Romance Studies, Vol. 24 (2), July 2006

EDOUARD GLISSANT: RESISTANCE ANDOPACITE

PATRICK CROWLEY

University College Cork, Ireland

This article examines Edouard Glissant's notion of opacite and its interpretation by critics as a formof resistance to cultural appropriation. In doing so it asks to what extent opacite can be located withina postcolonial framework. Or, to put it another way, is Glissant's opacite a form of resistance thatis specific to a territory that we can call postcolonial or is it more general? In teasing out this question,the article critically examines approaches to Glissant's work which, whilst always illuminating, tendto circumscribe opacite mthin specific contexts. The importance of contexts is acknowledged but, it isargued, opacite 15 active unthin transversal modes of poetic interpretation that Victor Segalen's worksuggests and Glissant's thought elaborates. Opacite'5 resistance operates obliquely by both informingthat which is culturally or psychically impenetrable, and opening it to its outside in a process ofcreolisation in which the elements of exchange are transformed in unpredictable ways. As such,Glissant's work could be located within a postcolonial territory but its logic would exceed the, albeituncertain, limits of such a domain.

Les paysages du monde actuel sont le plus souvent eventres, delaves, detruits jusqu'a leurs sourcessouterraines par les guerres, les oppressions, rimprevoyance ou la betise des humanites, c'est unede nos approches de la connaissance aujourd'hui que de les frequenter par-dela ces ravages, quenous tentons par ailleurs de limiter, et de plonger a cet inextricable et a cette opacite qu'ilscontinuent de tendre sur le Tout-Monde, pour le proteger. C'est bien la le lieu, inexplicable,inexpugnable, de la connaissance tremblante dont la poesie est la garante la plus assidue.

Edouard Glissant, La Cohee du Lamentin, quatrieme de couverture

In juxtaposing resistance and opacite the title of this article suggests that opacite is a form ofpostcolonial resistance. I want to pursue this and look at a little of what Edouard Glissanthas written about opacite, and consider how this has been interpreted and put to use byWestern critics. I want to do this in order to come to some provisional assessment of opaciteas a form of resistance that could be termed postcolonial. Or, to put it another way, isGlissant's opacite a form of resistance that is specific to a territory that we can call postcolonialor is it more general?

In general it could be said that Edouard Glissant puts in play boundaries that remainoperative even as they are challenged. GUssant, for example, is an essayist, poet and novelistwho writes in ways that combine these terms so as to call into question, but not completely

Address correspondence to: Patrick Crowley, Department of French, University College Cork, Cork,Ireland; e-mail: pcrowley@french.ucc.ie

© 2006 University of Wales Swansea DOI: 10.1179/174581506x120073

io6 PATRICK CROWLEY

efFace, the conventional generic boundaries that separate the theoretical essay from thenovel or poem. Much the same could be said of Glissant's engagement with the boundaries,natural and political, that determine Martinique, the Caribbean island of his birth, whichwas, in the 1930s, a French colony and became, in 1946, a French departement d'outre mer,no different, in principle, from the metropolitan departements that constitute the Frenchstate. It was the independence of this territory that Glissant sought in the 1950s.' Glissant'sposition on Martinique's political status has since come to be more closely informed by hisnotions of creolisation and Antillanite: the networks of hnguistic, social and cultural exchangeand transformation that link Martinique to other Caribbean islands, to the Americancontinent and beyond. These two notions of creolisation and Antillanite are, argues MichaelDash in his reading of Le Discours antillais, 'inextricably linked' to opacite.^

GHssant's cultural analyses and his poetics are equally related. Since at least the 1950sGlissant has advocated a poetics of Relation that would open up positively defmed,discrete identities (hterary or pohtical) to what Hes outside them or beside them or to whatthey might encounter by chance. This movement towards multiple others, this opennessto exchange and unexpected transformarions was, by the 1980s, likened by Glissant toGilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of the rhizome that spreads outwards througha network of roots and nodes. Relation is about fertile contacts and fruitful synergies, theoutcomes of which cannot be predicted and which escape determination within a prolifer-ating mode of a being that resists hierarchy. That is. Relation refutes notions of identityimposed by a system that would transcend a relational subject position. A system of colonialpower, for example, that introduces an educational system freighted with the cultural valuesof its own tradition.

