SeannaSumaleeOa 1970 IntroductionOutOfTheA CommonPlacesThePoetic

INTRODUCTION
OUT OF THE ABYSS:

COMMONPLACES OF REPETITION AND REDEMPTION
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Not only that which sees in the present,

but also the eye of memory, that hears
words come from afar, woven expres-
sions, ritornellos, bywords, common-
places. 1
Necessity of paying heed over many years

to every casual citation, every fleeting
mention of a book. 2
And genesis after exodus. 3
For Édouard Glissant, the prolific and recondite Martiniquan

philosopher, poet, and novelist, the abyss crevassed by transatlantic
African slavery and colonization is also “the inverse image of all that
has been abandoned, that will only again be found in the blue
savannahs of memory or of the imagination, generations later”. 4
Glissant’s breathtaking image proclaims that even in the unimaginable
dark holds of the slavers is redemption to be found and founded. Out
of the African Atlantic experience arises a literature that projects faith
1
Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 133.
2
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999, 470.
3
Daniel Maximin, L’Invention des désirades, Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000, 41.
4
Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, 19. My
translation. All references to works bearing titles in French indicate the excerpts are
my translations, unless otherwise noted. While there are more literally accurate
translations of some of Glissant’s work and of other francophone work in this study, I
am just as – if not more – committed to rhetorical translation as to semantic
translation. Further discussion of this topic appears in the Afterword.
Copyright 1970. Brill.
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2 Common Places
toward the infinite redemptive possibilities of the past’s memory and

of the future’s imagination. This commitment to redemption manifests
in poetics that seek to make common aesthetic-ethical truths and
utopian agendas rather than universalize these as did prominent
European Romantic thinkers and writers. As the interpretive lens of
the book, the concept of the “differential commonplace”, a notion
inspired by Glissant’s peripatetic lieux communs (“commonplaces”),
conveys how African Atlantic 5 writers have revolutionized Romantic
and post-romantic forms and concerns regarding community, freedom,
and society. Such commonalities are not necessarily or uniquely the
effect of transcultural encounter, although they often are. By their
talent and the insights gleaned from indigenous culture and the
historical experience of slavery and colonization, African Atlantic
writers summon the utopian potential that remained stricken by
Anglo-European exclusiveness and racial entitlement and project it as
an attainable, differentially common future. Rather than homogenize
or universalize, a differentially commonplace perspective represents
intrinsic intimacy and mutual relevancy within the diverse even as it
relays difference.
While a great deal of postcolonial criticism has examined the
myriad ways that the processes of hybridity, mestizaje, creolization,
and syncretism inflect African diasporic literature, the temporal
perspective of the “commonplace” recasts our sense of the politics of
such literature. Assuming these hybrid processes yet structurally
distinct from them, the differential commonplace reforges history as
the grounds for utopian politics. Commonplace perspectives lead
African Atlantic writers to critically transfigure universalizing
aesthetic-ethical conventions, exemplified in European Romantic
movements, toward at once truly common and differential utopian
ends. In distinction to hybridity and creolization, commonplace
poetics intentionally make common – integrate and differentiate – in
order to join margin to center in long-lasting, consensual, and
5
To my ear, the term “African diaspora” and its inflections (e.g. African diasporic
literature) bear associations with those Africans and African-descended peoples in the
West; so the term awkwardly accommodates the Cameroonian writer, Werewere
Liking, who resides in Africa, as well as African critics in this study. While other
alternative terms, such as African Atlantic or African Atlantic, also connote the West,
they are fresh and unstable enough to accommodate other references. I intend
“African Atlantic” as a heuristic that foregrounds the exchange, be it deliberate or not,
of politico-aesthetic commonplaces rather than personal geographic migration.
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Commonplaces of Repetition and Redemption 3
brilliantly inventive ways. They also demonstrate that postcolonial

poetic and political moods and aspirations are far more complex than
has been adequately detailed. At stake is a common – which is not to
say universal – lifeworld.
The carefully selected literary corpus of this book features brings
to the fore this temporal and geo-cultural dynamic. It joins together
long or book-length poetry – the genre most sensitive to topics and
figures of speech – from the heart of African Atlantic literary
exchange: from St Lucia, Derek Walcott’s long poem “The Schooner
Flight” (1979), to Jamaica and the US east coast, Claudia Rankine’s
The End of the Alphabet (1998), to Côte d’Ivoire, Werewere Liking’s
“novel-song” Elle sera de jaspe et de corail (1983), and looping back
to Haiti, Frankétienne’s Fleurs d’insomnie (2005). Put in comparison,
the long poems of these anglophone and francophone women and men
writers clearly demonstrate the common positioning of African
Atlantic writing from different gender, linguistic, and postcolonial
perspectives. These long poems explicitly seek to redress and make
common the universalizing aspirations and conventions of key
Romantic and post-romantic writers, particularly Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Charlotte Brontë, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Leroux, and
Constant. For in “dialogues of place and displacement”, nineteenth-
century Europeans also deliberated questions of individual freedom
within and alongside their communities and would descry the dawn of
a just and good and therefore joyful society. 6 As for the post-
emancipation and post-colonization African Atlantic, a just, good
society also consists of joy and pleasure in Paul Gilroy’s quasi-orphic
telling: “the utopian desires which fuel the complementary politics of
transformation … exists on a lower frequency where it is played,
danced, and acted, as well as sung and sung about, because words,
6
Peter J. Kitson affirms: “It has been argued that the post-colonial crisis of identity
and the interest in developing or recovering a sense of identity between self and place
is especially relevant to societies marked by a material and psychological processes of
dislocation. Yet the dialogue of place and displacement is also a feature of Romantic
period writing, which has been often regarded as a response to the great historical
movements of urbanization and industrialization that marked late eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century British life” (see Peter J. Kitson’s Introduction to Placing and
Displacing Romanticism, ed. Peter J. Kitson, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001, 2).
4 Common Places
even words stretched by melisma ... will never be enough to

communicate its unsayable claims to truth.” 7
Glissant’s ideas and particularly his ethics play an enormous role in
this study. His prolific, flexible interpretation of les lieux communs,
his commitment to the aesthetic as a formidable politics in and of le
réel (“the real”), 8 his delight in juxtaposing lyrical abstractions with
baseline, denotative observations inspire and actually warrant the
centrifugal subjects of this study that might otherwise seem to chafe
under the concentrated close readings and cross-referencing. Along
with the rhetorical definition of commonplaces as topics for rhetorical
invention and figures of speech, Glissant’s heterogeneous
conceptualizations of commonplaces as the grammar of Relation, the
total entanglement of the world’s enumerable relations, structure the
rhetorical analyses in the chapters to come. For the critic, it implies a
redemptive, even utopian, interpretation of coincidental and deliberate
instances of mutually sympathetic poetic forms and themes. Contrary
to the postcolonialist critical emphasis on modernist and
postmodernist skepticism or even disillusion (for example, suspicion
of essentialist categories) in African Atlantic postromantic writing, the
African Atlantic long and book-length poems of this study
consistently reveal a redemptive vision wrested from the experience of
transatlantic slavery, European colonization, and violence, and this
study’s critique shares that redemptive vision. 9
7
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993, 37. It gives pause to find that what is often
claimed as exceptional emerges elsewhere as commonplace: thus, speaking of Kafka’s
“minoring” of the German language, Deleuze and Guattari describes the effect to
“make language stammer, or make it ‘wail’, stretch tensors through all of language,
even written language, and draw from it cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres,
accents, intensities” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987, 104). Yet along with acknowledging the commonplace,
Glissant would quickly advise us to take a “concrete inventory” of each place,
Kafka’s Europe and African America, when setting the commonplace into detailed
comparison (Édouard Glissant, Discours Antillais, Paris: Seuil, 1981, 197).
8
The aesthetic and the real are not distinct entities for Glissant. The real itself is
“undeniable”, “virtual”, and in some cases “optative” (Glissant, Discours Antillais,
122).
9
“Post-romantic” refers to the work of those movements, such as symbolism, that
directly issue in response to Romanticism. Without the hyphen, “postromantic” refers
to twentieth- and twenty-first century work of non-European writers that, like its post-
Whereas the rapid and consecutive political and social upheavals

of nineteenth-century Europe, and later, the twentieth-century’s
multiple genocides, brought Romantic faith into check (and hence the
advent of twentieth-century Anglo-European cynicism or despair),
four centuries of European oppression, domination, and violence in
the New World as well as over one hundred years of African
colonization kindled and cultivated African Atlantic postromantic
faith and optimism. In short, the philosophic and aesthetic
development of the post-slave, post-colonial African Atlantic literary
tradition inverts the development of the Anglo-European tradition.
Romanticism interests African Atlantic writers because it represents
the last moment of a utopian universal politics when aesthetic form
coincided with a philosophy of ethics – and where both of these
tragically clashed with the contradictions of European colonization
and bigotry. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, Walcott,
Rankine, Liking, and Frankétienne revolutionize what many
twentieth-century modernist and postmodernist critics would consider
bankrupt Romantic commonplaces such as allegory, the vates (poet-
seer), the poète maudit (the poet cursed or outcast), and the social
utopian program in their pursuit of a redemptive allegory of African
Atlantic experiences.
African Atlantic writers have repeatedly turned to tropes, generic
forms, and aesthetic and ethical themes typically adduced as
indigenous – or “raw materials” in Gilroy’s felicitous phrasing –
African Atlantic forms, such as blue notes and jazz syncopation, call
and response, abstraction in painting and sculpture, and the non-linear
“irruptive” narration of the griot’s storytelling. 10 The plenitude of
critical material attests to such achievement. Yet original forms are far
from the only source of a rich aesthetic. History and the ontological
positions it inspires are at least as powerful a magnet in attracting
specific form and topic. For the same tropes, genres, and
commonplaces that govern African Atlantic poetry have been
consistently associated with Anglo-European Romantic literature. 11 At
romantic counterparts, bears Romantic influence and reconceptualizes Romantic

concerns.
10
The term “irruptive” derives from Glissant’s description of all of Antillean
literature’s “irruption into modernity” (Glissant, Discours Antillais, 192). For Gilroy’s
“raw materials” (his quotation marks), see Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 81.
11
Romantic socio-political commonplaces such as “nationhood, culture, and
civilisation” impinged heavily on the development of modern black identity on
6 Common Places
the very least, the process of European colonization would entail

inculcating its literature and arts as the most readily – if not only –
accessible institutionalized literary history to African Atlantic writers
in their early education. However, both within and beyond the
constructive influences of culture, ethnicity, gender, and history, the
residue of original forms remain.
The collision and collocation of African, European, and
subsequently American cultural sources suggest African Atlantic
poetry as an ideal place to chart commonplaces, those repetitions
“between places in the mind and places in the world”. 12 These
particular African Atlantic postromantic commonplaces coalesce in
themes of the self and other, the self as other (and othered), the
individual and the community, as the community, or – the most
fraught – a-part (Glissant’s à-part) from the community. For many of
us, such commonplaces bring to mind the poetry of Hölderlin, Blake,
Wordsworth, Shelley, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Rilke; yet they
arguably invoke even more intensity in African Atlantic writing. The
challenge here is to discern how African Atlantic aesthetics dissolves
the divide between aesthetics and ethics that so vexes the “worthy
democratic aspirations” for social justice of nineteenth-century
European writers and thinkers. 13 However, the dissolution of a divide
between aesthetics and ethics means more than a fungible
metaphorical economy along the lines of Gyekye’s description of the
Akan language wherein “aesthetic terms are employed in evaluating
ethnical behavior as well” such that “even though the proverb is an
aesthetic expression, the thrust of its intended meaning is surely
ethical”. 14 While scholars have enriched our understanding of the
nimble and canny use of rhetorical ethos and logos, namely through
the compelling voice and character of speakers, research on the
Gilroy’s view, a “grim” view in keeping with other critics of Enlightenment and
nineteenth-century Europe: “European romanticism and cultural nationalism
contributed directly to the development of modern black nationalism … the nation as
… symmetrical family units makes a grim appearance amidst the drama of ethnic
identity construction” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 97).
12
Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2nd edn, 1991, 170.
13
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2000, 59.
14
Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African
Experience, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, 259.
illuminating elegance of rhetorical figuration and especially its

contribution to ethics remains scarce. Common Places aims to remedy
in small part this deficiency.
From the standpoint of the protagonists of this study, the signifying
function of an aesthetic instance bears far less revolutionary power
than the ontology of its syntax, which is constitutive repetition. The
term “constitutive” implies an iterative difference that constitutes the
possibility of the subsequent iteration, which action is privileged over
content. In this regard, W.E.B. Du Bois explains that the syntax of
“the Frenzy” or “’Shouting’” of African American religious services
is “as old as religion”: far from a sign of unpredictable, sincere,
authentically subjective religious possession, Frenzy is the ritualized,
quite rudimentary third part of the service. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari’s point that lexical invention may count for little, but even
modest syntactical invention takes flight is apt here. 16 Commenting on
the trend in African writing that favors theme over form, Liking flatly
states, “The text must achieve a certain sensibility of fiber, more
important than the thirst for anecdote”. 17 The formal primacy in
African Atlantic writing does not entail a tradeoff so that “where there
was unworkable, unspeakable loss, there is redemptive, figural
definition”, which E.P. Thompson perceives in Wordsworth, and by
extension, other English Romantic poets. 18 On the other hand, formal
revolutionary power does not principally lead to quantifiable,
pragmatic ends of the sort Gyekye claims for the proverb: “To enjoy
and appreciate the human being [given in proverbs] also means, at the
public policy level, that the basic rights, which intrinsically belong to
an individual by virtue of her being human, ought not to be interfered
with, subverted, or set at nought.” 19 Formal power acts, as Gilroy
notes above, on lower frequencies. (And higher ones, we would add.)
15
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, eds David W. Blight and Robert
Gooding-Williams, Boston: Bedford Books, 1997, 148-49.
16
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Pour une littérature mineure, Paris:
Éditions de Minuit, 1975, 49.
17
Quoted in Irène Assiba d’Almeida, “La ‘Prise d’Écriture’ des Femmes
Francophones d’Afrique Noire”, in Moving Beyond Boundaries: Black Women’s
Diasporas, ed. Carole Boyce Davies, New York: New York University Press, 1995,
139.
18
Thompson paraphrased by Marjorie Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems:
Four Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 4.
19
Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity, 259.
8 Common Places
The misfires of previous combined aesthetic and ethical programs

suggest that statewide pragmatic attainments need be projected with
far less certainty. As Gilroy explains, Kant’s “theories of culture,
‘race’, and nation” warranted the “distressing links between raciology
and statecraft and show[s] how modern political theory was being
annexed by the imperatives of colonial power even in its emergent
phase”. 20 Thus were the “worthy democratic aspirations to which the
critical Kant gave such enduring expression” fatally compromised.
Yet Gilroy himself acknowledges that cultural and ethnic counter-
discourses based on subaltern difference have failed to achieve a
practical ethics of social justice because of their structural affinity to
the dominant, prior paradigm. 21 Jeffrey Nealon is more brief when
arguing that such identity politics is “doomed to fail” because it
“remains unable to deal with the other as other; it continues to
thematize differences among persons, groups, and discourses in terms
of (the impossibility of their) sameness”. 22 And Glissant explicitly
brings syntax round to the subject of identity when he argues that the
“reclamation of identity is merely an utterance when it is not also the
measure of a saying [dire]. On the contrary, when we designate the
forms of our saying and inform them, our identity is no longer
founded on an essence, it leads toward Relation.” 23
Utopian and redemptive desires

Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers believed, though
apprehensively, in the possibility of social progress and human justice.
They “knew apocalypse and terror as well: the Revolution and
Napoleon” 24 along with the effects of rapid urbanization and
industrialization. Pursuing their means through the formal
imagination, they affirmed social and aesthetic commitments in ways
that resonate with African Atlantic twentieth- and twenty-first-century
writers, but the Anglo-Europeans failed their own project. 25 The
20
Gilroy, Against Race, 59.
21
Ibid., 6-8.
22
Jeffrey Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity, Durham:
Duke University Press, 1998, 6-7.
23
Glissant, Traité, 32.
24
Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 7.
25
In a fascinating article, Patrick Karl O’Brien examines the development of the
Third World in light of the wobbly origins of the Industrial Revolution in Western
Europe, the subsequent formation of a global economy prior to the World Wars,
upshot viewed from the perspective of the twentieth- and twenty-first

centuries ought to give us pause: the West’s psychic migration from
Romantic faith to the abyss of modernist and postmodernist cynicism
is neither inevitable nor irreversible. As the African Atlantic
emigration from the abyss to redemptive faith soberly illustrates, the
case against utopian desire is far from closed.
From the standpoint of the rich, first-world West this is not so, as
political scientist Russell Jacoby consistently laments and documents
in his work. Citing Judith N. Shklar, Jacoby traces the freefall which
“utopian”, “radical”, or “socialist” ideologies underwent during the
twentieth century:
Radicalism, [Shklar] wrote, “has gone totally out of fashion”. It

requires a “minimum of utopian faith” that people can transform their
social environment, but today this spirit is lacking. 26
Jacoby adamantly identifies the source of progressive Western

political fecklessness and resignation in bad faith, lack of faith, and
cynicism – not in the plausibility of utopian and radical change. His
assertions warrant notice for the sociopolitical gridlock of the West,
placed in contrast with Africa and the Afro-Americas, is
underwhelming:
Today [we] do not dream of a future qualitatively different from the

present. To put it differently, radicalism no longer believes in itself.
Once upon a time leftists acted as if they could fundamentally
reorganize society. Intellectually, the belief fed off a utopian vision of
a different society …. [Now] At best radicals and leftists envision a
modified society with bigger pieces of pie for more customers. They
turn utilitarian, liberal, and celebratory. 27
Ironically, many post-independence Afro-Caribbean and African

state leaders and cultural leaders have sought the holy grail of this
purportedly reconstructed, pragmatic turn. Thus, while Gyekye
decolonization and American hegemony. See Patrick Karl O’Brien, “Intercontinental

Trade and the Development of the Third World Since the Industrial Revolution”,
Journal of World History, VIII/1 (Spring 1997), 75-133.
26
Russell Jacoby, The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy, New
York: Basic Books, 1999, 4.
27
Ibid., 10.
10 Common Places
underlines that an African embrace of modernity should be

“selective”, he asserts that what “cannot really be rejected or
compromised on, where great improvements in material conditions are
hoped for, are technology and the economic system that has come to
be known as the free enterprise (or market) system”; in short, “to
enhance [Africa’s] material existence, it would be expected that the
economic arrangement evolved by Western modernity will serve as a
model for (most) non-Western societies”. 28 Admittedly, it behooves us
not to “jettison the overt, self-declared normativity” of such desires, as
Bruce Robbins scrupulously chides. As Robbins says, paraphrasing
the African anthropologist, James Ferguson, those postmodernists
who would naysay by principle all normative aims of earnestly
democratic African leaders need recognize that the anti-normative,
absolute relativist turn “has been less popular in Africa … because
Africa, unlike parts of East Asia, is still waiting for its share in
modernity’s material benefits. Equality of cultural respect is no
substitute for what Africans themselves might recognize as equality:
equality of living standards, equality of access to the good of the
earth.” “There can be no ethically responsible discussion of either
Africa or China without a transnational comparison of living
standards”, Robbins maintains tout court. 29
Redemption, the correlative to utopia in this study, is another
concept that has fallen into disrepute in twentieth-century criticism.
There, implicit if not explicit scare-quotes indemnify its mention. Yet
the idea of redemption occupies a significant place in African Atlantic
poetics and therefore plays a heuristic role here. Perhaps the most
clamorous indictment of the idea of aesthetic redemption is Leo
Bersani’s self-described “polemical study” The Culture of
Redemption. Reserving his greatest contempt for Walter Benjamin,
whose ideas significantly influence this study, Bersani misconstrues or
conflates redemption with a correction of history, on the one hand, or
the ideology, the “tyranny of the self”, on the other. His critique thus
exemplifies common critical assumptions about redemption that
license a foreclosure of any theorization of the concept itself. 30 Yet
28
Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity, 272, 270.
29
Bruce Robbins, “Afterword”, PMLA, CXXII/5 (October 2007), 1649.
30
Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990. In contrast, Margaret Atwood provides a canny, witty, and subtle critique
of this notion of art redeeming history’s atrocities in her novel, Oryx and Crake, in
redemption does not function as a correction of history, which implies

the dissolution of one relation in favor of another. On the contrary,
redemption figures as an indissoluble connection – a relation that is
relayed and related to immanent moments of the past, present, and
future and is therefore spiritually and culturally productive. From its
very first claim to the last, Bersani’s argument relies on a consistent
and curiously unremarked slippage in terms, suggesting an
ambivalence about the idea of redemption that obstructs closer
scrutiny. Thus, on the first page of the book, the Prologue begins by
conspicuously substituting the notion of repair for redemption: “A
crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that a certain type of
repetition of experience in art repairs inherently damaged or valueless
experience.” 31
In turn, this unacknowledged conceptual shift allows Bersani to
advance the claim, which African Atlantic writers would find
anathema and to which their work represents a resounding
contestation, that a horror for life itself “carries within it the
conviction that, because of the achievements of culture, the disasters
of history somehow do not matter. Everything can be made up, can be
made over again.” 32 African Atlantic writers have no interest in
justifying the History of slavery or colonization, or the histories of
individual oppression and trauma, but they (as well as Benjamin) are
interested, as I will argue, in redeeming the commonplaces of history
(including the future) that remain hitherto unimagined. For African
Atlantic writers, the aesthetic provides a mode of discerning these
commonplaces, for Benjamin, materialist historiography, but the
former, as evinced by their work, would concur with Benjamin that
“only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in
the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe
from the enemy if his wins”. 33
While mindful of the real exigencies of underdeveloped or
chronically unstable countries, the African Atlantic poets have not
chastened their hopes for revolutionary transformation. As Fredric
which the two protagonists of a dystopian future play the game “Blood and Roses”
based on that very premise (Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, New York: Anchor,
2004, 78).
31
Bersani, Culture of Redemption, 1.
32
Ibid., 22.
33
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans.
Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1985, 255 (emphasis in the original).
12 Common Places
Jameson points out, the creative imagination plays a preeminent role

in utopian formulation: “Reality seems malleable, but not the system;
and it is that very distance of the unchangeable system from the
turbulent restlessness of the real word that seems to open up a moment
of ideational and utopian-creative free play in the mind itself or in the
political imagination.” 34 Jameson further conjectures that if utopia
provokes fears of losing “psychic privileges and spiritual private
property”, the possibilities are more than worth the cost: “it also seems
possible that a genuine confrontation with utopia demands just such
anxieties, and that without them our visions of alternative futures and
utopian transformations remain politically and existentially
inoperative, mere thought experiments and mental games without any
visceral commitment.” 35
Formal investments
Let us return to the phenomenon of reverse psychic and moral
development (from abjection to redemptive faith), which casts the
issue of genre and form in a curious light. The tension between form
and theme frustrates readings sanctioned by aesthetic politics, which
are particularly fraught in African and African diasporic artistic and
critical circles. This tension resolves into (if not instantiates) the
stipulations of aesthetic and/or critical manifestos, for example, the
Black Arts Movement or Éloge de la Créolité. Aesthetic and ethical
tension alike should invite closer examination rather than neglect of
poetic works that feature forms that cannot be assigned to certain
thematic or narrative content. Repetition is a practice and it may enact
or signify an ideology, but that instantiation is thoroughly contingent.
By definition, repetition is productive, but its productivity may
represent positive or negative aesthetic/ethical effects. Despite the
affinity between, say, the Black Arts Movement’s art “from the people
... returned to the people” and Wordsworth’s “man speaking to men” 36
from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads and numerous other
34
Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia”, New Left Review, XXV/25 (January-
February 2004), 45-46.
35
Ibid., 40, 53.
36
Maulana Karenga, “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function”, in The
Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds Henry Louis Gates Jr. and
Nellie McKay, New York: Norton, 1997, 1974; William Wordsworth, “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads”, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, eds M.H. Abrams et
al., New York: Norton, 5th edn, 1986, II, 164.
commonplaces, diasporic critics have not been keen to admit

