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Édouard Glissant: Creolization and the Event

Article  in  Callaloo · March 2013

DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0092

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 ÉDOUARD GLISSANT:
Creolization and the Event

by Lincoln Z. Shlensky

L’être est repos, une violence qui s’arrête,

dans un procès dont l’étant est le seul événement.
—Édouard Glissant

Introduction: Creolization and the Event

The writings of the Martiniquan novelist, theorist, poet, and playwright Édouard
Glissant (1928–2011) frequently privilege place and landscape as central to a concept
of Caribbean poetics, and recently critics have tended to place greater emphasis on his
use of geographical tropes.1 Glissant’s earliest published collection of essays, Soleil de la
conscience (1956), gives some indication of the importance he thereafter was to place on
the imagery of land (and, almost equally, of sea). In a memorable passage in that book,
for instance, he remarks on the sense of displacement that the European terrain, newly
encountered first-hand as he begins his university studies, inspires in him: “Mon paysage
est encore emportement; la symmétrie du planté me gêne. Mon temps n’est pas une suc-
cession d’espérances saisonnières, il est encore de jaillissements et de trouées d’arbres”
‘My countryside is still an enthusiasm; the symmetry of planted fields disturbs me. My
time is not a succession of seasonal hopes, there are upsurgings and breaks in the trees’
(25). Glissant’s first novels, La Lézarde (1958) and Le quatrième siècle (1964), actively assert a
homology between the Martinican landscape and a sense of collective destiny. Marronnage,
the historical phenomenon of maroon slaves transformed by him into a geo-social principle
of resistance and reclamation of the island hinterlands, would continue to fascinate Glis-
sant throughout his career. Soleil de la conscience also introduces the phrase lieux communs
(“common places”) in a reversal of the typically negative valence of the term “common-
place,” a topological pun which functions equally well in English and French. Much later,
in his novel Tout-monde (1993), Glissant would construct a narrative that corresponds to
the geographically “chaotic” dimensions of the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. Glis-
sant at the time was becoming interested in ecological activism as a means of creating a
conceptual bridge between his poetics and his politics. His idiosyncratic elaboration of
concepts indicative of transit, such as errance, or errantry, also demonstrates the promi-
nence of spatial metaphors in his later thinking, even when (and, often, especially when)
such terms convey a deterritorializing tendency.2 Glissant’s exploration of the fiction of
William Faulkner, the only anglophone author who attracted his sustained attention and
the only writer to whom he devoted an entire monograph, likewise announces its critical
cartographical approach in the title of his book, Faulkner, Mississippi (1999). The centrality

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of such place-based analysis in Glissant’s oeuvre reaches a conceptual apotheosis, it now

appears, with the introduction of the term la pensée archipélique (“archipelagic thinking”)
as a prominent theoretical direction in his writings in the new millenium (Glissant, La
cohée du Lamentin 231; Traité du tout-monde 31).3
A critical focus on Glissant’s approach to landscape, despite its manifest significance to
his writing, nevertheless threatens to obscure our understanding of a different aspect of
his analysis of Caribbean culture: his complex and relatively little studied stance toward
historical chronology and, in particular, toward the phenomenology of historical events.
While it is true that, as Mary Gallagher points out, “a more balanced, less schismatic ap-
proach to the relation between space and time” (Soundings 5) must inform any perceptive
critical discourse on Caribbean identity, such balance will remain elusive in discussions
of Glissant’s contribution, I maintain, until there is a great deal more attention paid to his
conception of history, historical narratives, and historical events. In what follows, I aim to
unpack Glissant’s understanding of historical events as an element of his larger analysis
of history because I believe that the cautious, indeed ambivalent, attitudes he expresses
towards events, especially in his earlier writings, reveal much about the difficulty he per-
ceives in integrating traumatic and often unwritten narratives of history into any ethical
representation of Caribbean identity. Glissant is obviously aware of the ways in which those
with little political power typically lack access to communications technologies and the
authoritativeness of institutional historiography. He writes disapprovingly, for example,
of what he calls agents-d’éclat (“flash agents”) (Poétique de la Relation 188–94, 213–14; Poet-
ics of Relation 175–79, 197–98), or contemporary mass media, which he links to the kind of
ideological framing of material reality that Guy Debord in the 1960s had associated with
the alienation produced by the spectacle (Debord 63). Even Glissant’s most unambiguously
“historical” novel, Le quatrième siècle, exhibits such skepticism: the young protagonist is
a historical researcher who, by the end of the novel, adopts an uncompromising skepti-
cism towards historiography that the novel suggests is necessary in order to comprehend
Caribbean identity. Such skepticism notwithstanding, it is necessary to understand Glis-
sant’s framing of history in relation to the discourse’s prevailing institutional modes and
narrative conventions. His evolving approach to understanding the impact of historical
events is key to such an alternative reading of his work.
In assessing Glissant’s relationship to events, I will place special emphasis on his
elaboration of the concept of creolization because this is where the idea of historical con-
sciousness as a discursive phenomenon comes to the fore in his writing. Creolization, in
Glissant’s apprehension of it, is at once the bygone historical fact of social exogamy and
the contemporary experience of intercultural tension and exchange, but the relation be-
tween these two “moments” is opaque because Glissant initially, in his best-known earlier
works, views the contemporary social and political embodiments of creolization as failed
manifestations of the historical syncretism of cultures. In his later texts, however, Glissant
implicitly alters this view to suggest that creolization is never an attainment but rather
always an unpredictable process whose outcomes—indeed, whose very activity—can be
grasped only indirectly or after the fact. My argument is that Glissant’s growing interest
over time in events is a consequence of his awareness, increasingly apparent after the
publication of Poétique de la Relation in 1990, that the assertion of social autonomy and
collective responsibility across Caribbean societies depends on the contentious interplay

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of cultural articulations of key events as momentous not in themselves but rather as criti-
cal signifiers of an otherwise disregarded or misrecognized process of creolization. This
is to say that Glissant’s later work more emphatically suggests that socially significant
events, although of vital importance in the formation of collective consciousness, are still
less important in themselves than for the ways in which they reveal the workings of social
validation and political coalescence—a process that, for Glissant, is virtually synonymous
in the Caribbean context with the concept of creolization—around or between events. It
is in this sense that critics may reevaluate their view of creolization as a primarily geo-
cultural mode; such analyses, while useful as a means of identifying and commenting on
the unique contours of Caribbean political sodalities, nevertheless run the risk of idealizing
a singular element of Caribbean culture in ways that Glissant’s later work aims to displace
without, thereby, jettisoning cultural specificity. He accomplishes this by elaborating a
concept of creolization that draws on a strain of recent phenomenological thinking in
which events, rather than serving as the traditional anchors of historical narratives and
the static identities these subtend, instead potentially function to disrupt such narratives
by creating the space in which, alongside geo-cultural synchrony, alternative diachronic
lineages of events become thinkable.
Glissant’s understanding of creolization as a particular kind of historical event in his
later writing echoes, even as it modifies, the French philosophical discourse that developed
in the aftermath of what came to be known as “the events” of 1968 in Paris. This tradi-
tion must be elucidated at somewhat greater length as a prolegomenon to a discussion
of Glissant’s specific apprehension of events. In addressing the question of the event, as
the intellectual historian Martin Jay points out, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida,
Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, François Lyotard, and Gilles Deleuze
initially sought to respond to the influential Annales School of historiography in France,
which since the 1930s had pioneered an historiographical methodology that would draw
on sociological analysis to expose latent recurrent patterns beneath the surface of history.
The post-structuralist theorists became interested in a revised conception of the histoire
évenémentielle, or event-driven history, that would resist the lure of such structuralist patterns
while also eschewing “the conventional emplotted stories valued by traditional historians,
who by and large understood events, at least significant ones, as hinge moments in their
coherent narratives” (Jay 563). Among those who have expounded on the question of the
event, Jay singles out the relatively little known philosopher Claude Romano, whose books
L’événement et le monde (1998) and L’événement et le temps (1999) are rigorous philosophical
expositions in which the writer elaborates on and explores the history of event discourse
from the Greek stoics through Heidegger.4 Romano’s iconoclastic analysis of the struc-
ture of events, and the critique of traditional phenomenology that this analysis implies,
is essential to a revised understanding of Glissant’s late literary and political trajectories.
Romano distinguishes between two types of events: ordinary events, or what he
calls “innerworldly facts” (“innerworldly” because they occur within the bounds of our
established worldly horizon or worldview), and authentic events. He refers to these au-
thentically momentous events as evential, that is, events whose eventiality (or eventness)
itself alters an accepted worldview; such events “escape any horizon of prior meaning”
and, in the process, lead to fundamental change (Event and World 39). Romano spends
most of his densely philosophical book explaining how to distinguish events from facts,

