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Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) |
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A French-Caribbean poet, novelist,
and philosopher, who was frequently mentioned as a candidate for the
Nobel Prize for literature. Although Édouard Glissand's work mainly dealt with
his native island of Martinique, its landscape, language, and identity
of its people, his thought reached far beyond the Antilles and has had
a strong relevance in the current postcolonial debate. "We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone." (from Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing, 1990) Édouard Glissant was born in 1928 in Sainte-Marie, Martinique,
the son of a gireur – a ganger who organized the workers who cut the
cane. The island has been in French possession since 1816, its official
language is French, but Creole is the language of the people. Little is
known of Glissant's father; he tends to refer more often to his mother
to whom he dedicated La Lézarde (1958, The Ripening). Glissant entered the best-known educational institution of the country, the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, in 1939, later recalling the francophile excesses of the institution and the suppression of the Creole language and local culture. However, an exception was Aimé Césaire, a poet and founder of the Negritude Movement, a cause which sought to promote African culture free of colonial influences. Césaire had returned to Martinique in 1939 and was appointed to a post at the the Lycée Schoelcher, but Glissant was too young to attend his classes. Later Glissant joinded the "Franc-Jeu" movement which helped Césaire's campaign of 1945, when he was elected mayor of Fort-de-France. In 1946 Glissant moved to France, where he studied history and philosophy at the Sorbonne and ethnology at the Musée de l'Homme. His friends included Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), his compatriot, whose writings have had a profound influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements. In Paris Glissant worked at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. In 1947 he started to contribute to Présence Africaine and from the early 1950s he participated widely in left-wing activities. With the Guadeloupean writer Paul Niger and others he founded the separatist Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l'Autonomie (FAGA), which agitated for the decolonization of French overseas departments. The group was dissolved by Charles De Gaulle in 1961 as a threat against the nation; in France Glissant himself was kept under virtual house arrest for months and forbidden to return to Martinique. Later in life, Glissant was basically a man of words rather than of action, but then he decided, as an act of rebellion, to travel by boat to Point-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. There he was immediately captured and sent back to Paris. The ban was lifted in 1965. After moving back to Martinique Glissant taught for a year at
the Lycée de Jeunes Filles ain Fort-de-France, and then founded the
Institut
Martiniquais d'Études in 1967, an educational and cultural institution.
The curriculum included Martinican and Caribbean history, geography,
and literature. A part of his cultural project was the quarterly review
Acoma, founded in 1971. In 1980, Glissant returned to Paris, where he edited the UNESCO Newsletter. He became in 1988 a lecturer at Louisiana State University. From 1995 Glissant taught literature at the City University of New York. President Jacques Chirac appointed Glissant in 2006 to form a committee that would do the preliminary work necessary for the foundation of a National Centre for the Memory of Slaveries and of their Abolitions. His report, Mémoires des esclavages, came out in 2007; the name of France's then-Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, is featured on the front cover. Glissant died in Paris, on February 3, 2011. His tomb is at the small Diamant Cemetery in Martinique. "Édourd Glissant's grave is easy to find. As people in the town will tell you, it faces the sea, right by the entrance. Glissan't grave's flatness and proximity to the soil strike the eye. Its horizontality contrasts with the elevation, modest or ostentatious, of adjacent tombs with funerary monuments that resemble miniature houses." ('Édouard Glissant's Graves' by Valérie Loichot, Callaloo 36, no. 4, 2013) Glissant debuted as a poet in 1953 with Un champ d'îles.
In his essays and theoretical studies, Glissant's topics varied from
Eurocentric cultural imperialism to multilingualism and the
creolization of cultures and values. For example, the epic poem Les
Indes (1956, The Indies) retraced Columbus' voyage to
America and its consequences. The slave trade, argued Glissant in Poetics of Relation (1990), caused the deterritorialization of African languages and contributed to creolization in the West. "This is the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality. The only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the exchange value of slaves." Glissant saw that the clearest symbol of creolization is a creole language, open to multilingual influence. Thus the arrogant monolingual imperialism is challenged by the Tower of Babel. "Creolization carries in itself the adventure of multilingualism along with the extraordinary explosion of cultures." In contrast to Césaire's culturally unifying concept of négritude, Glissant criticized "fake universality" and emphasized cultural fragmentation in the Caribbean. Struggling to come in terms with the fragmented heritage of Caribbean writers, Glissant replaced the monolingual concept of root-identity with the concept of the specific rhizome-identity (antillinité), which maintains the fact of rootedness but rejects the idea of a totalitarian root. Originally the metaphor of the rhizome was introduced by the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The creole is at the same time "absolutely original" and growing like a rhizome without fixed roots – the process is global. Glissant extended it from Caribbean and the Atlantic identity to embrace the tout-monde (whole world) of human interculturalism. In his second novel, Le Quatrième Siècle (1964, The Fourth Century), which won the Charles Veillon Prize, exemplified the idea through tracing the intertwined genealogies of two Martinican families to two enslaved Africans, duelling on board a slave ship. The Longou's are the fugitive slaves, and the Belouses, the plantation slaves, accept their fate. Glissant's