European Romantic affinities, all the less so because of
Romanticism’s poor faring in modernist and postmodernist critique. 37
Romanticism’s formal-temporal conflicts has made it “open to all the
attacks of solipsism that ... a succession of de-mystifiers of the self
have directed against it”, as Paul de Man points out. 38
At first glance, the investment of African Atlantic writers in formal
experimentation seems to ally them with modernist and postmodernist
poetics. On the contrary, the poems manifest a deep attachment to
philosophical and rhetorical arguments similar to those of
Romanticism and its subsequent European transformations, precisely
because these arguments both involved and excluded them. They are
“postromantics”, twentieth- and twenty-first century non-European
writers who challenge and respond to Romantic forms. In various
ways, Frankétienne, Walcott, Rankine, and Liking deftly use
Romantic and post-romantic forms to fathom the redemptions of the
past, present, and future in the experience of the abyss and post-
colonization, all along conscious of the successes, failures, and
defaults of such poetics in nineteenth-century Europe.
Historical parallels between late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Europe, its aggravated, often violent, political reversals, and
nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americas and Africa, from the
Haitian Revolution to the imbricated decolonization of the Caribbean
and Africa elucidate the reasons for such aesthetic correspondences.
The psyche of the “long” nineteenth century might well be summed
up by Nietzsche’s prescient observation:
To those few at least whose eyes – or the suspicion in whose eyes is

strong and subtle enough for this spectacle [“God is dead”], some kind
of sun seems to have set; some old deep trust turned into doubt: to
37
Gilroy rebukes Romantic politico-aesthetic mores when he cautions against the
dangers of “organicist Herderian notions”, manifest in the sanctification of the Folk,
otherwise known in current parlance as the authentic “black community” (implicitly
inner-city) or “the people”: “[Richard Wright’s] eventual betrayal of the African-
American vernacular is then all the more profound and comprehensive because of his
erstwhile closeness to the Folk whose sentimental representation supplies the
yardstick against which authentic racial culture is evaluated. This reverence for the
Folk bears the clear imprint of European romanticism absorbed into black intellectual
life by various routes” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 156).
38
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2nd edn, 1983, 198.
14 Common Places
them, our world must appear more autumnal, more mistrustful,

stranger, “older”. But in the main one might say: for many people’s
power of comprehension, the event is itself far too great, distant, and
out of the way even for its tidings to be thought of as having arrived
yet. Even less may one suppose many to know at all what this event
means – and, now that this faith has been undermined, how much
must collapse because it was built on this faith, leaned on it, had
grown into it – for example, our entire European morality. This long,
dense succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval that
now stands ahead. 39
Shadowed by entrenched European imperialism and slavery, the

headlong descent of the French Revolution into Napoleonic
dictatorship, Prussia’s ruptures, and scattershot wars, Romantic
writers from Hölderlin to Hugo to Blake continually wrestled with the
line between the individual and society, freedom and social obligation,
nature and man.
The English Romantics wrote amidst abolitionist movements and
colonial unrest. Blake’s haunting engravings of “A Negro Hung Alive
by the Ribs to a Gallows”, “Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave”,
and more than a dozen others testify to his deep contempt for slavery
and his admiration and sympathy for its victims. As David V. Erdman
writes:
Blake, in relating his discussion of freedom to the “voice of slaves

beneath the sun” … was directing the light of the French Revolution
upon the most vulnerable flaw in the British constitution, and in doing
so he was contributing to the most widely agitated reform movement
in England at the time.40
In the same allegorical poem from which Erdman cites, Visions of the
Daughters of Albion, Blake relates the physical and psychological
anguish of the slaves: his antagonist Bromion boasts that the slaves
“are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge: / Their daughters
worship terrors and obey the violent”. 41 Coleridge directly engaged in
39
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine
Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 199.
40
David V. Erdman, “Blake’s Vision of Slavery”, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, XV/3-4 (1952), 243.
41
William Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, ll. 22-23, in The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, II, 53.
the anti-slavery debates, while his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the
primary intertext of Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” to be examined
later) registers its historical unease through an allegory of the
Christian supernatural.
Debbie Lee attributes the idiosyncratic descriptions and “diseased
climate” of Coleridge’s poem to the poetic inscription of his “original
idea of alterity”, which he developed in his antislavery lectures and
writings. She argues that “Romantic works chronicle ... the death of
Romantic illusions in the face of slavery” and that “there was nothing
quite like the abjection of the African slave against which British
national character defined itself in the early part of the nineteenth
century”. 42 Peter J. Kitson, who has extensively researched the
subject, writes: “Most of the writers associated with the first
generation of British Romanticism and a host of other, non-canonical,
writers wrote against the slave trade.” 43 Their activism emerged within
the context of an epistemic shift from the Enlightenment to the
Romantic period, which “witnessed the beginnings of a paradigm shift
in race theory and in the ways race was related to nationality and
culture”. 44 Notwithstanding such explicit acknowledgements of
slavery, European writers typically referred the term “slavery” to the
social injustice and class oppression of European subjects, as
Christopher L. Miller documents. 45
In comparison with modernist and postmodernist critics, African
Atlantic writers are more cautious than outright skeptical toward
rhetorical structures such as the first-person lyric “I” or social utopian
schemes. When Liking’s diarist persona objects to utopian approaches
to Africa’s current malaise, the goddess figurehead Nuit-Noire swiftly
rebukes: “For negative souls there’s nothing to be done / There’s no
point worth sacrificing on an egoist’s altar.”46 Even less are many
African Atlantic writers willing to abide a totally secularized social
universe – as Walcott’s protagonist Shabine acerbically observes, “I
42
Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002, 57, 64, 6, 53.
43
Peter J. Kitson, “‘Bales of Living Anguish’: Representations of Race and the Slave
in Romantic Writing”, ELH, LXVII/2 (Summer 2000), 515.
44
Ibid., 519.
45
Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the
Slave Trade, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, 62-82.
46
Werewere Liking, Elle sera de jaspe et de corail: journal d’un misovire, Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1983, 132.
16 Common Places
from backward people who still fear God”. 47 Romanticism’s rhetoric

of the passionate and the perverse complements features of traditional
African Atlantic religions. 48 Thus the poète maudit, the fantastic, and
the occult in Coleridge, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud attune
to Frankétienne’s vodoun and Walcott’s Protestantism. The vates or
poet-seer on the order of Hölderlin, Blake, and Shelley reverberates in
all our poets’ possessed, deranged, or inspired speakers. The
autobiographical narrator of Brontë’s Jane Eyre becomes the
testimonial “lyric itinerant” in Rankine that also sings the blues
(tellingly born in postbellum nineteenth-century United States).
Perhaps most incongruously, Liking’s manifesto authorial “I” rewrites
the French social utopian program as ritual. And to the extent that
allegory, a mode of repetition, is Romanticism’s signature aesthetic, as
de Man claims, all four of these writers resound allegory in a higher
redemptive register.
Granted, plenty of African Atlantic writers have expanded and
continue to expand the Romantic tradition through confessional or
social protest poetry. Yet the poets in this study – and not a few others
– emphatically strain that tradition to such an extent that its increasing
exigency, relevance, and unexhausted potency for twentieth- and
twenty-first century black concerns come to light. African Atlantic
poetry traces a very different history of Romantic significance, one
whose most powerful sociopolitical resources jostle with other, non-
47
Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York: Noonday, 1986, 359. In
this regard, Gyekye proposes that Africa and other underdeveloped regions
“selectively” appropriate Western modernity: “Secularism, for instance, which is said
to be a feature of modernity as developed in the West, cannot be accepted by deeply
religious societies (why should a society become secular in order to be modern?).” On
the contrary, Gyekye also condemns the tendency to “take refuge in supernatural or
fatalistic metaphysical causal explanations for phenomena, such as the African
predicament, that can be causally explained in rational terms” (Gyekye, Tradition and
Modernity, 280, 233).
48
Kitson notes “the Romantic and Gothic concern with the divided self and the
psychologically aberrant” (Kitson, Placing and Displacing Romanticism, 3). From a
Western standpoint, what appear to be antithetical, contradictory and thus aberrant
forces in African diasporic religions, such as the Yoruba Esu Elegba’s coextensive
virility and debilitation are actually normal. See Donald Cosentino’s article “Who is
That Fellow in the Many-Colored Cap? Transformations of Eshu in Old and New
World Mythologies”, Journal of American Folklore, C/397 (July-September 1987),
261-75. African Atlantic writers draw on the metaphorical energy of such
juxtapositions by setting them as foils to the theme of madness, as demonstrated in the
chapters to come.
European aesthetic movements and ethoi. In opposition of

oppositional – which is to say exclusive – thinking, Glissant remarks,
“What is truly right is one culture in apposition to others, [mutually]
permeable and decisive”. 49 Novel appositions imply a genealogy
veering from Romantic utopian exclusiveness to a differentially
common utopia.
Romantic ego
Some modernist and postmodernist critics have recently tempered
their earlier dogmatic positions – or “moralism” 50 in David
Bromwich’s term – on Romantic “ideology”, “transcendence”,
“solipsism”, and ontological “mystification”, the general assessment
remains that the Romantics’ social progressivism boils down to an
unwitting (in the most generous estimations) self-interest and
promotion, or similarly, a mystified individualism. 51 In this vein, “the
primary poetic action is the suppression of the social”, claims
Marjorie Levinson, whose historicist reading lays waste to the
tenability (or sincerity) of Wordsworth’s concern for the rural poor in
“Tintern Abbey”:
49
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 179.
50
Bromwich clarifies that he can “concur with some of the insights but none of the
moralism of this school [New Historicist]” (David Bromwich, “The French
Revolution and ‘Tintern Abbey’”, Raritan, X/3 [Winter 1991], Academic Search
Premier, EBSCO, http://searchebscohost.com [accessed 31 May 2008], n.pag.).
51
These terms all from Alan Liu, “Wordsworth: The History in ‘Imagination’”, ELH,
LI/3 (Autumn 1984), 518, 508. A foundational advocate of the New Historicist
approach to Romanticism, Jerome McGann, later reflects on the presence of a
“residual investment in a type of interpretative thought that I was explicitly trying to
avoid” in his study The Romantic Ideology (Jerome McGann, “Rethinking
Romanticism”, ELH, LIX/3 (Autumn 1992), 740). The bias still resonates, however,
in the rhetoric of his proposed solutions outlined in his Preface to Social Values and
Poetic Acts, brimming with subjunctive and imperative “musts”, “shoulds”, and
“oughts” as in, for instance, “For although one neither can nor should revive the
historicist program, one should and must reincorporate its work into literary studies”
(McGann, Social Values and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 16). One of the limitations of an
approach that deems the “problems facing literary studies” to be “social, institutional,
and methodological” (ibid., x) is that the critic’s disclosure of the minutiae of his
sociopolitical and literary commitments and the explicit performance of self-reflexive
predicative censure and skepticism amplify the critic’s presence such that he
overshadows, if not eclipses, consideration of the literary work itself.
18 Common Places
Tintern’s devaluation is the effect of irresistible socioeconomic forces

allegorically and immediately inscribed in the town, along the river
banks, and within the ruin itself. And, Wordsworth had himself
abetted those forces, consciously and unawares. 52
The contemporary poet Annie Finch does not hesitate to reduce

Romanticism, with its sprawling and much contested purview, to “the
Romantic poetic construct of the fixed, central self ... the idea of the
self as the point of reference around which everything else revolves –
the lone conscious subjectivity in an objectified world”. 53 The
commonplace about the Romantic poets in twentieth-century criticism
is that they “deny history” and “render being back to certain
logocentric identities (people, nation, church)”, as Alan Liu puts it, or
appropriate the figure of the folk or common people to their own
agendas. 54 Certainly these claims are not wholly invalid, but as
Virginia Jackson points out, “Romantic poetry itself was less subject
to such a caricature than the twentieth-century interpretations of that
poetry were”. 55 In fact, as Gerald Izenberg persuasively demonstrates,
the Romantics also worried about these representational tendencies:
far from reifying an autonomous selfhood, the Romantics perceived
the dangers that accrued to it even before Napoleon:
It was the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics’

preexisting struggles for self-definition, freedom from heteronomous
authority, and original creative achievement that produced a new idea
of selfhood, and it was the convergence of that idea with crises in their
personal lives and in contemporary historical events that seemed to
reveal the idea in action as acutely dangerous to others and in need of
revision. 56
52
Levinson, Wordsworth’s Great Period Poems, 37, 35. Theodor Adorno would find
this same “suppression of the social” as the special faculty of lyric in his essay “On
Lyric Poetry and Society”, in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Sherry
Weber Nicholson, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, I, 37-54.
53
Annie Finch, “Coherent Decentering: Toward a New Model of the Poetic Self”, in
After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, eds Kate Sontag and David Graham, St
Paul: Graywolf, 2001, 137, 140.
54
Liu, “Wordsworth: The History in ‘Imagination’”, 518, 509.
55
Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry?”, PMLA, CXXIII/1 (January 2008), 183.
56
Gerald N. Izenberg, Impossible Individuality: Romanticism, Revolution and the
Origins of Modern Selfhood, 1787-1802, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1992, 15.
In this regard, asserting an ideological kinship between black

diasporic writing and Romanticism may seem reactionary. On the
contrary, for all his critique of the “fixed, central self” of European
and African essentialisms, Glissant can still proffer a commonplace as
shamelessly positivistic as this – “from those [works] of Rimbaud to
those of Claudel or of Aimé Césaire: poetry is not an entertainment,
nor an array of feelings or of beauty. It constitutes a knowledge which
cannot be struck with obsolescence.” 57
African Atlantic writers continue to live out and work through
nineteenth-century debates whose painful contemporary relevance is
ensured by the ongoing effects of slavery, colonization, and global
neo-liberalism. The debates fueled by underdeveloped or chronically
unstable countries query the legitimacy of individualism for peoples
who survived by the grace of communalism: 58 to what extent does a
society exist whose values, abrogated by the forces of oppression, are
no longer assumed? How steep a price should be paid for individual
and social freedom? Is the instability of freedom necessarily
preferable to the securities, however slight, of institutionalized
corruption? Is the poet’s work answerable to these questions? Lastly,
does posing these ethical questions as equally, simultaneously
aesthetic ones – as these writers do – imply a commonplace, effective
politics? Analyzing the commonplaces of the following long poems as
differentially iterative, “itinerative”, and (re)citational will help us
perceive the formal correlations between aesthetics and ethics that
African Atlantic writers find so promising.
Commonplace time and language

These debates figure in literature in ways that bring to the fore
tensions, tropological more than thematic, with time and language. It
is in this regard that the African Atlantic writers most conspicuously
depart from their Romantic and post-romantic European counterparts.
57
58
While praising the social benefits of communalism or communitarianism, Gyekye
is careful to point out that the unqualified celebration of communalism seen in “the
barrage of procommunity literature” authored by Western scholars is “patently and
deeply undercut by the nostalgic sentiments expressed by people whose societies have
been largely urbanized” (Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity, 277). We would not
repeat that error, especially insofar as the poetic works in this study express complex,
conflict-ridden attitudes toward the community and the communal.
20 Common Places
Literary time is inextricably tied to material history and linguistic,

discursive repetition, and allegory, in both European Romantic and
African Atlantic postromantic writing, represents a privileged means
of engaging problems of temporality. As Walter Benjamin
perceptively discerned, “epochs which tend toward allegorical
expression will have experienced a crisis of the aura”. 59 In the
nineteenth-century European literary context, the anxiety surrounding
the sense of loss – loss of European national communities and
communal destinies – manifested itself as the “shock” of modern
experience, which was “sundered from the customary contexts of
life”. 60
Death becomes a figurehead for the “disfiguration” associated with
what de Man calls the “forgetting” of history itself – that is,
continuous, efficiently causal, progressive history is belied in and by
language. 61 Timothy Bahti exemplifies the constituents of this
material “decomposition” in a deft reading of Baudelaire’s poem “Le
Cynge”:
If ... Western literary history – from its “origin” in Homer – is

represented as the repeated, reiterated, allegorical re-presentation of a
lost original, then there is never any standpoint from which the history
can be told or written as meaning the literal recovery of lost life-
events. The sign of the tombeau vide [empty tomb] in “Le Cygne” is
the c/signe as the tombeau vide, its material dimension [next to and
outside from] the (absence of) life, history, even the corpse, the bones,
the mere “signs” of the (missing) body. 62
The contrast to African Atlantic poetics is all the more striking in light
of the decidedly material “empty tomb” of the Middle Passage, the
59
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 365.
60
Ibid., 329. For Benjamin’s discussion of shock in Baudelaire, see ibid., 375-77 and
383-87, and his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in Benjamin, Illuminations,
155-200.
61
Reading Shelley’s fragment The Triumph of Life, de Man argues that it “warns us
that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive
or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a
random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its
occurrence” (Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984, 122).
62
Timothy Bahti, Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 223.
missing bodies of Ibo, Yoruba, Ewe, and so many other peoples to be

survived by “slaves”, “Negroes”, or colonized subjects, and lost
languages. Most conspicuously, time is not taken for granted in the era
in which the four writers of this study are born and raised (early to
mid twentieth century). The case of New World Africa differs from
that of the continent, so the two will be addressed separately. With
respect to the Caribbean and by extension, the Americas in general,
the long history of the abomination of transatlantic slavery and
conflicted desire compose the “mixture of the acid and the sweet” of
that world in synchronic, dizzying flashes. 63
The constant appearance of the term “shock” throughout Glissant’s
work resounds with Walter Benjamin’s explanation that the
commonplace of shock in Baudelaire and Poe is symptomatic of the
rapid onset of mass culture and modernity, although the Caribbean, it
goes without saying, has been spared the “disintegration of aura”. 64
While Baudelaire and his fellow Europeans could assume centuries of
experience as more or less coherent cultures (French, Germanic,
English, etc.) leading up to modernity, New World Africans hurdled
the barrier of slavery in a single bound, on this side slaves, on the
other, a people already arrived at modernity – Caribbeans, Americans,
Brazilians, etc. As Glissant describes it:
Our history strikes us with a suddenness that dizzies …. This is also to

say that our history is presence at the limit of the tolerable, presence
that we must link up to the complex weft of our past without
transition. 65
Not only does African Atlantic history strike its subjects with vertigo,
the history itself is stricken. Walcott lyrically describes the Caribbean
as a broken vase that is mended, a “cracked heirloom whose
restoration shows its white scars …. Antillean art is this restoration of
our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary.” 66 This “continuous-
discontinuous” experience of the Antilles finally “in the All liberates
63
For Walcott, the tropical fruits of the Caribbean serve as a metaphor for the
“tartness” of its experience (Walcott, “The Muse of History”, in Derek Walcott, What
the Twilight Says: Essays, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 41).
64
Benjamin, Illuminations, 194.
65
Glissant, Discours Antillais, 192.
66
Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, World Literature Today,
LXVII/2 (Spring 1993), 262.
22 Common Places
the knowledge of Relation”. 67 Glissant’s “suddenness that dizzies”

and Walcott’s “shattered histories” echo Benjamin’s discussions of
allegory. Inimitable in the subtlety of his observations, Benjamin
elucidates the ethical dimension of allegory in terms of a shocked
history from which the aura of associations – origins, authenticity, and
a sacred mystique – has faded. 68 Allegory testifies to this shock, but
retains a redemptive component: “That which the allegorical intention
has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at
once shattered and preserved.” 69
Benjamin interprets the secular workings of allegory from a
redemptive perspective of history, as Bahti explains:
… from political history to eschatology ... from statement to parable,

this rhetorical shift may be understood as the theses’ final shift to
allegory. This allegory represents the shift of allegory itself, wherein
every temporal event – “every second” of all of history – forever
signifies, points to, or shifts to another, by way of the figure of the
Messiah …. The eschatological “hinge” is Eingedenken, that attentive
mindfulness of history whose tropological structure ... provides the
folds, angles, and pivots where a story – even the Messiah – might
enter and lodge or displace itself.
Benjamin’s Judaism and his experience as a Jew in Hitler’s Europe

cannot be discounted when considering his interpretation of allegory
and history, even if he primarily queries secular material. Ultimately,
anchored in a faith such as Judaism, the ethical element of allegory
justifies its socio-historical imperative. This religious or spiritual
dimension appears in Walcott and, as we will see, in Rankine, Liking,
and Frankétienne, whether or not it manifests itself under the aegis of
organized religions such as Christianity or vodoun. Bahti takes
Benjamin’s Messiah for “an allegory of allegory, a sign standing in
the absence of its meaning”, although this reading considerably dims
the redemptive aspect Benjamin ceaselessly emphasized. 70
Bahti’s understanding of allegory reflects de Man’s, for whom
“allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and
67
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 19-20.
68
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 365. For a sustained discussion of aura, see
Benjamin, Illuminations, 221-24.
69
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 365.
70
Bahti, Allegories of History, 202.
now but always a past or endless future [of repetition]”. 71 While these
deconstructionist perspectives fitfully apply to African Atlantic views
of temporality and historicality, they furnish invaluable insight into
allegory’s ethical force:
Referring to the present as a kind of exile, assigning it that meaning, is

of one piece with the past signaling for redemption or fulfillment. The
present understanding moves itself back into the past (metalepsis), and
the past moves forward into the present (metaleptic prolepsis). 72
African Atlantic temporality reflects such a “metaleptic proleptic”

relation. Benjamin’s statement that “the past carries with it a temporal
index by which it is referred to redemption” resonates with Glissant’s
comment that his novel Le Quatrième siècle “was a prophetic vision
of the past. In other words, there are occult phenomena in human
cultures that can lead to fundamental variants which sometimes escape
[historical] analysis.” 73
Caribbean temporality has only and always been one of shock, as
Glissant elaborates in a conspicuous present tense:
The Antilles are the locale of a history made of ruptures and whose
beginning is a brutal uprooting, the Trade. Our historical
consciousness wasn’t able to “sediment”, so to speak, in a progressive
and continuous manner, as among peoples who engendered an often
totalitarian philosophy of history, the European peoples, but
consolidated under the auspices of shock, of contraction, of aching
negation and explosion. This discontinuousness [ce discontinu] within
continuousness, and the impossibility for the collective consciousness
to get an angle on it, characterize what I call a non-history. 74
In literature, this temporality fibrillates Caribbean discourses that

“introduce densities and breakages – like so many detours ... processes
of redoubling, precipitation, of the parenthetical”. 75 The notion of
71
de Man, Blindness and Insight, 226.
72
73
Benjamin, Illuminations, 254; Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du
Divers, Montréal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1995, 65.
74
Glissant, Discours Antillais, 130-31.
75
In a book section on the “open word and closed place” of the Plantation, Glissant
describes the discontinuous narrative technique and style of Antillean fiction
24 Common Places
precipitating and tripping through time is exemplified in the anecdote

of the mute promeneur on the black shores of Martinique, which
significantly yokes the issue of Caribbean temporality to language. 76
At first thwarted in his attempts to communicate with the young man,
Glissant watches and wonders why
[the] walker without voice continues to chase his black sand, of a

faraway volcano, known of him alone, up to the very beaches that he
feigns to share with us. How can he quicken his race so, when he
wastes away so intensely? .… We do not quicken, we trip forward, all
– for fear of falling. 77
A similar, though far more dimly viewed, Caribbean phenomenol-

ogy of time is portrayed by Jamaica Kincaid. She dryly observes that
“the people in a small place”, the people descended from slaves
populating the small places of the islands, suffer the catatonia of a
continuous present with none of the reprieve of temporal coordinates:
The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete

account, of themselves. The people in a small place cannot give an
exact account, a complete account of events (small though they may
be) …. The people in a small place can have no interest in the exact,
or in completeness, for that would ... demand a reconsideration, an
adjustment, in the way they understand the existence of Time. To the
people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present,
and the Future does not exist. 78
In a sense, Afro-Caribbean experience is timeless because it is

perceived to lack the agents and actions as well as the causes and
effects that are commensurable with the sanctioned measures of
history. As Kincaid states, Caribbeans have “no big historical moment
to compare the way they are now to the way they used to be. No
Industrial Revolution, no revolution of any kind, no Age of Anything,
no world wars, no decades of turbulence balanced by decades of
(Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 85). Antillean discourse is extensively treated in

the huge monograph thus entitled.
76
The link between temporality, language, and commonplaces is discussed at length
below in the following chapter.
77
78
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, New York: Plume, 1988, 53-54.
calm.” 79 That many of the big moments of Enlightenment and

Industrialization coincided with transatlantic slavery and colonization
went largely unremarked. As Miller repeatedly demonstrates: “For
Rousseau as for Montesquieu, slavery is a metaphor for the debased
condition of man in society in general, that is to say, in Europe ...
peoples who give themselves over to representatives are no longer
free.” Miller goes further to argue that “most” European readers of Du
Contrat social (1762) “seeing the word slavery, would have
understood perfectly well what it referred to: political injustice among
Europeans” despite the flourishing trade and “peculiar institution”, in
American Southerner John C. Calhoun’s euphemism. 80
In comparison, the experience of time in postcolonial Africa is not
shot through with the sustained intensities of the African Americas.
But there are correspondences, especially observed in the common
calibration of time by the European presence and modernization. With
a hint of regret, John S. Mbiti observes:
… modern change [that] has imported into Africa a future dimension

of time. This is perhaps the most dynamic and dangerous discovery of
African peoples in the twentieth century. Their hopes are stirred up
and set on the future. They work for progress, they wait for an
immediate realization of their hopes, and they create new myths of the
future. It is here that we find the key to understanding African
political, economic and ecclesiastical instability. 81
The postcolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon laments the same

impatience and fervent anticipation evinced by the damnés de la terre
of colonized Africa, but, Hegelian-Marxist that he is, Fanon attributes
these faults more to the socio-historical than to the cultural effects of
colonization. His description neatly coincides with Mbiti’s
anthropological and philosophical observations just quoted:
79
Ibid., 79.
80
Miller, French Atlantic, 69, 70. Calhoun intends the possessive sense of “peculiar”
as was normal nineteenth-century usage in his 1837 “Speech on the Reception of
Abolition Petitions” (John C. Calhoun, Speeches of John. C. Calhoun Delivered in the
Congress of the United States from 1811 to the Present Time, New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1843, 222-26).
81
Quoted in Kwame Gyekye, An Essay on African Philosophical Thought: The Akan
Conceptual Scheme, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 176.
26 Common Places
The national bourgeoisie is from the start oriented towards activities

of an intermediate kind .… At work is not its money but its business
acumen. It doesn’t invest, it cannot achieve this accumulation of
capital that is necessary for the blossoming and flowering of an
authentic bourgeoisie. At this rate, it would take centuries to get under
way an embryo of industrialization. Whatever the case, it runs up
against the implacable opposition of the old metropole, which
according to neo-colonialist conventions, will have taken all
precautionary measures. 82
In short, “the spirit of hedonism rules at the heart of the national

bourgeoisie of colonial countries.” 83 Colonization cuts all the way
through independence, so that it appropriates the power to designate
(and determine) time. On this view, Fanon anticipated that the most
zealous of anti-colonial warriors would, lacking post-independence
objectives, much less a pragmatic program, lose their raison d’être
alongside the colonizer:
After independence, the [nationalist] party lapses into a spectacular

lethargy. No longer are militants mobilized except on occasion of so-
called populist rallies, international conferences, independence
celebrations.
As for the intellectuals, these who “on the eve of independence had
rallied the party confirm by their actual conduct that this rallying had
no other aim but to partake in the distribution of the independence
cake”. 84 This dyadic colonized present and post-colonized present
time ticks, so to speak, to a colonial clock.
In his article, “Language and Time in Postcolonial Experience”,
Emmanuel Chukuwudi Eze proposes to trace the relationships
between “language and time from [an African] postcolonial
standpoint”. 85 When Eze explicitly identifies the sources of
postcolonial cultural crises, he also identifies the commonplace issues
of its literature, and of its literary critics:
82
Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1961, 221.
83
Ibid., 194.
84
Ibid., 212, 213.
85
Emmanuel Chukuwudi Eze, “Language and Time in Postcolonial Experience”,
Research in African Literatures, XXXIX/1 (Spring 2008), 24.
As can be seen in the case of the idea of history, some of the common
conceptual problems can be said to have been deposited ... on
landscapes dialectically occasioned in Africa by a Europe’s
supposedly one and only idea of Civilization, Modernity, or the Free
Market. How is it going to be possible for us to think both modern and
Afro-historically, in awareness of the ruptures in the economic,
cultural and political experiences on the continent, while
acknowledging that these experiences, often violent in the extreme,
were regularly initiated and conducted in the name of a civilizing
Reason. 86
Eze uncannily echoes Jacoby’s critique of erstwhile leftists as well as