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suggesting, in short, that evential events come to upend, or even abolish, the context that
presumably would explain them. In other words, while people are prone to understand
occurrences within the context of a worldly horizon of experience that is familiar, what
Romano distinguishes as authentic events—the kind that post-structuralists have sought
to reconsider—are disruptive of that horizon of experience and the world that settles
around it. A recursive structure thus pertains to the truly transformative event, in which
the usual explanatory or causal contexts no longer adequately serve to explain it, “or
rather,” as Romano says, “if they ‘explain’ it, what they give a reason for is only ever the
fact and not the event in its evential sense” (39, emphasis added). In other words, as he
continues, “[i]f events thus uproot the causal framework, this is because the context in
which they are inserted—the ‘world,’ in the [familiar] sense—does not explain them: on
the contrary, they illuminate their own context, by conferring a meaning on it that was in
no way prefigured” (43). Truly significant events are not explained by a prior context or
history, but rather, Romano asserts, “every genuine event, as such, has its history, opens
a history, which can later be closed in its turn when the new possibilities given rise to by
the event have been ‘exhausted,’ when other events have arisen without relation to this
history” (44).
Romano’s theory of the event deserves particular attention because something very
much like a hermeneutics of the event is a recognizable, if largely unexamined, project
within Glissant’s later work. Glissant anticipates the preceding discussion of the event
in his own theorizing of history, which, as I shall show, increasingly converges with his
understanding of creolization as an always incomplete and ongoing process rather than a
definitive expression of Being.5 My view is that Glissant’s later framing of creolization as an
event-like phenomenon similar to a notion of the event, in Romano’s sense, as that which
abolishes its own presumable contexts in the process of ushering in a new social reality.
In advancing this view, my analysis offers an explicit rejoinder to the contrary claim that
Glissant’s work becomes less politicized after the publication of Le discours antillais. Such
a claim is most articulately postulated by Chris Bongie, who positions Glissant’s Poétique
de la Relation as a transitional work between Le discours antillais (which Bongie valorizes as
explicitly political in the “modernist” sense) and his subsequent works, such as La coheé du
Lamentin (2005), which Bongie describes as “post-political” (Bongie, Friends and Enemies
330–31). Bongie’s claim, which amplifies an earlier argument made by Peter Hallward,
is complex, and other critics, such as Celia Britton, have already responded to it in some
detail.6 My approach is different from Britton’s in that I aim less to refute than to compli-
cate Bongie’s claim by bringing renewed attention to a shift that takes place in Poétique de
la Relation—a shift that Bongie laments—in which, as I shall show, Glissant increasingly
comes to recognize the social impact of extraordinary events and the processes that give
rise to them.7 Let it suffice to say, at this point, that although I agree with Bongie’s claim
regarding Glissant’s renunciation of explicitly oppositional discourse in his late work, a
different reading of Glissant’s shift in thinking than that articulated by Bongie and his
critical interlocutors is possible. Such a reading requires one to focus attention on the fact
that Glissant’s early novels and essays, up to and including Le discours antillais, ground
themselves in a narrative of social failure and paralysis that his later texts, beginning with
Poétique de la Relation, amend by theorizing the possibility of collective “act-ivity” (Bongie,
Friends and Enemies 328, quoting Nesbitt) in the radical emergence of intersubjectively

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validated events. While thinking through such collective events may not necessarily dem-
onstrate the kind of oppositional logic that Bongie valorizes, they suggest that in his later
essays and novels Glissant aims to imagine provisional forms of social solidarity whose
actual conditions of possibility his earlier discussion of Martiniquan history in Le discours
antillais left under-theorized, if not entirely disregarded. Glissant’s changing conception
of what an event is, and how it functions within a social context, requires that one com-
mence with an attentive rereading of his two most widely cited texts, Le discours antillais
and Poétique de la Relation before considering his late fiction and essays.

“Notre histoire est à venir”: The Event in Le discours antillais 8

Glissant’s early thinking about events is encapsulated in his best-known critique of his-
tory as traditionally conceived—that is, as conventionally emplotted with an overwhelming
ideological tendency to inscribe the narratives of the victors. In Le discours antillais he devotes
a lengthy discussion to considering the claim that Caribbeans are “historyless” (Discours
221–79; Discourse 61–95).9 On the face of it, and in light of the pejorative circumstances in
which a statement to this effect is typically made, such a claim is so obviously derogatory
as to be simply incongru or absurd (that is, as Deleuze might point out, neither true nor
false).10 Nevertheless, Glissant provocatively asks his reader to take the claim seriously in
another sense. For there are some contexts in which, as is the case with West Indians, “un
peuple soit confronté au trouble de cette conscience dont il pressent qu’elle lui est ‘néces-
saire,’ mais qu’il est incapable de ‘faire émerger’ ou de ‘faire passer dans le quotidien’”
‘a people may be confronted with the discomfiture of a consciousness they recognize as
‘crucial’ but which they cannot ‘cause to emerge’ or ‘bring into the everyday’’ (222–23).
The result, for Caribbeans, is that standard conventions of historiography cannot mend
the carence épistémologique (“epistemological deficiency”) but rather “contribueront à leur
tour a épaissir ce manque” ‘contribute in turn to worsening this lack’ (223). Antillean his-
tory is incoherent, according to Glissant, because Caribbeans do indeed lack a historical
narrative as traditionally conceived; for the region is

le lieu d’une histoire faite de ruptures et dont le commencement

est un arrachement brutal, la Traite. Notre conscience historique ne
pouvait pas ‘sédimenter,’ si on peut ainsi dire, de manière progres-
sive et continue, comme chez les peuples qui ont engendré une
philosophie souvent totalitaire de l’histoire, les peuples européens,
mais s’agrégaeait sous les auspices du choc, de la contradiction, de
la négation douloureuse et de l’explosion. Ce discontinu dans le
continu, et l’impossibilité pour la conscience collective d’en faire le
tour, caractérisent ce que j’appelle une non-histoire. (223–24)

the site of a history characterized by ruptures and that began with a

brutal dislocation, the slave trade. Our historical consciousness could
not be deposited gradually and continuously like sediment, as it were,
as happened with those peoples who have frequently produced a
totalitarian philosophy of history, the European peoples, but came

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together in the context of shock, contradiction, painful negation, and

explosive forces. This discontinuity within the continuous, and the
inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize
what I call a non-history. (61–62, translation modified)

