Can Language Free Us From Subordination?

Britton, Celia M. Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. New World Studies (Ed. A. James Arnold). Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

Celia Britton's Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory is an important contribution to the body of scholarly works about the Martinican writer. The originality of her book resides in the fact that she bridges the language barrier between the French and the English-speaking scholarship as she reads Glissant's work against the background of the English-speaking postcolonial theorists' writing and examines his fiction in the light of the French post-structuralist philosophers (Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida). She also shows the importance of Frantz Fanon's thoughts on Glissant, coming back full circle to the English-speaking postcolonial theorist so indebted to Fanon, Homi Bhabha. Britton's book is a remarkable exercise in what I would call "criticism in relation," paralleling Glissant's "poetics of relation" because of the way in which she uses Indian critic Spivak's analysis for her own approach to Glissant's work. Most stimulating are the adjustment and critical dialogue she engages in with the postcolonial theorist through Glissant. Britton offers a close textual analysis of the Martinican writer's essays and novels, and argues quite convincingly about their "postcolonial" quality even if Martinique is all but an independent state.

Glissant's position on the issue of language in Martinique (and for that matter in any colonised country) is what leads the author in her critical approach to his work (essays and fiction). It is a pity therefore that her chapter entitled "The Lack of Language" does not try to counter Glissant's view on the linguistic/cultural amnesia of the slaves. Only a brief mention is made of Chamoiseau's and Confiant's opposite views about the nature of [Martinican] Creole in chapter 1 (29). We have to wait until chapter 6 for a discussion of Glissant's position when she uses Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s comments in The Signifying Monkey (146-51). Glissant's approach to the issue of language goes against findings in the region by linguists like Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain (1936), Claire Lefebvre and her Haitian Creole Lexicon Project (University of Montreal) and Maureen Warner Lewis (1991).

In juxtaposing Le Discours Antillais/Caribbean Discourse with the fictions, Britton shows how Glissant dramatises, without resolving (even refusing to solve) the issue of identity, alienation and language. She establishes a critical dialogue between Glissant and Spivak in chapter 3, Fanon in chapter 4, Homi Bhabha and Freud in chapter 5, Gates in chapter 6. Her analysis brings forward the unity/consistency and evolution/transformation in Glissant's fiction from La Lézarde (1956, The Ripening, though she deliberately kept this novel aside) to Tout-monde (1993). She also shows the close link between Glissant's thinking and his fiction. Through her analysis of Glissant's concept of "Antillean verbal delirium," she helps us to understand how the notion of Caribbean madness--"la folie antillaise" evoked by Schwarz-Bart in 1972 (in Etudes et Documents about Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle) and usually associated with Caribbean female writers--was also at work in Glissant's 1975 Malemort, before it became central to his 1981 La case du commandeur.

Though Britton sets out to use all Glissant's essays for her study, she ends up relying heavily on his Discours antillais and to a lesser degree on Poétique de la relation. This confirms the centrality of Le discours antillais for the interpretation not only of Glissant's work but more broadly of French Antillean writing. Another issue not dealt with in detail but which runs through the essay is Glissant's social and political commitment/non-involvement in Martinican politics. Britton's study of the language issue shows that, in fact, Glissant's choice to overcome the issue of language-identity and open himself to the world (poetics of the chaos-world) is a contemporary solution for...