#glissant

This sense of irruption brings with it an attendant sense of chaos and fragmentation that is incompatible with western discourses of history and linear progress. This relationship between chaos, cultivation and collection is particularly important in the work of the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, whose frequent invocation of the hurricane and fascination with fragmentation provides an opportunity to consider “the interconnectedness of environmental and cultural experience” as enacted at the shoreline [...]. Positioned as the site of arrival and departure, wreckage and relation, the shoreline is presented as “the ultimate frontier”, a space that bares “visible evidence of our past wanderings and our present distress” (Glissant 1989, 11). Invoking lines from Walcott’s “The Sea is History” [...], Glissant attests that “landscape is its own monument” whose “meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history” (1989, 11). As the site of various material surfacings, the shoreline becomes the site upon which these subterranean and submarine histories can become visible, and, through poetry, newly legible. ‘

Yet for Glissant it is not only the terrestrial beaches that emerge as sites of cross-cultural contact and historical exchange, but the ocean itself. Bringing “to light like seaweed, these lowest depths, these deeps” (Glissant 1997, 6) that harbour the submerged voices of the Middle Passage, his poetics exhibits a concern with both “material residue of the past as well as the lost lives [...]”. For Glissant, the Ocean is not an empty void, but is instead viewed as the site of Atlantic modernity whose “vast beginning [...] is marked by [...] balls and chains [...].” The striking image of the “scarcely corroded balls and chains” that punctuate the sea floor of the Atlantic stands both as monument to the victims of the transatlantic slave trade and a testament to the sea’s transformative temporalities (6). Within Glissant’s writings the ocean is not an end point, but an origin.

It is the site of strange movements and meetings between the past, the present and possible futures.

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As DeLoughrey suggests, Caribbean writing is frequently drawn to the plurality and “the infinity of the oceanic imaginary [which] provides an alternative model of space and time, a ‘tidalectic’ between past and present, land and sea, the local and the global” (2012, 803). 

The concept of the “tidalectic” was first coined by Brathwaite, whose poetic attention to Caribbean histories and geographies explicitly draws upon the complex relationship between maritime space and cultural production. Engaging the elemental forces of tide and hurricane, Brathwaite’s “tidalectic” places emphasis on the open-ended and cyclical action of the ocean in which land and sea, arrival and departure, local and global are brought into a state of continuous contact and exchange.

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Rather than adopting the image of the single wave (often attached to “waves” of colonization), Brathwaite’s tidalectic draws from the dynamism of “the ripple and the two tide movement” [...]. The inclusion of “ripple” and “two tide” is significant here as it ensures that the tidalectic is not symply a dichotomous process of infinitely repeated motions of arrival and departure enacted between two static points but is instead characterized by an ongoing “tangled urgent meaning to & fro. like foam. saltless as from the bottom of the sea. dragging our meaning our moaninig / song from Calabar along the sea-floor with pebble sound & conch & wound & sea-sound moon” (Brathwaite quoted in Naylor 1999 [...]). Brathwaite draws a sense of continuous relation between the sunken history of the Middle Passage, the sea-sounds of the islandscape and the voices of the island community. The constant tug and pull of the tide unearths the sounds of “pebble”, “conch & wound”, reclaiming a cacaphony of drowned voices that fell to the “bottom of the sea” during the passage from Calabar in Nigeria to “a simple unsuspecting shop in Mile&Q, Barbados” (162). In a similar mode to Glissant’s beachcombing, Brathwaite’s tidalectic enacts a poetics of salvage and restoration that works to recover and recirculate the submerged voices and histories of the Atlantic. [...] Yet while these images are fragmentary in nature, [...] [a]cross the poem, Brathwaite mediates a sense of ruin, fragmentation and decay with the possibility of restoration. In gathering together the various strands, shards and splinters of history and culture that have washed ashore, the poem seeks to address past narratives of “struggle” and conquest that have shaped the Caribbean, and in doing so gives rise to the possibility of “restoration” and recovery (11). The poem’s repetition of “out of the” establishes a new order out of the wreckage of the beachscape, where “out of the ruins”, “out of the cracks”, “out  of the silence” new voices and images might begin to grow (12).

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spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. 

A phrase written by Hegel as a metaphor for the fact that true knowledge only comes with hindsight. Only after something has happened can we truly gain proper knowledge. Ive spent the last week and a half writing the take home exam – I wrote about the theories of the French/Martinican author, poet, playwright and philosopher Édouard Glissant, specifically on his theories of a new way for cultures to interact – a way that would allow for mutual beneficiary relations by mutual interaction and respect. It will be very interesting too see what result I will get, as I went quite a bit off the books with this one. I basically let loose and followed wherever my mind (and the books) took me. 

I made connections too some of the usual post-colonial and feminist theorists, but most fun of all – to my favorite Canadian thinker: Marshall McLuhan. One of these days I might translate what I wrote and put it on this blog, but I think the interest would be moderate at best.