In Memoriam Édouard Glissant (1928-2011)

Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright and thinker of the créolisation concept, Édouard Glissant was born on September 21, 1928 at Sainte-Marie, Martinique. He died in Paris on February 3, 2011, at the age of 82, leaving a monumental volume of work.¹ During his infancy, Édouard Glissant had his mother's name, Godard. Although his father will acknowledge him, and give him his name, this will not happen before he successfully passes an entry exam that allows him to be admitted to the prestigious Lycée Schoelcher at Fort-de-France. Le Lycée Schoelcher was well known for receiving the best students of Martinique and for promoting an excellent education in order to provide an outstanding academic preparation for the children of the elites of that country. The colonial discipline of the Lycée is tied to very high standards. The young Glissant is very conscious of the colonial identity and starts to develop, during those crucial years, his critical thought. He is very concerned with the development of a Caribbean thought. At that age, Glissant will also be very impressed by the arrival at the Lycée of a young philosophy professor in 1940, Aimé Césaire. The young Césaire, who will have written his Cahier du retour au pays natal [End Page 149]

Édouard Glissant, before the Anse Cafard 'Cap 110 memorial', Martinique.

Photo source: Mediapart, France <http://www.mediapart.fr/>.

in 1939, will be an undeniable influence in the minds of the young martinican students of the Lycée during those formative years. The student's enthusiasm sparked by meeting this professor, who will come teach then about surrealism, and the Négritude movement that made Paris flourish towards the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, is evident and strong. Their philosophy professor is not just a teacher; he is also a poet, a committed communist very involved in the political life of Martinique during the 1940s. This wakening to the consciousness of "being black in the world", as the Paris editors of the Revue du Monde Noir had stated in 1930, will add to Glissant's preoccupation of thinking the Caribbean, and the people that compose this complex and mixed archipelago. The encounter with Aimé Césaire, will definitely mark Glissant's thought and writings the rest of his life.

As all young martinicans willing to pursue college studies, it was necessary to leave the island for the Metropole. In 1946, Glissant leaves his native island to continue his higher education at the Université de la Sorbonne in Paris. He obtains a degree in philosophy, and then studies ethnology at the Musée de l'Homme. The encounters in 1946 with young Franz Fanon, as well as the Haitian poet René Depestre, will be fundamental for his pursuit of a Caribbean archipelic thought that expresses more and more his own perspective and his own lived experiences. Glissant writes continuously. He introduces himself into the literary and intellectual life of Paris during those early years and establishes strong ties with other intellectuals such as: Yves Bonnefoy and Kateb Yacine. His literary creation is steadily marked by his militant reflexions. Opposing the rejection of the Other, Glissant makes an effort to set forth a unique and consistent thought. After his collaboration and intense written and critical work for the review Les Lettres nouvelles, his first poems are published in the Anthologie de la poésie nouvelle by Jean Paris. Glissant's life changes in 1958, after the publication of his first novel La Lézarde. At age thirty, Glissant receives the Renaudot Award, for this narration that tells the story and trajectory of a group of young anticolonialist martinicans. The poetic style of the narration, as well as the text's narrative modernity, makes way for this award. The readers find in this novel the essential debates in terms of the decolonization struggles in Martinique; one can also find a literary figure that reveals himself to the literary world. In La Lézarde we can see the importance of belonging to a particular...