Jacoby’s challenge. Moreover, this same triad Civilization-Modernity-
Capitalism occasions the anxious concerns of the Romantic, modern,
and postmodern literary and critical canons of the West. The question,
then, of the possibility of thinking both modern and Afro-historically
is one of writing in the minor as conceived by Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari, who Eze discusses. In this regard, Eze cautions critics
to recognize the difference between writers such as Kafka, who write
from within Europe, and African writers, who write from the “clearly
located elsewhere” of Africa. He also specifies that “rather than just
culturally minoring by politically-inflected processes of deterritorial-
ization in the strictly Deleuze and Guattari sense, modern African
literature are, you might say, blatantly majoritatively nationalizing by
culture and territorializing by politics”. 87
Unlike the African writers Eze addresses, the writers in this study
do not nationalize and territorialize. Nor is this study primarily
concerned with thematics, ostensibly the object of Eze’s evaluation. 88
Each chapter’s examination of commonplaces aims to discern how the
African Atlantic writers not only deteritorrialize the aesthetic and
ethical problems common to the Romantics and post-romantics, but do
so aesthically-ethically – through their reformations of figures of
speech, tropes, and even larger figurative genres the socially creative,
86
Ibid., 38 (emphasis in the original).
87
Ibid., 35, 34 (emphases in the original).
88
Although Eze specially points out the “tones of such modern African usage in
language and their existential expressions are just as important as the that in
experience that ... its writing claims to express”, these “tones” refer to “self-
concealments” and “indirections” of the literature, which turn out to largely refer to
themes and content (see ibid., 34; emphases in the original).
28 Common Places
reaching affirmative milestones to which most Romantics could only

aspire. 89
The writers
Whenever Glissant offers anecdotes to illustrate his theoretical ideas,
his geopolitical coverage is consistently broad: for instance, “the
forests of Rwanda and the streets of New York ... the hidden
sweatshops of Asia ... the silent heights of the Andes”. 90 The point is
to establish common ground between – or better, in – the ici-là (“here-
there”). A study of commonplaces in the post-colonial African
Atlantic world that did not at least approach – if not donner-avec
(“giving-with”) – the Africa in Africa, and that did not also venture
outside the English language would strike Glissant and other critics as
bad faith. African scholars have reproved the elision of African
writers in black Atlantic criticism. Cilas Kemedjio accurately
describes the role of Africa in “academic work to this point” as “in
large part ... analyzing the representation of African in the Caribbean
consciousness or imaginary”. 91 Alternatively, Charles Piot concludes
that modern “Africa [is] itself diasporic – as derivative of the Atlantic
slave system and made and remade by its encounter with
modernity”. 92
Moving to countries other than their native homeland, three of the
four poets complicate our conventional notions of nationality. They
also fit uneasily into conventional labels such as “poet” since three of
the four expend equal effort writing plays and essays, acting, and
painting as to writing poetry. Derek Walcott, the 1992 Nobel laureate,
was born in the Lesser Antilles’ St Lucia in 1930. He first aspired to
be a painter but early on began to write poetry and then plays. He
lived in Jamaica while earning his Bachelor of Arts and then moved to
89
I specify “affirmative” in recognition of Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence, like
Nietzsche’s, that generative power can reterritorialize as much as deterritorialize. To
pull an example from the essay in question, “What is a Minor Literature”, Deleuze
and Guattari assert that the “study of the functions in distinct languages” ... [can]
evaluate the hierarchic and imperative system of language as a transmission of orders,
an exercise of power or of resistance to this power” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 23).
90
Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 17.
91
Cilas Kemedjio, “Glissant’s Africas: From Departmentalization to the Poetics of
Relation”, Research in African Literatures, XXXII/4 (Winter 2001), 113, 112.
92
Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic”, South Atlantic
Quarterly, C/1 (Winter 2001), 156.
Trinidad, where he spent many years writing as well as founding and

directing the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. A professor at Boston
University, he also founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theater in 1981.
Walcott now splits his time between New York City and St Lucia.
Born in 1963 in Jamaica, Claudia Rankine is the youngest of the
poets and is usually associated with the post-Language poetry vein of
American contemporary poetry. She earned both her Bachelor’s and
Master’s of Fine Arts at prestigious colleges in the United States and
has lived there ever since. A prolific poet, editor, and critic, Rankine
has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, the
University of Georgia, and the University of Houston. She is now a
Full Professor of English at Pomona College in California.
Liking was born in 1950 in Cameroon and educated in traditional
Bassa culture. She moved to Côte d’Ivoire in 1978, where she trained
in anthropology at the University of Abidjan, and has lived there
since. In 1985, she founded the artists’ colony Ki-Yi Mbock Village
outside of Abidjan. The colony houses around fifty artists and which
especially aims to reach troubled adolescent youth, among the general
public. Poet, novelist, actress, dancer, and singer, she is known most
for her “ritual theater”, with its stylized, allegorical use of space,
masks and other props, and marionettes.
Haitian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, and talented
musician, Frankétienne stands as the exception to the migration rule.
Born in 1936, he has always resided in Haiti, where he survived both
Duvalier regimes, with more than forty written works to show for it.
Frankétienne writes in both French and Haitian kréyol, and like
Beckett, freely translates some of his own work. According to
curriculum vitae found on the website of the prestigious Prince Claus
Fund, which awarded Frankétienne the literary prize in 2006,
Frankétienne never left Haiti before 1987, after which he began and
continues a hectic international schedule of lectures, gallery shows,
performances, and the like. The cultural figurehead of Haiti,
Frankétienne has steadily gained an estimable international profile,
but has hitherto refused all offers to leave Haiti for artistic or
academic residencies and positions.
Taking its cue from Glissant’s lieux communs, this study is an
inquiry into the revolutionary and, in some cases, utopian implications
of commonplaces and rhetoric when emitted, as Glissant puts it, from
African Atlantic places. In Chapter 1, “Glissant’s Common Places”, I
30 Common Places
detail how the conventional and rhetorical senses of the term

“commonplaces” figure in this study, and how Glissant’s engagement
of these senses alongside as well as across his own epistemology of
the lieux commns injects a utopian dimension into rhetorical acts.
Our examination of Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight” will
comprise two chapters. The long poem’s speaker, also the poet of the
poem “The Schooner Flight” which we are reading, reflects a number
of the conventions of English Romantic speakers, from Wordsworth’s
introspective Prelude poet to Byron’s Childe Harold. Ostracized from
Caribbean society at large of which he is its most eloquent bard, he is
subject to madness and beauty, and prone to aestheticizing nature.
Chapter 2, “Walcott’s History”, takes its point of departure from the
oft-cited line “The sea is History” from the lyric thus entitled and
explores the reprises of its allegorical moorings (and unmoorings) in
the long poem “The Schooner Flight”. At first dogged by a Hegelian
History and consequential notions of historicality, he revises the
meaning of historicality and progress through repetition and implicit
citation of antecedent poetic material, thereby relaying temporality
rather than marking it, so to speak, in time. In Chapter 3, “A
Backward Faith in ‘The Schooner Flight’”, the allegorical scaffolding
of Christianity provides Shabine with an alternative framework with
which to grasp and redeem not a communal past or trauma but
common histories experienced through the individual. My readings
parse the concepts of genealogy, memory, and faith as these are
relayed through allegorical iterations of Coleridge’s “Rime of the
Ancient Mariner”, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, T.S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land, and the Bible’s Book of Jonah and through transatlantic
slave mythopoetics and personal recollection. These latter
commonplaces, common, that is, in their authorial anonymity relative
to the signature Western works, reroute the teleological impulse of the
former to constitute History and allegory as recursive and redemptive
commonplaces.
Chapter 4, “Jane Eyre’s Blues at The End of the Alphabet”,
addresses a tacit problem in the Walcott chapters: what happens when
the hero is not the common man or even a man at all? What if gender
prevents her from speaking the universal language of allegory, or from
plotting autobiography as allegory rather than romance narrative? Is it
possible for an expression to be commonplace without being gender-
neutral? In terms of this problem, what role can persona play? Need it
play any role at all? In this chapter, to read Rankine’s elusive poems
that make up the “toward biography” of The End of the Alphabet is to
yield to the sometime overlapping, sometime discontinuous references
to Jane Eyre’s “I” and “you” of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre,
Antoinette’s “I” and “she” of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, African
American women’s blues, and the immigrant tale. Juxtaposing the
concept of the differential commonplace and Deleuze and Guattari’s
itineration provides a lens through which we examine the formal
processes of Rankine’s impostures of the body, call and response, and
repetition. I analyze these principal means by which Rankine iterates
the autobiographical heroine of Romantic novels and first-person male
persona of African American classic blues as a lyric itinerant.
Rankine’s itineration not only circumvents the somewhat belabored
questions of the unified/fragmented self and experiential or discursive
subjectivity, it renders them irrelevant to its model of expression.
Reckoning traumatic experiences of the body and of love, the body’s
disease and mind’s dis-ease without recourse to the eventually
stabilized, centered self of Romantic novel or of the blues, Rankine
repeats the “I” and “you” in and as postures of syntax, of clichéd
feeling, and of the conventions of feeling to achieve moments of
expression that also attain to allegory.
Two chapters examine Werewere Liking’s “novel-chant”, Elle sera
de jaspe et de corail. Chapter 5, “Dear Diary: A Manifesto. Werewere
Liking’s Elle sera de jaspe et de corail” introduces the context of
utopian schema and manifestos as historical and generic. It addresses
the problem of authentic experience where colonization, compounded
with original error, has alienated the forms and contents of social
experience. Well aware of the skepticism toward utopian schemes and
the weaknesses of determinist racial manifestos, Liking’s diarist
strives to imagine a pan-African ritual initiation that will differentially
and ritually iterate a utopian race of jasper and coral human beings.
The movement of sinusoidal desire, modeled on the sine wave and
representing a mode of faith, gives the initiation its form and impetus.
Liking’s project shares ethical stakes with those utopian schemes
proffered by the social utopians, Pierre Leroux, l’Abbé A.L. Constant,
and Charles Fourier, but it pursues its ethical aims by way of
aesthetics.
Chapter 6, “Ritualizing Utopia”, clarifies how Liking radically
transforms utopian schema, manifesto form, and what these aim to
32 Common Places
achieve through the notion of ritual. If the articulation of a gendered

allegory challenged Rankine, the total lack of Liking’s fellow
Africans’ intent toward a desirable African present and future vexes
Liking. Desire withers away in societies shattered by colonization,
post-independence adjustment, and chronic underdevelopment; yet
desire, especially the “sinusoidal desire” – an iterative desire patterned
after the mathematical and physical sine wave – conceived by
Liking’s diarist establishes the possibility of future (and repeating)
redemption. While the social utopians employed either dogmatic,
universalist rhetoric or systematic programs, their African Atlantic
female counterpart, Liking’s misovire (“man-hater”), enacts a ritual of
dispute, declamation, contemplation and reflection (“the gaze that
poses”) necessary to transform contemporary people’s mindsets: such
transformation prepares them to conceive the new human race.
Undermining the tenability of the skepticism that has banished the
utopian imaginary as a contemporary option and approach, Liking
demonstrates through lyric, narrative, theatrical dialogue, and
dictation that the problems with utopia and manifesto – and by
extension, the human imaginary – are formal, aesthetic ones.
Chapters 7 and 8, “Masks of Affliction in Frankétienne’s Haiti”
and “Frankétienne’s Logorrhea: An Excess of Seeming”, respectively,
explore how the personal masks of the alternately lyrical vates and
possessed vodoun serviteur, the poète maudit, and logorrhea of
Frankétienne’s Fleurs d’insomnie constitute the ground of an ethics.
Chapter 7 contextualizes Frankétienne’s work within post-
Revolutionary Haitian history, vodoun cosmology, and French post-
romanticism. It then focuses on apostrophe and possession specifically
through the iconic post-romantic figure of the vates, tracing how the
instability of the subject is not, in fact, of the person. In Chapter 8, in a
gesture that seamlessly converges with Glissant’s poetics of
commonplaces, Frankétienne imagines the speaker as a mutilated,
deranged, and afflicted body whose cry is the commonplace of Haiti.
As the common rhetorical ground of the Tout-Monde, the Haitian
persona invokes the structurally necessary ethics that his cry’s echo
also projects.
In this respect, Frankétienne’s persona and its several masks
formally, aesthetically configure the ethical model based on the visage
(“face”) that the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas describes. By
restoring the etymological link between persona (mask) and person
(body, whose gender is only body), and by channeling and tuning its
cry through Haitian vodoun, Frankétienne’s person/a feverishly bears
witness to Haitian experience under the tyranny of Jean-Claude
Duvalier and implacably demands the reader’s ethical response. I trace
the complex dynamics of these ethics through passages of poetry that
stage in concert the trope of the voyage, the femme fatale, and the
poète maudit; and also a passage of logorrheaic excess that draws on
the dark delusionary power of Lautréamont’s aesthetics. I argue that
vodoun’s ontological concept of the person not only evades the ethical
shortcomings of personal models based on the sovereign subject or the
empirical individual but iterates a person whose various, non-identical
iterations may project not only redemption but a utopian future.
In the Afterword, “‘The Horizon Devours My Voice’: Notes on
Translation”, I argue that the act of analyzing poetic form as the
principal means of translating poetry constitutes one way of creating
the differential commonplaces Glissant calls for. I briefly review the
major points of nineteenth-century German, English, and French
debates on translation and Glissant’s own peripatetic ruminations on
translation and propose how translation, whether in terms of poetic
analysis or inter-lingual iteration, represents a special commonplace
with particular implications for the redemptive dreams of Romantics
and African Atlantic postromantics alike. In order to exemplify my
claims, I demonstrate and explain my translation choices for a few
passages from Frankétienne, Liking, and Glissant that appear in this
study.
CHAPTER 1
GLISSANT’S COMMON PLACES
The term “commonplace” covers a vast territory, from the broad swath
cut by truisms and platitudes to the twenty-eight common topoi
(“topics” or “places”) circumscribed by Aristotle. Dismissed as trite or
revered as truth, commonplaces populate our conversations. They are
places found everywhere in various linguistic expressions, and they
are durable. This universality may strike us as mysterious, Babel’s
trick or treat, the trace of an immemorial common human past.
Commonplaces are like the uncanny, at once common and strange;
and when we bump up against similar ideas or beliefs in a different
language or even discourse, it is uncanny because difference in and
the difference of similarity are brought to light. In contrast, European
philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment discovered the same in
difference (or rather, “almost the same, but not quite” 1) and reified
human commonplaceness into mankind’s universality. This
conception of the universal was foreseen and attacked by the
seventeenth-century rationalist Spinoza who, in Gilles Deleuze’s view,
disputes not the universal per se but rather a “certain conception of
abstract universality” which also entails its “inadequacy”, insofar as
“common notions are general rather than abstract ideas”. 2 The
European conception of universality would enact particularly noxious
consequences for Africa and its diaspora, as illustrated by the kinds of
1
Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”,
October, XXVIII/1 (Spring 1984), 127 (emphasis in the original).
2
Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New
York: Zone Books, 1990, 277, 278 (emphases in the original). While I am drawing on
Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza here and below, it is well known that Deleuze’s
interpretations of other philosophers are idiosyncratic and selective. Henceforth, I will
avoid the tedium of the phrase “Spinoza, in Deleuze’s view” etc. on the assumption
that the reader has been alerted to Deleuze’s interpretation.
36 Common Places
social and moral quandaries treated by the writers in this study. Not
without consequences, universality facilitated the construction of
racial, national, and cultural priorities that, in turn, underwrote the
success of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imperial and colonial
endeavors.
In spite of their dubious genealogy, Édouard Glissant urges us to
reconsider the commonplace and the totalité (rather than universality)
of Relation. 3 For Glissant, to find commonplaces arising in highly
differentiated, diverse cultures is as auspicious for humanity’s future
as it is mysterious. Such felicities reveal nothing less than “this poetic
necessity, open and mysterious” of Relation, mysterious because the
commonplace is bound to repeat, even in places we would not expect,
and “repetition is, here and there, an acknowledged mode of
knowledge”. 4 He therefore takes up the commonplace not only as a
heuristic for his philosophy of Relation but as a practical matter of
(future) trans-global ethics. Aptly complementing his notion of
apposition, Glissant’s strategy of commonplaces aims to compare
rather than order philosophical, social, and cultural truth. As Natalie
Melas succinctly puts it, Glissant seeks an epistemological mode
which “conceive[s] of equivalences that do not unify ... a practice of
comparison that might not synthesize similarities into a norm”. 5
We are not so far removed from understanding these cross-
hatchings as was Aristotle, the first theoretician of the topoi, although
he ascribed far less epistemic power to the commonplace as heuristic
practice. 6 In Common Places, I mean not only to explore the ways that
3
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 190. Glissant appears to be playing fast and loose
with the philosophical ideas he engages, in this case affirming the commonplace’s
mystery rather than guarding against the “danger of common notions appearing to
intervene miraculously”, as Deleuze does. However, Glissant’s Relation is that
adequacy that Deleuze claims ratifies “something common also to minds capable of
forming an idea of it” (Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 280). The notion of
selectively engaging the ideas of one’s philosophical predecessors and peers is itself a
strategy Deleuze fondly dubs enculage, which has been translated “buggery” (Gilles
Deleuze, Negotiations: 1971-1990, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, 6).
4
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 190, 57.
5
Natalie Melas, “Versions of Incommensurability”, World Literature Today, LXIX/2
(Spring 1995), 275.
6
Brad McAdon asserts that Aristotle primarily distinguishes between dialectic and
rhetoric by the weaker intellectual capacity of the latter’s audience, who are
“untrained thinkers” (Brad McAdon, “Rhetoric Is a Counterpart of Dialectic”,
Philosophy and Rhetoric, XXXIV/2 [2001], 141). In light of Aristotle’s inconsistent
Glissant’s Common Places 37
commonplaces of postromantic African Atlantic writing point us to

revolutionary aesthetic-ethical possibilities, but also to rehearse a
literary methodology based on Glissant’s idea of lieux communs with
the hope that it will become useful for comparative literature studies. 7
Before examining at length Glissant’s commonplace, a notion he
develops through numerous texts over the decades, we should specify
the commonplace’s definitions for this study. As the leitmotif of this
study, commonplaces functions on three basic levels in the poetry
analyses of the following chapters. At the broadest level,
commonplaces acts in the historic role assigned to it by Aristotle:
heuristic and ultimately epistemic rhetorical devices. In other words,
topics, themes, or procedures for argumentation and deliberation. As
Ekaterina V. Haskins explains, Aristotle pursues an “assimilation and
differentiation of his linguistic sources”, although this method issues
from his view of cyclical history: “Each age ... generates the same
ideas about the world, and these ideas are preserved, if only partially,
in the form of sayings, maxims, and myths. Aristotle’s task, then, is
not to advance understanding to a new level, but to distill the truth
implicit in preserved opinions.” 8 This supports a view of the
commonplaces as topics of invention, or in Richard Lanham’s
definition, “common sources of arguments”. 9 Alternatively,
describing commonplaces as “lines of reasoning”, Jeanne Fahnestock
emphasizes that rhetoric may well be as constitutive as it is reflective
of cognitive processes. 10 Here, the commonplaces designate familiar
topics that allow for intellectually and morally (and culturally,
use of the term topoi in his rhetorical handbooks, it is perhaps impossible to obtain a
precise definition of the commonplaces. For a thorough examination of its various
designations, see Brad McAdon’s article “Probabilities, Signs, Necessary Signs, Idia
and Topoi”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, XXXVI/3 (2003), 223-48.
7
Glissant is skeptical of any systematic or systematizing philosophy: “The concept
presents itself as enclosed and open, mysteriously …. Systematic thinking abolishes
that which is open in the concept” (Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 83). Through his
prose style, Glissant deliberately hinders his ideas and observations from congealing
into precise, absolute concepts or a theory lending itself to synopsis; sentences,
paragraphs, chapters, parts, and intertextuality within the oeuvre simulate rhizomatic
branchings that are reprised and relayed across each other.
8
Ekaterina V. Haskins, “Endoxa, Epistemological Optimism, and Aristotle’s
Rhetorical Project”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, XXXVII/1 (2004), 6.
9
Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 169 (emphases in the original).
10
Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999, 21-22.
38 Common Places
Glissant would add) productive repetition, such as the vatic speaker

and her community or a brave new world.
At the secondary level, commonplaces are “poetic necessities” in
the way of specific figures of speech and tropes. Furthermore, these
specific figures, such as systrophe or zeugma, are in some way
distressed by repetition. In this respect, they serve hermeneutic more
than heuristic ends. In contradistinction to the invention definition,
Ellen Quandahl examines the rhetoric within Aristotle’s contemporary
context and concludes that “common topics are part of a theory of
interpretation” rather than invention: “they are the elements of
interpretation so often embedded in commonplaces in figures of
speech and thought.”11 Illustrating this interpretative dimension, for
the speaker of Rankine’s poem The End of the Alphabet to repair so
frequently to apostrophe, be it imperative or interrogative or
exclamatory, in a context in which personal identity (first, second, or
third person) is vexingly inconsistent is to undertake an interpretation
of the concepts themselves of personal speakers. These local levels of
the commonplace reflect a means of thinking productively outside of
strictly logical, predicative constraints. Poetic thinking is thus freer to
think in relation: “Such is the violent errancy of the poem.” 12 Recall
that Deleuze and Guattari favor syntactic invention; Aristotle did so as
well, as Marc Angenot argues: the power of the common topoi
“relate[d] not to the particular semantic contents ... but, in part, to the
relation which is postulated between the constituents ... and the
presence of a relational structure”. 13
As Quandahl also affirms, what attracted Aristotle to tropes was
the observation that
… relations are productive of thought …. One could say, then, that

topics are tropes that Aristotle examined in a new way. He saw that
patterns – in the list of arguments Greek boys were memorizing –
could be examined philosophically. 14
11
Ellen Quandahl, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Reinterpreting Invention”, Rhetoric Review,
IV/2 (January 1986), 135.
12
Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, 53.
13
Marc Angenot, “Présuppositions Topos Idéologème”, Études françaises, XIII/1-2
(April 1977), 15.
14
Quandahl, “Aristotle’s Rhetoric”, 134.
Quite pertinent to the interests of this study, Angenot presses

Quandahl’s observation further for sociological, historical inquiry by
giving precision to the concept idéologème, in short a commonplace
whose very name brings to the fore the iterability and valency of
whatever place or concept is being invoked:
The idéologème is a minimal proposition of topical and persuasive

status, endowed with a broad acceptability in a given state of social
discourse …. It is a semantic device that is often dialogical and
polemical, and endowed with the capacity of migration through
different discursive fields and different existing ideological
positions. 15
It is precisely migration in the mode of repetition and citation of

commonplaces that intrigues Glissant: since Relation is not a thing to
be grasped, its operations can only be inferred and imagined. 16
Nonetheless, the recurrence of the form or the topic represents the
trace of an encounter between cultural imaginaries, which are ways of
knowing/desiring specifically expressed in a given culture.
Essentially, what these commonplaces express is Relation, which is
“passageway, initially non-spatial, which yields itself as passageway
and confronts the imaginary”. 17 Therefore the third level at which
commonplaces function for this study is as culturally, aesthetically
specific but also common iterations of Relation that, examined and
interpreted in such materialist yet rhetorical terms, figure as a moment
of ethical quest.
Lieux communs and lieux-communs