Glissant’s claim is above all a literary one: if history is to be written well, it must be narrated
against the grain of conventional emplotment. A writer can do justice to the Caribbean,
correspondingly, only by renouncing any uniform, linear, or regularly patterned historical
narrative that privileges ontological presence over absence, discursive expressibility over
the inexpressible, or epistemological certainty over uncertainty. To engage in a critically
responsive reading of Caribbean history, moreover, would involve abandoning any reli-
ance on simple cause and effect in favor of a far more complex awareness of historical
“discontinuity,” or the irreducible chasm between the known (or knowable) and the
historically repressed.
This is what Glissant means when he offers the following highly skeptical definition of
“events” in an untranslated essay in Discours titled “Évenement” (“Event”): “Qu’est un
événement, pour nous? Un fait qui s’est produit ailleurs, sans nous, et qui retentit pourtant
(pour autant) ici et en nous. Par quoi ce qui se fait dans le monde, au même degré que
ce qui ne se fait pas ici, nous coup du monde” ‘What is an event, for us? A fact which is
produced elsewhere, without us, and which (despite all that) resounds here within us. By
which what is made in the world, to the same degree that it is not made here, cuts us off
from the world’ (172). An event, in this skeptical appraisal, is the spec(tac)ular enactment
of emplotted historical narrative whose frame of reference focuses the collective gaze
elsewhere and thereby abolishes the specificity of Caribbean history.
Glissant is aware, however, that a different sort of event—one that would deviate radically
from the deterministic form of externally focused faits (literally, the already-accomplished,
or “facts”)—is an uncertain yet real potentiality, even if the contours of such an event remain
obscure. He gestures toward the necessity of such an alternative event in a discussion in
Le discours antillais of facts created elsewhere: “Pour un peuple qui ne s’exprime pas, pour
un peuple mentalement asservi, il n’y a pas d’événements, il n’y a que la non-histoire.
. . . Un peuple sans événement, un peuple coupé du monde, est un peuple qui ne se voit
pas et ne se pense pas: c’est notre plus sûre calamité” ‘For a people who does not express
itself, for a mentally subservient people, there are no events, there is only a non-history.
. . . A people without events, a people cut off from the world, is a people that is not seen
(or does not see itself) and does not think: that is our surest calamity’ (172–73). Glissant’s
repeatedly negative assertion of this possibility—”there are no events . . . non-history . . .
a people without events”—only emphasizes the importance of such an event, despite the
difficulty of actualizing or recognizing it. He wishes to envision events in other than the
deeply alienated terms that his pessimistic analysis of the French West Indian situation in
the 1970s implies, but offers no evident discursive framework for doing so.
Some of the difficulty Glissant has in imagining such alternative events may lie in
the fact that, even when he considers the phenomenon of collective agency, it is largely
subordinated to his own intermittent tendency to frame Caribbean history in terms of
tragedy. An earlier (and also untranslated) section of Le discours antillais, once again titled
“Événement,” thus describes the shooting death of a high school student perpetrated by

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unidentified soldiers that took place during the mass demonstrations in Fort-de-France in
May 1971. Despite mentioning the demonstrations at the outset of his discussion, Glissant
spends remarkably little time discussing the political project behind the demonstrations
or their accomplishments in terms of government concessions and new forms of explicit
or implicit social solidarity.11 He focuses instead on the testimonial given by a bystander,
a pharmacist on a shopping errand, who did not actually witness the killing but heard
the gunshots and observed soldiers and students, including the lycéen Gérard Nouvet,
who was killed on May 13.12 Glissant is fascinated by the sense of normalcy evinced in the
testimonial’s description of Fort-de-France; for the pharmacist, the shooting seems only
momentarily to disrupt the otherwise smooth surface of social normalcy. “Ce qui frappe
dans ce meurtre,” he writes, “c’est son caractère tranquille, dérisoire. Comme si la situation
des petites Antilles ‘appelait’ ce genre de ricanement paisible et moqueur de l’histoire”
‘What is striking about this murder is its calm, derisory character. As if the situation of
the Lesser Antilles ‘called forth’ this kind of quiet and mocking sneer of history’ (90). He
goes on to compare the murder of the lycéen to another similar murder in 1978, suggesting
that these events reflect a post- or neo-colonial historical pattern:

Nous sommes un écho caricatural. C’est peut-être pourquoi notre

situation est typique d’un des modes de la Relation. Ces meurtres
quasi rituels sont l’accompagnement d’une forme très particulière
de colonisation, où la déréliction mentale s’allie à l’irresponsabilité
dans la consommation. Ce sont les ponctuations de la dérision. (90)

We are a caricatural echo. This is perhaps why our situation is

typical of one of the modes of Relation. These quasi-ritual murders
accompany a very particular form of colonization, where mental
dereliction joins forces with irresponsible consumption. These are
the punctuations of derision.

In light of such an analysis of unremitting social breakdown, what Glissant means by the
title of this essay, “Événement,” is left to be puzzled out. It becomes clear that the “event”
in question is not the workers’ demonstrations but the student’s murder, or rather, the
“quasi-ritual” quality of the murder, in which the discourse around it (or at least that
which Glissant cites) focuses on the murder’s disruption of an otherwise normalized—but
actually alienated—social order.
Having begun his analysis of this event by referencing the demonstrations during which
the murder took place, however, it is surprising that Glissant does not seem to consider
that the notable “events” of that moment include not just the murder but, perhaps just as
or more importantly, the popular demonstrations against perceived economic exploitation
that preceded it. By contrast, Aimé Césaire, who by 1971 had been mayor of Fort-de-France
and the Martiniquan deputy to the French National Assembly for some twenty-five years
(he would serve in these roles for fifty-six and forty-eight years, respectively), also referred
to the death of Nouvet, but with an entirely different frame of reference. Speaking on May
22, 1971, at the Place du 22 Mai in the Trénelle quarter of Fort-de-France, Césaire recalls the
violent slave revolt of May 22, 1848 (and a series of revolts that preceded it earlier in the
century), in Saint-Pierre, which was the immediately precipitating cause of the abolition

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of slavery in Martinique.13 He then assigns Nouvet a place “dans le long martyrologue de

notre peuple, à côté des Martiniquais et des Martiniquaises tombés au cours des siècles,
victimes du colonialisme et du sadisme policier” ‘in the long martyrology of our people,
alongside Martiniquan men and women fallen during the course of centuries, victims of
colonialism and of police sadism’; he also compares the student’s legacy to that represented
by two historic revolutionary figures in far-flung contexts: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Patrice Lumumba. In contrasting Glissant’s and Césaire’s framing of Nouvet’s murder,
I do not aim to directly weigh the virtues of these two authors’ respective historical or
political rhetoric, yet I do think it is worth noticing how distinct this rhetoric is. It bears
remarking that, writing years after the event, Glissant does not seem to credit the impact
of the workers’ demonstrations that framed Nouvet’s death nor the meaning of the death
itself as a potential political opening that would inspire Césaire’s public speech nine days
afterwards. This is perhaps Glissant’s subversive point: that the radical potential of the
demonstrations is neutralized because the normalcy of the neocolonial condition in Mar-
tinique is taken for granted by Martiniquans themselves. Yet if Glissant’s use of the term
“Événement” as the title of this brief section of his book is meant to be understood by his
readers as ironic—a signifier of the banality with which such violent events are greeted
in a nominally post-colonial society inured even to sanguinary ruptures of its ritualized
self-estrangement—then the irony is rendered somewhat flat by the dismissiveness with
which he himself treats the popular unrest of May 1971 as bearing no conceivable revo-
lutionary potential.
This is not to say, it must be reiterated, that Glissant actually does rule out the pos-
sibility of any events taking on a truly disruptive or liberatory quality. Such a possibility
is contemplated, at least abstractly, in the previously cited comment he makes that Mar-
tiniquans cannot break free of their “non-history” without experiencing and, ultimately,
claiming collective events. I am making the claim, however, that Glissant’s framing of
events in his best-known critical text has significant limitations—exemplified by his ex-
cessively ironic response to the discourse around the events of May 1971—but that these
limitations are addressed in his later works, partly through a reframing of the concept of
the event. The problem that Glissant grapples with in Le discours antillais, in the end, is
his conviction that truly history-altering collective events remain unthought, if not un-
thinkable, in Martinique. While never ruling out the possibility of a future moment that
would signal a radical departure from the alienating patterns of French Caribbean his-
tory, Glissant indicates that no event can be credited thus far with having brought about
such a radical reorientation.14 But is the problem that such events have not taken place or,
rather, that they have not been recognized as properly transformative? Glissant seems to
hesitate over this question. In a symptomatically ambiguous passage, he maintains that “la
forme particulière de thérapeutique qui constitue le passage à la violence en acte échappe
à notre réflexion présente” ‘the specific therapeutic form which consists of the passage to
an act of violence is beyond our present thinking’ (156). Glissant assures his reader that
he is speaking here not of the physical violence of militantisme (156) but rather of the in-
tellectual “violence des idées corrosives dans leur nouveauté, tranquilement aggressives,
constitutives en profondeur d’un ‘ordre’ et d’une conscience inédits” ‘violence of ideas
that are corrosive in their novelty, tranquilly aggressive, constitutive in their depths of
an unprecedented ‘order’ and consciousness’ (155). Even with this questionable caveat,

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however, the “violence en acte” Glissant is evoking here appears quasi-ritualistic in its
purging effects; it is akin to the sacrificial modes of violence that he had treated as the-
matically central yet deeply problematic in La Lézarde and Le quatrième siècle, with greater
suspicion in La case du commandeur and Le discours antillais, and with outright hostility in
Tout-monde and Poétique de la Relation.15 That Glissant long found it difficult to move away
from redemptive ideas about the role of violence may help explain why he has trouble
imagining how collective acts, whether violent in the physical or intellectual sense, could
rise to the level of truly momentous events. Although he is convinced, then, that “[c]’est
en réinvestissant son passé que, dans nos pays, on échappe à l’ambigu traumatique des
refus et des rejets inconscients” ‘it is by revaluing the past that, in our lands, one escapes
the traumatic ambiguity of unconscious refusals and rejections’ (156), he can clearly ar-
ticulate in Discours neither the kind of event that would precipitate such a change nor the
specific elements of history that might be revalued.

