poets-from-martinique

"Trees that live a long time exude mystery and magic. As if they were creating strong potions of happiness and calamity in their ripe old age, stirring together heaven and animal nature, and using these mixtures to control us and come to our aid. An herb's magic is perishable; a potion made from it can only work on bodies, be useful for love or for doing harm to others. But a tree, though more reserved in how it serves, makes understanding possible for us. Because a tree slowly reads the forest out to us, letter by letter, multiplying everywhere its depths. A tree is an entire country, and if we ask which country, we plunge immediately into the ineradicable darkness of time where we struggle to clear our way painfully through branches that hurt and scar our arms and legs indelibly."

""All this wind," said Papa Longoué, "all this wind about to come up, nothing you can do, you wait for it to come up to your hands, then your mouth, your eyes, your head. As if a man was only there to wait for the wind, to drown, yes, you understand, to drown himself for good in all this wind like the endless ocean..." -And one can't say, he went on thinking (on his haunches in front of the child), one can't say there is no obligation in life, even though here I am a helpless old body just mulling over things already done-and-gone, the land with its stories for ages and ages, yes me here so I can have this child in front of me, and look, Longoué, call him the kid, but look he has Béluse eyes a Béluse head. That's a race determined not to die. A tag end that just won't end. You figure that's just being a child--but that already is strength, that's tomorrow. This one won't do like the others, he's a Béluse, but he is like a Longoué, something will come of him, Longoué I'm telling you something will come of him, you don't know what, but still the Béluses have changed over time; and if not well then why would he come, why does he come here and not talk never talk Papa Longoué you understand, why all alone with you if there is no obligation, some malfini in the sky the eagle pulling strings, don't pull Longoué don't pull the strings, you just repeat yourself, you say: "Truth shot by like lightning," you are an old body Longoué, all that is left is memory, so OK, it would be better to puff on your pipe go no further, except why old devil why?..."

"Having a bit of earth amounts to nothing when the earth as a whole does not belong to everyone. ("Dry Season at La Toufaille")"

"Pythagore Celat went around loudly trumpeting "we" though there was not one soul who could guess what he meant by it. (beginning of "Trace of the Time Before")"

"The tangle of crowding memories and things forgotten" transports us, the hullabaloo hurtles, here we have landed, ludicrous and aghast at these two barriers: the swell of words of which we understand scratch, their music rains down and hurts in the back of our minds, where occasionally some of the usual ones open up and fill us with such brilliant joy (for example, when we discover that "koutla" doesn't simply mean "machete," it really means the thing that will serve as our refuge, the thing that cuts through the days and nights and allows you to believe that you will survive) and the density of the forest we look up to, daring to think that one day we'll go up there. (beginning of "Burnt-over Memories")"

"From the persistent myth of the paradise islands to the deceptive appearance of overseas departments, it seemed that the French West Indies were destined to be always in an unstable relationship with their own reality. It is as if these countries were condemned to never make contact with their true nature, since they were paralyzed by being scattered geographically and also by one of the most pernicious forms of colonization: the one by means of which a community becomes assimilated. Indeed, there are numerous opportunities that were lost by the French West Indians themselves. The cruel truth is that Guadeloupe and Martinique have undergone a long succession of periods of repression, following countless revolts since the eighteenth century more or less, and the result on each occasion has been a more visible abandonment of the collective spirit, of the common will that alone allows a people to survive as a people."

"Our intention in this work was to pull together all levels of experience. This piling-up is the most suitable technique for exposing a reality that is itself being scattered. Its evolution is like a repetition of a few obsessions that take root, tied to realities that keep slipping away. The intellectual journey is destined to have a geographical itinerary, through which the "intention" within the Discourse explores its space and into which it is woven."

"It is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, the friend, or simply the associate or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas…to take full responsibility for a complete break. (Reversion and Diversion," p. 25)"

"Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity is accepted difference. ("National Literatures")"

"To move from the oral to the written is to immobilise the body, to take control (to possess it). ("Poetics")"

"This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to aIl the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still sornething we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. ("The Open Boat")"

"Roots make the commonality of errantry and exile, for in both instances roots are lacking. We must begin with that. ("Errantry, Exile")"

"Diversity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motor driving universal energy, and it must be safe guarded from assimilations, from fashions passively accepted as the norm, and from standardized customs. ("Poetics," p. 30)"

"Creolization ... is a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry. ("Poetics," p. 34)"

"Contemporary violence is the response societies make to the immediacy of contacts and is exacerbated by the brutality of the flash agents of Communication.' It is not all that easy to forego the comfortable expanses of time formerly allowing changes to occur imperceptibly. In cities this speed becomes concentrated, and the response explodes. These same mechanisms are at work both in cultures of intervention and in emerging cultures: New York or Lagos. In the shantytowns and ghettos of even the smallest cities the same gears engage: the violence of poverty and mud but also an unconscious and desperate rage at not "grasping" [com-prendre] the chaos of the world. Those who dominate benefit from the chaos; those who are oppressed are exasperated by it. (beginning of "Distancing, Determining")"

"The world's poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers, onto the rambling pre-science of poetry in the depths of our being. The active violence in reality distracts us from knowing it. Our obligation to "grasp" violence, and often fight it, estranges us from such live intensity, as it also freezes the shiver and disrupts pre-science. But this force never runs dry because it is its own turbulence. Poetry-thus, nonetheless, totality gathering strength-is driven by another poetic dimension that we all divine or babble within ourselves. It could well be that poetry is basically and mainly defined in this relationship of itself to nothing other than itself, of density to volatility, or the whole to the individual. (beginning of "That That")"

"If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. (p. 189-90)"

"Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. (p. 190)"

"Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. (p. 190)"

"What is here is open, as much as this there. (p. 190)"

"The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence. (p. 191)"

"As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence; I shall also pay attention to not mixing it into any amalgam. Rather, it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it. (p. 192)"

"I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to "make" him in my image. (p. 193)"

"We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone. (p. 194)"

"The tremulous thought is not a thought out of fear, not scared thinking. It is thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. We understand the world better if we tremble with it. Because the world trembles every which way. It trembles organically and geologically. It also trembles with the climate. But the world also trembles through the relations that we have with each other."

"For me, the arrival is the moment where all the components of humanity ... consent to the idea that it is possible to be one and multiple at the same time; that you can be yourself and the other; that you can be the same and the different."

"In creolization, you can change, you can be one with the other, you can change with the other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are a multiple. You are not broken apart, because you are multiple."

"All of Édouard Glissant's work, as a poet, novelist, playwright, or theoretician from the very beginning (Les Indes and Soleil de la conscience [1956], La Lézarde [1959]) has been concerned with exploring the possibilities of a language that would be fully Antillean. Such a language would be capable of writing the Antilles into history, generating a conception of time, finding a past and founding a future. It would escape the passivity associated with an imposed language of fixed forms (French) as well as the folklore traps of a language that is no longer one of material production, its vocabulary fixed because stagnant (Creole). This Antillean language would provide the means for this place and its people to relate to the world as one among equivalent entities. Carrying the work of other theorists of Caribbean self-formation, such as Fanon and Césaire, into new dimensions, Glissant sees imagination as the force that can change mentalities; relation as the process of this change; and poetics as a transformative mode of history...Glissant's intent, finally, is to realize Relation in concrete terms--in which language is made of rocks and words and in which the future can be made to open for the Antilles by beating a time other than the linear, sequential order of syntax. Verb, noun, subject, object, are not fixed in their places because, in the words of Glissant, "in Relation every subject is an object and every object a subject.""