Within this notion of Relation, Ghssant locates opacite as a means of preserving theirreducible kernel of identity that maintains what is diverse, what is culturally specific, or,to use the term Glissant borrows from Victor Segalen, le Divers.^ Segalen's writings fromthe period 1904-1918 would have characterized le Divers as the exotic something that resultsfrom an encounter with what lies within another culture, something that retains an elementof impenetrability. In Fragment VI of Essai sur I'exotisme, Segalen writes: 'L'impenetrabilitedes Races qui n'est autre chose que l'extension, aux races, de l'lmpenetrabilite desIndividus."* Glissantian opacite is akin to Segalenian impenetrabilite in that it has to do withthat which cannot be reduced to categorical systems of thought that would recuperatealterity by making it understandable, by rendering it transparent.^ GHssant's reading ofWilliam Faulkner's representation of the plantation slave, in novels such as Absalom,Absaloml (1936), returns us to Segalenian impenetrabilite. Ghssant notes that Faulkner adoptsthree narrative modes (objective narration, subjective narration and interior monologue),and notes that: 'Le deuxieme mode s'apphque assez rarement aux Noirs, le troisieme a peupres jamais.'* Glissant offers the following reading:

je prefere penser qu'il y a dans ce choix methodologique la lucidite et l'honnetete (la generositeen somme, naturelle autant que systematique, c'est-a-dire d'ordre esthetique) de celui quisait, qui admet en efFet qu'il ne comprendra jamais ni les Noirs ni les Indiens, et qu'il seraitodieux (et, a ses yeux, ridicule) de poser au narrateur tout-puissant et d'essayer de penetrer cesconsciences pour lui impenetrables.

Here the notion of impenetrabiHty informs an aesthetic (styhstic) choice that signals a hmitto what can be understood. Glissant regularly returns to this notion of epistemological

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limits via the French verb 'comprendre' and its etymological sense of 'taking and drawingtogether'. Glissant writes; 'je reclame pour tous le droit a l'opacite. II ne m'est plusnecessaire de "comprendre" I'autre, c'est-a-dire de le reduire au modele de ma propretransparence, pour vivre avec cet autre ou construire avec lui.'^ 'Comprendre' is equatedwith a 'sens repressif redoutable'.* Equally, the impenetrability of the other informs opacite,but is neither closed entirely upon itself nor is it simply an attribute of a European construc-tion of the exotic or of the other. Opacite, as Glissant writes in L'lntention poetique, is com-mon to communities heavy with the weight of their own history as well as to communitiesthat have been shorn of their history through colonization. Indeed, the relation betweensuch communities requires not so much a language of communication 'mais par contre unecommunication possible (et, s'il se peut, reguliere) entre des opacites mutuellement liberees,des differences, des langages'.' Thus, where for Segalen le Divers is intimately linked to theexotic, Glissant writes about opacity in ways that open it up to a broader cultural dimensionthat foregrounds the capacity of poetic languages to act as conduits of exchange in a worldthat has been dominated by a form of Western thought that has privileged transparency.The opening chapter of Le Discours antillais begins:

Nous reclamons le droit a l'opacite. Par quoi notre tension pour tout dru exister rejoint le drameplanetaire de la Relation: l'elan des peuples neantises qui opposent aujourd'hui a l'universel dc latransparence, impose par I'Occident, une multiplicite sourde du Divers.*"

