‘Et l’une et l’autre face des choses’: la déconstruction poétique de l’Histoire dans ‘Les Indes’ et ‘Le Sel noir’ d’Édouard Glissant (review)

The richness and diversity of Édouard Glissant’s creative and intellectual output continues to act as the substratum of any investigation into Antillean literature, history, and thought. As the author of multiple works, from novels, plays, and poems to philosophical and political essays, ‘la galaxie Glissant’ (p. 13) extends well beyond his native Martinique and towards the tout-monde, a concept that rejects the hegemony of universality by understanding the world as an infinite series of dynamic, divergent, and unpredictable creolizations. From this vast œuvre, Samia Kassab-Charfi’s monograph focuses on two of Glissant’s earliest collections of poetry — Les Indes (1956) and Le Sel noir (1960) — and presents detailed analyses of their stylistic features, thematic content, and ideological drive. Underpinning this selection is the desire to provide a contextualization for Glissant’s subsequent works by highlighting the comprehensiveness and consistency of his ethical and epistemological outlook (p. 16) while focusing specifically on his poetic deconstruction of Western-centric historiography. The first chapter outlines a number of the key theoretical structures and influences in Glissant’s work, notably his use of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome as a way of challenging the atavistic nature of both Western History and Négritude’s misplaced nostalgia for a lost African homeland. Instead, Glissant promotes a composite, archipelagic vision, converting ‘l’ordre vertical atavique à un ordre qui serait horizontal ou extensif, rhizomique et relationnel’(p. 51). The second chapter then considers how this theorization is reflected in the narrative construction and poetic language of Les Indes. Its six subdivisions (or ‘chants’) map a historical chronology that begins with Western-led exploration, moves through conquest, slavery, and resistance, and finishes with ‘La Relation’, while the poetic language deliberately undercuts Western narratives of conquest and domination by inverting the colonizer’s gaze and revealing the predatory underside of imperial conquest. The final two chapters extract four ‘postes-clés’ from each of the collections, and in so doing interconnect the key themes and stylistic features that traverse Glissant’s work, thereby attesting the constancy of his philosophical thought in challenging Western historical constructs. This process of mythical deconstruction, which begins, as the title suggests, by viewing History from ‘l’autre face des choses’ (or from the perspective of the colonized ‘other’) and works to create an appropriate aesthetic response to Western narratives of colonization, is therefore the pivot around which this study turns. The value of Kassab-Charfi’s close reading of these two early poetic collections thus lies in its provision of a contextual framework for ‘la parole poétique glissantienne’ (as Chapter 2 in entitled) and its persistent capacity to destabilize Western myths while envisaging an alternative world that has been dynamically mis en relation.