Édouard Glissant


Édouard Glissant was a French writer, poet, philosopher, and literary critic from Martinique. He remains an influential and well celebrated figure in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary as well as within multiple Francophone literary canons.
His seminal work Poetics of Relation has been used by scholars across the world to understand the rapid transformation of a multicultural world.

Life

Édouard Glissant was born in Sainte-Marie, Martinique and moved to Lamentin, Martinique for primary school. He and other students were forbidden from speaking Creole.
His father worked as an agricultural manager as a Géreur d’Habitation, a former slavery plantation converted into a colonial habitation. He learned traditional stories from sugar cane laborers when he accompanied his father during summer breaks from school.
He studied at the Lycée Schœlcher, named after the abolitionist Victor Schœlcher after being awarded a scholarship in 1938.
Glissant left Martinique in 1946 for Paris, where he received his PhD, having studied ethnography at the Musée de l'Homme and history and philosophy at the Sorbonne.
He published his debut novel La Lézarde in 1958, winning the Prix Renaudot, which continues to be a relevant French literary award. Due to this success, Glissant emerged as a significant literary contributor from the Caribbean.
He established, with Paul Niger, the separatist Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l'Autonomie party in 1959. This organization of writers contributed to Martinique Independence efforts through their literary and cultural activities. At this time in history, Algeria's war for Independence was taking place. Charles de Gaulle barred him from leaving France between 1961 and 1965, likely as a consequence of his contributions to Post-colonialism.
He returned to Martinique in 1965 following this barring and founded the Institut Martiniquais D'études in 1967, as well as Acoma, a social sciences publication. He devoted himself to writing novels, poetry, and plays during this stage of his life.
He wrote Caribbean Discourse, a foundational essay for Poetics of Relation, in 1981 and subsequently was appointed Director and Editor in Chief of the UNESCO Courier.
Glissant divided his time among Martinique, Paris and New York; from 1995, he was Distinguished Professor of French at the CUNY Graduate Center. Before his tenure at CUNY Graduate Center, he was a professor at Louisiana State University in the Department of French and Francophone Studies from 1988 to 1993.
In January 2006, Glissant was asked by Jacques Chirac to take on the presidency of a new cultural centre devoted to the history of the slave trade. This request followed the publication of a letter written to the French Minister of the Interior following riots in Paris where he and Patrick Chamoiseau publicly criticized a new law requiting schools to teach the "positive role of the French presence overseas, particularly in North Africa where much postcolonial and anticolonial efforts had taken place.
Glissant died in Paris, France, on 3 February 2011, at the age of 82. Glissant published more than 20 books during his life.

Writing style

Glissant as a writer employs a hybrid literary style. He is recognized for his ability to blend philosophy, analysis, poetry, and even dialogue. His creativity is complex and offers insight into how language operates in practice, in theory, and in history.
His style emerges and is not static with non linear and fragmented components.
Glissant's development of the notion of Antillanité seeks to root Caribbean identity firmly within "the Other America" and springs from a critique of identity in previous schools of writing, specifically the work of Aimé Césaire, which looked to Africa for its principal source of identification.
Glissant is notable for his attempt to trace parallels between the history and culture of the Creole Caribbean and those of Latin America and the plantation culture of the American South, most obviously in his study of William Faulkner.
Glissant was the pre-eminent critic of the Négritude school of Caribbean writing, composed of the generation of literary contributors prior to him. He is regarded as a father-figure for the subsequent Créolité group of writers that includes Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant.

Connections to notable Francophone figures

The poet and politician Aimé Césaire was a teacher at his school during his attendance and served as a great inspiration to Gissant.
Césaire met Léon Damas of French Guyana at Lycée Schœlcher as students, who would later also become a poet and politician. In Paris, France, Césaire and Damas would join with Léopold Senghor, a poet and the future first president of Senegal, to formulate and promote the concept of negritude.
Another student at the school at that time of Glissant's attendance was Frantz Fanon, who became a significant psychiatrist and writer of post colonial theory.
Glissant was close to two French philosophers, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, who wrote major works like Anti-Oedipus as a team. Glissant and was influenced by their theory of the rhizome and Poetics of Relation expands upon the theory of the rhizome.

Seminal theories

The Right to Opacity

In his text Poetics of Relation, Glissant explores the concept of opacity, which is the lack of transparency, the untransability, and the unknowability. And for this reason, opacity has the radical potential for social movements to challenge and subvert systems of domination. Glissant demands the "right to opacity," indicating the oppressed—which have historically been constructed as the Other—can and should be allowed to be opaque, to not be completely understood, and to simply exist as different.
The colonizer perceived the colonized as fundamentally different and opposed, creating a sense of Otherness. This prevented the colonizer from truly understanding the colonized and required the colonized to conform to the colonizer's cognitive framework. Consequently, the colonized were dominated and subjected to the colonizer's demands for transparency and conformity. Glissant rejects this transparency and defends opacity and difference because other modes of understanding do exist.
That is, Glissant calls for understanding and accepting difference without measuring that difference to an "ideal scale" and comparing and making judgements, "without creating a hierarchy"—as Western thought has done.
The Right to Opacity has also been applied by scholars in Early Childhood Education and towards the development of Decolonial Ethics.