“Tout cri fait événement”: Creolization and the Event in Poétique de la Relation 16

Poétique de la Relation marks the beginning of an important shift in Glissant’s conception

of the event. In Le discours antillais, as I have discussed, he posits that collective historical
consciousness among Caribbeans did not form gradually and cumulatively but, rather,
“in the context of shock, contradiction, painful negation, and explosive forces.” How these
explosive forces are understood by Caribbeans themselves—that is, how they actually
work to constitute historical consciousness—remains unclear, however, because Glissant
puzzlingly resists considering any identifiable événements as incitements to consciousness,
no matter how much they may appear to be the kind of violent ruptures of the social status
quo that he valorizes in theory. Poétique de la Relation marks a change in Glissant’s thinking
that is best represented by three paradoxical images around which the text forms itself:
the psychological “opening” represented by the memory of the slave ship’s closed cargo
hold; the vastly complex cultural forces generated from within the narrowly restrictive
confines of the slave plantation; and, lastly, the emergence of a figure of social derangement
in the solitary beach-walker or marcheur, whom the writer encounters in his meditative
explorations of the Martiniquan littoral environment.17 Each of these images suggests an
evental variation on the concept of Relation that Glissant had developed in Discours but
which now, in Poétique, offers the possibility of an actualized collective consciousness that
Discours did not admit. Glissant articulates his shifting appreciation of historical conscious-
ness in poetic terms that evoke the workings of creolization as event-like in ways that
differ from his earlier ironic delineations of the événement. We see this new perspective in
Glissant’s treatment of the slave ship’s hold, a metaphorical-metonymical void that serves
as the founding event of an unremembered or “veiled” collective experience. Despite its
traumatic circumstances, the grim experience of this event

ne fut pas morte, elle s’est vivifiée dans ce continu-discontinu: la

panique du pays nouveau, la hantise du pays d’avant, l’alliance enfin
avec la terre imposée, soufferte, rédimée. . . . Et ainsi le inconnu-absolu,
qui était la projection du gouffre…à la fin est devenu connaissance.
(Poétique 19–20)
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did not die; it quickened into this continuous-discontinuous thing:

the panic of the new land, the haunting of the former land, finally the
alliance with the imposed land, suffered and redeemed. . . . Thus, the
absolute unknown . . . in the end became knowledge. (Poetics 7–8)

The language of a continu-discontinu in this passage should recall for us the very similar
discontinu dans le continu with which Glissant discusses the Caribbean’s historiographical
deficit in Le discours antillais (223–24).18 But whereas in Discours this paradoxical terminology
describes the situation of a community of people whose repression of memory betokens
their ensnarement in a non-histoire, here in Poétique the same relation to their experience
enables the historically dislocated community’s connaissance, or “self-awareness.” Glissant
has entirely reframed the situation of Caribbean social existence so that now the absence
of a witnessed and recorded history is itself the sign or, perhaps more accurately, the event
of collective self-consciousness.
Glissant’s explication of the historical role of the plantation system in Poétique also
differs in significant ways from the account offered in Discours. This has everything to do
with Glissant’s new understanding of the plantation as a “Locus Solus” (Poétique 82; Poet-
ics 167), a solitary and incommensurable space, whose anomalousness is apprehensible,
therefore, in evental terms as a form of unprecedented singularity. In the earlier text, his
analysis identifies signs of cultural resistance to the plantation’s social and economic
impositions. There he presents the plantations as a powerful systemizing force within a
long history of autocratic New World power structures in which regimented slave labor
plays a pivotal role (Discours 271; Discourse 90). In Poétique, the plantation, no less brutal,
becomes nevertheless something much more complex and contradictory: an émanation d’un
fantasme (“emanation of fantasy”) (82; 67) that, in its fragile and uncertain self-identification,
produces the rich yet volatile singularity of Caribbean poetics.
The same complexity and antithesis are evident in Creole-language modes of oral ex-
pression, such as the folk tale, which develop in response to repressive plantation social
dynamics. Glissant argues that Creole oraliture inherently undermines the historical con-
tinuity of plantation society in two senses. In the first place, insofar as it always must resist
“la loi du silence” ‘the rule of silence’ for slaves, the oral literary mode they practice “ne
se continue pas avec naturalité . . . mais . . . jaillit par fragments arrachés” ‘has no ‘natural’
continuity . . . but, rather, bursts forth in snatches and fragments’ (83; 69). Its lack of a con-
sistent internal tradition means that it cannot be assimilated into a predictable historical
pattern. Beyond this explicitly subversive “obligation du contournement” ‘obligation to
get around something,’ the other inherent feature of Creole oral literature, according to
Glissant, is its imperative to “se refaire à chaque fois, à partir d’une succession d’oublis”
‘renew itself in every instance on the basis of a series of forgettings’ (83; 69). These oublis,
or acts of forgetting, are very different from the historical carence épistémologique (“episte-
mological deficiency”) of Discours; they are, rather, acts of internal de-centering that reflect
the Creole language’s “intégration, de ce sur quoi elle fonde: la multiplicité des langues
africaines d’une part et européenes d’autre part, la nostalgie enfin du reliquat caraïbe”
‘integration, of what it starts from: the multiplicity of African languages on the one hand
and European ones on the other, the nostalgia, finally, for the Caribbean remains of these’
(83; 69). The emergence of a Creole oral literature among the plantation slaves is thus the

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very phenomenon of an historical rupture—an unpredictable event, in Romano’s sense—of