Glissant has pondered commonplaces as a concept and phenomenon
for decades. They are important because they manifest Relation as
well as the total inclusiveness of humanity – whether the world admits
this or not. And whether an affirmative, creative Relation is truth or
dream matters not: “That human cultures exchange each other by
15
Marc Angenot, “La Lutte pour la vie: migrations et usages d’un idéologème”, Le
Moyen Français, XIV-XV (October 1984), 189. Angenot illustrates his interpretation
of the idéologème through a fascinating examination of French rhetoric in various
media of 1889 with respect to the Darwinian idéologème “la lutte pour la vie” (“the
struggle for life”).
16
17
Ibid., 202.
40 Common Places
perduring [en perdurant], change themselves without losing [se

perdre] themselves: that this becomes possible.” 18 Glissant is punning,
albeit with serious intention, on the contrary morphemes “per” and
“dur” – “through” and “hard” or “lasting”. What does this difficulty
and endurance imply for peoples who have suffered the consequences
of the concept of universality and who then react by avowing its
contrary in the creed of particularity and difference? The poetics
Glissant seeks would enable us to imagine from within contradictions
and contraries and to forge creative appositional bonds among
cultures, as Melas points out in a quotation cited earlier. This poetics
hinges on the particular form of repetition that is the commonplace:
“The common place ... allows us to compose with contraries and incite
them toward reconciliation.” 19 In manifesting Relation, commonplaces
“relink (relay), relate” – they do not reduce nor represent but appose. 20
Even though their conceptual playing fields are different, the
common lexicon reveals why Glissant and Aristotle, poetics, ethics,
form, and rhetoric are crucial to the historicized but nonetheless
formal poetic inquiry of this study. To bring some order to a
deliberately disorderly thinker, we will focus on three areas. First, we
examine the several things that commonplaces mean for Glissant and
one particular commonplace of interest, le cri (“the cry”) of the
oppressed. Second, we discuss why poets (fictional writers in general)
have the greatest capacity to descry, engage, and release the power of
commonplaces. Third, we attempt to clarify how engaging
commonplaces in the specifically aesthetic-ethical rather than just the
ethical register may become a positive utopian moment.
Scattered through Glissant’s works, the term “lieux communs”
increasingly appears in later works and is joined by the hyphenated
term “lieux-communs” and the quasi-scientific term “invariants” (from
Deleuze). The lieux communs are culturally specific formulae about
being in the world, cultural truths that migrate through traditional
channels or technological channels. Heretofore, lieux communs arose
from the migration of peoples, trade, or imperial expansion. The speed
and facility of personal, cultural, and informational trafficking in the
post-industrial world has sprung a variation of traditional lieux
communs: the lieux-communs. The hyphen indicates its innate relation
18
19
Ibid., 178, 172.
20
to “lines of force”, a Deleuzian concept designating latent or

unanticipated movements, motives, or flows of creative energy that
may be constructive or destructive. Phenomena of the spectacle, lieux-
communs take the commercial forms of trends, fashions, and other
consumer-oriented ephemera, spectacularly bursting forth from the
near-instantaneous, synchronous places of info-technological
channels. Like Deleuze, Glissant does not bias the concepts of
Relation or lieux communs/lieux-communs, whose conceptual
neutrality is better indicated by the synonymous term “invariants”.
Therefore, “what appears to be an infinite regress (the accumulation of
common-places publicly pooled and celebrated in fleeting rituals) thus
underpins the presumed barbarism of fashion but at the same time
limns the moving depth of Relation”. 21
Whichever of the two versions of commonplaces is at issue, it is
quite literally “a place where a thought about the world encounters a
thought about the world”. 22 The commonplace is where people “under
contrary or convergent auspices, think the same things, pose the same
questions”, and this ubiquity manifests Relation. This statement would
seem to suggest that the identity of content – in other words, universal
content – bears primacy in the theory of Relation. But the stakes are
elsewhere for Glissant – along the lines that actually create the
constellation of commonplaces: the syntax of iteration. When Glissant
claims that the commonplace “mobilizes our imaginaries better than
any system of ideas, but on the condition that we be alert to recognize
it”, he means that our ability and our desire to imagine Relation rests
on our acknowledgement of the commonplace (in common to all
places) as a total world-over (that is, “Tout-Monde”) phenomenon. 23
Such realization, followed by acknowledgement, at the very least
obliges us to consider the diverse and the same in other terms, to be
imagined and imagined again and otherwise as differential
commonplaces. Again, it is the truth of connection by way of
repetition and not the truth value of any content that comes to the fore:
21
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 188-91, 189.
22
23
Ibid., 23. The “Total World-Over” is my translation of Tout-Monde in order to
capture all the resonances of the collective noun that fade in a literal translation such
as “Total-World” or “All-World”.
42 Common Places
Not theories, ideologies, powers – not a system or an idea of the world

– but the enormous entanglement …. The mass of commonplaces. 24
In light of the many registers in which Glissant’s commonplaces

vibrate, when the phrase “differential commonplaces” appears in the
following chapters, it emphasizes Glissant’s manifold concept of the
commonplace that relates and relays difference.
While Glissant leans toward optimism, he is wary of hastily once
more vindicating any version of universality, such as a planétarisation
of thought even as he also concedes the risk he runs with his own
notions of Totalité, Relation, and Tout-Monde. He stipulates that “the
aspiration (pretension) to the universal must burrow itself in the dense,
subterranean loam where each one experiences relation with the
other”. 25 Obviously, the problem is clearest to those who experienced
universality as the condition of their difference, therein paradoxically
“threatened by indistinction”, disabusing them of any illusions.
Patently the matter is difference, for Glissant. Commenting on Kostas
Axelos’ Le Jeu du monde, to which he otherwise is sympathetic,
Glissant explains:
In is the “totality”, in which one can stress “the same in the other, the
other in the same”. As captivating as this play seems, we cannot
overlook a generalization which in-differentiates the other of the
same, overcoming even as it maintains these. For a people threatened
by indistinction, such play seems fatal. The nonexclusive series, non-
transcendental differentiations proposed by a science of Relation
would constitute the logistical basis necessary – and would even
exceed itself by its open dynamic – of every totality of the world.
Even thus hypothesized, totality quickly becomes totalitarian when it
26
dispenses with taking inventory of beings.
People who have the most to gain – in concrete and abstract terms –
from liberating ideas are often those who suffered (and still suffer)
great losses from their past implementation. For a thinker such as
Glissant, who finds much to admire in Anglo-European philosophy
and letters, it must be frustrating and at times bewildering how often
philosophers of liberating, genuinely active ideas clumsily, heedlessly
24
Ibid., 27-28.
25
Édouard Glissant, L’Intention poétique, Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 27, 21.
26
fail to take into consideration the “concrete inventory of all beings”

that would bring to the fore those who would have the highest stakes
in such philosophies. 27 While Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic
thought is not indifferent, Glissant, in a rare criticism, regrets the
negligence that links them to the most ordinary kind of European
thought that they themselves critique:
Despite comparisons between civilizations or expressions (but always

generalizing: the Occident, the Orient), this rapid incursion of the two
authors into Relation (the relay, the relative, the related) lacks an
awareness of many other situations. There is likewise in that an a
priori abstracting of which we are wary. Whoever speaks nominates
[se nomme] himself, it remains to him to nominate whoever remains
silent, that is to say to conceive of his dense existence. Not in order to
speak for him, but to await his word. Any other attitude brings on a
recess, which facilely takes itself for liberty …. Any relativizing
system, whatever the justice of its thrust, must tend towards a concrete
inventory of Relation: towards the justice of opacities. 28
Awaiting another’s word may resemble the exchange which Glissant

describes in a later work, in which he tries to communicate through
the “implacable” self-induced mutism of a fellow Martiniquan:
“Respecting the indefatigable muteness, I nonetheless wanted ... to
open up with the young walker a system of relation that was not based
on words.” 29 Glissant has long observed – in this instance, as a
paradoxically emphatic parenthetical – the opacity of beings: “(How
much does language matter when it takes the cry and the word to
measure its implant [l’implant] in them ... ).”30 Imagining what gesture
“without affection or condescension, but without criticism or
superiority” might appeal to the mute promeneur, Glissant succeeds
27
Ibid., 197. According to Deleuze, the formation of common notions leads to active
joy and ultimately, to “desires belonging to reason, which are genuine actions” and
therefore represent the foundation of ethics (Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy,
285). Spinoza defines his common notions as intrinsic to general human being. Yet
the thinking of concrete difference within this framework – if we momentarily
transcribe it as allegory – proves difficult if not impossible. Chapter 4 takes up this
problem of expression within allegory by any concretely othered subject, specifically
the gendered person/a.
28
Glissant, Discours Antillais, 196-97 (emphasis in the original).
29
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 136-37.
30
Glissant, L’Intention poétique, 44.
44 Common Places
on the second or third try. Whatever the reason for this success,
Glissant tries to “conceive of his thick existence” by discovering the
commonplace between the man’s mutism and fasting and the
psychosocial and geopolitical consequences of Martinique’s
départementalisation. Glissant relays this commonplace farther into
the Tout-Monde, where many “have not had the leisure to take refuge,
such as this walker, in absence”, and conceives such commonplaces as
there are of brute necessity: “fright, consumption, tormented
extinction, futile resistances, naïve faith, famines without echo,
stunned horror [l’effarement].” 31 Glissant realizes that the comparison
will appear glib to some, but it bears repeating that commonplaces are
literally appositions, not identifications, and this relay or what Lanham
calls “characteristic oscillation ... between places in the mind and
places in the world” 32 of commonplaces is one means to keep in mind
the concrete inventory of what is à côté (“besides”).
Poetics as the medium of ethics

Whatever the status of reference, rhetorical commonplaces are
radically implicated by the material world, and vice versa, and we
must learn how to think them together. Throughout Glissant’s oeuvre,
the metonym for this premise is le cri du monde (“the cry of the
world”), which immediately brings to mind the commonplace of the
African American moan of the spirituals and subsequently the cries or
shouts of the blues, which W.E.B. Du Bois eloquently contextualized
in terms of black expression. 33 Furthermore, Glissant’s cry of the
world is a deflected echo of a philosophical commonplace, in
particular Heidegger’s appeal of Being and Levinas’ summons of the
Other into obligation and ethics. The conceptual distinctions between
Glissant and other philosophers cannot be addressed in any detail here,
but a conspicuous rhetorical distinction (complementing conceptual
distinctions) in Glissant is the onslaught of figurative exempla that
31
32
Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 170.
33
Much has been said on the moan and the cry of African American spirituals and
blues, but Du Bois’ treatment has become canonical (see Du Bois, The Souls of Black
Folk, 148-49, 185-94). Cornel West puts it succinctly, “the ‘ur-text’ of black culture”
is “a gutteral cry and a wrenching moan” and explains the transformation of Middle
Passage experience into music, song, dance, and literature (Cornel West, “Black
Strivings in a Twilight Civilization”, in Cornel West, The Future of the Race, New
York: Random House, 1996, 102).
shores up an instance of le cri. Above, the battery of commonplaces

beginning “fright, consumption, tormented existence” goes on for
forty-four more examples that “produced in fact this Howling”. 34 The
Treaty of the Total World-Over begins with a section entitled “Le Cri
du Monde” and this gripping proclamation:
They tell us, and there is truth, that everywhere is disrupted,

disoriented, debilitated, all madness, the blood the wind. We see it and
we live it. But the entire world is speaking to you, by so many
strangled voices.
Wherever you turn, desolation. But you turn nonetheless. 35
Levinas resounds in that obligatory turn insofar as “no one is

permitted to evade” being in the face of the Other who invokes us, all
the more of the Other in hunger. 36 Glissant sharpens the point by
listing those “echoes which have now made us accept to listen
together to the cry of the world, knowing as well that, in listening, we
perceive that all hear henceforth”. Each echo begins with an
emphasized phrase, listed here, that takes inventory of the phenomena:
The thought of métissage …
The mutual impact of the technologies or mentalities of the oral

and the written …
The slow erasure of the absolutes of History…
The increasingly evident workings of what I have called

creolization …
The diffracted poetics of this Chaos-world that we share …
The symphonic and just as vibrant the dysphonic that generate

multilingualism in us …. 37
34
35
36
Emmanuel Levinas, Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité, The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1961, 175.
37
Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 17, 16 (emphases in the original).
46 Common Places
Responding to Hegel’s infamous dictum of Africa’s location

outside of History, Glissant reckons Hegel’s error, beyond the West’s
tendency to “conceive the world as solitude and then as taxation – of
the West”, to Hegel’s failure to perceive the mutual implications of
the rhetorical and concrete. Again, the commonplace of the cry is
invoked as a means of illustration and critique:
Time, duration are for me imperative vitalities. But it’s also necessary
that I live and cry actuality with those others who live it. In
consciousness of causes. That which is henceforth a poetics, within
the larger poetics of relation, is thus contradictorily knotted in
urgency: the lived cry in the endured duration, the lived duration in the
rationalized cry. 38
Comparing these examples demonstrates how little Glissant

hesitates to move from poetic, figural discourse (“the blood the wind”)
to a species of sociological, demonstrative discourse, then to a
deliberative, argumentative discourse (the latter two are no less poetic
than the former is deliberative and demonstrative). His exuberant,
oblique appositions rhetorically and referentially adhere to the
Relational stipulation that the “relinked (relayed), related do not unite
in a definitive fashion”. They also embody the character of Caribbean
literatures which, born of the constraints of the plantation, mastered
the art of the detour through techniques of “redoubling, breathlessness,
parenthetical, the psychic immersion into the drama of the common
destiny”. 39 Deleuze and Guattari point out similar phenomena in
minor literatures as exemplified by the stuttering, wailing, compulsive
repetition of Kakfa’s tales, asserting that there,
Language ceases to be representative in order to stretch towards its

extremes or its limits. The connotation of aching pain accompanies
this metamorphosis. 40
Similar to the gestalt of Kafka’s writing that Deleuze and Guattari

describe, Caribbean literatures (which are characterized at once by
orality and literacy) are syntactically driven, whence their “forced” or
“compelled poetics”:
38
39
40
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 42 (emphasis in the original).
Verbal delirium as the arrest of communication is one of the most

frequent avatars of the counter-poetics enacted by creole. Shadings,
drummings, acceleration, thick repetitions, blurring of syllables,
misinterpretation of the signifier, allegory and hidden meaning, in
these forms of customary verbal delirium, there are … all the phases
of the history of this dramatic language.41
This brings us to the second premise, if we can use such a formal

term with Glissant, of the poetics of commonplaces. First, Glissant’s
commonplace, as a form of knowledge, is essentially unsystematic:
“the portal [l’ouverture] of poetics is unforeseen and unheard.” 42
Second, it stakes its legitimacy on reiteration rather than systematic or
logical proof, and because it is also unoriginal, even anti-original
(ante-original?), it relays and relates to everyone, masters and slaves,
but perhaps more significantly to the excluded middles. In this regard,
the same titles of works and sections of works rebound appear from
the earliest of Glissant’s poetry (1955) to the latest book-length essays
(2007); and in one of several “Repetitions” sections, he asserts:
Reprise without respite what you have always said. Yield to the
infinitesimal élan, to the increase, perhaps unperceived, that
stubbornly inheres in your knowing.
It goes without saying that the very term “commonplace” implies a

conceptual lingua franca, where what is perceived to be unitary and
self-standing appears “elsewhere, in a different guise”. 43 In terms of a
figurative use of place, the ubiquity of the commonplace does not
issue through the unification nor consolidation toward a center but
rather the repetition of what is set apart or aside (à l’écart): its
“poetics aims at toward the margins [à l’écart] – which is not
exclusion but attainment of passing beyond a difference”. 44 In
different terms, poetics aims à l’écart of the self, which for so long
has served as a personal center.
Deleuze and Guattari illustrate the converse in speaking of minor
literatures, in which “if the writer is in the margins or set aside from
his fragile community, this situation puts him all the more in a
41
42
43
Ibid., 57.
44
Ibid., 96.
48 Common Places
position to express another potential community, to forge the means of

another consciousness or another sensibility”. 45 For this mysterious
inclusiveness of commonplaces and a poetics of relation derives from
their remove from subjectivity, as Glissant affirms:
Perhaps it is the role of poetics to point [invariants] out, to seek them

out. The function of the commonplaces of world-thinking is to clarify
this search. What does one abandon in performing this work? One
abandons the pretension to truth solely within the narrow circle of his
own subjectivity and in that, I believe is also an invariant, this
necessity to overpass one’s own subjectivity not in order to move
toward a totalitarian system but to move toward an intersubjectivity of
the “Total World-Over”. 46
Two terms here, “truth” and “intersubjectivity”, warrant close scrutiny

because the thicket of their associations can be misleading. The term
“truth” evokes proof, demonstration, and/or conclusiveness as a result
of the controlled context, the “narrow circle”, in which it appears – in
this case, in the subject. Glissant does not abandon the concept of truth
altogether, however. Truth is that which relates and is related –
beyond the sameness of the self-same and beyond difference, if
difference refers only to categorical difference, such as ethnic or Third
World difference.
Therefore in comparing poetic modes to the binary mode of
technology, he propounds that the “truth of the poet is also the desired
truth of the other, there where the truth of the information system is
enclosed within its sufficient logic”. 47 As for intersubjectivity, this
concept has less to do with analytic or pragmatic schema for
promoting justice than with Levinas’ sense of the constitutive,
necessary condition for being as we know it: “The relation with the
being that expresses itself pre-exists the revelation of being in general,
as the basis for consciousness and as the meaning of being.” 48 Glissant
here refers intersubjective to the inevitable effect of Relation, and only
consequentially, to Relation’s implications which, if realized,
appreciated, and acted upon in creative measures, promises positive
empirical, pragmatic consequences. This explains why Glissant’s
45
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 31-32.
46
47
48
Levinas, Totalité et Infini, 175.
project is not a politics but a poetics of Relation, of the commonplace,

of the Tout-Monde, and he is clear about such distinctions:
Poetry – be it a totality so as to strengthen itself – is brought to life by

another dimension of poetry that each intuits or stammers within. It
could be that it originates in this rapport, from itself to nothing other
than itself, from the weighty to the transitory, or from the whole to the
individual, the essence of its definitions. 49
If poetry originates in rapport, rapports of difference in degree and

kind, then its essence is formal and syntactic, and the power of
commonplaces, a genre of poetry, is that of form. The task of the poet,
which brings us to the third premise of commonplace poetics, is to
uncover the “conjunctions of forms and structures” of commonplaces
which, residing in their mutually diverse, far-flung places, have yet to
be perceived as commonplaces: “writing subjects the commonplaces
of the real to an exercise of connection which is constituted in a
rhetoric.” 50 Ironically, Glissant alludes to the exercice d’écriture with
which all students in France and francophone countries are, for better
or for worse, well acquainted and that is associated with standard,
interchangeable formulation and composition. His exercise, however,
is not the practice of grammar, for example, or of discursive synthesis.
It forges the connections among disparate places and establishes
commonplaces in rhetoric. This is a thoroughly, congenitally
aesthetic-ethical affair; it is inductive and therefore operates in a
entirely different fashion from the deductive strategies of
methodological, prescriptive literary schools or movements like
écriture féminine or Martinique’s Créolité, which conceive of the
aesthetic and the ethical as largely distinct registers to be yoked
together. 51 The rhetoric Glissant intends is not the rhetoric of identity
in the sense of a flattening of difference into sameness or
interchangeability, nor essential, self-proclaimed original identity, but
the rhetoric of Relation. Relation is not a superior or elective politics,
but a primordial and thereby instantiative force that bears no moral
value:
49
50
51
Regarding créolité, See Jean Bernabé et al., Éloge de la Créolité, trans. M.B. Taleb-
Khyar, Paris: Gallimard, bilingual edn, 1993. For écriture féminine, see Hélène
Cixous’ seminal essay “Le Rire de la Méduse”, L’Arc, LXI (1975), 39-54.
50 Common Places
Likewise Relation has no moral: it doesn’t elect. Just as it has nothing

to do with stipulating what would be its “contents”. Relation, from
being totalizing, is intransitive. 52
In this sense, Relation very much resembles Levinas’ absolute and

transcendent expression, which effects ethical obligation. 53 If
thematized in writing, Relation can function as an ethical force for
combating hatred, exploitation, all breeds of identity-borne self-
interests, and the phantasmagoria of self-sustenance and reliance that
occur as much in and through writing as elsewhere. Poetry can move
us to understand the world as Relation: “Writing is to rally the savor
of world.” For these commonplaces, such as “the end of History”,
figured into the context of Relation lead to promising ends:
And these reasons, which we have wrested into an arduous passion for
writing and creating, for living and fighting, today become for us so
many commonplaces that we are learning to share; yet precious
commonplaces: against the disorder of identitarian machines of which
we are so often the prey, as in the right of blood, the purity of race, the
completeness, if not coherence, of dogma. 54
Yet revolutionary content cannot merely be superimposed or

transferred in effect; another ontology requires a “conversion of
being”. 55 The poet must aim to conceive this through the powers of
the imaginary and the imaginary’s assemblage of those far-flung, yet-
unknown commonplaces that intimate the very instantiation of
humanity by Relation. That conception is part discovery and
inscription of commonplaces, and part writing as a mode of
commonplace, an aesthetic-ethical project. The immanent
conceptualization Glissant foresees as the poet’s task has an intriguing
philosophical counterpart (or shall we say “commonplace”?) in
Benjamin’s concept of the “constellation”, by which singular elements
or “stars” are configured and related into something meaningful:
“Ideas are timeless constellations, and by virtue of the elements’ being
52
53
See especially Levinas, Totalité et Infini, 172-75.
54
Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 120, 113, 17.
55
Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, 14. The case of French and Haitian
revolutionary rhetoric exemplifies the inevitable failure of stratagems that
superimpose or transpose content; I discuss this in Chapter 7.
seen as points in such constellations, phenomena are subdivided and at

the same time redeemed; so that those elements which it is the
function of the concept to elicit from phenomena are most clearly
evident at the extremes.” For Benjamin, nothing less than “the
salvation of phenomena and the representation of ideas” are at stake in
the work of philosophy. 56 It is helpful to bear in mind Benjamin’s
figure of the constellation alongside Glissant’s commonplace, because
“constellation” evokes the diffuse, imaginative, qualitative and
quantitative character that also obtains in Glissant’s lieux communs.
In Glissant’s view, the intervention of intellectual, poetic work into
the real cannot be overestimated. Lynn Hunt asserts that it was
precisely through revolutionary rhetoric that the politics of the French
Revolution aimed to serve as “an instrument for reshaping human
nature, making citizens out of subjects, free men out of slaves,
republicans out of the oppressed” but that the “integrative functions of
revolutionary rhetoric were ultimately stymied”. 57 Glissant has learned
the lessons of history well – he argues that politics, much less
aesthetic politics, will never suffice:
Not a single global operation of politics, economics, or military

intervention is capable of even catching a glimpse of the measliest
solution to the contradictions of this erratic system that is the chaos-
world unless the imaginary of Relation resound in the mindsets and
sensibilities of humanities, and not humanity, otherwise. 58
On the contrary, the innumerable “means of saying” and writing

inscribe, if obscurely and partially, Relation: “Writing, which leads us
to unpredictable intuitions, makes us discover the hidden constants of
the diversity of the world ... as well as sense why it is the world as
totality, and not an exclusive part of the world, elected or privileged,
56
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osbourne,
London: Verso, 1977, 34-35.
57
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984, 49.
58
Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers, 67. Although far narrower in its
scope, Maryse Condé makes a similar statement with respect to women’s commitment
to realities closer to the ground: “Whenever women speak out, they displease, shock,
or disturb. Their writings imply that before thinking of a political revolution, West
Indian society needs a psychological one. What they hope for and desire conflicts with
men’s ambitions and dreams” (Maryse Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the
West Indian Writer”, Yale French Studies, LXXXIII/2 [1993], 161).
52 Common Places
that carries us.” 59 In short, writing aspires to inscribe the processes of

world-thinking into consciousness, not a mere awareness nor ideology
of intrinsic world relation.
At place in the world

