Glissant's Africas: From Departmentalization to the Poetics of Relation

Les Africains, les Noirs Américains, les Antillais, tout ça, c'est pareil, c'est l'histoire qui a tout changé. Au temps de l'esclavage, mes grands-parents avaient beaucoup travaillé, enchaîné, bien sûr. L'embarquement se faisait sur le fleuve Victoria à Limbé. L'esclavage a emmené mon papa travailler là-bas.

Africans, North Americans, Caribbeans, it's all the same thing--it's history that changed everything. In the time of slavery, my grandparents had worked very hard, in chains, naturally. They got on the ships on the Victoria River at Limbé. Slavery brought my daddy to work over there.

--Claude Moundio, alias Petit Pays, Cameroonian singer

Five hundred of them weeping slaves from their native land and we bore. We bound them down with iron chains and we made them walk below, scarce eighteen inches to a man was all they had to go. But the plague it came and the fever too, and it killed them like flies, we laid their bodies on the deck and we hauled them o'er the side. But sure the dead were lucky, for they'd have to weep no more, nor drag the chain and feel the lash in Cuba for ever more.

--David Jones, "Ballad of the Flying Cloud"

Africa's disillusionment with its independences has set the continent in a series of contradictions and problems that have left in their wake bloody tyrannies, interminable civil wars, cyclical famines, or unspeakable genocides that often threaten the very survival of entire communities. The postcolonial ravages experienced in Haiti and the other independent countries of the Antilles and Africa are turning the tomorrows of decolonization into a nightmare for the great majority of people. Against the socioeconomic and political disaster brought about by the "suns of independences," departmentalization is presented as the path to salvation. Edouard Glissant is the first in a line of Antillean writers and thinkers to produce what can be called an Africa of departmentalization--perceiving Africa in particular and the postcolonial world in general through the impact of departmentalization in the Caribbean. The failure of the dreams of independence, with catastrophic consequences for daily life, functions in the propaganda of departmentalization as another trump against the temptation for independence. The pathology of Africa thus ensues from the exploitation of postindependence misery through hegemonic French discourse in the Antilles. The perception of an exclusive focus on the sordid nature of the African situation in Antillean discourse denotes its infeudation within the sphere of hegemony.

Glissant's project of theoretical mediation sheds light on the stakes and the profound causes of the misery of Africans and other peoples of the "hidden side of the earth" within the framework of the Poetics of Relation. A study focused on the construct of Africa in the imaginary of departmentalization will facilitate the exploration of some of aspects of this theoretical inscription of Africa within crosscultural poetics, namely, the curse of independence, the critique of Afrocentricity, and the Egypt of the slave raids.

Africa functions within Glissant's theoretical or poetic schemas either as an exemplar of resistance or as a counterexample of the Antillean reality. The artificialization of Martinican society through the French colonial strategy is explained in part by the absence of a cultural, social, or political hinterland, a basic lack that exacerbates the situation of domination. In Africa, the ambushes of independence have engendered an autonomization of contradictions and tensions, thus contributing to the reinforcement of the collective consciousness. Domination there is attenuated by the existence of a mythological hinterland. The resulting density of culture and politics transforms African communities into partners of the worldwide Relation at the very same time that Martinique risks disappearing as a collectivity from the world scene. Rather than leading to an impasse, the African situation proceeds to a reconfiguration of the distribution of power:

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