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  • Sugar and Its Secrets:The Caribbean Contexts of Creolization
  • J. Michael Dash
American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South Eds. Martin Munro and Celia Britton Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2012. viii + 256 pp. ISBN 9781846317538
From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic By Miriam J. A. Chancy Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2012. xxxiii + 358 pp. ISBN 9781554584284
Racial Experiments in Cuban Literature and Ethnography By Emily Maguire Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. vii + 237 pp. ISBN 9780813037479 [End Page 161]

Edouard Glissant once described St John Perse as that “necessary” poet who “On the pathway of the world … precedes us while also ignoring us.” It could be said that Glissant himself has become that necessary “thinker” who also precedes and ignores, to use his own terminology, the “lieu incontourable,” which is invariably the point of departure for studies of the plantation Americas. This is the case arguably because of Glissant’s poetic conception of New World–space in terms of the “blue savannas of memory and imagination.” From the outset, Glissant was fascinated by the kind of dynamic imaginative renewal that could result from the trauma of deportation and displacement. Memory and imagination become powerful forces in the process of navigating the terror of the unknown (l’inconnu-absolu) for the deportee. The disruptive capacity of the unknown, which he termed the “abyss,” makes an imaginative response vital for the survival of the radically uprooted subject. New World–space then becomes habitable only because of the openness of the poetic imagination. At the end of the opening essay of Poetique de la Relation, tellingly entitled “The Open Boat,” Glissant closes with an invocation of the liberating force of the poetic impulse. “It’s that which keeps us bound to poetry … in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry the cry of poetry. Our boats are open, we navigate them for everyone” (21). The imagination’s capacity for renewal, the poetic “cry,” feeds on the productive strangeness of the unknown.

“Open sailing” meant the abandonment of the stabilizing certitudes of filiation, history, and home and yielding to the positively charged menace of this new “non-world, inhabited by no ancestor.” It is worth noting that in the early book of essays L’intention poetique, originally published in 1969, he directly addressed the absolute newness of experience of the displaced African in the uncharted space of the Americas.

The fugitive, the African condemned to the fateful islands, did not recognize even the taste of the night; that unknown night was less dense, more naked and it terrified him; far behind he heard the dogs but the acacias had already snatched him from the world of the hunters; and so he entered, man from vast stretches of earth into a another history in which, without him knowing, time was beginning again for him.

(9)

The horrors of deportation, the shock of a new darkness, is an apocalyptic moment that can create a new, modern imaginary, “he entered another history in which time was beginning again for him.” This apocalyptic moment of poetic renewal is at the heart of Glissant’s concept of creolization, which is the product of the engendering abyss (le gouffre-matrice). The space of the Americas is, in his view, marked by the creolizing impulse, the creative void of the abyss.

Each time I return to the Americas, whether to an island like Martinique, which is where I was born, or to the American continent, I am struck by the openness of this landscape. I say it is an “irrupted” landscape—it’s a word that I coined obviously—in it is irruption and rush, and eruption as well, perhaps a lot of the real and the unreal.

(Glissant, Introduction a une Poetique du divers, 11)

His coining of the word “irrupted” (irrué) is an attempt to categorize fissured New World–space. It was first used in Glissant’s 1981 book of essays, Caribbean Discourse, [End Page 162] to distinguish the New World from the settled, ordered space of Europe. Perhaps his intuition was that the unsettled, exploded, and “rent” nature of the Americas was merely a prelude to the global...

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