Although far from developing a primer on commonplaces akin to
Aristotle’s The “Art” of Rhetoric, 60 Glissant proposes how a writer
should undertake the task of establishing commonplaces in a rhetoric.
He implicitly responds to Deleuze and Guattari’s question: “Problem
of a minor literature, but also for us all: how to tear a minor literature
from one’s own language [langue] that is capable of deepening
language [langage], and to make it run along an austere revolutionary
line?” 61 Glissant responds with a loosely tripartite answer that
dizzyingly swaps langue (the language or tongue of a distinct nation
or people, and perhaps their subjects) and langage (language as the
grammar and syntax of human verbal expression) in a series of
antimetaboles and antitheses: 62
The poet, beyond the langue he uses, but mysteriously inside that very
langue, both the langue and its margins, is a master mason of langage.
The clever and mechanical machinery of langues may soon appear
obsolete, but not the work which churns in the depths of langage. The
poet strives to trans-root [enrhizomer] his place into the totality, to
diffuse the totality into his place: permanence in the instant and
inversely, the elsewhere in the here and reciprocally [réciproquement].
Therein lies the bit of divination he avails himself of in view of the
derelictions inscribed in our real. He does not partake of the game of
the universal, which can never be the means to establish Relation. He
never ceases to suppose from the first word of his poem: “I speak to
you in your langue, and it is in my langage that I hear you.” 63
59
Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 32, 119.
60
See Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, II.xviii-ix, II.xxiii-xxiv, Loeb Classical
Library, trans. John Freese, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, 263-73,
297-335.
61
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 35.
62
To avoid further confusion, the original French terms for these two senses of
language are retained and italicized.
63
Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde, 122-23. I have extensively analyzed the rhetoric of
this passage in regards to difference and in comparison to Heidegger’s own ideas of
difference and poetic language in my article, “Commonplaces: Rhetorical Figures of
Difference in Heidegger and Glissant”, Philosophy and Rhetoric, XLI/1 (2008), 1-21.
The poet of a world of Relation builds grammar and syntax even as

he builds inside a particular langue. The place of poetics is “beyond”
(that is, on the far side) of the langue the poet uses, “but mysteriously
in” the langue and likewise in its margins. Like Deleuze and
Guattari’s outsider inside his community, the poet is always à l’écart.
The building of poetry occurs ubiquitously in these all these places –
beyond, inside, and at the margins of language – more than it does
simultaneously in a locationally-collapsed everywhere. Such are the
conditions of possibility for commonplaces. To build langage on the
site of langue and off-site in the margins is a very different project
from building langage as a universal, common langue, the project
dreamed of by the workers of Babel. The key is an awareness of place,
one’s own in relation to others, and that the language of a certain place
exists alongside languages of other places in the world. As Glissant
reiterates so many times:
… we write in the presence of all the languages of the world, even if

we know none of them …. That is to say that I dispatch and hustle my
language not into syntheses but into linguistic overtures that allow me
to conceive of today’s rapports between languages over the face of the
earth. 64
The poet who limits his writing to the machine of langues, engines
of artifice (astuces), and mechanics produces literature that risks
obsolescence as well the isolation within the narrow ideological
purview of one’s own language group. In contrast, the work that
immanently churns in langage (grammar and syntax) remains relevant
because, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, it “expresses these
assemblages ... insofar as they exist ... as revolutionary forces to
construct”. 65 In order to forge commonplaces à l’écart of the
universalizing, Glissant shifts to the metaphor of farming to suggest
how the poet might root his place across and into the world totality
instead of diffusing the totality into his place.
The use of the synonyms inversely and reciprocally in lieu of
absolute parallel structure is peculiar and requires attention. The
significance of the correlation of the two adverbs to temporal
(permanence/instant) and spatial (elsewhere/here) attributes is very
64
65
54 Common Places
subtle, but subtle differentiation is, after all, what composes Relation.
To invert two things is to uniformly transpose them, and with regard
to the Antilles’ irruption into modernity or the catastrophic measure of
(post)colonial African civilizations, time has assumed this
spontaneous duality. Space requires an altogether different treatment.
When we reciprocate, we mutually agree to terms of exchange that are
not necessarily equivalent. For underdeveloped countries, or
pathologically dependent countries like Martinique, such discretionary
leeway is imperative. To fulfill both aspects of the aesthetic-ethical
project, the poet forging commonplaces must carefully gauge how
much of the totality to diffuse into his place, especially as the totality
increasingly standardizes. In other words, the infinite potential of
generative, ethical progressions of Relation depends on preserving
differential commonplaces.
Thus, the poet discerns the common – which is not the standard –
between permanence and instance, this place here and that place
elsewhere, in transacting langues and langages. In this regard, both
forms of language are as concrete and location-specific as the
geographical spaces and times from which they arise and to which
they give rise. Literally, langues and langages are the commonplaces
of their places:
We do not emit words into the air, diffuse into the air. Consequently,
the place where we speak words, where we express the text, where we
emit the voice, where we emit the cry, that very place is immense. 66
In the two senses of the French verb supposer, the poet “assumes” this
task of translating that which cannot be represented. The poet also
imagines the possibility of realizing the translation.
Lastly, a final reversal occurs between langues and langages. The
poet speaks to the other in the other’s particular langue, and hears the
other through his langage – yet another of Glissant’s repetitions.
This notion recalls an assertion by the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott
that the poet creates an “individual vocabulary” or “dialect” within the
established language. 67 However, Glissant intends more than
Walcott’s version of heteroglossia, which Mikhail Bakhtin conceived
as the thick socio-historical essence of discourse. Within an
66
67
Walcott, “The Antilles”, 262.
onstensibly unified community, the variations of a language, for

example French, do not necessarily reflect the minor difference,
whether ontological or epistemological. Variations in grammars and
syntax do, and these arise not only between languages of the world,
but within a single language. The poet explicitly builds a grammar and
syntax of Relation (and is built or instantiated as a subject himself)
through langue and langage, and this process proliferates creative
difference, from which it issues. As Deleuze and Guattari proclaim:
“It’s the glory of such literature to be minor, that is to say
revolutionary for all literature.” 68 The process leading to minor
literature or founding commonplaces, which are forms of aesthetic-
ethical action, requires inversion, reciprocation, and a discretionary
donner-avec (“giving-with”) the notion of a genuinely differentiated
difference. 69 The diversity of all that makes up human beings, the
difference of Relation resides in the diversity and difference of langue
and langage, of this-place and that-place: in short, of commonplaces.
The productivity of greater standardization will ultimately lead toward
irreversible stasis, whereas this kind of aesthetic-ethical productivity
leads toward further productivity: “The End is relay. Not the being of
the Other who imposes itself on me, but the modality of my relation to
him: and inversely.” 70
If the poetics of differential commonplaces can be said to have a
procedure, it would be non-identical repetition, iteration, or citation.
Never founding, given, or giving an original moment, such iteration is
described by Richard Schechner as “twice-behaved behavior”, which
instances “never for the first time [but] for the second to the nth
time”. 71 While in rapport with much of postcolonial politics, neither
68
69
Glissant’s phrase donner-avec, literally “to give-with” or “giving-with”, is partly a
response to Heidegger’s Mit-dasein (“being-with-others”), which for Glissant
emphasizes being (ontology) rather than the process of Relation. In turn, “giving-
with” does not necessitate assimilation but still relates and relays (along with) the
other. Thus, speaking of the naturalization of the anti-rationalist, differential mode of
the baroque, “a worlded baroque”, Glissant observes that the baroque “‘understands’
or rather it gives with this movement of the world. It is no longer reaction, but the
result of all aesthetics, all philosophies. Thus, it does not just affirm an art or a style,
but much further, brings about a being-in-the-world” (Glissant, Poétique de la
Relation, 92).
70
71
Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1986, 36.
56 Common Places
the poet nor the work of commonplaces strive toward singularity,

particularity, or even novelty as “newness enter[ing] the world”
through hybridization. 72 Poets establish commonplaces through the
accident of the poem, which is not arbitrary; rather, the accident is the
latent or manifest disclosure of commonplaces by dint of the
unpredictable issues, effects, and truths of poetry’s process. 73
Occasionally in this study, Deleuze and Guattari’s term itineration
will appear in lieu of “iteration” or “repetition”, because it explicitly
evokes wandering or Glissant’s errantry, a concept also influenced by
Deleuze and Guattari’s work on the nomad. While conceptualized
with respect to science and method, itineration is “not exactly a
question of extracting constants from variables but of placing the
variables themselves in a state of continuous variations”. Moreover,
the itinerant model of science is problematic in the same way that
poetics and poetry are, and this is not a reductive or simplistic
analogy. Deleuze and Guattari assert that problematic models proceed
from “a problem to the accidents that condition and resolve it. This
involves all kinds of deformations, transmutations, passages to the
limit, operations in which each figure designates an ‘event’ much
more than an essence.”
Their characterization could well describe the accidental nature of
poetics, of founding commonplaces. Moreover, just as the mass of
apposed commonplaces are irreducible to a general, essential constant
but rather retains differentiation as the necessary element for
reiteration, itinerant operations “effect individuations through events
or haecceities, not through the ‘object’ as a compound of matter and
form”. 74 The connection between these alternative iterative processes
and lyric poetry is supported by Timothy Bahti, who summarizes
lyric’s mode as “nonmimetic, nonreduplicative, nonparaphrastic,
nonrepresentational ... peculiarly recurrent and recursive without
being repetitious and repeatable”. 75 In the following chapter,
Walcott’s canny protagonist, Shabine, recites History as a complex
allegorical chain in order to outfox its oppressive dismissal.
72
Salman Rushdie praises the “mongrelization” of the world through the forces of
migration, cultural transnationalism, and popularization (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary
Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991, New York: Penguin, 1991, 394).
73
74
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 369, 362, 369.
75
Timothy Bahti, Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 13.
CHAPTER 2
WALCOTT’S ALLEGORY OF HISTORY
The sea is History. 1
What does “the sea is History” mean? This line from a celebrated
poem by Derek Walcott is frequently quoted in Caribbean literary
criticism. 2 By and large, the criticism takes its meaning more or less
for granted: “the sea symbolizes the history of the Middle Passage.” 3
Re-evaluated more rigorously within the context of Walcott’s oeuvre,
however, the line shows its recalcitrant opacity. Like much African
Atlantic writing, Walcott’s work is peppered with capitalized
instances of “History”. In the long poem “The Schooner Flight”,
Walcott’s poet-narrator Shabine accuses History, and those who
define it, of self-serving disavowal: “History ... ain’t recognize me.” 4
Édouard Glissant writes with equal pith about History: “As for us,
they taught us to tell: a story. And to assent to History.” 5 Both Walcott
and Glissant clearly invoke History with a capital “H” in its
Enlightenment register. Secularized henceforth, History constituted
empirical evidence of the West’s superiority – scientific progress and
rationalism. For Hegel, progress represented the dialectical movement
of “Universal History” – that is, the history of a civilization’s intellect
1
Walcott, Collected Poems, 366. Walcott, Rankine, Liking, and Frankétienne do not
number the lines or stanzas of their long poems: therefore my citations refer to page
numbers.
2
Paul Breslin helpfully identifies two other crowd-pleasers: “I’m nobody, or I’m a
nation” and “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” (Paul Breslin, Nobody’s Nation:
Reading Derek Walcott, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, 1, 189).
3
For example, Breslin neatly sums it up: “In one sense, the sea for Walcott is history,
as the title of the poem in The Star-Apple Kingdom explicitly says”, and further, “the
sea, then, is nationhood, with the Atlantic crossing the one common past” (ibid., 268).
4
Walcott, Collected Poems, 350. All further references will be given in parenthesis in
the text.
5
58 Common Places
– towards World Spirit, the culmination of Reason. History would

reveal the West to be the apex of the world’s intellectual, political,
social, and cultural development. In contrast, History had not yet
obtained in Africa, Asia, and other peripheries of Western Europe. 6
Adopting a grimmer perspective, Marx understood History as the
relentless course of an increasingly reified, inhuman society advancing
toward its death and rebirth in revolution. 7 These views and others,
then, conventionally ascribe a teleology to History, a path leading to
an ultimate destination, once God, now Reason or the Good Society
(in a return to Plato). Yet in this History’s tableaux, the Caribbean
islands function only as “zones of specialized economic exploitation”,
colony, and cruise stop. 8 Nineteenth-century British historian James
Anthony Froude would notoriously assert that “there are no people
there [the Caribbean colonies] in the true sense of the word, with a
character and purpose of their own”, a statement that would indelibly
mark the psyche of Caribbean peoples. 9 Indeed, from within the
Caribbean itself, V.S. Naipaul, Walcott’s fellow Nobel Laureate,
would join the chorus, recasting Froude’s statement in his bitter
travelogue The Middle Passage: “Nothing was created in the British
6
After a brief overview of Africa, Hegel dismisses it from The Philosophy of History
thus: “What we properly understand as Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped
Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented
here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.” Asia fares slightly better,
having served as the origin of natural history, but “China and India lie, as it were, still
outside the World’s History” (G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John
Sibree, New York: P.F. Collier, 1902, 157, 176-77).
7
Despite their adherence to the possibility of universal class struggle and solidarity,
Marx and Engels both betray their own brand of racism. Marx affirmed that “the
common Negro type is only a degeneration of a much higher one [race]”, and Engels
dismisses Slavic people as “ethnic trash”. Both quoted in Diane Paul, “‘In the
Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth
Century”, Journal of the History of Ideas, XLII/1 (January-March 1981), 121, 137.
8
Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, 60.
9
J.A. Froude, The English in the West Indies; or The Bow of Ulysses, New York:
Scribner, 1900, 347. The echo of Froude in Engels on the Slavs is uncanny: the Slavs
are “peoples which have never had a history of their own” (quoted in Paul, “In the
Interests of Civilization”, 137).
Walcott’s Allegory of History 59
West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish America, no great revolution

as in Haiti or the American colonies.” 10
There is nothing new about Others protesting against the denial of
their historicality: not only African Atlantic literature but also
literature from regions outside the African Atlantic confirms this in
myriad remarkable voices. Besides, it was commonplace, as observed
in my Introduction, for the Romantics to worry about the historical
status – albeit its loss rather than its denial – of national legitimacy or
culture through the medium of art, so much so that some modern
critics would impute such aestheticization to “the defensive motion of
understanding”. 11 A self-described mulatto of both the African and
Western aesthetic traditions, Walcott predictably faces this quandary
as well. But his recourse to the commonplaces of the concept of
History and the historical in both traditions subscribes to neither
corrective nor deconstructive objectives, even as Walcott partakes of
the means of allegory that serve those other objectives. Walcott’s
poet-protagonist Shabine does not allegorize a people’s historicality in
order to perform and thereby inaugurate its legitimacy. 12 Yet neither
does he indulge the double gesture of invoking the historical in order
to expose its fictions and fictionality. Instead, Shabine revises the
meaning of the historical as a particular kind of allegory, one which
repeats and recites commonplaces but in different contexts, henceforth
placed in apposition with the original contexts as a virtually more
productive body of citation aimed toward future citation. This does not
describe a naïve faith; rather, it describes what we might call a
performed belief, in which one’s own participation (citation and
projected recitation) partly secures its confidence.
To return to the initial question, how may we understand the line
“the sea is History”? Between the sea and History, which is vehicle
and which tenor? In Western culture, among others, the sea
10
V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, London: Andre Deutsch, 1974, 27. Naipaul was
born in Trinidad. In Caribbean circles, his disaffection from the Caribbean has
surpassed Froude’s original sentiment in infamy.
11
de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 261. De Man is here speaking of lyric as a genre
tendentiously employed to attain the ends of such “defensive” strategies.
12
Bhabha describes the “pedagogical” institution of diverse peoples as a national
constituency through the device of narration that nonetheless must contend with the
“performance” of the people which undermines such pedagogy. See Homi K. Bhabha,
“DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”, in Nation
and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha, London: Routledge, 1990, 291-322.
60 Common Places
conventionally signifies the eternally recurring, the origin of origins, a

fathomless, isotropic space that defines all that it is not – horizons,
land, limits. In African diasporic discourse, the sea acquires a dolorous
connotation in light of the Middle Passage. 13 All of these meanings
certainly circulate in Walcott’s line. As for History, does it refer to
“the history of the transatlantic slave diaspora”, as many critics would
have it? If so, the line would echo the proclamation of Césaire’s nègre
in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: “There is yet an ocean to
cross.” 14 Or is this the History persistently challenged by Walcott’s
poetics? Some critics identify that challenge as a corrective measure,
such that Walcott exposes the bias in the definitions and
representations of history. He thereby achieves a “transvaluation of
the traditional idea of history” and “valorizes the inner capacities and
principles that have gone into the experience of [the Middle Passage]
... the substance of which real history consists”. 15 That is, Walcott is
“engaged in producing a counterhistoriography”, and further,
“discloses the inadequacy of the written record and accounts based on
it, in order to redress the balance toward a more complete picture,
pieced out with the imagination”. 16 According to this line of critique,
Walcott seeks to revindicate Caribbean history, but the frequency of
this critique suggests that it is preconditioned to some extent by
notions about what a politicized minority literature should achieve. 17
Indeed, identical claims are made regarding the work of numerous
marginalized writers from widely diverse backgrounds.
Perhaps the aesthetic glitter of Walcott’s writing and his Nobel
Prize have biased critical approaches to his work, most of which
13
For a fine collection of essays regarding the literary as well as the cultural legacy of
the Middle Passage as trope in African diasporic literature, see Black Imagination and
the Middle Passage, eds Maria Diedrich et al., New York: Oxford University Press,
1999.
14
Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, ed. and intro. Abiole Irele,
Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2000, 32.
15
Patricia Ismond, Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek
Walcott’s Poetry, Mona, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2001, 10.
16
Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, Gainesville: University Press of
Florida, 2000, 64, 67.
17
For instance, Australian poet John Kinsella chides Walcott for his “European eye”
and advises: “a more persistent paranoid vision might better reveal the deep
obfuscations and abstractions that inform the great wrongs of colonial history”
(quoted in Jim Hannan, “Crossing Couplets: Making Form the Matter of Walcott’s
Tiepolo’s Hound”, New Literary History, XXXIII/3 [Summer 2002], 560).
assume that his poetics reflect the conventions of traditional English

poetry and its thematics and thus exempt it from closer examination.
In contrast, Rei Terada cogently argues that this line of criticism
misreads not only Walcott’s poetry but postmodernist and
poststructuralist theory as well. Significantly for this study, Terada
refers to the allegorical force of Walcott’s writing, which she tells us
“Walcott acknowledges and at times even rues”, but specifies that
“Beginning with the intuition that poetry can only be allegorical,
Walcott extends this knowledge to language as a whole”. 18 Her
analysis of his poem “The Light of the World” proves that postmodern
enactments of difference by “manifest verbal dislocution” conjoined
with formal dislocution are, in a sense, mystified themselves. Such
postmodern poetry retains the assumption that language can be made
to say something in a certain way, even if (or especially) to say that
language prefigures and is opaque to thought. In this regard, Terada
proposes: “Walcott demonstrates what postmodern poetry might look
like if it lived” by its own episteme.
In a refreshing departure from the skepticism of much literary
criticism, Terada argues that recognizing the limits of aesthetics, from
“political protest” to postmodern poetry, need not contravene its
ethical value: “Without the illusion of mastery over language,
[Walcott] still aims for communal relevance, beauty, and ‘truth.’” 19
Jim Hannan, in a deft treatment of the couplet form and rhyme in
Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound, also disputes the “mimetic
presuppositions about literature” that much black diasporic and
postcolonial criticism betrays in its separation of “the highly literary –
imagination (with its indebtedness to Romanticism), balance, the
formal symmetry ... from the contemporary and postcolonial – the
demands of history, the constitution of Caribbean society”. While
Hannan tends to phenomenalize form, such that couplets are taken to
“express conditions of the postcolonial”, he acknowledges form’s
independent value “working in excess of the given logic or meaning of
these lines”. 20 As previously asserted in the Introduction, form in
African diasporic culture functions in intricately cultivated ways.
18
Rei Terada, “Derek Walcott and the Poetics of ‘Transport’”, Postmodern Culture,
II/1 (September 1991), Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu (accessed 1 June 2006),
paragraph 3.
19
Ibid., paragraphs 2, 3, 17.
20
Hannan, “Crossing Couplets”, 575, 560, 560, 567.
62 Common Places
Terada underscores such a complex relation when she observes that

“poets sometimes do things for purely formal reasons, but Walcott
recalls that people in his childhood neighborhood also sometimes
‘quarrelled for the formal custom of quarrelling.’” 21
As with the other poets in this study, Walcott draws frequently and
seriously on the complex aesthetic and political resources of
Romanticism. What African Atlantic poets may find so compelling in
Romanticism is the character of its ambivalence toward modernity.
Staking a claim in faith despite its apparent impotence in light of
history, Romanticism bears a similarity to what Walcott calls the “acid
and the sweet” vision of the New World black. 22 Several critics
discern a Romantic streak in Walcott, though not explicitly in terms of
faith and modernity. Paul Breslin identifies a “Shelleyan ideal”
underpinning many of Walcott’s poems, whose poet-speakers
implicitly function as an “unacknowledged legislator whose vision …
offers an ideal toward which nations should aspire”; furthermore,
Walcott “invokes a Romantic poetics in which the authority of
language is grounded not in convention but in nature itself”. 23 While
Breslin at times speaks of Romanticism’s relation to nature and
Walcott’s use of convention in reductive terms, he nonetheless
recognizes Walcott’s idealism as one that reaches beyond the
individual self. In a similar vein, Paula Burnett asserts: “Walcott is no
romantic, but he is an idealist, in the sense that he believes in the
open-endedness of possibilities.” 24 In his poem “The Light of the
World”, Terada affirms that “Walcott gives that society what he loves
most, his lux mundi, beauty, poetry, even though he realizes that is all
‘but’ nothing .... But notice that this diminishment does not free the
poet from communal responsibilities.” 25
When we scrutinize what appears to be an austere, self-evident
statement, “the sea is History”, it becomes more elusive, far richer. It
mimics the logical proposition A = A , whose simple equivalency
belies the context of Walcott’s figure, which is the opaque, complex,
still-unfolding story of transatlantic slavery. Such deceptive simplicity
suits Glissant’s fondness for the philosophic aphorism, and he
21
Terada, “Derek Walcott and the Poetics of ‘Transport’”, para. 6.
22
Walcott, “Muse of History”, 41.
23
Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 200, 198.
24
Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, 19.
25
Terada, “Derek Walcott and the Politics of ‘Transport’”, para. 8.
foregrounds the semantic intractability of Walcott’s line when he

employs it as the epigraph to his philosophical treatise Poétique de la
Relation. There, it is curiously cited without the article as “Sea is
History”. Glissant’s capitalized Sea mirrors its appearance in
Walcott’s Collected Poems, where the title appears as “The Sea Is
History” and hangs as an emblem over the poem, evoking other
emblems such as the inscription above the Gate of Hell in Dante’s
Inferno. In this regard, the title “The Sea Is History” encapsulates an
allegory, and, like Dante’s allegory and the allegorical poetry
influenced by it Blake, Shelley, and Hölderlin the question of the
historical and ex-historical destiny of a national people cuts through
Walcott’s poem.
In “The Schooner Flight”, allegory is explicitly a citational as
much as it is an aesthetic-ethical practice, as we will see. In fact,
citation gives aesthetic-ethical yearnings their force. The allegorical
echoes in “The Schooner Flight” hearken further back than
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Walcott invokes
allegory’s heyday in medieval literature in ironic but reverent
allusions to The Wanderer and The Seafarer (c. 975), and William
Langland’s Piers Plowman (c. 1360-99). The Old Testament’s Book
of Job and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1604) make their appearances.
“Flight” also points forward to modernism through T.S. Eliot’s The
Waste Land (1922) and Little Gidding (1942).
Allegory, like History, moved from Christian to secular rhetoric
from the late nineteenth-century onward, with some exceptions.
Unlike History, its teleological impulse has dwindled. Instead, its
temporality consists “only in the repetition ... of a previous sign”, as
Paul de Man argues. In Western conventions of literature, allegory
prefigures the redemption of the world, which presumably arrives at a
future time relative to the allegory’s composition. Specifically,
redemption is an event of the future perfect tense: redemption will
have arrived. Thus, allegorical signs are actually retrodictively
assigned their status as signs. This structural principle undercuts the
primacy of meaning insofar as it cultivates a “relationship between
signs in which the reference to their respective meanings ... become[s]
of secondary importance”. 26 Following Walter Benjamin, Timothy
Bahti explains that “Allegory is that which resists historiography even
26
64 Common Places
as it provokes history as its own representation, as the ongoing

recovered meaning, and the unremembering (unerinnernde) memory
(Andenken or Gedächtnis) of loss”. 27
With respect to Walcott’s epic Omeros, Breslin specifies that “the
retracing [of diasporic routes] opens a new communication between
present and past on terms other than either a nostalgic pretense of fully
recovered origin or a fatalistic acceptance of the narrative of dispersal
and loss”. 28 Also foregrounding Walcott’s relation to history, Burnett
defines Walcott’s poetics as “mythopoeic” and describes its workings
in a fashion that resembles those of allegory:
A mythopoeic art is related to symbolism but does not confine itself to

fixed correspondences as symbolism tends to do. Rather, its
characteristic mode is narratological; it unfolds and develops
meanings. 29
Given these insights, Walcott’s allegory represents neither an evasion

nor a rejection of history, but rather a different relation to it. Because
of their vigilant attention to form, de Man’s, Bahti’s, and Benjamin’s
critiques of allegory usefully ground our reading of Walcott’s poem. 30
While Bahti interprets Benjamin’s notion of “unremembering
memory” in a somewhat negative light, the phrase recalls Glissant’s
“third avatar” of the abyss of transatlantic slave experience, the
reflection of the unfathomable deeps that are Afro-Caribbean memory
on the blue expanse of the sky. 31 However, such “blue savannahs” of
memory are the allegorical impression of history and therefore an
ultimately positive, iterative force.
27
28
Paul Breslin, “Derek Walcott’s ‘Reversible World’: Centers, Peripheries, and the
Scale of Nature”, Callaloo, XXVIII/1 (Winter 2005), 19.
29
Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, 92-93.
30
Theodor Adorno, Bahti, Benjamin, and de Man have all done excellent work on
allegory and lyric. Unfortunately, much of this work is widely dispersed in the form of
essays and notes: but for a start, see Theodor Adorno, “Parataxis”, in Adorno, Notes to
Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992, II, 109-49, and the previously mentioned “On Lyric Poetry
and Society”, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, I, 37-54; Bahti, Ends of the Lyric, 57-
163; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 228-387 and The Origin of German Tragic
Drama; and de Man, Blindness and Insight, 187-228, and Rhetoric of Romanticism.
31
Walcott’s engagement of allegory is eminently rhetorical in ways

that recall the Romantics, early and late, but it severs redemption from
nostalgia or history. In both Romantic and post-romantic poetry,
allegory is fully bound to place, ethos, and a particularly concrete
expression of time (past, present, and future) as co-extensive distances
laid out on a landscape, similar to the African Atlantic temporalities
described in the introduction. While we are accustomed to conceiving
Romantic poetry as the poetry of nature and of location (as in
Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” or Hölderlin’s many river poems),
geographic specificity or singularity has less purchase on the
Romantic imagination than we may believe. Even in Wordsworth, de
Man observes, “the significance of the locale can extend so far as to
include a meaning that is no longer circumscribed by the literal
horizon of a given place”. The upshot of “an allegorical rather than a
metaphorical and descriptive use of nature” is “primarily a
redemptive, ethical function”. 32 Adorno underscores the ethical
impulse in Hölderlin, linking his abstract poetics to a sense of the
perilous deceits of naturalized language:
Whenever Hölderlinian pathos seizes on the names of existing beings,

of places in particular, the poetic gesture tells the living ... that they
are mere signs …. This was the price Hölderlin had to pay, however,
to transcend the expressive lyric. 33
The Middle Passage has clearly assumed such allegorical status in