other important theoretical concepts include that
of "opacity" (it stands opposed to "the preconceived transparency of
universal models") and relation" (la Relation), the nonhierarchial
principle of unity, a
relation of equality with and respect for the Other as different
from oneself. "In Relation the whole is not the finality of its parts:
for multiplicity in totality is totally diversity." In a global
framework it is manifested in the relations between languages. Besides
building up the concepts of "opacity," "Relation" and "creolization,"
Glissant
spoke of "poetics" in his theoretical works, arguing that poetry "is
the only narrative giving expression to the world." All these concepts
have connections with each other, but as a result of their unsystematic
theoretical treatments, it is left much to the reader to unearth the
"deep resonances" in Glissant's work. Glissant
rejected the need for a lingua franca. The opposition between spoken
language (langage) and written language (langue) became a
central issue in his writings in the 1970s. As an act of resistance
from within the language, he also urged Antillian writers to break up
the colonial French, and stated that it is absolutely necessary to
violate the language at the written level. Relation is in constant
movement; Glissant associated it with "chaos-world", a concept derived
from scientific chaos theory. In his novels Glissant's recorded the anticolonial revolt, liberation of Afro-Caribbeans, and the lost history of his country. In 1958 he was awarded the prestigious Renaudot Prize for the novel La Lézarde (The Ripening), about young revolutionaries and murder. The story, based on the events of 1945, follows the flow of the river Lézarde down from the hills to the sea, and at the same time records the journey of the hero, Thael, and his relationship with his surroundings. Thael is a member of a revolutionary group, his mission is to kill a traitor. The Fourth Century was the partial sequel of Le Lézarde. Monsieur Toussaint (1961), drew on the life of
Toussaint Louverture (1746-1803), the famous Haitian revolutionary
leader, who has inspired a number of writers, among them Aimé Césaire.
The original version of the work was not designated for a theatrical
production, but its stage version was published in Acoma in
1978. Malemort (1975) disoriented the reader with
changing perspectives, drifting characters, violent shifts in style and
backward narrative, looking for the mythical figure of Odono
transported from Africa. Martinique is portrayed as the land of the
happy malemorts, who are neither alive or dead. At the end "la
bête longue" swallows one of the working class characters. From Le Lézarde onwards, Glissant increasingly pushed the traditional conventions of the novel by fusing different literary genres. "Perhaps we will experience some unprecendented interbreeding between the arts?" he said in an interview. "But what they will be, we do not as yet know." (The Baton Rouge Interviews: with Édouard Glissant and Alexandre Leupin, translated by Kate M. Cooper, 2020, p. 122) Many of his books are difficult to categorize or put into a specific genre. All the same, Glissant was in 1992 a finalist for the Nobel Prize for literature; the prize went to the poet Derek Walcott. As a Martiniquan, Glissant became torn between two worlds:
administratively the island is part of France, whereas geographically
it belongs to the Caribbean region; the official language is French,
but the vernacular is Creole. Resisting the notion of unique origins,
Glissant regarded the Antillian's identity, culture and history
primarily as a product of multiligualism and multiracialism. After
visiting William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi, Glissant radically reread his oeuvre through the lens of concepts such as
rhizome, creolisation, opacity, and the Other, which may need
clarification for those who are not familiar with Glissant's thought: "Whatever attitude he adopts in his rapport with the Other and
whatever global vision of the Other he had formed, the writer has no
choice but to disturb this vision through his work, even after
expressing it in the work. Because finally he must renounce
indivisibility and terrifying unity." (Faulkner, Mississippi by Edouard Glissant, 1996, p. 5)
Glissant argued that there is a lot of in common with Faulkner's
multiculturalist universe of the South and the Caribbean archipelago.
Challengingly, he looked at the American writer in a Caribbean context,
reversing the usual Western-focused gaze. A few years before his death, Glissant co-authored with Patrick Chamoiseau the political pamphlet, Quand les murs tombent (2007). It criticized President Sarkozy's new Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-Development for being primarily preoccupied with illegal immigrants and elaborated the notion of an identity unbound by national borders: "human beings are by definition migrants, emigrants, immigrants". (Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past by Bonnie Thomas, 2017, p. 8) For further reading: Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant by Barbara J. Webb (1992); Edouard Glissant by J. Michael Dash (1995); Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance by Celia Britton (1999); Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé by Jeannie Suk (2001); 'A New Region of the World: Faulkner, Glissant, and the Caribbean' by Hugues Azérad, in The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, edited by John T. Matthews (2015); Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations, edited by John E. Drabinski and Marisa Parham (2015); Poetics of the Antilles: Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant by Jean Khalfa (2017); Think Like an Archipelago: Paradox in the Work of Edouard Glissant by Michael Wiedorn (2018); Édouard Glissant: a Poetics of Resistance by Sam Coombes (2018): The Baton Rouge Interviews: with Édouard Glissant and Alexandre Leupin, translated by Kate M. Cooper (2020); Édouard Glissant’s Politics of Relation: Mapping an Intellectual Movement of Marronage by Moses März (dissertation, 2020); Édouard Glissant, Philosopher: Heraclitus and Hegel in the Whole-world by Alexandre Leupin; translated by Andrew Brown (2021); Le nouvel Édouard Glissant: de l'opacité poétique à la limpidité politique by Mamadou Moustapha Ly (2021); 'On Reconsidering Identity in Art,' in Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art by John Yau (2023); Édouard Glissant: artisan du Tout-monde by Aliocha Wald Lasowski (2023) Selected works:
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