the kind that Glissant was unable to locate or describe in Discours. Creole poetics, he sug-
gests in Poétique, are the radically unexpected yet prosaically evental “moyens à chaque
fois hasardés” ‘risky everyday retorts’ (83; 69, translation modified) of the slaves and their
immediate descendants.19 This insight is what allows Glissant to posit the plantation as a
focal point of “des modes actuels de la Relation” ‘present-day modes of Relation’ (79; 65)
where, eventually yet unmistakably, “[o]n comprend que c’est là un univers où tout cri
fait événement” “we understand that this is a universe in which every cry was an event’
(88; 73, translation modified). The incommensurability of the slave-plantation experience,
in this remarkable formulation, is where Caribbean events first take on meaning.
The third image in Poétique that indicates Glissant’s changed understanding of the
relation between events and collective historical consciousness is that of the marcheur, or
solitary walker, who appears twice in Poétique. This figure first appears in a section of the
book titled “La plage noire” (“the black beach”), a reference to the beach at Le Diamant
on Martinique’s southern coast that Glissant frequented (and where he now is inhumed).20
Walking on this beach one day, Glissant, the writer, meets “un jeune homme fantoma-
tique” ‘a ghostly young man’ who, out of the blue one morning, stopped answering to
his name and “s’est mis en mouvement, a commencé d’arpenter ce rivage. Il a refusé de
parler, ne se reconnaissant plus aucun langue possible” ‘started walking and began to
pace up and down the shore. He refused to speak and no longer admitted the possibil-
ity of any language’ (136; 122). Glissant suggests that the speechless marcheur, although
deranged, is an avatar of a wider social crisis; his renunciation of language, even as “son
corps maigrit” ‘his body grew thinner and thinner,’ is correspondingly “le refus tranquille
et tourmenté de ce qui se passe alentour, dans le pays: une autre constante dérive, mais
dans le satisfaction inquiète” ‘the quiet, tortured rejection of what was going on all around
him in this country: another constant downward drift yet one performed with an anxious
satisfaction’ (136; 122). The writer cautiously establishes a gestural communication with
the marcheur, of which he remarks, “[c’]était vraiment un signal imperceptible, une sorte de
balancement de la main à peine levée, qui devint (car je l’adoptai à mon tour) notre signe
de connivence” ‘it was really a minute, imperceptible signal, sort of seesawing his barely
lifted hand, and it became (because I adopted it as well) our sign of complicity’ (137; 123).
The marcheur’s repetitious métronomique transits are matched, in turn, by the seesawing
gestural language he and Glissant develop together. Yet these are not simply compulsive
traumatic reactions of the kind Glissant associates in Discours with “la conscience torturée”
‘psychic torture’ (53; 23); they are, to evoke Derrida’s understanding of events, traces of
a hauntology (Derrida 10) that, through their radically repetitious evental quality, begin to
chip away at the idea of a static ontology of events.
The marcheur, in his absolute refusal, enacts the event—or perhaps the advent—of an
unexpected, even explosive, new awakening to the larger social problem of “poursuite d’un
bonheur qui se limite à des prérogatives fragiles” ‘pursuit of a happiness that is limited to
shaky privileges’ (Poétique 136; Poetics 122).21 His silence paradoxically launches a herme-
neutics that historicizes the present in unexpected ways. How this works, in Glissant’s
telling, is poetically mysterious, but it seems predicated on the idea that, in refusing to
represent through the available modes of discourse, the marcheur evokes a possibility that
the even deeply self-alienated gestures, like the most marginalized culture or language, may

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become recognized as traces of what remains dissociated but always historically potential.
The signal gesture of the marcheur is not his receding presence, a variation on the idea
of a continuous-discontinuous ontology, but rather the phenomenon in which he signals
that the event of Relation has already taken place without having yet been acknowledged.
This is the paradoxical sense in which one may understand Glissant’s notion of cultural
creolization: its signs only ever become identifiable in the aftermath of what Lacan calls
“missed encounters”—events in a Relational mode—which have taken place already but
have not yet become conscious or experienced as such. Glissant articulates this paradox,
with its specifically evental implications, elsewhere in Poétique:

Le contact des cultures infère une relation d’incertitude, dans la

perception qu’on en a, ou le vécu qu’on en pressent. Le simple fait
de les réfléchir en commun, dans une perspective planétaire, infléchit
la nature et la “projection” de toute culture particulère envisagée.
Il en résulte des mutations décisive dans la qualité des rapports,
dont les conséquences spectaculaires sont souvent ainsi “vecues”
bien avant que le fond même du changement ait été perçu par la
conscience collective. (175–76)

Contact among cultures infers a relation of incertitude, in the percep-

tion one has or the experience one senses of them. The mere fact of
reflecting them in common, in a planetary perspective, inflects the
nature and the “projection” of every specific culture contemplated.
Decisive mutations in the quality of relationships result from this,
with spectacular consequences that are often thus “experienced”
long before the basis for the change itself has been perceived by the
collective consciousness. (161–62)

This is to say that in Relation, and in its specific iteration as creolization, symptoms of
psychic displacement and dissociation often condition an awareness of the actual yet
previously imperceptible events that they chronologically follow. What seems to be an
event—the spectacle of a momentary rupture in that which one perceives as the smooth
skin of normalcy—is, in this view, often not the event itself but rather an avatar of it that
nevertheless makes the event perceptible in retrospect.22 Something like this would be the
case, for example, in Glissant’s treatment in Discours of the death of Gérard Nouvet in 1974
as symptomatic of a broader kind of cultural death. Although the vestiges of such a pessi-
mistic view appear to recur in Glissant’s evocation of the marcheur in Poétique, the later text
in fact offers a supplement to his earlier analysis, as suggested in the above discussion of
an occurrence’s retrospective action. A symptom such as the marcheur’s incessant walking
could mislead us into thinking of underlying causes and their visible effects. Yet Glissant’s
discussion here of inflected “projections” suggests that such a causal framework is not
what is at stake in his analysis of Relation in Poétique. What becomes evident, rather, in
this new account is that a reactive surface phenomenon—a spectacle—potentially incites
the far-reaching intersubjective (or collective) recognition that a true transformation, a
context-rupturing event, already has taken place without, however, yet having entered
into historical consciousness.23

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Glissant suggests that it is the marcheur’s symptomatic reduction to aphasia—to an

inarticulateness that nevertheless is not muteness—which unexpectedly opens on to a
potential recognition that all languages are necessarily interdependent. Yet what is it that
actualizes this potential? Glissant recognizes that within the marcheur’s silently recursive
yet accelerating disorder, there lies an apparently irreconcilable “peur de tomber” ‘fear
of falling’ (140; 127). It is only at the text’s end that Glissant offers a way of conceptual-
izing this fear of falling: the marcheur, he concludes, can be associated with the historical
maroon, who similarly expressed refusal in nomadic flight. The disruptive message of the
maroons is tenuously preserved in the archive of cultural memory, just as Le Diamant’s
nearby volcanic hotspots “glougloutent leur brûleurs” ‘gurgle their burning’ (222; 205,
translation modified), evoking Creole-inflected words Glissant dimly remembers from
childhood that unexpectedly create for him the “attache de la plage à l’île, qui nous permet
de marronner loins des points fixes de tourisme” ‘tie between beach and island, which
allows us to take off like marrons, far from the permanent tourist spots’ (222; 206). Glissant
invites his reader to imagine that, like the faded yet implicitly still potent historical image
of the maroon, the disordered marcheur “est bientôt descendu des hauteurs, il déchiffre à
nouveau la plage” ‘has soon come down from the hills; once again he is making sense of
the beach’ (224; 208). His descent, for his onlookers as much as for the marcheur himself, is a
mode of deciphering or actualizing of history and historical events never recorded as such.
In addition to such historical reconnections, Glissant also offers something else more
subtle: a way of understanding the social conditions that give rise to events in the under-
appreciated complexity of their ordinariness. It is not just that the marcheur is a solitary
individual who can be “read” or ignored by the onlooker at his own choosing. Glissant
wishes to supplement the freighted symbolism of this figure with another register of
significance that we might call, simply, the aesthetic. The aesthetic or the literary—in
contrast to, say, historiographical discourse—leavens Glissant’s ideas everywhere, but in
this final essay of Poétique it is particularly magnified in its allusive verbal sensuousness.
There are the volcanic metaphors I have just described, which the author deploys in an
emotionally labile paragraph ranging through silence, fear, devastation, perseverance,
joy, and wistfulness—all of this enunciated in the seething aesthetic language of volcanic
mud. Midway through a meditation on what it means to say “we” or “they,” Glissant
characteristically pauses to describe a fleeting image that quickly moves away from the
strictly discursive mode: “[i]l y a, soudain, cette allure sur le morne. Un point à la surface
du chaos, qui se déplace et le change par son mouvement” ‘suddenly, there is something
about the foothill. A moving on the surface of chaos that changes chaos by its movement’
(223; 207, translation modified). There could hardly be a better description of an event: a
sudden movement that reorganizes, without rationalizing, the world’s endless diversity
and flux. Yet what Glissant is literally—or literarily—referring to in this brief moment is
the arrival of “le clan de cabris qui, matin et soir, font une halte dans l’enclos du jardin”
‘the clan of little goats who, leaping morning and evening, stop off inside the garden
wall’ (223; 207, translation modified). The almost imperceptible change he notices on the
morne is nothing more, nor less, than this “banc de cabris, en émeute dans son propre
bruit” ‘school of little goats, rioting in its own noise’ (224; 208). In the goats’ clamorous
rioting we hear echoes of the marcheur’s silent revolt, of course, but it is critical to note
that Glissant offers this visual and verbal playfulness as a sensuous retreat from, or an