Afro-Creole literature; its literature often juxtaposes the narrative of
the Middle Passage with the Israelites’ travails in the Egyptian desert,
another historical event suffused with allegorical gravity. 34 De Man’s
claim that the Romantics, confronted by the limits of symbol and by a
decreasing faith in divine redemption, were obliged to develop their
own typology distinctly pertains to African Atlantic poetics. The
Romantics’ “rediscovery of an allegorical tradition” consequently took
form in a “dialectic ... located entirely in the temporal relationships
that exist within a system of allegorical signs”. Walcott’s typology
neither counters nor rejects the tradition; it flaunts its inventive
32
de Man, Blindness and Insight, 206, 204.
33
Adorno, Notes to Literature, II, 122-23.
34
See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 205-12.
66 Common Places
revision while implying the foreshortened reach of the traditions to

which it is indissolubly linked.
However, the limits African Atlantic history poses to de Man’s
model are not only interesting but provocative, implying a more
resourceful use of allegory than de Man anticipates. De Man claims:
“Allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin,
and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes
its language in the void of this temporal difference.” The self, “seen in
its authentically temporal predicament”, must resort to a “defensive
strategy that tries to hide from this negative self-knowledge”. 35 Yet
the distinct relation to history, which is also an occlusion from history,
of African Atlantic cultures affects African Atlantic portrayals of the
self “divided to the vein”. 36 Walcott’s poet-narrator Shabine, like
Jonah in the Bible, leaves shore to escape a burden – his flight is not a
defensive strategy. And his contempt for identity politics of any creed
moots the question of essential self-identification. The acid-sweet,
double conscious being of the slave descendants precludes the kind of
self-identified transcendence of Descartes’ cogito (although it does not
preclude such in representation, as seen in many African Atlantic
works). 37 On the contrary, Glissant asserts that the New World black
self projects from negative self-knowledge, and Glissant illustrates
this precisely through the allegory of the abyss. In Glissant’s typology,
the three abysses repeat, “three times knotted to the unknown”, but
strangely concurrently:
The belly of this slave-ship dissolves you, precipitates you into a non-
world out of which you cry. This ship is a matrix, an abyss-womb.
Engenderer of your outcries.
....
Thus is the second abyss the ocean depths ... depths punctuated by
rusty ball-and-chains.
....
35
de Man, Blindness and Insight, 205, 208, 207, 208.
36
As remarked in an earlier note, the line “Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?”
from the early poem “A Far Cry from Africa” (1962) remains one of the most
ubiquitous of Walcott lines (Walcott, Collected Poems, 17).
37
“Double consciousness”, or the inability to continuously and transparently inhabit
the self, has been memorably theorized by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk; and
Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986.
In parallel to this mass of water, the third avatar of the abyss

projects therein the reverse image of all that has been abandoned, that
will not be recovered for generations but in the blue savannahs of
memory or the imaginary, effacing little by little.
The self (subject) is explicitly ex-original and, like allegory, projected

in temporal and spatial repetition and relation to the abyss (the object).
Yet the object is also relayed in Glissant’s sense: “the abyss is also
projection, and perspective of the unknown.” 38 In this regard,
Shabine’s flight, the schooner Flight, and Shabine’s poem “The
Schooner Flight” (not to mention Walcott’s poem “The Schooner
Flight”) exemplify this complex allegorical dynamic. Such complexity
denies simple assumptions about “the sea is History”.
A voyage poem as well as an allegory, “The Schooner Flight”
incorporates the fantastic, as does Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient
Mariner”, whereas other Caribbean poems eschew it in their
remembrance of the Middle Passage. Most major Caribbean poets
have written a voyage poem, and there are several book-length poems,
all of them allegories, notably Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays
natal, Glissant’s Sel Noir, and Brathwaite’s The Arrivants. 39 Walcott’s
poem really has two identifiable authors: Walcott and his protagonist
Shabine, who furnishes us with “The Schooner Flight” as the poem
composed on his travels. Given the nature of allegory, the plot is
wholly and unrepentantly unoriginal. Shabine, the poet-sailor and
narrator, flees from the corrupt island of his home and his infidelity
with Maria Concepcion, both of which “had started to poison my
soul” (346). He joins a crew composed of sailors from various
Caribbean islands, and the ship encounters a ghost ship and a storm on
its way across the Middle Passage. Before reading Shabine’s poem, it
will be helpful to recall the broad themes of the allegories that it
recites. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner crucifies the goodness that has
arbitrarily been bestowed on his ship and therefore must pay penance:
“With my crossbow / I shot the ALBATROSS.” 40 The innocent crew,
38
Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 18-19, 21.
39
With some censure, Condé refers to Césaire’s allegorical staging as ideological: “In
the celebrated opening lines of Return to my Native Land, Césaire gives an example of
this ideological description of nature” (Condé, “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the
West Indian Writer”, 153).
40
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, ll. 81-82, in The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, II, 335-52.
68 Common Places
however, pays the greater price: they suffer from the Mariner’s lack of
faith. That the innocent must endure suffering is, in fact, a motif
weaving through the intertext of “The Schooner Flight”. In the
medieval allegorical poem The Seafarer, “the world is wielded by
shadows of men / Ruling under affliction”. The Seafarer promises to
“tell of my travelling” that begins in bleakness:
how I lived out a winter of wretchedness

wandering exiled on the ice-cold sea
....
There I heard only the ocean roar,
41
the cold foam, or the song of the swan.
Shabine echoes the Seafarer as he takes leave of home, standing

outside “like a stone and nothing else move / but the cold sea rippling
like galvanize” (345). The corrupt government and Church in William
Langland’s dream vision poem Piers Plowman subject the common
folk to interminable hardship, so that Will, the poet-dreamer named
after the poet, seeks out Piers Plowman. Piers is the righteous avenger
of the folk who “putten hem to the plough, pleiden ful selde, / In
settyng and sowynge swonken ful harde” and whose hard labor the
“wastours” – or corrupt Church and its government accomplice –
“with glotonye destruyeth”. 42 In The Waste Land or “Unreal City” of
Eliot’s modernity, people subsist – “neither / Living nor dead” without
faith or passion, already condemned: “death had undone so many”;
“We who were living are now dying”; “My people humble people
who expect / Nothing.” 43
These allegories stop – which is not to say end – in the same place,
as well: a blessing. Walcott’s Shabine tells us, “From this bowsprit, I
bless every town” (360), recalling The Waste Land’s ambiguous
blessing in Hindi “Shantih shantih shantih”; 44 the Mariner’s “O happy
living things! no tongue / Their beauty might declare: / A spring of
41
The Seafarer, ll. 92-93, 2, 16-17, 20-21, translated by Edwin Morgan in Edwin
Morgan, Rites of Passage: Translations, Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1976, 102-
104.
42
William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-text,
Prologue, ll. 20-22, ed. A.V.C. Schmidt, London: J.M. Dent, 1991, 1.
43
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 63, 329, 305-306, in The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, II, 2181-96.
44
Ibid., l. 434.
love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware”; 45 and the
Seafarer’s “The blessed man lives in humility: on him heaven’s
mercies descend”. 46 In Piers Plowman, it remains for Will and
Conscience to seek blessing, but Conscience’s outcry awakens Will
from the vision before this is achieved.
Even this handful of select parallels reveals “The Schooner Flight”
to be partly an “allegory of reading” in de Man’s sense. 47 That it
constitutes an allegory of reading allegories of reading underscores
the explicitly and exclusively citational nature of allegory. This begs
the question of whether allegory promises nothing more than a literal,
inscribed redemption, and if so, may give rise to the same critique of
transcendence leveled at Romantic poets. If Shabine’s modest hope
that his “hand gave voice to one people’s grief” (11) will satisfy him,
he may well instance one of those Romantic solipsistic speakers. This
reading interprets Shabine’s statement as a litote that brings the poem
to a close by offering the poem itself as evidence. While the
suppositional and modest character of his statement distinguishes
Shabine from another exile in voyage, Césaire’s nègre, many critics
remark Walcott’s taste for apotheosizing gestures. 48 The more
interesting question that Shabine’s modest claim implies is this: if it
does not voice one’s people’s grief, what then does his poem do?
In order to tease out how Walcott’s allegory of reading reconceives
the structure of allegory, and relatedly, History and Progress, we will
scrutinize the allegorical personae, namely the narrator Shabine,
History, and Progress. These, along with the Antilles itself, are the
four personal axes of the poem and represent allegory at its most
compressed. We will forgo examining the Antilles separately because
45
Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, l. 343.
46
The Seafarer, l. 111.
47
“Allegories of reading” collate figural praxis and metafigural theory, not without
conflict. In de Man’s clearest definition of such allegories, “a literary text
simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode”; “precisely
when the highest claims are being made for the unifying power of metaphor, these
very images rely in fact on the deceptive use of semi-automatic grammatical patterns”
(Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, 17, 16).
48
See Terada, “Derek Walcott and the Politics of ‘Transport’”; Lloyd Brown,
“Dreamers and Slaves: the Ethos of Revolution in Walcott and Leroi Jones”, in
Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner, Washington DC:
Three Continents Press, 1993, 193-201; and Isabella Maria Zoppi, “Omeros, Derek
Walcott, and the Contemporary Epic Poem”, Callaloo, XXII/2 (Spring 1999), 509-28.
70 Common Places
as a type or antitype of Paradise, depending on one’s perspective, it

stages the other personae and is registered in them. We will
subsequently examine how Shabine’s reading of Eliot’s allegory of
History, The Waste Land, within the context of the Middle Passage’s
wasteland of the ocean floor, furnishes a different account of possible
redemption, one that does not seclude itself within the pantheons of
the fictitiously whole past and tradition.
The Creole bard

Shabine calls himself a seafarer (356) and like that early medieval
bard, bears witness to his world’s moral deterioration. The Seafarer
laments, “Now there are neither kings nor emperors / Nor gold-givers
such as once there were ... joys have departed”. 49 Shabine expresses
himself with similar grandeur, but subsequently undercuts it with
irony:
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,

a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.
(346)
Shabine is “bereaved of friend and kin”, but not in the sense of the
Seafarer, who testifies to the decline of a noble world. The Creole
Shabine can claim neither nation nor kin because his nation (in the
sense of “a people”) is indefinitely comprised of “partial presences”. 50
As a “red nigger”, he is an inadequate nigger and bears a common
noun for a proper name: shabine, from the French chabin, a
49
The Seafarer, ll. 87-91.
50
For Bhabha, the “partial presence” of the colonizer in the colonized gives rise to
colonial ambivalence (Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man”, 127). In the Afro-Creole case,
ambivalence is magnified by the “partial” presences of unknown (in number and kind)
African genealogies.
derogatory term for mulatto. 51 Although he champions his mongrel

status by recourse to the modern sense of nation as a pluralist state, he
will not enjoy, as did his bardic predecessors, the people’s
acknowledgement of him as epitome of the race. The medieval bards’
ubi sunt lamentations were answered by God with heavenly reward.
While the Wanderer laments the absence of magnificence and honor –
“’Where now is the warrior? Where is the war horse? / Bestowal of
treasure, and sharing of feast?’” 52 – he may confidently anticipate
their rightful restoration in heaven. In contrast, Shabine yearns only
for simple things never afforded to the African descendant in the first
place:
Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbour?

Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for,
and the window I can look from that frames my life?
(350)
The stark contrast in value hollows out the generic function of ubi
sunt, which is to lament the passing of an innocent and noble world.
As for Shabine’s visionary gifts, it is either wishful thinking or bold
deceit when he claims to have witnessed the Caribbean as “slums of
empire was paradise”, given that “nobody” historical ever recorded a
Caribbean paradise before its transformation into an empire of slave-
run factories. The Creole bard is illegitimate in form and function,
then, for a bard explicitly operates within a unique tradition, which
confers cultural weight, and Shabine can claim none. Until the
tropology of world, people, race, glory, History, and monumentality is
severed from the concept of authenticity, Shabine remains an
imposter. Nonetheless is Shabine forging another (also an other)
commonplace through iteration, just as Glissant anticipates the poet of
Relation will do. It is an ethical mandate underwritten by aesthetics.
In the tradition of dream vision, the protagonist resembles the
author, in name and otherwise. George Kane (paraphrased by A.V.C.
Schmidt) describes the convention of “French and English dream
51
Breslin notes: “The word derives from French chabin, a thick-wooled variety of
sheep ‘once thought to be a cross between a sheep and a goat’” (Breslin, Nobody’s
Nation, 315, n.3 [emphasis in the original]).
52
The Wanderer, ll. 84-85, in An Anthology of Old English Poetry Translated Into
Alliterative Verse, ed. Charles W. Kennedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960,
7.
72 Common Places
vision poems for the author to incorporate his ‘signature’ in the text,
sometimes in an oblique fashion”. 53 Such biographic self-inscription
can be very seductive, soliciting hastily biographic interpretations
where others would better serve. 54 “The Schooner Flight” begins with
an allusion to the medieval dream vision Piers Plowman by William
Langland, whose protagonist bears the name and physical likeness of
its author. “Longe Wille” or tall Will falls asleep after a supernatural
encounter “of Fairye me thoghte”, 55 and the Caribbean everyman
Shabine also personifies the young Derek Walcott, a rusty-headed and
green-eyed Dutch, English, and African slave descendant poet. Like
the indeterminacy of Will’s “Fairye”, Shabine relates his tale as a true
account but casts its verisimilitude into doubt by noting the
phantasmagorical sight of himself in double:
I look in the rearview and see a man

exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island.
(345)
Yet Shabine differs from Will insofar as he does not know what the
vision portends. In Piers Plowman, either Will or allegorical figures
like Holi Chirche furnish interpretations of the allegories for the
reader. In contrast, the meaning of Shabine’s allegorical journey
remains unclear, even when he sums it up as “one theme”:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart –

the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know,
vain search for one island that heals with its harbour
and a guiltless horizon, where the almond’s shadow
doesn’t injure the sand.
(360-61)
53
See A.V.C. Schmidt’s Introduction to Langland, Piers Plowman, xiii.
54
For instance, Ismond does not hesitate to assert that “Walcott’s voice ... merges into
that of Shabine: they function as a single entity and give us, effectively, the
Shabine/Walcott persona as protagonist” (Ismond, Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The
Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s Poetry, 230). She reads the entire poem through
the “Shabine/Walcott” compound. Edward Baugh gently reproves Breslin for his
dependence on biography, especially to read tone (Edward Baugh, “Derek Walcott
and the Centering of the Caribbean Subject”, Research in African Literatures,
XXXIV/1 [Spring 2003], 153-54).
55
Langland, Piers Plowman, Prologue, l. 6.
Less a discursive than a musical theme (“principal melody,

plainsong”), 56 Shabine’s theme includes a series of four projectile
images that, if metaphors, are vehicles for the tenor “pursuit”. Paradox
undercuts the theme, however, implying that the pursuit is a syntactic
one rather than a semantic one; such a pursuit does not require a
sensible object such as a target with an identifiable, knowable aim or a
search that is not futile from the start. In lieu of meaning, then,
Shabine performs the structure of meaning, an allegory of reading.
This act exemplifies the significance of form in African Atlantic
culture as discussed in the introduction: form and rhetoric are at the
very least as significant as the meaning, if not already largely the
meaning in themselves that readers anticipate them to express. In the
imagery of Glissant’s allegory of the abyss, the figure of a literal abyss
of meaning, the reflected sky on a reflecting ocean deflects
nothingness into form, which is meaning: those “blue savannahs of
memory”. The sky/ocean as form pronounces it, repeats it, instantiates
it: “Excess is a repetition that signifies.” 57 Shabine seeks a place
destined by the rhetoric of imagination rather than the heavenly
paradise of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval bards. But uncovering the
commonplaces of aesthetic and ethical desire sets these places in
meaningful relation. He spins five metaphors of pursuit, the last of
which is flight and “The Schooner Flight” – the poem itself. In this
regard, Shabine allies himself to Coleridge’s Mariner, who also looks
for an opportunity to tell his tale in order to alleviate his heart-pain.
Indeed, the Mariner’s theme valorizes rhetoric: “He prayeth best, who
loveth best / All things both great and small.”58 In other words, prayer
makes visible one’s adherence to God’s example.
Casting a wide net from the local to the universal, Breslin
interprets Shabine’s aimless target and vain search to bring forth his
acceptance of the fundamentally Caribbean, and by extension
universal, “condition of transcendental homelessness ... the condition
of life itself”. 59 While a plausible reading, it is this generalizing
“temptation” that Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze advises critics to “resist”,
56
See “theme”, def. 4 of OED Online: http://www.oed.com.
57
58
Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, ll. 614-17.
59
Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 214.
74 Common Places
as noted in the Introduction. 60 Indeed, Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari warn of the capacity of minor or marginalized languages to
“reterritorialize” or be reterritorialized when the “asignifying,
intensive usage of the language” is evacuated. 61 It is not so much the
universalizing as the equalizing, flattening effect of such readings that
misses the deep political stakes of Walcott’s ironic reading of
allegory. 62 Historically, the European imagination sought paradise as
one island with a healing harbor, guiltless horizon, and gentle shadow,
and this oneness fueled exploration and colonization. Ostensibly
justified by the divine and Historical sanction of Western destiny,
Europeans wantonly pursued, largely without consequences, lucre,
their sexual desire and moral perversion, and their nostalgia for either
aristocratic or exceptional status (actualized in the Big House, El
Dorado, or the City on the Hill) or romantic noble savagery (Paradise
island). In mistaking an allegory for the imminent real and attempting
to locate its reference outside language, European cultural imaginaries
advanced economic and imperialist interests, which eventually
developed into a machine fueled by what Paul Gilroy calls “the
complicity of rationality and ethnocidal terror”. 63 In this respect,
Shabine’s allegory is both an allegory of reading (allegory) and an
allegory of history that, as Bahti argues, is not:
… history told to the point of its being known (i.e., as narrative), but
rather the empty tombs of historical signs as the site and cite ... of
memorization, reiteration, and a radical thought of history ... signs of
holding on to loss in and as language that figurally means – and
repeatedly, ceaselessly reminds of – the loss of its meaning, even as
historians and their narrative history would represent literally or
60
Eze makes this statement with explicit reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of
“minor literature”: “critics must resist the temptation to characterize the struggles of
some modern European writers with language in exact terms as the African” (Eze,
“Language and Time in Postcolonial Experience”, 35).
61
62
Melas distinguishes qualitative and quantitative comparison, “similitudo” and
“comparatio” in her analysis of Fanon’s and Glissant’s rhetoric. She argues that “a
similarity constituted as difference from difference can never coalesce into a standard
and therefore produce a measurement by comparison” (Melas, “Versions of
Incommensurability”, 278-79).
63
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 56.
“historically” the forgetting of this loss in an amnesia that calls itself a

recovery. 64
Where historic amnesia for historians is loss, Walcott proffers the

rich imaginative and social possibilities of historical amnesia far
beyond the productive emptiness of “signs as the site and cite ... of a
radical thought of history”. Amnesia is the painful but nonetheless
foundational non-origin of Afro-Caribbeans and African Americans,
born/e from the abyss of the ship’s “non-world”, as Glissant
designates. Unlike the metaphysical tombs of the Romantics and
Moderns, the abyss tomb/womb is historical. It incites and recites in
the form of a “memory of imagination”. Walcott rejects “the muse of
history” as a “creative or culpable force” for poetry. History is a
powerful but oppressive muse, and “literature that serves historical
truth” bespeaks a narrow, barren imaginative horizon: “This shame
and awe of history possess poets of the Third World who think
language as enslavement.” 65 According to Walcott, by conflating
history and language, Third World poets are blind to the redemptive
and revolutionary potential of a situation in which the status of
Historical truth is strictly discursive and, by the same token, as
transformative and mutable as the language.
History’s Shabine
So what is Shabine’s History? Shabine knows History on the epochal
scale of colonial and anti-colonial discourse: “The first chain my
hands and apologize, ‘History’; / the next said I wasn’t black enough
for their pride” (350). Here, History is the implacable, impersonal
teleology of Europe towards her destiny; History is also its subsequent
(“first” and “next”) reinscription as Race, as historically constructed
an allegory as any. The white man’s apology expresses neither regret
nor remorse; it merely acknowledges its assumed historical
imperative. Akin to shrugging one’s shoulders, the apology ironically
demotes an idealization of history as an agonistic record of glory and
triumph to mere determinist necessity. Defined as such, history can
only be “assented to”. 66
64
65
Walcott, “Muse of History”, 62, 37, 37.
66
76 Common Places
From its first mention in Walcott’s poem, History assumes an

anthropomorphic guise and sneers at Shabine, the grandson he
disavows:
I met History once, but he ain’t recognize me,

a parchment Creole, with warts
like an old sea-bottle, crawling like a crab
through the holes of shadow cast by the net
of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat.
I confront him and shout, “Sir, is Shabine!
They say I’se your grandson. You remember Grandma,
your black cook, at all?” The bitch hawk and spat.
A spit like that worth any number of words.
But that’s all them bastards have left us: words.
(350)
Personal history here furnishes Walcott the material for an allegory of

History. Walcott’s grandmothers were poor blacks and his wealthy
maternal grandfather a Dutchman; his paternal grandfather was an
Englishman. The grandfathers were Creoles by virtue of their West
Indian residence and the legal parchment that decreed them as such. 67
Dressed in the stereotypical garb of colonial gentlemen, History treats
Shabine with typical disdain. He allegorizes the imperial Father that
refuses to recognize its colonized bastard-sons. In turn, “nigger”
arrivistes ventriloquize the History’s rejection: as racial bastard, he is
not “black enough” to claim the cachet of authenticity (350). Here,
History is anything but impersonal, bestowing favors only on
historically or racially authentic persons.
Furthermore, History is an allegory of reading and, thus analyzed,
divulges the extreme density of Shabine’s allegory. In his crabbed
fashion, History invokes Eliot’s Prufrock, who would rather have been
“a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of the silent
seas”. 68 In literary criticism, Prufrock proverbially represents the
impotence of modern consciousness, but his fanciful metaphor also
invokes Hamlet’s sidelong reply to Polonius: “for you yourself, sir,
67
After more than a century of changing hands between the French and English, the
English were granted St Lucia in 1814 by the Treaty of Paris and it became a crown
colony.
68
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, ll. 73-74, in The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, II, 2174-77.
should be old as I am, if, like a crab, you could go backward.” 69