In a footnote to this line Glissant makes the point that 'L'Occident n'est pas a I'ouest. Cen'est pas un lieu, c'est un projet'. If Glissant resists then he is resisting a mode of thoughtwhich, though forged by the encounter between Enlightenment ideas and imperialistpragmatism, is not confined to Europe in the way that opacite is not confined to culturesdeemed, by Europeans, to be exotic. Ghssant returns to opacite nearly ten years later inPoetique de la Relation to reaffirm that it goes beyond a colonizer-colonized dichotomy —'Nous reclamons pour tous le droit a l'opacite' — and to caution against the notion of asingle community enclosed upon itself within its own opacity." Opacite is not to beconfused with obscurantism or apartheid, it simply refuses to yield itself; it resists a certainmode of thought that seeks to know or rather to categorize the world and thus reduces itsdiversity to 'la fausse clarte de modeles universels'.'^

The West, though understood as a project, can also be undentood, specifically andhistorically, as colonial France which took overseas a version of Enlightenment thoughtthat was instrumentalized and pressed into the service of power. The light of reason or,in Glissant's view, the false Hght of universal models, informed, for example, the thinkingof many ethnologists, cartographers, teachers, administrators and urban planners who soughtto 'understand' the non-European. This is not to say that GHssant sees rational enquiry assomething to be jettisoned, but as a mode of thinking that should be situated. Opacite, then,appears as a medium that resists the Hght of (Western) understanding in order to preservedivenity and advance exchanges based not upon hierarchy but upon networks that abolishthe primacy of any one centre of understanding. It is equally clear that while Glissant'sreprise of opacite in essays written since the 1960s indicates a consistent notion he has alsoconsistently recontextuaHzed opacite. This article begins with a quotation from the quatriemede couverture of GHssant's collection of essays La Cohee du Lamentin (2005) that looks toopacite as a form of protection against the ravages of contemporary forms of oppression and

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destruction. These essays are less preoccupied with the postcolonial nature of Martinicansociety than they are with the emergence, for example, of recent manifestations of a globalimperium. In the section entided 'Les Empires qui se suivent et ne se repetent pas' GHssantoffers a critique of empire that moves from the Roman empire to empire's most recentavatar, and offers brief reflections on the armaments industry in the United States and 'laCoaHtion etatsunienne' in Iraq."

But the question arises concerning the extent to which opacite itself resists. How resistantis opacite to strategies of contemporary European thought that seek to understand it and,to return to our initial question, to what extent can it still be located within territoriesof postcoloniaHsm? GHssant's work has attracted much critical attention since the early1990s with many commentaries seeking to advance an understanding of GHssant's workthrough the mediation of contexts. The relationship between opacite and enHghteningcontextuaHzation is worth examining as it offers an insight into the limits of opacite'sresistance and, I think, attempts to appropriate it for a specifically postcolonial territory.

The notion of opacite lends itself to a postcolonial reading as it forms part of GHssant'sconsistent meditations on the cultural consequences of colonization and the transadanticslave trade. Daniel Aranjo sees opacite as a poetics that opposes History's legacies. In hisdetailed examination of opacite, Aranjo, describes it in terms of a dense, polysemous net-work of words (such as poids, lourd, epais, dru, sourd, longuement, nuit, noir, recouvrent, la mortand immobilite) that return the reader to 'le mot opacite [qui] est un mot fondamental cheznotre auteur'.'" A fundamental word, argues Aranjo, that informs GHssant's baroque style(his use of long sentences, Hsts, itaHcs, repetition) and functions to articulate 'toute la massedu non-dit, du refoule, tout un Bas-Empire et tout un obscure Quatrieme siecle deSouffrance; tout un lourd Moyen-Age du cri renfonce et noye' (Aranjo 1992: 108). Opadtiexpresses what has been erased from official history and, specifically, the wounds of historythat can only come forth through the poetic cri that Aranjo traces to the slave trade. Heargues that 'l'Opacite n'est pas seulement matiere (et matiere premiere) du cri, mais ce crilui-meme et son organisation meme. Non seulement matiere, mais forme. Non seulementle dit, mais le dire. L'opacite marque (est) le defoulement meme: racine obscure du cri, disaitLorca' (Aranjo 1992: 109). The context of (colonial) History's marginaHzation of the trans-adantic slave trade that involved the suffering of some eleven to thirteen milHon Africansis as crucial to Aranjo's reading as it is to GHssant's work.'^ At the same time, the Lorcacitation roots the notion of opacite within a context in a way that is at odds with GHssant'sdeployment of the image of the rhizome.