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iterative reordering of, the seriousness of his meditations on collective pronouns, totality,
Relation, and chaos. He is signaling to his reader, not coincidentally, that the rhetoric of
the literary mode, or more particularly the aesthetic sensuousness that gives each work
its vital specificity might, in fact, be understood in evental terms; it is sensuousness or the
aesthetic, after all, which disrupts and thereby supplements other modes of discourse,
especially the rationalist historiographical mode.
Glissant’s attempt to supplement historiography with the aesthetic mode reflects his
increasing tendency to understand history by means of the artistic vocabulary of aleatory
and unexpected happenings. Thus in what remains a definitive literary biography, J. Mi-
chael Dash’s 1995 monograph makes the claim that Glissant’s second novel, Le Quatrième
siècle, offers “a view of the past based on duration and not an event” (81). Yet we might
just as correctly say instead that Glissant’s later understanding of events, as evidenced in
Poétique de la Relation, is much more complexly discursive than what is offered in traditional
historiography. Dash himself gives us a clue as to how Glissant’s approach would oblige
critics to reevaluate conventional views of the event when he points out that the central
figure of the conteur, Papa Longoué, presents the past in a manner that is characteristi-
cally “hesitant and restrained and given to emphasizing each sensuous detail” (81). What
Dash is describing here is Glissant’s evident awareness that what makes a significant or
transformative event difficult to comprehend in the immediacy of its occurrence is the
fact that those who experience it are themselves changed by it. These participants only
slowly come to recognize this alteration as the event takes on the quality of an authenti-
cally felt experience over time. Claude Romano relatedly asserts that any understanding
of events tends to be delayed (48–49), but he does not offer an explanation as to how or
when occurrences eventually do come to be acknowledged for the context-disrupting
significance that distinguishes inconsequential from momentous events. Glissant offers
just such a means of understanding how events reshape their contexts when he suggests
that sensuousness—the literary, in this sense, may be considered as an analogue of psycho-
logical affect—combines with an intellectual appreciation of history, such as that evinced
by Glissant’s hyper-intellectual (and semi-autobiographical) character Mathieu, to create
an entirely changed phenomenological horizon: a true experience. Looked at from this
perspective, as a melding of intellectual and emotional cognition, creolization in Glissant’s
sense might be viewed as an experiential rupture of known contexts that his novels and
other texts attempt to represent and enact in the literary realm. Such a perspective cor-
responds well with new efforts to position creolization as a conceptual tool that, even as
it retains its cultural specificity in the history of victimization and resistance in the Carib-
bean, nevertheless enables the possibility of free discursive exchange that crosses political
and institutional borders—and indeed destabilizes those borders through the practices
of interconnectedness created in the crossing. Creolization would thus become thinkable,
Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih suggest, as “a theory that is simultaneously rooted in
changing material and historical processes while promising a certain transitivity to that
which is emergent” (24). Just as Glissant’s later work begins to position events within the
context of global counter-discursive practices, the concept of creolization in his later work
comes to be reframed in terms of the radically unexpected events that give it meaning.

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“Ce que vous appelez les événements”: The Event in Glissant’s Late Writing 24

Until nearly the moment of Glissant’s death in 2011, his literary and critical output was
prolific. Explicit theoretical discussions of events feature only occasionally in this late writ-
ing, but paradoxically Glissant seemed to participate all the more cognizantly in evental
discourse through his public political statements and insofar as he incorporated recognized,
often controversial, historical events into his late essays and fiction. His novel Ormerod
(2003), for instance, weaves its narrative from two otherwise unrelated historical events:
the quixotic eighteenth-century rebellion of a self-styled French guerrilla army led by an
escaped slave, Flore Gaillard, against the British occupation of St. Lucia; and the 1979–1983
revolution in Grenada under the auspices of Maurice Bishop’s New Jewel Movement.
Glissant’s frequently voiced criticisms of American imperialism and the pitfalls of French
republicanism are presented inventively in the novel (a guillotine dragged through the
St. Lucian forests serves as a potent symbol of the French Revolution’s limits), but what
stands out is its focus on historical events that seemingly ended in failure yet provide him
with poetic material while supplying the Caribbean as a whole with an archive of fragile
collective memories. The novel’s postmodern eponymous twist is that its namesake is two
different people: a revolutionary in Bishop’s Grenadian movement and a Caribbean literary
critic living in Australia who has written on Glissant’s work. The events in this novel are
correspondingly as much literary as political, although the two are not simply congruent.
Glissant had also inserted himself into other contexts one might qualify as evental, if not
“evential”: for one, the 2008 election campaign of Barack Obama. Addressing the soon to
be successful presidential contender, Glissant wrote that even if it is a mere cliché that his
policies necessarily would represent a political departure from the imperial Pax Americana,
his election campaign in itself represents an extraordinary event (“une donnée inédite,”
a unique given) that already has taken place under everyone’s noses: “la créolisation des
sociétés modernes” ‘the creolization of modern societies’ (Glissant and Chamoiseau 4).
Here, again, Glissant’s writing suggests that what is truly unique takes place where no
one is looking; that is, like Lacan’s famous counter-citation of Descartes’s cogito, the true
event occurs where it is not thought.25
In Glissant’s late writing he sometimes blundered injudiciously into evental thinking,
however, in ways that provide critics such as Bongie with justification for their claims
that he had “re-canted” modernist oppositional politics at great expense.26 For example,
in Mémoires des esclavages, which Glissant wrote on the occasion of the founding in Paris
of the Centre National pour la Mémoire des Esclavages et de Leurs Abolitions, and his
appointment as its first director by then-president Jacques Chirac, in 2007, Glissant trou-
blingly says nothing about the context of heightened racialization of Muslims and legislative
targeting of them under the Chirac administration.27 Even more problematically, Glissant
takes it upon himself, using the formal language of philosophical “propositions,” to reject
the notion of slavery reparations for all of his fellow descendants of slaves in the DOM,
“comme si nous allions monnayer toutes ces échéances” ‘as if we were going to put a price
on such debts,’ while nevertheless insisting condescendingly that “[l]a seule réparation qui
doive être faite est aux nations de l’Afrique noire, pour ce sous-développement total dans
lequel la traite les a d’abord précipitées” ‘the only reparation that must be made is to the
nations of Black Africa, for the absolute under-development that the slave trade originally

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precipitated’ (139). But what gives Glissant the prerogative to reject reparations for one
population, or to claim them for another, in a subsumption of collective political rights
by literary fiat made all the more egregious because it is put forth using the disembodied
language of an analytical theorem and graphically demarcated in formalistic quotation
marks, as though delivered from on high? In this case, Glissant’s assertion that reparations
for an event can only be valid when they are commensurate with it in some metaphysical
way suggests the peculiarly elite perch that this celebrated author, as Bongie observes,
was sometimes too willing to assume (Friends and Enemies 361).
Glissant’s “proposition” refusing reparations for the slave trade highlights the prob-
lem of granting an event too much incommensurability, or granting that which is deemed
philosophically incommensurable the quasi-sacred status of a Kantian noumenon. The
problem is likely to be familiar to anyone who has participated in the public discourse
around historical trauma, which in some cases may transmute into the rigidly defensive
stance epitomized in the phrase, “Don’t touch my Holocaust.”28 It is a potent reminder
that evental thinking is not, in itself, the guarantor of an anti-essentialist ethics, let alone
of a radical utopian politics that philosophers of the post-1968 generation sometimes
seemed too determined to find in extraordinary events.29 Glissant is sometimes guilty of
such sacralizing of traumatic history, although I obviously do not accept Bongie’s claim
that everything Glissant writes after Poétique is “post-political” in the sense of refusing to
take a stand. On the contrary, as I have been arguing, I think this mid-career book opens
up his political thinking in new ways insofar as Glissant is able to validate a concept of
significant events without simply conflating politics and literary aesthetics, as Hallward
warns against doing.30
Glissant generally avoids such conflations because he recognizes, in a subtle yet signifi-
cant refinement of the earlier politics in Discours, that authentic events are not always to
be located in the spectacular instance that calls attention to itself; rather, they often come
to be understood as a result of, and even beyond or in opposition to, that spectacular
moment that signals only an initial éclat of recognition. This is a point Glissant makes
repeatedly in his late works. In describing the lasting impact of the first Congress of Black
Writers and Artists at the Sorbonne in 1956, for instance, Glissant remarks in Philosophie
de la Relation (2009) that events need to be understood as much more than the impact of
a single (or singular) moment:

Les événements et les personnes aussi disparaissent dans l’indéfini

ou l’indifférent où on les isole souvent, ils s’imposent alors par leur
propre force et leurs propres évidences, c’est-à-dire par la justesse et
la justice de leur position dans ce mouvement des espaces, dans ce
débat des humanités, dans les rapports que mouvements et débats
développent entre eux. (121)

Events and people also disappear into the indefinite or indifferent

where they are often isolated; they then project themselves by their
own impact and their own consequences, that is to say, by the fair-
ness and justice of their position in this movement of spaces, in this
humanistic debate, in the relations that debates and movements
develop between themselves.

