On reading Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation

Jotting

This book has been an inexhaustible treasure trove for me. For some, it might feel dense. But this density is the result of the author’s tasking of language. It is a book to return to over and over again. Written at the turn of the century, it prepares us for our time through its premonitions, its flexible stretches of imagination, and its plea for a world that looks beyond the pitfalls and snares of modernism.

Below are some selected excerpts that I copied into my notebook over the course of reading the book.

1. The world’s poetic force (its energy), kept alive within us, fastens itself by fleeting, delicate shivers onto the rambling prescience 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 prescience. But this force never runs dry because it is its own turbulence.
2. Today it is not only the legitimacy of cultures that is threatened in the world (the life energy of peoples); also threatened are their relations of equivalency. A modern epic and a modern tragedy would offer to unite the specificity of nations, granting each culture’s opacity (though no longer as censor), yet at the same time imagining the transparency of their relations.
3. We will look straight at the sacred, the assumed order in the disorder of Relation, without being stricken with awe. We will discuss it without the solemn chant of the Greek Chorus… The imagined transparency of Relation is, in that way, the opposite of the reductive transparency of the generalizing universal.
4. Thus, that which protects the Diverse we call opacity. And henceforth we shall call Relation’s imaginary a transparency, one that for ages (ever since the Pre-Socratics? or the Mayans? in Timbuktu already? ever since the pre-Islamic poets and the Indian storytellers?) has had premonitions of its unforeseeable whirl.
5. For centuries “generalization,” as operated by the West, brought different community tempos into an equivalency in which it attempted to give a hierarchical order to the times they flowered. Now that the panorama has been determined and equidistances described, is it not, perhaps, time to return to a no less necessary “degeneralization”? Not to a replenished outrageous excess of specificities but to a total (dreamed-of) freedom of the connections among them, cleared out of the very chaos of their confrontations.
6. It is not just literature. When we examine how speech functions in this Plantation realm, we observe that there are several almost codified types of expression. Direct, elementary speech, articulating the rudimentary language necessary to get work done; stifled speech, corresponding to the silence of this world in which knowing how to read and write is forbidden; deferred or disguised speech, in which men and women who are gagged keep their words close. The Creole language integrated these three modes and made them jazz.
7. For three centuries of constraint had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out.