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  • Islands of Créolité?
  • David Scott

They all knew the sea, barely or well, and their unequal brine unites them.

The Indies are eternity

—Edouard Glissant, “The Indies”

When Eloge de la créolité appeared in 1989, there was an understandable enough elation in francophone Caribbean studies.1 It was something of an intellectual event. And rightly so. Striking a note of defiant provocation, the authors—Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant—sought to reckon in a sympathetic yet critical way with the profound inheritance of Negritude, its almost overwhelming authority as a cultural-intellectual frame of engagement and identity embodied in the towering (if not unambiguous) presence of Aimé Césaire, then of course still very much alive. Crossing out without negating la présence africaine with the poetics of antillanité, the authors were concerned to forestall—even subvert—the drive toward an external identification with a mythological Africa as the consoling counterpoint to an external identification with a mythological Europe. “Nous sommes fondamentalement frappés d’extériorité,” they asserted with exuberant disaffection, we are fundamentally stricken with exteriority. It is against this orientation that they formulated their idea of créolité, “une vision intérieure,” as they called it, the interior vision of a hybrid world made up of disseminated and recomposed fragments.2 [End Page vii]

To be sure there were skeptics and questioners, among them Maryse Condé, for example, who in a terse reflection accused the authors of seeking to impose a new literary regime of “law and order,” based on a new demand for “authenticity” and consequently a new system of “exclusions.”3 But also Edouard Glissant himself, in whose name, so to speak, this éloge had been offered: if Eloge de la créolité can be read as a declaratory and programmatic manifesto inspired by Glissant’s Le discours antillais, which had appeared in 1981, his 1990 Poétique de la relation might be understood as doubting the seeming virtues of the syncretistic model of “creoleness” presented by Eloge. The suspicion, so it seemed, was that the very demand for a model of créolité might harbor as many obstacles as it overcame, that despite the open-ended rambunctiousness of, say, Chamoiseau’s fiction, the irreducibly makeshift mixtures out of which his characters’ lives were contingently assembled, an unavoidable conceptual hypostatization foreclosed the rhizomatic impulses of antillanité.

Anyhow, be that particular quarrel as it may for the time being, a reasonably attuned anglophone Caribbean reader looking on at the end of the dispiriting 1980s may well be forgiven a sense of puzzlement at the tremor of excitement over this discovery of the “creoleness” of the Caribbean. Créolité? Yes, bien sûr, but how curiously belated . . . After all, in the so-called English-speaking Caribbean there had been, since at least the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, an important elaboration of the idea of “creole” and “creolization” to think the distinctively interculturated/acculturated character of Caribbean society—against the background of its genesis inside a catastrophic history marked by genocide, deracination, displacement, and systematic cultural domination driven by colonial plantation slavery. Obviously it is the work of Kamau Brathwaite—historian, cultural critic, and poet—that comes most readily to mind here. For remember that the seminal work outlining his cultural-historical theory of creolization, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, was first published in 1971, and Contradictory Omens, perhaps the most succinct elaboration of the assumptions and implications of his creole theory, appeared in 1974. Moreover, the volumes reconstructing his New World poetic journey, Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands, were already published in 1967, 1968, and 1969, respectively (and later brought together as The Arrivants in 1973). Brathwaite’s project, developed subsequently in the idea of “nation language” in History of the Voice (1984), might in fact be described as the formulation of a creative and critical idiom of Caribbean interiority. In other words, several years before the ringing declaration embodied in Eloge de la créolité, there already existed a fundamental body of Caribbean work devoted precisely to the excavation of the interior landscape of “creoleness.”

Now, needless to say, it is...

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