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Thus, even though Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor had given birth through their
politics and poetry to the Négritude movement as early as 1938, Glissant argues that the
event went virtually unmarked, “comme s’il n’avait pas même été entendu” ‘as if it had
not even been understood/perceived,’ until the 1956 Congress brought this “révolution
de la pensée et de la sensibilité” ‘revolution in thought and sensibility’ to wider global
attention (122). He makes a similar point in a different context in Mémoires des esclavages,
where he discusses the problem of a paucity of historical knowledge of significant events
related to the end of slavery in the French Caribbean. The historical lack is framed some-
what differently here than it is in Discours; here it is not only a problem of an erasure of
historical memory but also of a lack of awareness of the relation between historical events:

En ce qui concerne les libérations par exemple, les événements sont

nets, les révoltes des esclaves et les conjurations des hommes de
couleur libres se généralisent partout dans les régions concernées,
et dans les petites Antilles de 1934 à 1948 [sic (1834 to 1848)], il n’y a
pas une seule hésitation repérable dans les volontés d’émancipation,
c’est la relation de ces faits entre eux qui devient obscure et difficile, tout
comme si une conspiration tacite s’était s’organisée pour différer
encore ces affranchissements, malgré les énormes avantages et les
dédommagements consentis aux anciens propriétaires d’esclaves.
. . . (Mémoires 163–64)

In respect of the liberations for example, the events are unmistak-

able, the slave revolts and conspiracies of free men of color become
frequent occurrences across the regions concerned, and in the Lesser
Antilles from 1934 to 1948 [sic (1834 to 1848)] there is not a single
identifiable hesitation of will regarding emancipation; it is rather the
relation of these facts together that becomes obscure and difficult, as if a tacit
conspiracy had been planned to further postpone the enfranchise-
ment, despite the enormous benefits and compensation granted to
former owners of slaves. . . .

In this reading of history, the phenomenon of the event itself is only recognized with
difficulty, against the grain of history or counter-discursively, by those whom it touches.
Events are “out there” to be known, but they can be understood in their fullness of meaning
only when individual and collective historical subjects turn their attention to the historical
latticework of micro-scale, human relations that make such events discernible.
That individual-scale micro- or proto-events form the fractal dimensions of society-
scale macro-events is an insight one might derive from Claude Romano’s contention that
significant events can be as seemingly diminutive as an unexpected encounter between
two people, although this is not a point he fleshes out fully in Event and World (41–42).
Yet this idea is the profound basis, it seems to me, of Glissant’s emphasis in his writing
on sensuous descriptive detail. It is why his novel Ormerod is an historical novel turned
inside out, in which disparate historical events—events that do not cohere as such—are
related together on through a sensuous associativity that circulates through time and
space, rather than through anything like a formal logic of political comparisons. Glissant
himself may be said to express a similar attitude towards his own books, which one may

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appreciate as the accomplished signs of their own incompletion, just as the character
Apocal, himself a writer who in Ormerod presumably stands in for Glissant while stand-
ing apart from him, remarks of his own half-dreamed effort to name while undoing the
finality of proper names: “Je n’écris pas un livre, je palabre avec vous . . .” ‘I am not writ-
ing a book, I am palavering with you . . . ‘ (137). Apocal then recounts to his interlocutor,
Nestor, that Ormerod—we know not whether he means the critic, the book, or something
else entirely—”était contemporain des événements qui m’ont intéressé en ce temps-là
. . .” ‘was a contemporary of events that interested me at that time . . .’ (138). His explana-
tion of these events launches him into a Glissantian sensual reverie in which “[i]l reproduit
la spirale des îles, les plages, les mangroves, les caps, les salines et les marigots, tous ac-
cochés aux racines et aux lianes” ‘he reproduced the spiral of the islands, the beaches, the
mangroves, the capes, the salt ponds and the backwaters, all clinging to roots and creepers’
(138). The reverie proceeds to designate this natural jumble as an image of the unexpected,
which in turn is indistinguishable from the creolization of languages and cultures. But
this natural image is not neutral in some naturalized way: “ce que vous appelez les événe-
ments Ormerod” ‘what you call the Ormerod events’ (140) are those in which a man with
intolerable ideas and a nation remaking itself in an intolerable image—Maurice Bishop’s
refusal to follow the US-backed neocolonial template in Grenada—become the figures of
the as-yet unknown and the still-to-be accomplished. For

nous ne nous fréquentions pas d’une île à l’autre, nous n’y pensions
pas, comment aurions-nous pu par quelques vagues ou sensation-
nelles déclarations des journaux entrer dans la connaissance de cela
qui restait inconnu des acteurs eux-mêmes Ormerod . . . est le nom
qui nous a rattachés à ce bouleversement silencieux d’archipel en
danger, de peuple qui chavire, de nation qui ne peut. . . . (140–41)

we do not travel from one island to another, we do not think of them,

how could we have entered, given a few vague or sensational decla-
rations of newspapers, into the knowledge of that which remained
unknown to the actors themselves Ormerod . . . is the name that has
attached us to this archipelago in danger, a people that capsizes, a
nation that can not. . . .

The word “Ormerod,” however it is taken—whether as the name of a book (un)weav-

ing history in all of its sensuous detail, or as one of the text’s diegetic or extra-diegetic
historical signifieds—becomes the literary figure of the event for this novel, or perhaps it
becomes the figure of literature as an event. It is the figure of that which ungrammatically,
as in the above passage, un-inscribes even as it inscribes the unknown, unanticipated, and
therefore historically potent and potential. Its efficacy, however, is linked to something
thus far unaccomplished: the full recognition by Caribbeans of the linkages between them
and of the need to revalue these linkages through the necessarily belated recognition of
events they precipitate.
During “the events of 2009,” as they are now generally known—a two-month-long
outbreak of large protest demonstrations and workers’ strikes that began in Guadeloupe
and eventually extended to Martinique and other parts of the French Overseas Depart-

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ments and Territories—Glissant ventured to explain his understanding of the Creole phrase
adopted as the name of the protest movement, “lyannaj kont pwofitasion.”31 Glissant, who
with eight other Caribbean writers and intellectuals had written a manifesto in support
of the movement while placing particular emphasis on the need to develop Caribbean
poetic resources, referred to pwofitasion, or exploitation, as the symbol of collective anger at
continuing social inequalities in the region. He added that the notion of lyannaj, or alliance,
was the counterpart to this anger, and that it referred to “ce qui allie, lie et relie cela qui
était désolidarisé” ‘that which combines, binds and connects where solidarity had been
lost’ (Lemieux). It is entirely in keeping with Glissant’s late literary work that he should
place such emphasis on a term whose meaning, like that of creolization understood in its
always retrospectively apprehended evental sense, evokes the work of social and political
interconnection yet to be fully actualized in the Caribbean.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Epigraph translates to: “A Being is a cessation, a violence that paralyzes, in a process in which be-ing
is the sole event” (Glissant, La cohée du Lamentin 234). I dedicate this essay to my wife, Caren, and to
our children, Lev and Talia—with generous forbearance they tolerated my absences as I researched
and wrote it.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Crosta; Britton; Dash; Hanneken; Loichot; Pare.