Introducing Hamlet prohibits a simply phenomenal interpretation. 70
When Hamlet feigns a fictitious author’s description of old men, he
cunningly describes Polonius, “eyes purging thick amber and plum-
tree gum ... and a plentiful lack of wit”. 71 Only once this citational
chain is realized can Prufrock’s and Hamlet’s unflattering portrait
point ahead to the “sea-bottle” warts of Shabine’s History. As History
re-iterates Polonius, he unwittingly ridicules himself (Polonius’
foible). Because Polonius does such a sorry job of pretending that he
“ain’t recognize” Hamlet, he is made the audience’s fool. Likewise
History and Shabine. And in a final turn, this allegorical regress
doubles Shabine’s reaction to History’s spit. The spit’s ironic
eloquence is poorly contested by Shabine’s cliché sentiment that “a
spit like that worth any number of words”. At the same time, the spit
divulges a “plentiful lack of wit” compared to the legacy of “words,
words, words” that History bequeathed to its bastard sons. 72 Words
may be all that the Afro-Creoles inherited, but words can boomerang
back to History.
Is History an impersonal and irrevocable force, or one that
arbitrarily favors purity and authenticity? Is History Shabine’s
grandfather, representative of innumerable and anonymous colonial
fathers who sexually exploited black women and thereby created a
truly Creole race? Or is it imperialism’s abandonment and disavowal
of its children? Compared to this semantic polyphony, the allegorical
meaning of History is straightforward. History is its repetition through
signs – Prufrock, Polonius, Hamlet; or alternatively, bad faith and
(mis)recognition. It means “words”, as both Hamlet and Shabine
wryly observe. Words, as we have seen, walk crabwise, and History
69
Shakespeare, Hamlet, II.ii.205-206, in The Complete Pelican Shakespeare, eds
Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller, New York: Penguin, 1982, 1337-90.
70
Jonathan Culler reviews a reading of a Robert Frost poem “in an empirical frame”
that thereby misses an allusive citation to the French Renaissance poet François
Villon. He rightly observes that such methods fail the richness of poems that “call to
be calling, both to display their poetic calling and to mark the belief that language can
sometimes make things happen, through acts of naming, highlighting, and reordering,
as well as through the instigation of poetic forms that will repeat as readers or
listeners take them up and articulate them anew” (Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric?”,
PMLA, CXXIII/1 [January 2008], 203, 204).
71
Hamlet, II.ii.197-98.
72
Ibid., II.ii.192.
78 Common Places
can go backwards as allegory, as words. Yet each corresponding

iteration produces an allegorical relation that exceeds its two
iterations. For instance, the citation of the crab figure might signify:
(a) Shabine’s History, which crawls or escapes through blackness (the
grille) to attain colonial cream; (b) Eliot’s Prufrock as he would be, a
mindless creature free from modern angst; and/or (c) Shakespeare’s
Polonius, old age that would reverse. But locating the allegorical
referent in Shabine’s poem is impossible because its meaning is
instantiated only betwixt, between, and through all the iterations.
History is only linked to Prufrock through an ironic – thereby
ahistorical or synchronic – invocation of modernity. As de Man
argues, irony is “the instant at which the two selves ... are
simultaneously present, juxtaposed within the same moment but as
two irreconcilable and disjointed beings”. 73
History revels in modernity, which testifies to the West’s
expanding dominance over the earth through capitalism and
colonization, while Prufrock dreads modernity as civilization’s
decline. Yet these are not evolutionary stages; Shabine’s History is
contemporary with Eliot’s “Prufrock” (“Prufrock” was published in
1915; the parchment Creole was likely a grandfather about that time).
Moreover, the poem “The Schooner Flight” needs “Prufrock” for its
Hamlet citation to shuttle forward Polonius’ misrecognition and
Hamlet’s words into the context of modernity. Here is Benjamin’s
“metaleptic prolepsis”, in which, as Bahti explains, “one moves from
the past back to the present: the past anticipated its effect, response, or
fulfillment in a present that was ‘future’ for it but is present now”. 74
The allegorical path is discontinuous, yet none of the intermediary
citations are dispensable. Their repetition is imperative and conditions
a meaning that must be repeatable but wholly anomalous in the way
itineration is conceived by Deleuze and Guattari. In the entirely
different context of comparing models of science, it is the “following”
or itinerant sciences that “effect individuations through events or
haecceities, not through the ‘object’ as a compound of matter and
form”. 75 Likewise, Walcott’s allegory (re)produces instances of
73
74
75
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 371, 372. By the term “form”, Deleuze
and Guattari mean a final product, of presumed internal and external integrity, rather
than the rhetorical, structural form intended here. Deleuze and Guattari also
anomaly, “strait gate[s] through which the Messiah might enter”, that
is, the conditions for redemption. 76 The meaning of History in Walcott
will not reduce to trite paraphrases of “The sea is History”. In
Shabine’s poem, History totters backward to meet its colonials’ words
in the present, but cannot tell the difference until caught in the
“shadow” of its bastard colonial grandson’s allegory. As Shabine tells
us,
we live like our names and you would have

to be colonial to know the difference,
to know the pain of history words contain.
(354-55)
We can no more paraphrase the meaning of History than of pain.
A timeless progress
In Walcott, progress often bumps up against history: in his essay “The
Muse of History”, he describes the “vision of progress” as “the
rational madness of history seen as sequential time”. 77 The term vision
highlights how an ideal like progress becomes phenomenalized in
discourse. In the poem, progress is a vision, in all senses of the term,
and its cohort History can substitute for progress in several lines
without distorting the semantic meaning. Introduced as the capitalized
allegorized concept Progress, progress later appears without the initial
capital but nonetheless draws on the allegorical function. Progress
enjoys the benefit of explicitly positive denotations and connotations,
and in the allegorical crossfire of “The Schooner Flight”, progress
cannot but evoke Paul Bunyan’s Protestant 1728 manifesto The
Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come. Vince,
Shabine’s shipmate, first utters Progress when he espies a plane
overhead: “’Progress, Shabine, that’s what it’s all about. / Progress is
leaving all we small islands behind’” (355). Vince’s syntax begs the
question: what is the antecedent for “it” in “it’s all about”? If the
referent is Hegel’s History, the statement connotes: “Progress ... that’s
distinguish itineration from iteration and reiteration, the latter two of which conform
to the reproductive sciences that seek to extract constant, essential forms (ibid., 369-
74). In this study, iteration and reiteration are broadly synonymous with itineration but
are specific to rhetorical and aesthetic praxis rather than science.
76
Benjamin, Illuminations, 264.
77
Walcott, “Muse of History”, 41.
80 Common Places
what History all about ... leaving us behind”. If the tone is idiomatic,
the statement conveys that “Progress is what really matters in the
world ... and what really matters leaves us behind”. In either case,
Progress is foreign to small islands in the Third World, defined as
absence in both contribution and reception on the world stage.
Undermining this Hegelian dichotomy, Glissant points out the total
and necessary constitutive relation of all world entities, even though
the ultimate function of the small players remains unclear: “A
particular culture can pretend to function outside ... but it intervenes
nonetheless – for it can’t otherwise – as an active relay of Relation.” 78
Poets like Walcott must critique commonplaces that belie the true
Tout-Monde as well as bring differential commonplaces to the fore.
The structural logic of Relation that crosshatches the global and
dominant with small places and hinterlands is no small irony in the
Caribbean case. Modern capitalism, the economic and political
hegemony of Europe and the United States, developed by dint of the
slave trade and sugar industry, the latter based in the West Indian
colonies. 79 Historicality or global significance progressed precisely by
leaving behind colonies and their subject populations. In turn, slaves
progressed in status to indentured servants or colonial subjects. At a
second level, Progress as the West must leave behind the Rest in order
to constitute Progress in the first place. 80 Capitalism requires lateral
discrepancies. On this point, the OED Online date chart records the
first appearance of the figural sense of “progress” explicitly in relation
to imperialism and colonization as “advance, advancement; growth,
development, continuous increase; usually in good sense, advance to
better and better conditions, continuous improvement”. Thus, progress
occurred in 1603 with respect to the Ottoman Empire; in 1686 with
respect to the French-turned-Englishman and East India Company
representative Sir John Chardin’s business through Persia; and in
1862, according to historian of English civilization Henry T. Buckle,
who pronounced: “As civilization advances, the progress of
78
79
See Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History,
New York: Viking, 1985; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, New York:
Capricorn Books, 1966.
80
The witty phrase “the Rest” to indicate (ironically or not) the Third World and
underdeveloped nations, was first made widespread by the African writer Chinweizu’s
study, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African
Elite, New York: Random House, 1975.
manufactures greatly outstrips the progress of agriculture.” 81 Notably,

the last development of “progress” marks the movement from an
agricultural to industrial economy, which occurred through the
international industry established by plantation slavery. 82
Of progress, Shabine is quick to check Vincent’s naïvety:
“Progress is something to ask Caribs about.

They kill them by millions, some in war,
some by forced labour dying in the mines
looking for silver, after that niggers; more
progress. Until I see definite signs
that mankind change, Vince, I ain’t want to hear.
Progress is history’s dirty joke.
Ask that sad green island getting nearer”.
(355-56)
The rhymes are sardonically suggestive of a certain breed of progress:

“war”/“more”, “dying in the mines”/“definite signs”, “ain’t want to
hear”/“getting nearer”. Shabine brings to the fore the embedded
meanings of Progress by pitting the original literal meanings of
progress – “the action of stepping or marching forward or onward” 83
and “going on, progression; course or process (of action, events,
narrative, time, etc.)” 84 – against Vincent’s colonialist definition. The
syntax of his riposte slyly achieves the irony produced by this play.
Progress is “something”, as vague a pronoun as Vince’s “it”, to ask
Caribs about. He then less subtly replaces the proper nouns with
telling pronouns: “they kill them.” “They” syntactically substitutes for
Progress, but we know that Europeans indeed killed the indigenous
Caribbeans by the millions in their haste to implement the most
expedient and profitable blueprints for industry. As Knight explains:
“The dichotomous goals of gold and God were reconciled in slavery,
and the decimation of the local population that had taken place first on
Hispaniola soon spread throughout the region from the Bahamas to
81
OED Online, def. 4b.
82
On this view, see Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Alex Dupuy, “French
Merchant Capital and Slavery in Saint-Domingue”, Latin American Perspectives,
XII/3 (Summer 1985), 77-102; and Eugene D. and Elizabeth Fox Genovese, “The
Slave Economies in Political Perspective”, Journal of American History, LXVI/1
(June 1979), 336-71.
83
OED Online, def. 1a; citation from year 1475.
84
OED Online, def. 3b; citation from year 1432.
82 Common Places
Trinidad.” 85 The indigenous people that did not escape through flight
or warfare were enslaved, but when the natives proved unable to
withstand the physical trauma of slave labor and disease, Europeans
impassively changed course. They had discovered a heartier source:
the Africans. So Shabine discloses what from one standpoint is ironic,
from the other genuinely literal: that Progress as conceptualized and
represented by Europeans meant the advancement of economic, social,
and political power in proportion to raciological murder, oppression,
and exploitation. 86 Europeans progress from strategems of war to
labor, from native slaves to foreign, African slaves. Death progresses
purely by the numbers: “They kill [Caribs] by the millions ... after that
niggers; more progress.” Shabine also ironizes the moral progress
when Europeans moved from exploiting Caribs, the “savage,
irrational” but still human Other, to Africans, the “ultimate referent of
the ‘racially inferior’ Human Other”. 87 Progress as “mankind change”
is categorically distinct from Progress as mankind exchange, and this
contradiction between the conceptual and the actual makes for
“History’s dirty joke”.
The conversation leaves such an impression on Shabine that it
seeps into his sleep, morphing into a dream vision recasts the
symbolic dreams in Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea as an
allegory. Shabine’s dream iterates Antoinette’s dream in Rhys’ novel,
and likewise, Rhys’ novel famously iterates Charlotte Brontë’s novel
Jane Eyre. Allegory perpetuates itself, we remember, projecting its
future iteration by recourse to the past. The question of a novel’s
citation within a largely allegorical field will be momentarily deferred
until the chapter on Rankine, in which both Brontë’s and Rhys’ novels
figure largely. Rhys’ protagonist Antoinette is a white Creole who is
ambivalently divided between white England and black Dominica and
85
Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 38.
86
Gilroy has coined the useful term “raciology”, which emphasizes à la Foucault the
scientific, knowledge-driven institutionalizations that empower brute racism with
logic and rationale. He defines it as “the lore that brings the virtual realities of ‘race’
to dismal and destructive life” and argues that, given its imprimatur, it “cannot be
readily re-signified or de-signified” (Gilroy, Against Race, 11-12).
87
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:
Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation: An Argument”, The New
Centennial Review, III/3 (Fall 2003), 266. Wynter’s article provides a painstaking
analysis of the conceptualization of the human in the West, from its Christian to
secular, rational form.
occupies an impossible sociocultural position. West Indies-born, a

descendent of slave owners, Antoinette nonetheless acquires her
cultural disposition from the island’s black population. She is derided
as a “white cockroach”, a Shabine on the other side of the racial
divide. Antoinette dreams three times that she is fleeing from
“someone who hated” her into the treacherous, thick mountain forests
where Carib people still remain. She cannot move and hears footsteps
behind her. 88
Walcott’s allegorization imbues the colonial narrative with
paradoxically historical and ahistorical depth: the sins of progress are
not dated, nor do they limit their reach to particular individuals.
Shabine is not a Carib, but he experiences himself as one. Such sins
progressively, so to speak, reverb across times and humanities.
Shabine’s allegory cannot be reduced to narrative particularity
precisely because it is underpinned by commonplaces and, more
importantly, reproduces commonplaces. Shabine’s dream vision
refigures Antoinette’s flight as an allegory of the initial contact
between Europeans and the native Caribs.89 Here, a Carib rather than
Afro-Creole Shabine flees from the soldiers who pursue him:
... and when I heard noise

of the soldiers’ progress through the thick leaves,
though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran
through the blades of balisier sharper than spears.
(356)
In this instance, Progress is literal and allegorical, evoking Bunyan’s

Pilgrim’s Progress with its Christian soldier symbols. In Bunyan,
progress represents Christian’s flight from sin as a movement from the
profane realm of the earth to the sacred realm of God’s kingdom. In
Shabine’s dream re-vision, Christian’s moral progress has been
supplanted by the imperial soldiers’ progress in eliminating the
indigenous to clear the ground for Progress. We are in deep
tautological territory here. It is all the more astonishing, then, that the
88
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, New York: Norton, 1982, 26-27.
89
Doris Garraway spatially identifies this contact as a “border of violence”, which
continually shifted in response to the degree of “incorporation [of Carib populations
and of land] and the continued violence of the colonial encounter” (Doris Garraway,
The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2005, 45).
84 Common Places
dream concludes by converting the Enlightenment’s hypostatized

concept into a subjunctive one, a commonplace where racial
difference disappears:
… black smoke pass, and the sky turn white,

there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is
an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight.
(356)
The white/black division dissipates into nothing and appears as

nothing, leaving behind Progress as a living creature of camouflage
that is indistinguishable from the greenery of its surroundings and
lives symbiotically with the environment. The dream also imagines
progress as a young leaf in sunlight: a micro-factory of creation. As is
now evident, Shabine is iterating allegory not only intertextually but
intratextually as well, that is, from his own imagery conceived just
prior to its subsequent, differentiated iteration. Might this constitute a
Creole commonplace of progress, in which color is not the criterion of
division and domination but of mutually differentiating creation?
Rapture in the Waste Land

As we move deeper into the poem, allegory becomes diffuse, tangled
in the skeins of cross-reference. No longer in the singular character
guise of History and Progress, allegory lends itself to richer, if more
obscure, historical texturization. In “Raptures of the Deep”, the second
canto, as I will call it, Shabine’s stint in salvage diving draws on T.S.
Eliot, specifically the “The Fire Sermon” and “Death by Water”
sections of The Waste Land as well as “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock”. An allusion to the Bible’s prophetic book of Jonah briefly
appears, only to reissue in force at the end of the poem. “Raptures of
the Deep” weaves the tropes of prophecy, baptism by water, and death
that connect these intertexts through the themes of slavery, desire, and
bad faith. The result is an uneasy juxtaposition of sexual desire and
slavery, the personal and the communal.
The subtitle “Raptures of the Deep” itself radiates contrary
meanings. At its most literal, it is already a colloquialism, the
layman’s phrase for nitrogen narcosis, which frequently occurs in
deep-sea diving. The term “rapture” encapsulates several dictionary
meanings, each of which pertains to a different intertext. “Rapture”
denotes the act of being seized (Jonah’s seizure by the whale); seizing
a woman (the house agent’s “assault” of the typist in The Waste

Land); conveyance into heaven (Phlebas the Phoenician in The Waste
Land); and musical ecstasy (the Siren-like mermaids in “Prufrock”).
Shabine takes to diving at the point where “Prufrock” ends, the
singing of the mermaids. Unlike Prufrock, Shabine hopes to get “the
sea noise out of my head, / the shell of my ears sang Maria
Concepcion” (349):
but this Caribbean so choke with the dead

that when I would melt in emerald water,
whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,
I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea-fans,
dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,
so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month
in the Seaman’s Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.
(349)
The aesthetic beauty of the imagery conflicts with its referents, which
are the dregs of the Middle Passage. But closer scrutiny proves that
Shabine actually distinguishes between the diverse species of coral
“and then, the dead men” (my emphasis). The imagery functions as an
allegorical index rather than an icon, pointing to the intertexts,
specifically to the language at the end of “Prufrock”: “combing the
white hair of the waves”; “sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and
brown”, et cetera. 90 In turn, the “Prufrock” allusion points to Eliot’s
subsequent masterpiece, The Waste Land.
The wasteland Shabine discovers is literal: the disintegrated
remnants of slaves thrown overboard across the Middle Passage. That
literal graveyard, literally blended and compounded, serves as an
iconographic metaphor for modernism. In Eliot, bones and desert
wastelands signify historical loss, yet the traditions – honor, sacrifice,
authentic love, and the like – that are mourned are timeless, abstract.
As such, they can be revived, reunited, and restored with little intrinsic
change. We may glimpse this implication in the particular way
metaphor collapses disparate motifs into leitmotif. For example, in
The Waste Land, motifs of sand and desert manifest the earth’s
90
Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, ll. 127, 130.
86 Common Places
infertility: “The wind / Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs
are departed.” The speaker fishes in a “dull canal” and the sunbathing
“white bodies” are juxtaposed with the “bones cast in a little low dry
garret”. 91 The motifs function metaphorically, so that the transcultural
mythical and religious sources of the poem are collapsed into an elegy
of Western civilization. In contrast, Shabine’s rapture is metonymical
and indexical, relating and relaying diverse figures while preserving
their distinctions, as in Glissant’s projection of Relation and
commonplaces. The corals point to the dead men, African slaves, who
in turn ironically point to the white bodies and bones of Eliot’s dull
canal, but these are never unified and collapsed into a grand narrative.
What Walcott’s allegorical indexing does is provide the historic pre-
text to the theme of modernist Anglo-European angst in Eliot. It
unchains the historical and the historically absent in Eliot’s hypostatic
modernity. Nonetheless, Walcott in no way transmutes Eliot’s poems
into a thought about of the Middle Passage, nor does Shabine’s rapture
correct or revise Eliot’s wasteland. The issue is not whether Eliot and
Walcott are addressing alternative modernities or experiencing
modernity differently. 92 Modernity in Eliot (and other Anglo-
European modernists) is indifferent precisely because its History,
which Shabine salvages, has afforded that indifference.
Conversely, when Shabine struggles with the personal matter of
adulterous desire, another theme of the intertext, his guilt and
nostalgia cannot transcend into representativeness because the
referent, Maria Concepcion, is indeterminate. Articulated as
allegorical, she is a persona contrived always to be repeated otherwise.
Maria Concepcion’s name evokes the Virgin Mary and Mary, Mother
of God (by means of the Immaculate Conception). At the same time,
invoking Shabine’s sexual desire, she is Erzulie, the vodoun goddess
of love whose several names and iconography include the Virgin
Mary. Erzulie represents the creative principles of feminine virtue,
innocence, eros, and maternal desire, and her serviteurs often go
bankrupt in their attempts to supply her with the “ornate pendants,
91
Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 176-77, 180, 193-94.
92
The various disciplinary ideas and practices gathered under the phrase “alternative
modernities” have usefully changed the terms and territory of modernity scholarship.
See Dil Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities”, in Alternative
Modernities, ed. Dil Parameshwar Gaonkar, Durham: Duke University Press, 2001, 1-
21.
earrings, numerous wedding bands, and rings carved and decorated

with jewels” she demands. 93 In “Flight”, Maria’s taste for expensive
“laces and silks” likewise sends Shabine into the black market
business. Yet “Concepcion” also conjures the name that Christopher
Columbus, on his third voyage, gave to the island now known as
Grenada, location of the Caribs’ rebellious leap that serves as the
hypotext of Shabine’s dream. The ironies of conception and suicide
only augment the opacity of reference.
For all these reasons, redemption is not to be procured through a
properly focused sexual desire, a stolid Caribbean nationalism and
fidelity, or the expunging of guilt and nostalgia associated therein. The
Maria Concepcion figuration illustrates this, especially when iterated
against Eliot’s The Waste Land. In his third dive, Shabine suffers the
raptures, recalling Jonah’s three days in the “the belly of hell” when
his repentance moves God to release him from the fish. 94 Whereas
Jonah begins preaching once safely aground, Shabine recuperates in
the Seaman’s Hostel, where he partakes of an ascetic diet of “fish
broth and sermons” that neither restores nor consoles. This tableau
contrasts with The Waste Land’s “fishmen loung[ing] at noon”, who
are enjoying fellowship at a public bar. The fraternal, spiritual
vibrancy of the fishmen imagery provides a brief reprieve from the
decadence of the typist and clerk’s shallow assignation. 95 Eliot mourns
the loss of the spiritual element of sexual desire, whereas Shabine has
too much of it: “the pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion, / the hurt
I had done to my wife and children” (349). Through parataxis and in
the manner of Glissant’s apposition, the pain for Maria elicits as much
grief and remorse as for Shabine’s family. Shabine also suffers the
guilt of abandoning home the Caribbean with its tragic conception
which he is in the process of doing.
Walcott never permits the diverse raptures of the deep to
coherently represent or phenomenalize diasporic affliction, the
tribulations of the post-slavery, post-colonial African diaspora. He
93
Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in
Haiti, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, 132. Desmangles’ study
insightfully argues for the symbiotic nature of vodoun, equally Africanist and Catholic
in makeup and practice. See also Maya Deren’s now classic account of Erzulie (and
other lwa) in her book Divine Horsemen: Voodoo Gods of Haiti, London: Thames and
Hudson, 1953, 137-45.
94
Jonah II:2.
95
Eliot, The Waste Land, ll. 263, 215-56.
88 Common Places
evades the temptations of narrative as well, however biographical a

detail may seem here or there. In lesser hands, Maria might have
become a representative muse, allegorizing the Antilles or Europe’s
colonized, exoticized mistress. Walcott weaves rather than welds
together the thematic strands of Jonah’s religious disobedience, The
Waste Land’s infertile sexuality, and Shabine’s erotic grief. In relating
themes through tropes that remain mutually discrete, Walcott achieves
an allegory that is immanent, historical, and nonetheless inclusive
across history and individual. Unlike Jonah, its moment of redemption
has not arrived and that moment will never resemble the rehabilitative
miracle, the return to tradition and mores, of which Eliot dreams.
Rather, it anticipates redemption in its allusions to Jonah and Erzulie
and its ironic indexing of Eliot, and it envisions redemption on an
altogether different order, as we will see.
CHAPTER 3
A BACKWARD FAITH IN WALCOTT’S

“THE SCHOONER FLIGHT”
Unlike Africanist religions like vodoun, the Christian dimension of

much black diasporic literature is often given short shrift in favor of
stereotypical Afrocentric culture or pan-Africanist motifs. Failing that,
the presence of Christian reference is ascribed to Christianity’s
capacious reservoir for aesthetic conventions. Even critics who
acknowledge the Christian element tend to qualify or undercut it. For
instance, Patricia Ismond asserts that Derek Walcott’s “dialectical
relationship to the Western tradition” allows him to bring “into
existence an alternative myth, one of whose primary purposes is to
counter the Christian one”. 1
Paula Burnett seems to dance both ways: while the presence of
Christian themes is “functionally mimetic” of actual Caribbean life,
Burnett stipulates that “it would be a mistake to ignore the often plural
sign in which Christian myth is a participant but not the dominant
element”. Christianity evaporates away in her statement: “Like an
animist or pantheist, Walcott prefers to suggest spirituality in the open
air.”2
We should avoid repeating the error of literalizing Christian as well
as Africanist religious content. But it should give us pause that the
most solemn canto in Walcott’s poem “The Schooner Flight”, in
which Shabine crosses the Middle Passage explicitly, clearly echoes
Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, a Christian allegory set in
a supernatural environment. Moreover, Walcott not only draws on
Christian allegories but also T.S. Eliot’s modern epic The Waste Land,
which laments their obsolescence, and The Waste Land’s virtual
1
Ismond, Abandoning Dead Metaphors: The Caribbean Phase of Derek Walcott’s
Poetry, 65; see also 38-40, 46, and 207.
2
Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, 102, 105, 108.
90 Common Places
retraction Little Gidding. The citations and iterations of the two most
lyrical and forceful cantos, “Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage”
and “Out of the Depths”, will show how Walcott’s poem implicitly
replies to the questions Walter Benjamin raises regarding allegories of
history and constellations of redemptive events. In Walcott’s version
of backward Christianity, one to which the abyss gives rise, history
can be redemptive and non-transcendental. Faith in general and
Christianity play a crucial role in Shabine’s allegory and recitation of
African Atlantic history. Even so, how are we to take his cry, “I from
backward people who still fear God”? 3 If not Benjamin’s Messiah,
what might enter the “strait gate” of “every second” of Caribbean’s
history? 4 What sanctions Shabine’s redemptive allegory?
Middle passaging
Allegory encounters its great referential challenge in the fifth canto,
“Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage”. Walcott takes on the
ultimate New World black ontological predicament by closely
seaming his allegory to Parts 3, 4 and 5 of Coleridge’s “The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner”. In Part 3, the Mariner espies a skeleton ship
with “gossameres” for sails (“and horror follows”, as the marginal
gloss relates) steered by a yellow-haired Woman, called Life-in-
Death, and her shipmate Death. In Part 5, the Mariner’s own ship
becomes “ghastly” as the lead crew arise and
all ’gan to work the ropes,

Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools … 5
In comparison, Shabine perceives a “forest of ships” and populates

them with crew. Whereas Coleridge personifies the ship as a rotting
corpse with “ribs through which the Sun / Did peer, as through a
grate”, 6 the bodies of Walcott’s ghost crew represent death:
3
Walcott, Collected Poems, 359. All further references will be given in parenthesis in
the text.
4
Benjamin writes, “For every second of time was the strait gate through which the
Messiah might enter” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 264).
5
Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, ll. 184-89, 336-39.
6
Ibid., ll. 185-86.
A Backward Faith in Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” 91
the fog swirl and well into sails, so close

that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull,
it was horrors, but it was beautiful.
We float through a rustling forest of ships
with sails dry like paper, behind the glass
I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons,
and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun,
right through their tissue, you traced their bones
like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines,
the backward-moving current swept them on,
and high on their decks I saw great admirals,
Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders
they gave those Shabines, and the forest
of masts sail right through the Flight.
(352)
Rather than personify or anthropomorphize the experience, these lines

