Languages and langages

This chapter in fact covers a range of subjects: the need for literature to express the ‘world totality’; the difference between ‘atavistic’ and ‘composite’ (i.e., creolized) communities; the ‘Chaos-world’ (Glissant’s term for the unpredictability that he sees as characterizing the modern world); the transition from written to oral expression; and the rejection of ‘monolingualism’ – i.e., the recognition that even if we only speak one language, we nevertheless write ‘in the presence of all the world’s languages’, and this awareness transforms the way we use our own language. There is an important distinction between a language (Creole, French, English, etc.) and a langage (for which there is no equivalent term in English), which is defined as the speaker’s or writer’s subjective relationship to the language that he or she uses. Speakers of different languages can share the same langage: thus there is a langage that is common to the Caribbean as a whole. Finally, Glissant discusses the art and the importance of translation.

On Beauty as Complicity

This interview concerns Une nouvelle région du monde. Beauty is not essentialist or transcendent but stems from the meeting of differences. The new region is a version of the Whole-World; and beauty comes about through the differences in the world. The book has in common with the Traité du Tout-monde that it concerns a vision of the Whole-World, but differs in that it is centrally about beauty.This realized quantity of differences is not the same as a universal. In all cultures there is a nostalgia for the primordial moment when there was a sense of complicity and fusion with the world around us, as opposed to utilitarian art, which asserts the singularity of a given culture. Primitive or indigenous art retains the sense of fusion with the world. Francophony is a result of the colonial enterprise.

Creolizations in the Caribbean and the Americas

Explores the position of the Caribbean in relation to the Americas. There are three kinds of community in both: the indigenous inhabitants (Meso-America); the European migrants (Euro-America); and the descendents of transported African slaves (Neo-America), which is the locus of creolizations, and is the main focus of Glissant’s discussion. Unlike the European migrants, the transported Africans had to invent a new culture, starting with the Creole languages. These were considered inferior by the white population – and for creolization to truly flourish there has to be equality between all the participating communities. One of the main properties of creolization is its unpredictability. The chapter ends with a discussion of the formation of Creole languages.

Rethinking Utopia

On La Cohée du Lamentin – an essay but written in a poetic style. The title is the name of one corner of the bay of Lamentin in Martinique, and the book explores, among other things, the relationship between one small particular place and the Whole-World. Glissant distinguishes two types of utopia: the classic normative utopia versus utopia today, which consists of bringing together all the beauties, suffering and values of the world, and so promotes the idea of Relation. For instance, we must struggle against the disappearance of languages because they are all important. Gauvin comments that Glissant’s thought is structured by a series of oppositions, which might be seen as ‘systematic thought’, but he replies that one can have non-systematic systems. There is a need both to define place and identity but also to go beyond them: this is a ‘poetics of Relation’.

The Imagination of Languages

Glissant and Gauvin discuss languages: the fact that language is no longer linked to identity, and the harm done by monolingualism. It is wrong to defend Creole ‘monolinguistically’: ‘créolité’ is an essentialist movement, unlike creolization. The imagination of languages allows us to see how languages meet up in the Chaos-World; it exists in some Western literature of the 20th century (e.g., Beckett, Pound, Joyce). Exoticism can be either positive or negative. Glissant himself has been influenced by the memory of Creole folk tales and also the work of Faulkner. For Antilleans, the French language has frozen into a kind of dead perfection. The shift from oral to written has necessitated the immediate construction of new forms of language in both Creole and French. ‘Subverting the language’ takes place through creolization and rejecting monolingualism. Prose is less able to do this than poetry and this leads to a dismantling of the traditional genres.

Watching Out for the World

This interview discusses Le monde incréé, defined as ‘poétrie’, which refers to a destructuring of conventional literary genres. It consists of three ‘unstageable’ plays, the final one of which is devoted to Marie Celat, who features in much of Glissant’s other work. Drama is a place of revelation, more openly than prose or poetry. The uncreated world is a world that proceeds from historical events rather than a creation or genesis: in other words, a ‘digenesis’. The third play also features the ‘déparleur’ or delirious speaker, who is searching for a poetics, and manifests the ambiguous presence of poetry combined with its impossibility. Glissant rejects postcolonialism because he thinks it implies that colonialism is over. Literature is threatened with disappearance, because it has become banal and consumable.

Movements of Languages and Territories of the Novel

What gives one a predisposition towards writing is not being able to speak several languages but having a particular predisposition to one langage, which may exist in more than one language. Gauvin and Glissant discuss a film in which Israelis express their attitude to Hebrew as opposed to their mother tongues, such as German; Hebrew is an absolute language replacing other absolute languages, but we have to accept that today there are no absolute languages. True creolization is not merely the interpenetration of words but the entry of the systems of poetic images from one language into another. The novel comes about when communities need political narratives to define them; the Western novel relies on the belief that you can recount history and the world because you control it.

The Chaos-world: Towards an Aesthetic of Relation

Chaos theory is applied to processes of cultural mixing in which cultures retain their differences, and which used to occur over large expanses of time but now happen at great speed. The notion of an erratic deterministic system allows us to understand the unpredictability that is seen as a major feature of contemporary cultures. Such a system is sensitive to its initial conditions, so that the present-day cultures of the Caribbean and the Americas, and Africa, cannot be understood without reference to the slave trade. The unpredictability of the erratic deterministic system allows us to distinguish between hybridity, which is predictable, and creolization, which is not. It is poetics that enables us to live with unpredictability. Measure and immeasurability combine in different relationships to characterize different periods in world literature.

Culture and Identity

This starts by establishing an opposition between identity conceived as a single root and as a ‘rhizome’, i.e. a multiple network of roots that reach out to other roots. In the Americas, there is often a conflict between the root-identity of the indigenous inhabitants and the rhizome-identity of the descendants of slaves. The role of myth in atavistic communities facilitates their construction of a history, based on the notions of Genesis and filiation, that legitimates their presence in a particular place, which thus becomes a territory. This founding myth also provides a justification for colonial conquest. It is not found in creolized societies, where identity is ‘rhizomatic’. Another example is a conference for peace organised by the Roma in Sarajevo, where, despite their persecution as Roma, they promote a multi-ethnic ideal. The great founding texts of atavistic societies promote an essentialist notion of ‘Being’, which in contemporary society is being replaced by the existent, or ‘being’. The chapter ends with a presentation of ‘trace thought’.

The Writer and the Breath of Place

This interview concerns Glissant’s Tout-monde, which he describes as ‘a novel that has burst apart’, characterized by ‘wandering’ and ‘drift’, in which there is no defined narrator but multiple voices. The ‘Whole-World’ is defined as the totality of the world as it exists in its reality and in our desire. It does not abolish identities, but single root identities are giving way to rhizome-identities. The nation becomes a cultural rather than a political entity. The role of the writer is to express the imagination of the world, starting from one’s own place. We must all try to track down the invariants of chaos. It is the function of poetics, which is a way of conceiving and expressing one’s relation to oneself and the other. The breath of the place meets other breaths and is transformed by that meeting. The Writers’ Parliament held in Strasbourg is a manifestation of solidarity between writers.