Remembering Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant

Ulf Andersen © 1993

One of the co-founders of the Creolite movement in Martinique, Raphael Confiant, in his tribute to the greatest influence on his generation, the writer and theorist Edouard Glissant, asserted that if Martinique existed at all on the global stage it was because of three writers: Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant. The death of Edouard Glissant on February 3, 2011, marks the end of a remarkable intellectual tradition for the French Overseas Department of Martinique. The fact that Martinique had a global impact despite the island’s size and tiny population might have been a surprise for Confiant, but not so for Glissant. One of the prevailing features of his thought is the importance of precarious insularity in the face of the certitude of continental mass. In his view, continental masses were destined to be fissured by archipelagos and broken into multiple islands. One of the epigraphs of perhaps his best known book of essays, Caribbean Discourse, is attributed to General de Gaulle who is supposed to have described the Caribbean dismissively in the following manner: “Between Europe and America I see only specks of dust.” These “specks of dust” were for Glissant essential to grasping the nature of global space. In this regard, he frequently affirmed the exemplary nature of island space by declaring on more than one occasion, “I believe in the future of small countries.”

It is precisely his interest in the poetics of insularity that distinguished Glissant from his celebrated compatriots Cesaire and Fanon. The impulse of Cesairean negritude is profoundly anti-colonial as is the revolutionary politics of Fanon. Furthermore, Cesaire and Fanon had structured their ideas in the context of Surrealist politics and Sartrean existentialism, respectively. Edouard Glissant was perhaps the first Caribbean writer to respond to the ideological and philosophical sea change of the 1950s in such a thorough-going manner. The mid-1950s were a philosophical watershed as a sense of the rational unfolding of history that characterized an earlier generation began to yield to a view of global space as constituted of multiplicity and difference. Glissant’s views on the poetics of writing and the politics of the writer in the late-1950s and 1960s say it all. His formative years as a writer were spent in post-war Paris still reeling from the German occupation and witnessing the unraveling of its colonial empire. The emergence of non-European cultures on the global stage and the rediscovery of the world’s diversity in the wake of collapsing empires are central to Glissant’s writing in this decade. On the very first page of what he called his “self-ethnography,” Sun of Consciousness (1956), which was published after being eight years in France, he alludes to the diminished role of Europe in an emerging global reality. “I foresee perhaps there will no longer be culture without all cultures, no longer be a civilization that can be a metropole for others, no longer could a poet ignore the movement of History.” Glissant was also struck by the desire in European thought to systematize an ever increasing global diversity. The attempt to theorize a unifying perspective is gently mocked at the end of Sun of Consciousness when Glissant asks the rhetorical question: “Who has not dreamt of the poem that explains everything, of the philosophy whose ultimate word illuminates the universe, of the novel that organizes all truths . . .?” In response to this dream of theoretical coherence or aesthetic order Glissant insisted on the ungraspable specificity of a world in which all elementary particles were interrelated.

Though he never mentioned him by name, Glissant seemed to be reacting to the ideas being launched at the time by Claude Levi-Strauss. The latter’s despairing view of cultural contact and fondness for abstract systematizing were both seen as profoundly wrongheaded by a young Edouard Glissant. His hybrid work, Sun of Consciousness, part memoir part travel writing, can be read as a response to the well-known travel book Tristes Tropiques published a year earlier to great acclaim by Claude...