Glissant, Édouard (b. 1928). Martinican novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist; the most distinguished and influential French Caribbean writer of the second half of the 20th c. His major preoccupation is with Caribbean cultural identity, a concept central to his important theoretical work, Le Discours antillais (1981). An advocate of independence for Martinique, he deplores what he terms the cultural dispossession associated with the island's quasi-colonial status as a DOM [see Dom-Tom]. In his view, France's economic and socio-cultural predominance in her Caribbean territories is a barrier to the development of a sense of West Indian nationhood, since the embracing of metropolitan French values negates the racial and cultural bonds formed throughout history between the many Caribbean islands. Here, as in his earlier essay L'Intention poétique (1969), Glissant emphasizes the significance of history in the quest for national identity. Martinican indifference to Caribbean folk traditions (African in origin), and the inferior status accorded to Creole, are seen as symptomatic of a profound rejection of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Glissant's theory of antillanité suggests that the Caribbean region has a cultural unity that overrides racial and linguistic differences. A literary corollary of this theory is the identification of affinities between French Caribbean and other writing in the Americas, particularly the fiction of Latin America and the southern United States. These ideas are further developed in Poétique de la relation (1990).
Glissant's principal collections of poetry (Poèmes, 1963; Boises, 1979; Pays rêvé, pays réel, 1985, Fastes, 1992), like the two versions of his play Monsieur Toussaint (1961, and 1978, with Creole additions to the text), are rooted in Caribbean history, densely allusive, and sound a characteristic note of ironic restraint. The ancestral loss of Africa and the bitter suffering of generations of anonymous slaves in the West Indies are linked with the poet's current distress over the destruction of the natural landscape in Martinique, and the difficulty of re-establishing an ill-recorded folk history.
Glissant's fiction is consistent with his belief in the need to rediscover the past in order to understand and reshape the present. His five loosely connected, unconventional novels move between real and imagined moments in the social history of Martinique. In La Lézarde (1958), the poetic, almost abstract account of a murder on the eve of the 1946 elections becomes a critique of the structures of colonial society. Le Quatrième Siècle (1964) traces the evolution of two archetypal groups during the era of slavery: the fugitive maroons, and the captives who learned endurance and survival in the unsparing world of the plantation. Malemort (1975), perhaps the most influential of Glissant's works, is a bleak allegory of French hegemony that presents modern Martinique as a cultural and ecological disasterzone, devoid of any creative impulse. La Case du commandeur (1981) shows the individual members of a peasant family, over many decades, vainly seeking to retrace their origins and define themselves. Mahagony (1987), in keeping with the harsh pun of its title, juxtaposes the tenacious struggle for freedom and the relentless quelling of insurrection throughout Caribbean history. A further related novel, Tout-monde, appeared in 1993.
[Beverley Ormerod]
Bibliography
- D. Radford, Édouard Glissant (1982)
