Relating Islands: The South of the South in the Americas

The fifteen statues arranged in a triangle whose point faces the open sea, precisely on the line of latitude of the Gold Coast in Africa, rise from the earth, held fast in the rock which continues there under the water, with a moving restraint and dignity. Arms stuck to the body, head slightly inclined, they would bring to mind in a less colossal form the statues of Easter Island if they did not stare so fixedly, it seems, towards the sea where so many ships crammed with shackled blacks capsized. It is all white, the African color of mourning, it is likely that the sea winds will stain them yellow little by little […] After so much rage, the fading calm of contemplation.

(Èdouard Glissant, Sartorius 162-63)

In this passage from Sartorius, Èdouard Glissant describes a Caribbean place of memory for his invisible nation of wandering Batoutos. It is situated on the south coast of Martinique facing Diamond Rock and commemorates the wreck of a nameless, illegal slave ship, which sank off the coast on the night of August 30, 1830. Of those who survived there were eighty-six Ibos, of which sixty were women. Not a single member of the European crew was found alive. Glissant speculates that there was most likely a slave revolt that took place on that fateful night and that the Ibos, known for their preference for suicide over subjugation, drowned the crew, committing mass suicide at the same time. The statues gaze therefore down at the place where under the weight of their African cargo nameless Europeans sank to the ocean floor. The scene sets up a series of relational correspondences—the dead white bodies covered in black under the sea echo the African figures clothed in white on the land; the colossal sculptures in Martinique invoke the toppled ancestors of another remote island far out in the Southeastern Pacific west of the Coast of Chile, Easter Island. But this is not the static closed site of racial agony as the borderless rock continues under the water and the salt-laden wind will, with time, turn the figures yellow with age.

This New World space of memory bears all the hallmarks of Glissant's poetics of displacement. Wind and sea ultimately turn location into relation and link this hemispheric "lieu commun" on a tiny French Overseas Department east to Africa and Europe and west to the coast of Chile. This vision of Anse Caffard with its Polynesian echoes of the mysterious monoliths of Easter Island also responds to a chain of relations in Glissant's own oeuvre. His monumental 1981 book of essays Le discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) opened with the bold declaration "Martinique is not a Polynesian island" (1). In so doing Glissant sought to free Martinique from two stereotypes of primitivist insularity which threatened to obscure the complex reality of the island's location in time and space. On one hand constructing Martinique as an exotic Polynesian elsewhere would lock island space in a timeless, tropical passivity which, as Glissant's introduction states, produces that "web of nothingness in which it is ensnared." He is equally aware that in order to bring ideological closure to Martinique's identitarian crisis as a French colony, Aimé Césaire's generalizing spatial politics had earlier construed Martinique's place in the Caribbean archipelago in terms of an agony-stricken Polynesia: "And my non-enclosure island, its clear boldness standing at the back of this Polynesia, before it, Guadeloupe split in two along its backbone and sharing our misery" (91). It was impossible to grasp "le réel antillais" for Glissant since neither of these Polynesian constructs allowed for a destabilizing relational perspective but relied rather on essentializing differences which were more rooted in ideological stereotype than in Martinique's rhizomatic connections to New World space.

It is a profound awareness of the impossibility of naming or reading Martinique in particular and the Caribbean in general in terms of settled notions of difference and legitimacy that makes Èdouard Glissant's ideas so enormously important to the positioning of Caribbean...