Michael Dash's opening chapter on GHssant is entided 'Contexts' and introduces thereader to GHssant by intertwining biographical details with bibHographical evolution.'^Such contexts determine the counter-poetics of GHssant's work, its resistance to Westernhegemony. In his treatment of opacite. Dash offers concrete examples from GHssant's Hterarywork and reads them through the context of GHssant's more heuristic essays.'^ One ofDash's examples, taken from his reading of Glissant's novel La Case du commandeur, con-cerns Marie Celat's paradoxical attempt to recover firom a mental breakdown by fleeing amental institution: 'She escapes with the madman Cherubin, who inhabits an abandonedsugar factory, and finds peace contemplating the counter-order of the dark in a chapterreveaHngly entitled "Roche de l'opacite'" (Dash 1995: 128). Dash moves from citingexpHcit references to opacite in GHssant's novels to a broader consideration of the functionsof opacite that takes its cue from GHssant:

RESISTANCE AND OPACITE 109

what may be more interesting is Glissant's speculation concerning the use of opacity and thesymbolic deployment of subterranean rocks as a counter-poetics. In Le Discours antillm, in adiscussion of what he calls the poetics of the unconscious, Glissant sees the practice of opacity inlanguage, whether the 'detours' of Creole or the Baroque excesses of French, as an instinctivecounter-poetics. (Dash 1995: 137)

Where Aranjo and Dash locate GHssant's work within the context of colonization andcharacterize it in terms of a counter-poetics that would address the wrongs of a colonialpast, it is CeHa Britton's work that sets GHssant's work firmly within the territory of thepostcolonial and, in the process, tracks the counter-poetics of opacite. The tide of her book,Edouard Clissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance, makes clear theHnk between postcolonial resistance and language.'^ Britton sees GHssant's work as a sourceof resistance to French cultural assimilation in that it provides a counter-poetics that wouldassert diversity. She writes: 'if language is to resist sociocultural domination, it must beconstructed and deployed strategically' (p. 182). Britton emphasizes Hterary resistance bothin terms of the representation of resistance in GHssant's texts; specifically, GHssant's craftingof a (poetic) langage that bends and shapes langues (Creole and French in the first instance).This poetic langage draws upon the Hterary resources of the detour, ruse and subterfuge:these are the methods that would subvert the culturally homogenizing effects of colonialFrench values dressed as universal.

Britton's argument works closely with GHssant's texts, and its critical edge is sharpenedby the argument that locates Relation and opacite within the postcolonial panoply. In thisrespect, Britton's examples of opacite are illuminating as subtle readings that make opacitytransparent. Britton quotes Glissant's observation that introducing Creole words or phrasesinto his texts serves only to spice the text with an exoticism that Western palates expect.Against this, she notes how GHssant brings the syntax and rhetorical structures of Creole(of Creole story-teUing) into his texts so as to unsetde the French reader with a languagethat is at once both famUiar and unfamiHar. This relation between Creole and French iswhat GHssant calls creolisation and what Britton reads as constituting 'a very general kind ofopacity affecting the whole of GHssant's fictional writing' (p. 142). And yet creolisation, asGHssant notes, performs a very specific kind of subversion that disconcerts the Frenchreader and I will return to this later."