"The Open Boat"

In Poetics of Relation, "The Open Boat" introduces Glissant's major theory. The Open Boat is a poem with intense imagery that enters the slave ship experience.
"The Open Boat" also discussed the phenomenon of "falling into the belly of the whale" which elicits many references and meanings. his image parallels the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale, realizing the gravity of biblical references as the Bible was used as justification for slavery. More literally, Glissant related the boat to a whale as it "devoured your existence". As each word a poet chooses is specifically chosen to aid in furthering the meaning of the poem, the word "Falling" implies an unintentional and undesirable action. This leads to the experience of the slaves on the ship as they were confined to an overcrowded, filthy, and diseased existence among other slaves, all there against their will. All of Glissant's primary images in this poem elicit the feeling of endlessness, misfortune, and ambiguity, which were arguably the future existence of the slaves on ships to "unknown land".
Slave ships did not prioritize the preservation of cultural or individual history or roots, but rather only documented the exchange rates for the individuals on the ship, rendering slaves mere possessions and their histories part of the abyss. This poem also highlights an arguable communal feeling through a shared relationship to the abyss of personal identity. As the boat is the vessel that permits the transport of known to unknown, all share the loss of sense of self with one another. The poem also depicts the worthlessness of slaves as they were expelled from their "womb" when they no longer required "protection" or transport from within it. Upon losing exchange value, slaves were expelled overboard, into the abyss of the sea, into another unknown, far from their origins or known land.
This "relation" that Glissant discusses through his critical work conveys a "shared knowledge". Referring back to the purpose of slaves—means of monetary and property exchange—Glissant asserts that the primary exchange value is in the ability to transport knowledge from one space or person to another—to establish a connection between what is known and unknown.

Essays

  • Soleil de la conscience . Sun of Consciousness, trans. Nathanaël.
  • L'Intention poétique . Poetic Intention, trans. Nathalie Stephens.
  • Le Discours antillais. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Dash.
  • Poétique de la relation . Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing.
  • Discours de Glendon. Includes bibliography by Alain Baudot.
  • Introduction à une poétique du divers. Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, trans. Celia Britton.
  • Faulkner, Mississippi. Trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear.
  • Racisme blanc.
  • Traité du tout-monde . Treatise on the Whole-World, trans. Celia Britton.
  • La Cohée du Lamentin .
  • Ethnicité d'aujourd'hui.
  • Une nouvelle région du monde . A New Region of the World: Aesthetics I, trans. Martin Munro.
  • Mémoires des esclavages. With an introduction by Dominique de Villepin.
  • Quand les murs tombent. L'identité nationale hors-la-loi?. With Patrick Chamoiseau.
  • La Terre magnétique: les errances de Rapa Nui, l'île de Pâques. With Sylvie Séma.
  • Les Entretiens de Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge Interviews, with Alexandre Leupin. Trans. Katie M. Cooper.

Poetry

  • Un champ d'il̂es.
  • La Terre inquiète.
  • Les Indes. The Indies, trans. Dominique O’Neill.
  • Le Sel noir. Black Salt, trans. Betsy Wing.
  • Le Sang rivé.
  • Poèmes : un champ d'il̂es, La terre inquiète, Les Indes.
  • Boises : histoire naturelle d'une aridité.
  • Le Sel noir; Le Sang rivé; Boises.
  • Pays rêvé, pays réel.
  • Fastes.
  • Poèmes complets. The Collected Poems of Edouard Glissant, trans. Jeff Humphreys.
  • *Includes: Le sang rivé; Un champ d'îles; La terre inquiète; Les Indes; Le sel noir; Boises; Pays rêvé, pays réel; Fastes; Les grands chaos.
  • Le Monde incréé; Conte de ce que fut la Tragédie d'Askia; Parabole d'un Moulin de Martinique; La Folie Célat.
  • *Poems followed by three texts from 1963, 1975 and 1987.

Novels

  • La Lézarde. The Ripening, trans. Frances Frenaye and later by Michael Dash.
  • Le Quatrième siècle. The Fourth Century, trans. Betsy Wing.
  • Malemort.
  • La Case du commandeur. The Overseer's Cabin, trans. Betsy Wing.
  • Mahagony. Mahagony, trans. Betsy Wing.
  • Tout-monde.
  • Sartorius: le roman des Batoutos.
  • Ormerod.

Theatre

  • Monsieur Toussaint. Trans. Joseph G. Foster and Barbara A. Franklin and later by Michael Dash.

Interviews with Glissant

  • , interview in Regards.
  • , interview in Atalaia.
  • , Le Monde
  • , interview in Mots Pluriels, No. 8
  • 1998: interview in Le Pelletier, C., Encre noire - la langue en liberté, Guadeloupe-Guyane-Martinique: Ibis Rouge.
  • , interview in Label France
  • 2010: , film by Manthia Diawara

Writings on Glissant

Book-length studies

Articles

  • Britton, C. : "Discours and histoire, magical and political discourse in Edouard Glissant's Le quatrième siècle", French Cultural Studies, 5: 151–162.
  • Britton, C. : "Opacity and transparency: conceptions of history and cultural difference in the work of Michel Butor and Edouard Glissant", French Studies, 49: 308–320.
  • Britton, C. : "'A certain linguistic homelessness: relations to language in Edouard Glissant's Malemort", Modern Language Review, 91: 597–609.
  • Britton, C. : "Fictions of identity and identities of fiction in Glissant's Tout-monde", ASCALF Year Book, 4: 47–59.
  • Dalleo, R. : "Another 'Our America': Rooting a Caribbean Aesthetic in the Work of José Martí, Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant", Anthurium, 2.2.
  • Dorschel, A. : "Nicht-System und All-Welt", Süddeutsche Zeitung 278, 18.
  • Oakley, S. : "Commonplaces: Rhetorical Figures of Difference in Heidegger and Glissant", Philosophy & Rhetoric 41.1: 1–21.

Conference proceedings

  • Delpech, C., and M. Rœlens. 1997: Société et littérature antillaises aujourd'hui, Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan.