J.

M ICHAEL D ASH
 ]

Anxious Insularity
Identity Politics and Creolization in the Caribbean

There are so many islands!

As many islands as the stars at night
[...]
just as this earth is one
island in archipelagoes of stars.1

Un pays d’île ne se trouve pas, s’il n y a pas d’autres îles. La

terre-île ne serait pas, s’il n’y avait d’autres planètes.2

L
E T M E B E G I N with two defining features of Caribbean societies.
The first is that they are inescapably historical. By this I mean that
Caribbean societies are the creation of a history which began with
the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 and with the
subsequent extermination of the native population of the region. History, as it
were, further complicates the picture by the peculiar nature of the region’s
settlement. Because of the need to repopulate the islands of the Caribbean

1
Derek Walcott, “The Schooner Flight,” in Walcott, Collected Poems 1948–1984
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986): 361.
2
Édouard Glissant, Mahagony (Paris: Seuil, 1987): 195.

© A Pepper-Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. Gordon

Collier & Ulrich Fleischmann (Matatu 27–28; Amsterdam & New York: Editions
Rodopi, 2003).
288 J. M I C H A E L D A S H ]

archipelago with labour to run the sugar plantations, slavery and later schemes
of indentureship left in their wake diverse ethnic groups cut off from their
communities of origin. This brings us the second defining feature of the
Caribbean region. Caribbean societies are also inescapably heterogeneous.
This means that, in an area where there is no native population, peoples quite
distinct from each other have had to coexist quite often on tiny island spaces.
This heterogeneity is further intensified by prolonged periods of colonization.
Caribbean societies are some of the oldest colonies in the West and cannot be
accounted for without reference to the powerful shaping forces of colo-
nialism.
Nevertheless, despite the powerful shaping forces of modernization in
these societies, they were never seen as ‘Western’. Equally ironic was the fact
that, despite being non-white, they could not be considered ‘native’ or pure
Other. In order to account for the peculiar nature of the origins of Caribbean
societies, Édouard Glissant uses the term ‘digenèse’, suggesting a double and
contradictory beginning for Caribbean society:
aux origines de l’Antillais ou du Caribéen il y a non une Genèse, mais un fait
historique combien de fois établi et combien de fois raturé de la mémoire
publique qui est la traite négrière. L’holocauste de la traite et le ventre du
bateau négrier […] sont une genèse d’autant plus impérative, quand même
elle procède d’une démarche du composite. Cette ‘origine’ d’une nouvelle
sorte, qui n’est pas une création du monde, je l’appelle une digenèse.3
Wilson Harris more recently calls into question the possibility of a fixed
essence or linear filiation in the Caribbean by using a term similar to
Glissant’s, “unfinished genesis.”4 It is this very historicity and heterogeneity,
this peculiar genesis, that made Caribbean societies an oddity in Western
scholarship and a nightmare for early ethnographers and naturalists, who were
forced to come to terms with, or deny, the fact that these were impure soci-
eties, problematic creations of the ongoing process of historical change.
Consequently, stereotypes of Caribbean island societies have been tradition-

3
Édouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Stock, 1996): 267; “The word in
the tale cannot pretend not to know that at the birth of the Antillean or Caribbean
people there was no Genesis, but a historical fact established over and over again and
erased over and over again from public memory: Slavery. The holocaust of the slave
trade and the belly of the slave ship […] confer a much more imperative Genesis, even
if the origin proceeds from a point that is hybrid. This new type of ‘origin’, which is
not about the creation of a world, I will call a ‘digenesis’ ” ; Faulkner, Mississippi, tr.
Barbara Lewis & Thomas C. Spear (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000): 195.
4
Wilson Harris, “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination,” Journal of Com-
monwealth Literature 27.1 (1992): 13–25.
] Anxious Insularity 289

ally tied to the idea of timelessness, in both a negative and a positive sense.
Island space could, for instance, lead to terrible isolation, to a sense of ship-
wrecked communities cut off from civilization and the modern world. The
British historian James Froude was as much a spokesman for an entire field of
scholarship as anything else when he declared in 1888 that in the Caribbean
“there were no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and
purpose of their own.”5 As much as being a late pro-slavery position that
posited the ex-slave are naturally inferior and incapable of entering history, it
arguably provides some insight into the use of racial stereotyping as a dis-
cursive process which helps the racist reduce the other’s strangeness by
understanding it. As Homi Bhahba has argued in “The Other Question,”6
racial stereotyping is a gratifying and facilitating process that is crucial to the
process of subjectification in the colonizing process and is a product of a
fetishistic anxiety. This is a key issue for two reasons. If this reductive opacity
is fetishistic, there is no way of opposing it by simply changing this negative
image for a positive one – a point that was to be made with great persuasive-
ness by Frantz Fanon and further elaborated by Édouard Glissant in his
demand for a new opacity that would be a kind of actively generated unread-
ability beyond the Other’s reductive understanding.
There is another, equally insidious, form of stereotyping of the Caribbean
that also focuses on the region in terms of a prehistoric timelessness but
ascribes to it a kind of heroic plenitude This process is accurately described
by Chris Bongie as a kind of “exoticizing exoticism,” as opposed to the
“imperialist exoticism” practised by the likes of Froude:
Whereas imperialist exoticism affirms the hegemony of modern civilisation
over less developed, savage territories, eroticising exoticism privileges those
very territories and their peoples, figuring them as a possible refuge from an
overbearing modernity. The autonomy of alternative cultures and territories,
their fundamental difference from what we might call “the real, of the
Same,” is the one requisite condition of exoticism: only given this difference
can the individual hope to exercise – be it for imperialist or eroticising ends –
the heroic sovereignty denied him in post-revolutionary Europe.7

5
James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1888).
6
Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Dis-
course of Colonialism,” in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex
Conferences 1976–84, ed. Francis Barker et al. (New York: Methuen, 1986): 148–72.
7
Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle
(Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1991): 17.
290 J. M I C H A E L D A S H ]

Bongie’s approach to plenitude fixes it, fascinatingly, in terms of a modernist

dream of heroic authenticity and exemplary self-knowledge.
This rather generalized phenomenon within colonialist discourse may well
have preceded ‘post-revolutionary Europe’, in that it may go back to the trope
of island space with defined boundaries and Crusoesque self-sufficiency. The
temptation of this kind of utopian insularity is to project the oppressed as full
subjects demanding the right to be heard. Indeed, this yearning for Caliban-
esque plenitude intimately linked to European modernism’s desire for authen-
ticity and disalienation is at the root both of nativist thought in the region and
of the persistent reversion to images of heroic resistance.
This approach has only recently come under explicit scrutiny by Caribbean
thinkers – for instance, by Antonio Benítez–Rojo, who makes the case for a
view of the Caribbean as non-apocalyptic: “The choices of all or nothing, for
or against, honor or blood, have little to do with the culture of the Carib-
bean.”8 Such stark choices are not practical in a region so marked by the rela-
tional and ambiguous contacts between colonizer and colonized, hero and
villain. It was Frantz Fanon who perhaps first deconstructed the appeal of this
binary structure by pointing to the futility of a mere inversion of power and
powerlessness and by raising the issue of the political unconscious. A similar
position has been taken and extensively examined by Édouard Glissant in his
interrogation of binary oppositions in Caribbean space. In Glissant’s theory of
relation, dominated and dominant do not form a pair of contradictory opposi-
tions but are relationally involved with each other, thereby making the possi-
bility of a dialectical tension between them unimaginable.
The peculiar relational identity or the phenomenon of digenèse in the
Caribbean is first raised in Haiti with the events that led to the revolution of
1804. Despite later ideologically driven attempts to see the Haitian Revolu-
tion as a collective act of marronnage or, in the words of Aimé Césaire,
“upright negritude,” it was, as Eugene Genovese reminds us, not a product of
atavistic longings for a primal, ethnic past but one of the most radical expres-
sions of the democratic revolutions of modern times:
Toussaint’s revolution provided the radical alternative of a modern nation
with embryonic modern social relations. Toussaint’s revolution called for the
“Europeanization” of St Domingue in the same way that it sought to compel
the European Revolution to come to terms with the aspirations of colonial
peoples. It did not seek to turn the blacks of St Domingue into Europeans but

8
Antonio Benítez–Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Post-
modern Perspective, tr. James E. Maraniss (1992; Durham NC & London: Duke UP,
rev. ed. 1996): 10.
] Anxious Insularity 291

to lead them toward a recognition that European technology had revolu-

tionized the world and forced all peoples to participate in the recreation of a
world culture at once nationally variegated and increasingly uniform. From
that moment, the slaves of the New World had before them the possibility of
a struggle for freedom that pointed to participation in the mainstream of
world history rather than away from it.9
Therefore, from the very outset, the anti-imperialist relational project of
Caribbean identity was being enacted in the first black republic in the West
hemisphere. In 1804, Haiti attempted to project itself as post-native and black
Western, a concept that was inconceivable at the time. It perhaps also illus-
trates Glissant’s contention that smaller Third World states are more alert to
the question of a relational identity than the West, which is burdened with the
ideal of imposing its universal civilizing mission on the world. The dream of a
non-hierarchical free play of interrelatedness in 1804 was, to say the least,
disastrously premature. It is instructive to examine the ways in which the
question of identity is negotiated in Haitian writing in the aftermath of the
revolution.
Haitian writing in the early years can best be understood in terms of two
opposing but interrelated approaches to the phenomenon of ‘digenèse’. These
approaches can be roughly divided along the lines of nature versus culture.
On the one hand, nature was used by early literary nationalists to establish a
kind of organic coherence and legitimizing plenitude. Haitian ground was a
means of establishing in nationalist poetry a buried authenticity that made the
first Caribbean nation state unique and original. The emergence of a nativist
essentialism – of a virginal nature, a feminized hinterland – not only stood in
contradiction to what Genovese sees as Haiti’s participation in the mainstream
of world history, but also looked back to an unattainable premodern past that
was itself the product of a nostalgia for pure origins that lay at the heart of
modernist thought. This early Haitian manifestation of the desire for opacity
outside of the West’s universalizing sameness found itself trapped in the kind
of discourse that Bongie calls an “eroticising exoticism.” In both a literal and
an ideological way, this attempt at a foundational poetics would be challenged
by the fact that the Haitian ground became problematic as both deforestation
and erosion made for the revaluation of the concept of ground and a grounded
identity outside of the dynamics of a relational identity. The use of nature to
provide an opacity, often symbolically presented in terms of the forest’s

9
Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in
the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1979; repr. New
York: Random House / Vintage, 1981): 92.
292 J. M I C H A E L D A S H ]

ability to conceal the maroon, would no longer be an adequate metaphor for

opacity, as the poets at the turn of the century would demonstrate.
Ideologically, this anxious insularity was countered by nineteenth-century
Haitian essayists whose now famous defence of the black race against Gobin-
eau’s ethnocentric fantasies in De l’inégalité des races humaines were essen-
tially a plea to recognize Haiti’s modernity, its place within a global history
and its inextricable involvement with the West. The refutations of static, time-
less premodernity by Louis Joseph Janvier, Hannibal Price and Antenor
Firmin took the broad view that no human characteristics were innate and that
all men were created equal and capable of civilization. In reacting against a
limiting essentialist view and attempting to respond to a deterritorializing
imperative, these essayists defined an anti-essentialist position that unfor-
tunately had no room for a Haitian particularity and promoted Haitian culture
in terms of docile transparency. In a sense, even though it sins at the other end
of the spectrum, the universalism of these early essayists still conforms to the
identity politics of the time, which sought a fixed and settled definition. Not
only does it leave out of account the dynamics of Haiti’s encounter with the
West, it equally underestimates the extent to which the West had been trans-
formed through contact with the Other, a phenomenon described in a recent
essay by Glissant as “L’universel a basculé dans la diversité, qui la
bouscule.”10
Anxiety created by the troubling implications of the Caribbean’s historical
‘digenèse’ would become a dominant feature of French Caribbean thought in
particular, and would re-emerge as an obsessive quest for cultural alterity in
the 1930s and 1940s. It is no coincidence that Caribbean intellectuals were
drawn to Surrealism at this time. In a sense, the Surrealist aesthetic represents
a response to the issue of historical digenèse as raised by Glissant, since, as
James Clifford accurately points out, Surrealism “values fragments, curious
collections, unexpected juxtapositions.”11 Even more precisely, Max Ernst’s
definition of the collage seems to respond precisely to the complexity of
fortuitous and paradoxical cultural and ethnic recombinations in the Carib-
bean when he defines the mechanism of the collage as “the coupling of two
realities, irreconcilable in appearance upon a plane that apparently does not
suit them.”12 The experience of Surrealism, however, is one in which the rela-

10
Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris: Gallimard,
1996): 68.
11
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography,
Literature and Art (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1988): 118.
12
Max Ernst, quoted in Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 117.
] Anxious Insularity 293

tional possibilities of this aesthetic become congealed into a kind of essential-

ist opacity. The emergence of a kind of reductive mystification in the practice
of Surrealism is raised by René Ménil in his Tracées, to which insufficient
attention has been paid.13
The investment in a literary primitivism or a rupestral, rock-bound poetic
that mark this period of writing is quite remarkable. The two classics of this
fascination with the premodern, with a strategic primitivism that attempted to
face the threat of a global, oppressive unfolding of modernity, were Jacques
Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée and Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour
au pays natal. In both instances, this global threat takes the form of the spread
of U S imperialism in the region in terms of the nineteen-year occupation of
Haiti and the view of World War II as a nightmare of modern technology.
What emerges in the ideologically driven writing of these decades is a poetics
of origination projecting the vision of an elemental Caribbean, of an identity
mystically rooted in the earth. Césaire, after all, saw poetry as “le mot primi-
tif: dessein rupestre dans la matière sonore.”14 Roumain similarly imagined
the freed water as “une mince lame d’argent” leaving incisive hieroglyphs on
the unprotesting surface of the land.15
I would like to argue that, following the logic of Césaire’s rupestral
poetics, the most important neologism in his epic Cahier is not the word
‘négritude’ but, rather, “verrition,”16 the word that brings the poem to a close.
This obscure and frequently misunderstood coinage has much to do with
Césaire’s poetics of erasure and pure origins, in that it means to sweep away
or scrape the surface clean. His poem ends, therefore, with the fiery tongue of
the night, spurting out of the re-animated volcano, destroying the past and
creating the ground for a new world space. This is the fiery tongue that speaks
the new world into existence, producing the founding word. The dream of a
heterocosmic space in defiance of modernity is produced by a triumphalist
primitivism. It is the dream of “la nouveauté palpitante du monde,”17 an un-
problematic sovereign territory on which a new social order can be grounded.

13
René Ménil, Tracées: Identité, négritude, esthétique aux Antilles (Paris: Robert
Laffont, 1981).
14
Aimé Césaire, Poésie et connaissance (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973): 120.
15
Jacques Roumain, Gouverneurs de la rosée (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie de
l’État, 1944): 219; Masters of the Dew, tr. Langston Hughes & Mercer Cook, intro. J.
Michael Dash (London: Heinemann, 1978): 183.
16
Engl. “veerition”; Aimé Césaire, “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (1956) /
“Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” in Césaire, The Collected Poetry, tr. &
intro. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith (Berkeley: U of California P, 1983): 84 / 85.
17
Césaire, Poésie et connaissance, 114.
294 J. M I C H A E L D A S H ]

As with Césaire’s poem, Roumain’s novel is a work about exile and return,
about the subject’s return to his native land with a vision gained from a pain-
ful experience with the disruptive forces of modern capitalist enterprise. This
great ‘creole classic’ hardly adheres to a poetics of creolization, since Rou-
main dreams of a return to a heroic sovereignty untouched by modernity’s
kiss of death. Roumain’s narrative is driven by an anxiety to establish a new
genealogy in the form of his protagonist, who manually inscribes a new truth
on the plain’s virgin surface. This novel is about the pure newborn conceived
at the spring by the virgin Anna–Ôse. We are ideologically remote from a
celebration of freaks of nature such as the ‘shabine’. As is the case with
Césaire’s poem, this novel indulges in the fantasy of a primitivist cosmogony
which would orient the primal images of tree, earth, sun and water. Moun-
tainous Haiti becomes, in Roumain’s narrative, an accommodating surface
which gives the Haitian peasantry an elemental right to their native land. To
this extent, Roumain’s novel is typical of the Latin American tradition of the
novela de la tierra. There is no denying the force of apocalyptic thought in
these works. Césaire and Roumain are exemplary practitioners of a rupestral
poetics within which the volcano’s fiery tongue or the silvery glint of the
blade of water makes for the founding of new worlds on an island rock.
In this survey of French Caribbean thought with its swings from nature to
culture, from a timeless premodernity to its anxious sense of involvement
with the other and the West, Frantz Fanon can be seen as a Janus-like figure,
both interrogating the past and yet part of it as well as pointing to a decon-
structive postmodernity without being able to conceptualize it fully. Fanon’s
importance in French Caribbean thought is intimately related to the effect of
Sartrean existentialism on his ideas. His interrogation of the unproblematic
insularity or the polarizing ideological perspective of an earlier generation is
intimately linked with his view of the individual as an embodied conscious-
ness condemned to come to terms with the Other’s existence. For Fanon, the
problem was aggravated in the colonial situation, since that situation pro-
duced a mimetic impulse in the colonized, who then lacked “ontological
resistance” to the colonizer. The strength and ambiguity of Fanon’s thought
are implicated in this relationship between resistance and mimesis. In a com-
ment that is pertinent to our discussion, Fanon notes:
Nous comprenons pourquoi le Noir ne peut se complaire dans son insularité.
Pour lui, il n’existe qu’une porte de sortie et elle donne sur le monde blanc [...]
c’est par l’intérieur que le Noir va essayer de rejoindre le sanctuaire blanc.18

18
We understand now why the black man cannot take pleasure in his insularity. For
him there is only one way out, and it leads into the white world […] it is from within
] Anxious Insularity 295

An anxious insularity becomes full-blown in Fanon’s theories as the colo-

nized psyche is pulled in opposing directions because of the ambivalence that
is at the base of the mimetic drive. This ambivalence is tied to the fact that
violent, disruptive modernity has made a self-sufficient insularity impossible
and has projected Caribbean societies into a violently forged creolizing real-
ity. Fanon’s position is crucial to understanding the dilemma of the colonized
in the Antilles, since he recognizes that all human relations must unfold under
the sign of alterity, the unavoidable presence of the other. Fanon adopted
Sartre’s notion of the “écrasante perspective” of the Other’s objectifying look
to speculate that the fragile colonial ego was incapable of projecting itself in
terms of an ideal Sartrean ‘for-itself’. Insular anxiety had produced a series of
constructs (négritude, marronnage, enracinement, etc) which were self-indul-
gent and ultimately illusory. In redeploying some of the fundamental concepts
of European existentialism, Fanon raised the complex issue of historical con-
tact, discursive practices and the struggle of individual consciousness for re-
cognition.
The basic inadequacy of Fanon’s thought derives from its manichaean
nature: i.e. the apocalyptic confrontation of two static narcissistic worlds in
the colony. Fanon’s often overly schematic binarism was arguably incapable
of admitting the importance of the relational – the fact that colonialism had
forced new contradictory social structures into being and that the West itself,
having entered into this relational system, was itself being transformed. In a
sense, Fanon had accepted the grand universalist narrative of colonial thought
and had overlooked the thrust of a hybridizing modernity. Henry Louis Gates,
Jr. reminds us of these inadequacies and the current tendency to turn Fanon
into a “transhistorical Global theorist,” to make him “even better than he is.”19
If the driving force of Fanon’s thought is the tension between resistance
and mimesis, the most important theoretical concept of Édouard Glissant is
that of ‘relation’. This term is crucial to Glissant’s earliest meditations on the
interdependence of perceiving subject and external reality, since the existence
of the subject always depends crucially on what is being perceived. From his
earliest work, Glissant has been preoccupied by the fact that subject and
object constantly elude each other’s grasp. In his earliest fiction, we sense this
emphasis on the interconnectedness of things and the subject’s inability to
establish a transcendental self. The seer is seen, the narrator narrated and the

that the Negro will seek admittance to the white sanctuary; Frantz Fanon, Peau noire,
masques blancs (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1952): 61; tr. as Black Skin, White
Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967): 51.
19
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 470.
296 J. M I C H A E L D A S H ]

protagonist constantly acted on in his early novel La Lézarde.20 In his inter-

rogation of the real and symbolic values of insularity, Glissant focuses on
island space as the site of a double identity – both closed and open. He speaks
directly to the issue of the Caribbean’s digenèse in his monumental Discours
antillais:
On prononce ordinairement l’insularité comme un mode de l’isolement,
comme une névrose d’espace. Dans la Caraïbe pourtant chaque île est une
ouverture. La dialectique Dehors-Dedans rejoint l’assaut Terre-Mer. C’est
seulement pour ceux qui sont amarrés au continent Europe que l’insularité
constitue prison. L’imaginaire des Antilles nous libère de l’étouffement.21
The main thrust of Glissant’s thought is to conceive of island space not as a
site of neurosis but in terms of a relational context.
It is within such a context that we should conceive of Glissant’s concept of
a creole identity. The main thrust of relational thought is opposed to ideas of a
singular autonomous essence. Creolization is therefore concerned with an
ever-changing, ever-diverse process that does not itself constitute a category –
as opposed to others who conceive of creole identity in terms of a plenitude,
such as Kamau Brathwaite and members of the Créolité movement, whose
notions of creolization are ultimately grounded in claims of a foundational
identity and rupestral plenitude.22 The deterritorializing imperative of Glis-
sant’s concept is shared by such theorists as Antonio Benítez–Rojo and Wil-
son Harris. Creole is thus tied to words like diversity, multiplicity and errancy
(l’errance), and one can even locate within Glissant’s own work an anxious
insularity as he struggles against the essentializing temptation of a closed
insularity, as in his abandonment of the idea of Antillanité, with its essential-
izing ending. It is this interrogation of a foundational poetics, which mirrors a
world where there are no more apocalypses or final resolutions, that has led
Glissant to use models like chaos theory and the Deleuzean rhizome in order
to describe an unstable system of identity politics. The creole language itself

20
Édouard Glissant, La Lézarde (Paris: Gallimard, 1958); The Ripening, tr. & intro.
Michael Dash (London: Heinemann, 1985).
21
Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981): 249–50; tr. as
Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, ed., tr. & intro. J. Michael Dash (Charlottes-
ville: UP of Virginia, 1989): 00.
22
Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation
Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London & Port of Spain: New Beacon,
1984); Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau & Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité /
In Praise of Creoleness: Édition bilingue français / anglais, tr. M.B. Taleb–Khyar
(1989; Paris: Presses Universitaires Créoles / Gallimard, 1993).
] Anxious Insularity 297

is projected not as a full, primordial, unproblematic language but as the exem-

plary relational product of juxtaposed, fragmented language communities.
I would like to bring this survey of anxious insularity to a close by examin-
ing one of the images that is fundamental to Glissant’s sense of the Dehors-
Dedans, of the link between his idea of opacity and his revisiting of the idea
of Difference and Relation, and his redefinition of alterity. In a curious way,
Glissant’s idea of opacity is related to the Surrealists’ ideal of “le hasard
objectif” and their desire to make the world of objects opaque to our under-
standing or grasp of them. Glissant seems to apply the same idea to the island
rock, which remains irredeemably plural, an inscrutable and unpredictable
totality or perhaps an irreducible force-field of possibilities beyond the sub-
ject’s control or mastery. But Glissant’s imagination seems equally drawn to
the idea of exploding rocks, of the rock under the erosive force of the sea or
the explosive force of the volcano, which is ‘diffracted’ across the sea in
terms of a new set of relational possibilities. In this regard, Glissant’s image
of the island-rock that splits and projects itself is closely tied to “le rocher du
Diamant” as a concretized manifestation of this image of an explosive trajec-
tory. Curiously enough, the symbolic force of this volcanic monolith, whose
very name suggests reflection and impenetrability, was noted by André
Breton and Paul Masson – “Ne trouves-tu à la fois singulier et nécessaire que
le rocher de l’île qui ouvre la mer libre soit précisément le rocher du
Diamant.”23 In a sense, it is through “Diamond Rock” that Martinique enters
into relation with the Other; it is an opacity outwardly projected across the
turbulent ‘étendue’ of the Caribbean Sea.
The model of exploding rocks or of “une insularité archipélisante,” there-
fore, becomes a way of avoiding the twin anxieties that have haunted identity
politics in the Caribbean – the temptation to exclusionary constructs and the
related fear of a pathological mimeticism. Glissant attempts to beak with
models of static polarity by theorizing the archipelagic concept of ground that
is not grounded. Because of the force of a disruptive modernity, Glissant is
proposing that what we are can never be fully understood and what we were
can never fully be recovered. Since there is no home, no roots, no transcen-
dental plenitude to which we can return, we are condemned to an outward
exploding of our individual opacities (to use his terms): an ideal relationality
between freed opacities. If the Caribbean is now firmly fixed within the
Glissantian moment, it is because he represents one of the most thorough-
going efforts to break free from an anxiety of exclusionism that has invariably

