significant document for Afro-Brazilian literary studies, as noted by Edu- ardo de Assis Duarte.13 Baquaqua’s account of his travels and his “commentaries on his experiences” from captivity in Africa, flight across the Atlantic, and marronage in the Americas illuminates a “richly textured view of the world of slavery and resistance.”14 Fur- thermore, the transhistorical and transpersonal “spirit of deter- mination and courage” that the editors identify in Baquaqua’s narrative reflects aspects of the experience of “all Africans and their descendants who refused to accept the status of ‘slave.’”15 Baquaqua’s oral and graphic recitation of these travels brings together significant social and cultural geographies that include ancestral heritages and spiritual cosmologies reflective of the forms that black writing takes in the diaspora. We will argue that Baquaqua’s transatlantic crossing and subsequent recital of his journeys assembles evidence of negritude, marronage, creoliza- tion, and black resistance that links disparate temporal and spa- tial locations and bridges the linguistic and cultural heritages of seemingly divergent social groups. Orí,16 another work that will be considered here, is a film writ- ten and narrated by Maria Beatriz Nascimento and directed by Rachel Gerber at the height of Brazil’s Black Movement of the 1970s. Orí emphasizes Afro-Brazilian cultural history and knowl- edge associated with “negritude” as well as with African cosmolo- gies implicated in the Yoruba word orí, meaning “soul,” “head,” “person,” or “destiny.”17 The film’s rich imagery, poetic structure, and scholarly discourse focus on evidence of Dogon and Bambara, Congo and Yoruba cultural, spiritual, and technological heritage in various stages of convergence in Brazil. Documenting and theo- rizing the formation of a deep and resilient black consciousness, from the history of fugitive slave communities,