“naturalize”, as Paul de Man puts it, analogies through a “movement
from inside to outside” that “allows for affective verisimilitude which
moves in the opposite direction”. For instance, the background
sunlight allows Walcott’s crew to trace the distant crewmen’s
skeletons like the veins of leaves. There is no anthropomorphism here.
In de Man’s terms, naturalization could be a means by which
Walcott’s poem “manifest[s] ... exterioriz[es] the subject that remains
hidden” in Coleridge. For de Man, however, naturalization does not
represent “historical modes of language power”. 7 If I understand de
Man correctly, naturalization phenomenalizes the ineffable in a way
similar to that by which Enlightenment Europeans phenomenalized
their allegories of History and Progress. As we will see, Walcott
avoids this technique.
Does Walcott’s “The Schooner Flight” exteriorize the hidden
subject of Coleridge’s poem, which Debbie Lee argues is divine
retribution for the slave trade industry, manifested in yellow fever or
the “white disease” that Life-in-Death represents? 8 Shabine’s Middle
Passage encounter echoes Coleridge’s poem, except that the ships
Shabine espies are literal ghosts: these imperial frigates and slavers
“sail right through the Flight”. Likewise, the crews’ skeletal corpses
and empty eye sockets (as perceived through a telescope) merely
7
de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 257, 262 (emphasis in the original).
8
Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination, 59.
92 Common Places
prove that the men met their physical demise long ago. Allegory
iterates prior tropes but respects the integrity of their context-bound
and therefore opaque references. By so doing, its tropology ensures its
own future iterability.
Shabine’s encounter – one canto in “this poem, each phrase soaked
in salt” (347) – conspicuously reprises the tropology of the Mariner’s
vision. Yet nothing is hidden or revealed. Here the ethical force of
allegory’s aesthetic – to refuse appropriation, transcendence, or
comprehension – comes to the fore. While Shabine’s allegory iterates
Coleridge’s, its subject is its own: the Middle Passage from the
perspective of a surviving descendent.
As if calling roll from history books, Shabine espies and names the
officers “high on their decks”, whose historic, heroic portraits
doubtless populated the textbooks of his youth: George Rodney, his
opponent Comte de Grasse, and Horatio Nelson, all admirals actively
involved in the international rivalry for West Indian territories.
Caribbean writer Jamaica Kincaid describes a similar heroic
acculturation in her brother:
... my brother had history books on his shelf …. Horatio Nelson, John
Hawkins, Francis Drake. He thought that the thing called history was
an account of significant triumphs over significant defeats recorded by
significant people who had benefited from the significant triumphs ...
he liked the costumes of it, he liked the endings, the outcomes; he
liked the people who won, even though he was among the things that
had been won. 9
As for the ghost ship’s crew, Shabine merely hears the hoarse orders
given to them. Unseen, these lumpenproletariat Shabines with whom
he feels kinship bring to mind the lineage of nameless petty sailors
outside History: “my memory revolve / on all sailors before me” (352-
53). Between Coleridge’s and Walcott’s two allegories, separated by
time but inhabiting the same space of European colonization, a void
opens and in that void, something unseen and unheard but historical
enters: the slave ships, emblems of the anonymous actors in history.
Allegory takes its sharpest turn here and becomes more opaque and
semantically recalcitrant, reducing the poem “The Schooner Flight” to
an emblem. Through metonymy, the last five lines of this canto invoke
9
Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1997, 94-95.
the Romantic trope of the poet’s voyage or flight into exile from his
world as an individual into the universal world of rhetoric. Here,
rhetoric is arrested at the gates of its most ineffable and fundamentally
constitutive sign, which Paul Gilroy calls the “slave sublime”. 10 The
allegorical figure of the Middle Passage, Édouard Glissant’s abysses,
obtains as a stutter:
Next we pass the slave ships. Flags of all nations,

our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose,
to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows
who his grandfather is, much less his name?
Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados.
(353)
Rhetoric is paralyzed. Relative to the twenty-three lines of lush figures

and specific, accessory detail (for example, “frigates, barkentines”,
and “half-naked”), the austere diction of these five lines seems an
afterthought. Primarily composed of monosyllabic words or repetition,
as in “fathers”/“grandfathers”, “shouting”/“shouting”, “who”/“who”,
this coda lacks any simile or other referential figure. In turn, figures of
restriction such as asyndeton (omission of conjunctions) and ellipsis
clip the phrasing.
The second vision has no recourse to the certainty of the vision of
the admiral fleets. Whereas Shabine previously testified by sight (four
“I see” or “saw”) and hearing (“I heard” and “you could hear”), he can
do no more than “suppose” the slaves to be beneath deck and therefore
their inability to “hear us”.11 With his rhetorical question, Shabine
appears to express doubt. However, granting the literal semantics of
these final lines, his question is an instance of erotema, “to affirm or
deny a point strongly by asking it as a question”. 12 He knows that few,
10
Gilroy never properly defines what he means by the phrase “the slave sublime”.
The most adequate explanation I can identify is: the black vernacular has a
“distinctive rapport with the presence of death which derives from slavery and a
related ontological state that I want to call the condition of being in pain. Being in
pain encompasses both a radical, personalised enregistration of time and a diachronic
understanding of language” (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 203).
11
Breslin also comments on this (Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 204).
12
For perhaps the most comprehensive rhetorical primer and lexicon online, see
Gideon Burton’s database Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric,
http://rhetoric.byu.edu.
94 Common Places
if any, of his Caribbean crewmates know either the identity or the

name of their grandfathers, unless they go by “History”.
The question leads us to understand that the Middle Passage is an
allegory of History. If journeys denote passages, the both phenomenal
and rhetorical passages in “The Schooner Flight” are impossible,
impassable. Each time History is invoked, whether by European or
New World African, it can only iterate, or more precisely, stutter the
Middle Passage. But the unknown past may also emerge in the future
to redeem: the speechless intervals of the stutter, the unanswered
shouts – both constitute all unthought possibility. Indeed, this stutter is
a large-scale, infinitesimally dense instance of Gilles Deleuze and
Félix Guattari’s minor literature, where so much of the linguistic
power derives paradoxically from the non-sense of sound like
Glissant’s le cri – the coughs, stammers, aphasias, muteness:
One will make a syntax of the cry .... One will push it to the point of
deterritorialization that can no longer be compensated by culture or by
myth, that will be an absolute deterritorialization though it be slow,
sticky, clogged. 13
The West’s passage from sacred destiny to History marks the rise
of secular modernity, of which the slave trade is the primary
constituent. While Walter Mignolo cogently argues that the exclusion
of Spain and Latin America from postcolonial studies has obscured
the earlier birth date of modernity, one in which Christianity directed
the polity of states and imperialism, Christianity’s epistemic
hegemony was already beginning to lose ground, as Sylvia Wynter
documents. 14 The true progress of History, then, is recursive: attempts
to move forward always return to the moment of its disavowal, which
History can retrieve little more than it can resolve. Once disavowed,
the Middle Passage persists in each disavowal that is History’s self-
mystification.
The noble but misguided pretense to represent the Middle Passage,
or even the process of excavating its historical meaning and impact in
order to proceed beyond it, betrays a desire for transcendence. Too
13
14
See Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001 and
Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being”.
large a scale in time, space, and numbers persons and lives cashed
out for lumps of sugar and pounds of tobacco the Middle Passage is
the sign of total immanence, total opacity. Walcott respects the limits
of his allegory, and the limits of allegory are also its power, but he
will not concede resolution or transcendence. Nor does his reticence
instance a gesture “toward and away from the complex ethical
negotiations that representing atrocity entails”, as in other
exceptionalist discourses. 15 Walcott neither monumentalizes nor
metaphorizes but rather allegorizes this opacity.
In fact, the poem’s Middle Passage allegory reflects what Glissant
entitles the ethics of opacity. Glissant has continually called for “the
right to opacity”, not only as an epistemic objection to and correction
of European ideology but also as an ethical mandate in and of itself:
How can we reconcile the inherent radicality of all politics with the
questioning necessary to all relation? Only by conceiving that it is
impossible to reduce whatsoever it may be to a truth that would not be
generated out of itself. 16
Along similar lines, Emmanuel Levinas asserts the total mutual

opacity and alterity of human beings as not only the ontological
human condition but also the constitutive condition of ethics. The
figure of the face-to-face encounter illustrates such an ethical alterity:
The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense, it could

not be comprehended, that is to say encompassed.
15
Naomi Mandel argues that the rhetoric of the Holocaust’s “unspeakability” and of
its singularity among all atrocities ultimately redirects “the issue away from the fact of
suffering and toward the terms in which it is couched”. Importantly, she challenges
the stakes of an “ethics … evoking the limits of aesthetics” (Naomi Mandel, Against
the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America, Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2002, 11, 7). Between the Holocaust and the Middle
Passage, however, lies a strong distinction in the production and reception of such
unspeakability. For numerous empirical, historical, and cultural reasons, people
throughout Europe and the United States have widely assumed, albeit generally, the
Holocaust of the Jews as their metaphysical burden. In contrast, there is little, if any,
moral or rhetorical capital that accrues to African Atlantic/diasporic individuals who
cite its unspeakability and none whatsoever for persons outside the group.
16
96 Common Places
This total opacity signifies an imperative bond: “The ‘resistance’ of

the Other never does me violence, does not act negatively; it is a
positive structure: ethics.” 17
Glissant differs from Levinas in attributing to this premise a right
applicable not only to human beings but to the ideas, truths, and even
commonplaces that partake of the humanity particularly inscribed
within a history, time, and place. He claims the solvency of this right
within the realm of knowledge all the more because the Western
philosophic inquiry into the “ground” of things, which Martin
Heidegger calls the “onto-theological constitution of metaphysics”,
has led not only to productive but also to destructive ends. 18 Walcott
imbues his poetic Middle Passage with opacity, both a condition and a
right to deflect exploitative knowledge of any kind, including the
poetic, on behalf of some misguided politic. 19
Out of the abyss: redemption

The storm at the poem’s conclusion, in Canto 10 “Out of the Depths”,
returns us to the question of Christian allegory with which this chapter
began. Let us briefly recall the resolution of the storm in Coleridge’s
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and in the Book of Jonah. In the
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the storm abates when the Albatross
appears and “as if it had been a Christian soul / [the crew] hailed it in
God’s name”. The Mariner commits his crime after the storm (unlike
Shabine), and it is not until he endures the horror of the ghost ship and
solitude among the dead crew that he is moved to bless “happy living
17
Levinas, Totalité et Infini, 168, 171.
18
Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. and intro. Joan Stambaugh,
Albany: SUNY Press, 1996, 71.
19
The Introduction discussed some of the pitfalls of a didactic or codified aesthetic
politics. On this subject, Robert Kaufman is both generous and mindful: “Aesthetic
delusion tends toward the collapse of the different identities – at times under the
pressure of good-faith, radically intended assumptions of responsibility for
sociopolitical or ethical engagement, for changing the world – and aestheticist
delusion can thus contribute unwittingly to an inability to distinguish between artwork
and world.” Kaufman stresses that Adorno and Benjamin clearly stipulated that
“critical aesthetic illusion pivots on a formal dynamic or dialectic of … charged
distance: the artist’s, artwork’s, and audience’s intense engagement and
correspondence with – amid an awareness of difference from – the empirical,
sociohistorical and political, real”. See Robert Kaufman, “Lyric Commodity Critique,
Benjamin Adorno Marx, Baudelaire Baudelaire Baudelaire”, PMLA, CXXIII/1
(January 2008), 201, 201 (emphasis in the original).
things” and in “the self-same moment ... pray”; the Albatross then
falls off his neck. His penance lasts for his lifetime, however, for he is
plagued by “agony” and forced to recount his tale and “travel from
land to land”. 20
In contrast, Jonah, like Shabine, sins before the storm and flees
obligation by setting sail. Captured in the belly of the whale, Jonah
prays:
And said, I cried by reason of mine affliction unto the LORD, and
he heard me; out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my
voice.
For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and
the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed
over me.
Then I said, I am cast out of thy sight; yet I will look again toward
thy holy temple.21
In contrast to Coleridge and the author of Jonah, Walcott leaves

Shabine’s sin vague, alluding to its nature in a single line that begins
the stanza of the climactic episode: “I have not loved those that I loved
enough” (358).
The Bible’s figurative language resonates in Shabine’s recounting
of the storm, heightening the moral stakes of the event, it would seem.
Yet his prayer neither quells the storm nor saves the crew. Instead, the
moral strength of Shabine’s “nigger” Captain carries the ship through
the storm, while Shabine’s faith as well as the thought of his family
“safe home” carries him through his fear:
Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said:

“I from a backward people who still fear God.”
Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward
by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace
from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith
that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel
in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell
sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale,
proud with despair, we sang how our race
20
Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, ll. 65-66, 282, 288, marginal gloss to ll.
582-85.
21
Jonah II:2-4.
98 Common Places
survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril,

and now I was ready for whatever death will.
But if that storm had strength, was in Cap’n face,
beard beading with spray, tears salting the eyes,
crucify to his post, that nigger hold fast
to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus,
and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us,
and I feeding him white rum, while every crest
with Leviathan-lash make the Flight quail
like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest,
till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail
subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm.
(359)
Here, at the narrative climax of the poem, rhetoric insists and

proclaims its figural craftsmanship and virtuosity. Shabine threads
together sources that address divinity and faith from the Bible (Job,
Jonah, and the Gospels), Greek epithets (“rosy-fingered dawn”),
Shakespeare, Coleridge and Eliot. Allegory so saturates this canto that
it misleads many critics, who alternately argue that Walcott suffers
from the insecure colonial’s “anxiety of influence”, that he is “writing
back” to the Empire, or that he is rectifying the narrow parameters of
the English literary canon. Other figures, such as metaphor, as well as
other genres lend themselves more effectively to those mimetic or
counterdiscursive strategies. Deleuze and Guattari’s observation on
metamorphosis versus metaphor particularly applies: “Metamorphosis
is the contrary of metaphor. No more is there a literal or figurative
sense, but a distribution of states throughout the range of a word” – or,
we might add, throughout the range of citations. 22
Clearly, Walcott’s command – and the perceptible pleasure he
takes in his command – of tradition, form, imagery, personae, the
minutiae of language, rhythm, and timing nullifies the claim that
proving his artistic legitimacy or defending the Caribbean as a source
of art motivates him. In this regard, poet James Dickey writes that
Walcott’s “endowment is so rich, his writing so effortless ... that even
literary conventions themselves seem extraneous”; Walcott is “a man
immersed in words, not afraid of them, but excited and confirmed by
22
what he can cause them to do”. 23 However, tracing the parallels

among the allegorical sources does not yield a coherent theme or
politic. Job proudly takes for granted his wealth as deserved and
challenges God’s omnipotence, which loosely corresponds to the
Mariner’s devaluation of living beings. Neither sin relates to Jonah’s
disobedience or to The Waste Land’s faithless modern anomie. While
all of these converge on the topos of faith, they do so only at its most
broadly defined.
When Shabine reprises God’s rebuke to Job, he certainly vies with
Job’s author for lyricism. Whereas God declares his omnipotence
through a hyperbolic challenge – “Can you pull in the leviathan with a
fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope?” 24 – Shabine proffers a
psalm-like epistrophe in alliterative music: “Let him, in His might ...
by the winch of his will.” The eloquence of this latter phrase is all the
more arresting because it arrives on the heels of a simple, humble
admission: “I from a backward people who still fear God.” While
Coleridge’s poem allegorizes a return to Christian faith for its ethical
resources, its thematic recourse to the fantastic suggests the ebbing of
Christian dominance in Western culture, which had begun its decline
in the early eighteenth century.
Yet Shabine makes no such thematic apology. Ostensibly
deferential, the adjective “backward” carries a ferocious ironic bite in
the context of the previous lines, which allude to Eliot’s The Waste
Land by way of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. 25 Prior to the testimony
of the passage quoted above, Shabine imagines “corkscrewing / to the
sea-bed of sea-worms, fathom pass fathom” (359). The image points
us to the clairvoyant’s warning “Fear death by water” 26 and its
realization when Phlebas, Eliot’s version of a Christian Fisher King,
drowns, signaling the death of Western spiritual authenticity.
23
James Dickey, “The Words of a Cosmic Castaway”, New York Times, 2 February
1986, LexisNexis, http://www.lexisnexis.com, (accessed 31 August 2008). Terada’s
article “Derek Walcott and the Poetics of ‘Transport’” led me to Dickey’s review of
Walcott’s Collected Poems.
24
Job XLI:1.
25
Many postcolonial critics have examined The Tempest as an allegory of
colonialism, which was obvious to Elizabethan audiences. For a lucid treatment, see
Robert Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest”, Critical
Inquiry, XIII/3 (Spring 1987), 557-78.
26
Eliot, The Waste Land, l. 55.
100 Common Places
The only drowned men in Shabine’s poem are the slaves, the
fathers below from “deck too deep”. Nonetheless their deaths,
uncounted (and unaccounted for) millions, scarcely damage the
integrity of African Atlantic spiritual faith. On the contrary, “how our
race / survive the sea’s maw, our history, our peril” proves the faith.
So unlike the world of The Waste Land, the faith of the slave diaspora
does not need to be resurrected because it still “survive”. “There is no
beginning but no end” Walcott affirms, emphasizing that “what was
captured from the captor was his God, for the subject African had
come to the New World in an elemental intimacy with nature, with a
profounder terror of blasphemy than the exhausted, hypocritical
Christian ... the slave had wrested God from his captor”. Ironically,
the stakes for the slaves were set on “the very battleground which the
captor proposed, the soul”. 27
Shabine pronouncedly shifts emphasis from the allegorical Christ
to an embattled but triumphant belief whose majesty derives from its
believers. The pathos of the Fisher King or the Albatross is
remarkably absent. The Christ story is itself an allegory, pointing back
to the pathos of Abraham and Isaac. These figures represent the
martyr’s self-sacrifice on behalf of others. In contrast, “crucify to his
post” of his own accord, Shabine’s Cap’n not only lives but manages
to save his entire crew. His “beard beading with spray, tears salting
the eyes” links him to Gonzalo, the “good old lord” of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest, whose “tears run down his beard, like winter drops”, and
he steadfastly braves the storm. 28 Some may quarrel with the doxy of
a Christianity that ascribes priority to the faithful over the faith and
does not require the heroic sacrifice of life, but a sacrificial economy
of redemption would have quickly incurred the African Atlantic’s
bankruptcy, to use a term Werewere Liking drily ironizes with respect
to Africa.
As we shall see, redemption is achieved through the iteration of
faith as a productive force. A chiasmus that reverses the cross
illustrates this. In the Cap’n’s posture, subject and object are reversed:
while he “hold fast / to that wheel ... the cross held Jesus”. His heroic
27
Walcott, “Muse of History”, 12, 11, 11.
28
Shakespeare, The Tempest, V.i.15-16. Burnett persuasively argues that Gonzalo
rather than Caliban is the figure from The Tempest who most haunts Walcott’s oeuvre
(Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, 7-10). Caribbean writers and critics
typically cite Caliban as the figure with whom they have the most affinity.
demeanor evokes a figural Christ older than the pathetic medieval

rendering: that of the Anglo-Saxon dream-vision allegory The Dream
of the Rood (c. 8th century). There, a warrior Christ boldly mounts the
cross as if marching into battle.
In a tragicomic moment, Shabine feeds the Cap’n the more
fortifying “white rum” instead of vinegar apparently this savior can
hold his liquor. Where exactly is the scene of redemption? The canto
closes with peace arriving at dawn, when the sea “get calm as Thy
Kingdom come”. The Creole demotic allows at least two readings. 29
The sea calms as if God’s kingdom has come, holding a moment open
for future allegorical iteration. Alternatively, the sea becomes calm
now that God’s kingdom has come. Salvation is projected neither
temporally into the future nor spatially to an otherworldly paradise.
Let us return to Shabine’s original sin: “I have not loved those that
I loved enough.” It recites Byron’s Childe Harold, who repeats it
twice, first as a social iconoclast, second as a humbler optimist: “I
have not loved the world, nor the world me.” 30 Similarly ambiguous in
tone, Shabine’s statement may instance either a confession or a
comment. In the sense that it lacks all nostalgia or sentimentalism, it
conveys the same sobriety as did the question: “Who knows / who his
grandfather is, much less his name?” Syntax renders the meaning
ambiguous as well, for it may signify “I have not enough loved those
that I loved” or “Those that I loved enough, I have not loved”. In the
first connotation, it is a matter of insufficiently loving those he loved.
In the second, it is a matter of deficiency – whether unaware of his
love and so not acting upon it, or aware but remiss in acting upon it.
The referent for “those” remains unclear: it may be God, his
family, Maria Concepcion, the Caribbean archipelago, its people.
None of these alternatives constitutes the gravity of sinning against
God represented in the intertext. Yet the confluence of feeling among
hearth, home, family, and country is eminently early Romantic,
recalling Hölderlin, Hugo, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, among others,
which lends Shabine’s error the gravity it held in Romanticism. In the
29
Jamaican poet Pamela Mordecai calls this the “creole ghost on the English line”
(quoted in Seanna Sumalee Oakley, “The Creole Ghost: Language, Geography, and
Community in Recent Jamaican Poetry”, Dissertation, University of Wisconsin-
Madison, Dissertation Abstracts International A, LXIII/04 [October 2002], 1349).
30
Lord Byron (George Gordon), Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III, stanza 113, l.
1049 and stanza 114, l. 1058, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, II, 514-
37.

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INTRODUCTION

OUT OF THE ABYSS:

Not only that which sees in the present,

Necessity of paying heed over many years

And genesis after exodus. 3

For Édouard Glissant, the prolific and recondite Martiniquan

toward the infinite redemptive possibilities of the past’s memory and

brilliantly inventive ways. They also demonstrate that postcolonial

even words stretched by melisma ... will never be enough to

Whereas the rapid and consecutive political and social upheavals

romantic counterparts, bears Romantic influence and reconceptualizes Romantic

the very least, the process of European colonization would entail

illuminating elegance of rhetorical figuration and especially its

The misfires of previous combined aesthetic and ethical programs

Utopian and redemptive desires

upshot viewed from the perspective of the twentieth- and twenty-first

Radicalism, [Shklar] wrote, “has gone totally out of fashion”. It

Jacoby adamantly identifies the source of progressive Western

Today [we] do not dream of a future qualitatively different from the

Ironically, many post-independence Afro-Caribbean and African

decolonization and American hegemony. See Patrick Karl O’Brien, “Intercontinental

underlines that an African embrace of modernity should be

redemption does not function as a correction of history, which implies

Jameson points out, the creative imagination plays a preeminent role

commonplaces, diasporic critics have not been keen to admit

To those few at least whose eyes – or the suspicion in whose eyes is

them, our world must appear more autumnal, more mistrustful,

Shadowed by entrenched European imperialism and slavery, the

Blake, in relating his discussion of freedom to the “voice of slaves

from backward people who still fear God”. 47 Romanticism’s rhetoric

European aesthetic movements and ethoi. In opposition of

Tintern’s devaluation is the effect of irresistible socioeconomic forces

The contemporary poet Annie Finch does not hesitate to reduce

It was the impact of the French Revolution on the Romantics’

In this regard, asserting an ideological kinship between black

Commonplace time and language

Literary time is inextricably tied to material history and linguistic,

If ... Western literary history – from its “origin” in Homer – is

missing bodies of Ibo, Yoruba, Ewe, and so many other peoples to be

Our history strikes us with a suddenness that dizzies …. This is also to

the knowledge of Relation”. 67 Glissant’s “suddenness that dizzies”

… from political history to eschatology ... from statement to parable,

Benjamin’s Judaism and his experience as a Jew in Hitler’s Europe

Referring to the present as a kind of exile, assigning it that meaning, is

African Atlantic temporality reflects such a “metaleptic proleptic”

In literature, this temporality fibrillates Caribbean discourses that

precipitating and tripping through time is exemplified in the anecdote

[the] walker without voice continues to chase his black sand, of a

A similar, though far more dimly viewed, Caribbean phenomenol-

The people in a small place cannot give an exact account, a complete

In a sense, Afro-Caribbean experience is timeless because it is

(Glissant, Poétique de la Relation, 85). Antillean discourse is extensively treated in

calm.” 79 That many of the big moments of Enlightenment and

… modern change [that] has imported into Africa a future dimension

The postcolonial philosopher Frantz Fanon laments the same

The national bourgeoisie is from the start oriented towards activities

In short, “the spirit of hedonism rules at the heart of the national

After independence, the [nationalist] party lapses into a spectacular

Eze uncannily echoes Jacoby’s critique of erstwhile leftists as well as

reaching affirmative milestones to which most Romantics could only

Trinidad, where he spent many years writing as well as founding and

detail how the conventional and rhetorical senses of the term

achieve through the notion of ritual. If the articulation of a gendered

GLISSANT’S COMMON PLACES

The symphonic and just as vibrant the dysphonic that generate