23
André Breton & Paul Masson, “Dialogue Créole,” in Martinique charmeuse de
serpents (Paris: J.–J. Pauvert, 1972).
298 J. M I C H A E L D A S H ]

been trapped in a colonialist politics of identity. As he reminds us in his Traité

du Tout-monde, the real work of decolonization means complete disengage-
ment from an identity politics that cannot take into account the significance of
a Caribbean digenèse. His call to arms in Traité du Tout-monde is well worth
taking seriously:
Faites exploser cette roche. Ramasse-en les morceaux et les distribuez sur
l’étendue.
Nos identités se relaient, et par la tombent en vaine prétention ces hiérarchies
cachées, ou qui forcent par subreptice à se maintenir sous l’éloge. Ne con-
sentez pas à ces manœuvres de l’identique.
Ouvrez au monde le champ de votre identité.24

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Praise of Creoleness, Édition bilingue français / anglais, tr. M.B. Taleb–Khyar
(1989; Paris: Presses Universitaires Créoles / Gallimard, 1993).
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ford CA: Stanford UP, 1991).
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Césaire, Aimé. The Collected Poetry, tr. & intro. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1983).
——. Poésie et connaissance (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973).

24
Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997): 158 (Make
this rock burst asunder. Gather the pieces and scatter them everywhere. Our iden-
tities are linked together, and these hidden hierarchies are thereby reduced to vain
pretence, or are compelled to preserve themselves through surreptitious self-praise.
Do not fall for these identitarian ploys. Open the whole domain of your identity to
the world. – tr. G.C.).
] Anxious Insularity 299

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ture and Art (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1988).
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Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967).
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Sons, 1888).
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course: Selected Essays, ed., tr. & intro. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: UP of
Virginia, 1989).
——. Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Stock, 1996); Faulkner, Mississippi, tr. Barbara
Lewis & Thomas C. Spear (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000).
——. Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).
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——. Traité du Tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).
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1986).

Y
] NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 541

W AYDE C OMPTON (Canada) is a Vancouver writer and editor whose

work includes the Dorothy Livesay Prize-nominated book of poetry 49th
Parallel Psalm ( 1999) and the pioneering edited collection Bluesprint:
Black British Columbian Literature and Orature (2002). His current pro-
jects include the performance called The Reinventing Wheel: A Turntable
Poem. He is also working on a novel about mixed-race and telepathy.

J. M ICHAEL D ASH (Jamaica/ U S A ) is currently a professor of French at

New York University, after many years at the University of the West Indies,
Jamaica. His major research interests lie in francophone and Caribbean litera-
ture and literary theory. He has translated Édouard Glissant’s La Lézarde
(1958, tr. 1985) and Le Discours antillais (1981, tr. 1989), is the co-editor
(with Julio Rodríguez–Luis) of A History of Literature in the Caribbean,
vol.1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions (1994) and (with Charles Arthur)
of A Haiti Anthology: Libete (1999), and is the author of Literature and
Ideology in Haiti, 1915–1961 (1981), Haiti and the United States: National
Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (1988), Édouard Glissant (1995),
The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (1998),
and Culture and Customs of Haiti (2001).

P ASCALE M ARIE D E S OUZA (U S A ) is director of the French Studies pro-

gram at Johns Hopkins University. She is co-editor of three special issues of
the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, “The Caribbean That Is? Exploring
Rifts and Disjunctions” and “The Caribbean That Isn’t? Exploring Intertext-
ualities” (with Anne Malena, 2001–2002) and “Migrations and Métissages
in French Caribbean Literature” (with H. Adlai Murdock, 2003), and has
published numerous articles on Caribbean literature and folklore, including
contributions to Penser la créolité (1995) and Maryse Condé: Une nomade
inconvenante (2002).

E VA M ARTHA E CKKRAMMER (Austria) studied Romance philology at the

University of Salzburg as well as in Coimbra, Portugal, and has published
(1996) a doctoral study in linguistics on the effect of literary translation in the
evolutionary process of minority languages (particularly Papiamento), as well
as studies in obituary notices (1996), contrastive textology (1999), and cyber-
discourse (2000). Since 1997 she has been an assistant professor at Salzburg
University with a special interest in creole studies and contrastive discourse
studies.
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