"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.""