2. See Wing’s note on her decision to translate “errance” as “errantry” (Glissant, Poetics of Relation 211fn).
3. See also Hanneken’s forthcoming manuscript.
4. Romano’s earlier book was published in translation in 2009 as Event and World; the later work has
not yet been translated into English.
5. In this, of course, Glissant’s view differs from those of Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, and
Jean Bernabé, the writers of the 1989 manifesto Eloge de la créolité, whom he argues had resorted
to an identity-based account of creolization that reinstated a static ontology, as suggested in their
declaration, “We are at once Europe, Africa, and enriched by Asian contributions, we are also Levan-
tine, Indians, as well as pre-Columbian Americans, in some respects” (Bernabé et al. 892). Glissant
voices his reservations in insisting on his preference for the active noun “creolization” over the static
“créolité.” See, for example, Glissant and Gauvin 31; Glissant, Poétique de la Relation 103.
6. Celia Britton provides the most thorough-going refutation of Bongie’s criticisms, although as far as
I am concerned, her response does not entirely put to rest his critique (“Globalization and Political
Action”).
7. Although Bongie’s argument about Glissant’s late “post-political” disposition follows on Hallward’s
claims in significant ways, it does not simply reiterate them. Hallward, unlike Bongie, is broadly
critical of Glissant’s earlier and later writings insofar as he identifies the same “singularizing” (or
totalizing, monadizing) tendency in both periods. In a view that is largely affirmed by Bongie, how-
ever, Hallward draws a distinction between the two periods in light of the explicitly national rhetoric
that suffuses the earlier works. He thus claims that “if Glissant’s early texts narrate the constitution
of the nation, the later texts generally revel in its dissolution” and thereby strip any former political
critique of even relative potency by “provid[ing] the opportunity for the newly global post-national
reconciliation [that] risks conversion into an effective affirmation of dispossession” (Hallward 119–20).
8. “Our history is to come.” This can also be read as a pun, with the alternate meaning, “our history
is future,” or even, “our history is still (to be written)” (Glissant, L’intention poétique 223).
9. Hereafter, when citing Discours antillais and its translation, Caribbean Discourse, I include page num-
bers of the French edition first, followed by those of the translation; I do the same for Poétique de la
Relation and Poetics of Relation. In my parenthetic citations, I also abbreviate these titles to Discours,

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Discourse, Poétique, and Poetics respectively, but I include these shortened titles only where there
otherwise would be confusion. Translations with no page reference are my own.
10. Mariam Fraser points out that for Deleuze, the opposite of the truth is not the false but the absurd
(131).
11. Glissant merely mentions that the demonstrations were in response to Guadeloupean agricultural
worker strikes, without commenting on whether the Martiniquan response potentially enabled new
forms of “relation” between Guadeloupean and Martiniquan workers, or between workers and other
classes within Martinique. In this respect, he leaves himself open to a critique similar to that leveled
against his novel Le quatrième siècle, which Burton criticized as erasing the history of plantation slave
demonstrations and agency (80).
12. A cultural center in Fort-de-France now bears Nouvet’s name, as does a street. For a charged account
of the significance of Nouvet’s murder, including its relation to the visit of the newly appointed min-
ister in charge of the DOM, Pierre Messmer (who was the following year to become prime minister
of France), listen to the section of the 1998 Radio Caraïbes program, “Exploration,” during which
the Martiniquan socialist politician Camille Darsières discusses the events of the period (Fortuné).
13. The French abolitionist and then under-secretary of the navy, Victor Schoelcher, had obtained a decree
in April, 1848, from the provisional government in Paris abolishing slavery throughout the French
Empire, but the decree had not reached Martinique until June, by which time abolition already had
been declared by the island’s governor, who was compelled to seek a political resolution to the rag-
ing revolt.
14. Glissant presents a chart correlating historical modes of economic and literary production in which
he leaves open the possibility of a “prospective” radical redirection, although such an eventuality
remains only potential. See Discours 318–19; Discourse 94–95.
15. The killing of the political boss in La Lézarde is framed mythically, as is the quasi-sacrificial death
of Valérie at the novel’s close, while violence remains a primordial element in Le quatrième siècle’s
antagonism between Longoués and Béluses. Glissant mentions approvingly in Discours that the
subversive creole folktale refuses to treat the sacrificial victim solemnly (264; 85), and Marie Celat
survives her bout of “insanity” in La case du commandeur and acknowledges “qu’était venu le temps
de laisser vivre” ‘that the time had come to live and let live’ (202). Raphaël Targin’s attempt to do
penance for Valérie’s death in Tout-Monde leads not to transcendence but to the tourbillon or existential
vortex; and, in Poétique, Glissant asserts the unsuitability of the epic or tragic ethos to conditions in
the Caribbean (64–68; 52–55).
16. “Every cry was an event” (Glissant, Poétique de la Relation 88).
17. For an in-depth reading of these and other Glissantian images of history, see my “Tumbling Mono-
liths: Édouard Glissant’s Césaire and Paris.”
18. Glissant reiterates this idea in an interview with Lise Gauvin (Glissant and Gauvin 21).
19. Romano claims that true events can be as prosaic as an encounter between lovers (Event and World
47).
20. Dash suggests that just as Glissant often associated writers above all with places, Glissant himself
can be associated with La Diamant beach. Personal communication, May 27, 2012. The intercalation
of place and event here recalls once again Mary Gallagher’s admonition that place and time need to
be considered in conjunction, and not hierarchically, in Caribbean poetics.
21. Romano develops the concept of the “advenant” an alternative to what is usually referred to in
critical theory and philosophy as the “subject” (Event and World 57–141).
22. Slavoj Žižek suggests that an event “retroactively opens up its own possibility: the idea that the
emergence of a radically New retroactively changes the past—not the actual past, of course (we are
not in the realm of science fiction or counterfactual narratives), but past possibilities, or to put it in
more formal terms, the value of modal propositions about the past” (Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf
160, qtd. in Jay 565).
23. Iain MacKenzie makes the similar argument, in a discussion of how to think about September 11,
2001, that Deleuze’s unique conception of events is that they are retrospective phenomena that take
place over an extended period but come to be recognized only belatedly, in response to a shock or
spectacular rupture.
24. “That which you call events” (Glissant, Ormerod 140).
25. Lacan’s version is “Je pense où je ne suis pas, donc je suis où je ne pense pas” ‘I think where I am not,
therefore I am where I do not think’ (Écrits 277; Écrits: A Selection 166).
26. Bongie’s first book, Islands and Exiles, cannily redefines the term “re-cant” to mean, in Glissant’s case,
both a forswearing and a postmodernistic revising.
27. Chirac spearheaded and signed Law 2004–228 on March 15, 2004, which banned wearing conspicu-
ous religious symbols in public schools and which was widely understood as being directed against
the headscarves worn by devout Muslim schoolgirls.

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28. Al tigu li be-shoah, or Don’t touch my Holocaust, is the Hebrew title of Moroccan-born Israeli director
Asher de Bentolila Tlalim’s 1994 documentary film about how actors and audiences responded to
a series of performances of the Akko Theater Center’s production, Arbeit Macht Frei.
29. Žižek comments on the 1968 “events” as a utopian form of protest (Violence 74).
30. “The idea of a ‘cultural politics’ is a disastrous confusion of spheres. If politics is to mean anything
at all, it should apply only to the domain of strictly in-different principles: principles of justice and
equality, principles that apply to all relations without discrimination” (Hallward xix).
31. Jean-Claude William, Fred Réno, and Fabienne Alvarez have edited an excellent collection of es-
says analyzing various aspects of these 2009 “events.” Two essays in the collection are particularly
helpful: Bernard Phipps’s “La langue en mouvement” (215–41), which addresses the ways in which
the Creole language and its cultural resources became an important element of the protests; and
Fred Réno’s “L’Étatisation du mouvement social” (341–58), which discusses the complexities of the
fact that the state served as the mediating ground upon which the protests and negotiations were
conducted.

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