Moving from the general to the particular, Britton provides a number of examples ofopacite in Glissant's work and in each case suggests that context is critical. She writes 'Thecritique of understanding (or at least the humanist conception of understanding) as anaggressive appropriation of the other, which GHssant mounts in Poetique de la relation [...],is relevant [...], insofar as camouflaged language can only be understood in a way thatrespects its opacity — which traces it through the detours of its context rather than tryingto reduce it to transparency' (p. 153, Britton's itaHcs). Britton offers an example fromGHssant's novel Le Quatrieme siecle. Identifying the recurring image of the 'right-hand half ofthe brain', she comments that it is 'far odder and more opaque' than the images of opaciteshe has previously discussed and sees it as an example of the 'determining force of context'(p. 154). She interprets the image by relating it to the memory of slavery and the forcesof intuition before concluding: 'The image is thus rooted in the sociohistorical culture ofslavery and can only be interpreted within that context' (p. 155). Britton goes on to arguethat, where cultural context is not available to the reader, Glissant's text compensates forthis by constructing its own context through repetition and reprise and that this results

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in an indirect, deferred understanding (p. 156). This is a form of understanding based onthe trace rather than on the whole, or as Britton puts it: 'For the reader, too, opacity meansthat the text can never be grasped as a whole — that is, as a wholly known and thereforecircumscribed entity' (p. 156). But is this not true of all Hterary texts or of Hterary texts thatprivilege poetic densities? Provocatively, one might ask whether Britton's reading is notharnessing GHssant's work to the postcolonial wagon at the expense of situating it within amore general poetics?

Let us look at Britton's final example of poetic opadti. Over five pages (pp. 157-^1)Britton adroitly draws her reader into the folds of GHssant's novel La Case du commandeur inorder to shed Hght on the 'particularly opaque phrase' 'casser la surface des eaux'. She Hnksit to other contexts within the novel and finds its echoes and traces sounded and scatteredwithin this densely poetic novel that provides the attentive reader with a context withinwhich 'casser la surface des eaux' can be understood. Britton's perceptive reading interpretsthe phrase through different stories told in text, tales that Hnk it to Africa, the slave trade,Martinican society, death and self-knowledge. As a close reading it is exemplary, it is veryfine and very convincing. In the end she writes that 'it is not possible to give a simpleparaphrase or translation of it; but the reader [...] has nevertheless acquired a sense of itsmeaningfulness' (p. 161). However, so thorough is her reading that there is not much of aremainder that could be considered opaque. Close, hermeneutic readings that work outmeanings from contexts are at the core of the Hberal arts tradition of interpretation in theWest. Britton's examples of opadte relate neither to creolismes nor to forms of Hnguisticcreolisation but to poetic language and devices — image, repetition, ambiguity and thecreation of a specific poetic language from the legacies of Martinique's history that Hnks itto the Caribbean, to the American continent, to Europe and to Africa. However, althoughher examples of opadte are almost too clear, they at least allow us to suggest that GHssantis not so much interested in the specific terrain of postcolonial resistance as he is in thecapacity of poetic language to unsettle categorical systems of thought that are alHed topower. As such, any postcolonial resistance that one may encounter in GHssant's work issimply part of a more general cultural and poHtical resistance. If opadte cannot resistBritton's careful reading then we need to ask if GHssant is simply making the task of under-standing only provisionally opaque so as to exercise the reading inteUigence of the Westernreader. If so is this not a form of resistance that ultimately convinces the Western reader ofhis or her powers of understanding? Also, is there a sense in which the semantic affinitybetween the 'con' of context and the 'com' of'comprendre' (in the GHssantian sense of theverb detailed above) results in forms of understanding that, potentially at least, circumscribetextual poetics?^" As good as this reading is, however, one might ask if it is to the detrimentof Glissant's insistence that opacite is also proper to Western societies heavy with theweight of history and his constant insistence on a poetics based on Relation, a poetics oftransformations and aleatory encounters that involves multiple contexts.'^'

Where Britton views GHssant through the prism of language's relations to postcolonialresistance, Peter HaUward looks at GHssant's writing from a perspective that ties it to thephilosophical thought of Deleuze and Guattari as part of its critique of postcolonial Htera-ture, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Spedfic.^^ HaUward's insightsinto Glissant's work are at odds with those of other commentators. Where most criticsinterpret GHssant's notion of opacite as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation and aform of protection for local forms of cultural and Hnguistic divenity, HaUward argues that

RESISTANCE AND OPACITE H I

GHssant is not concemed to privilege ethnic particularities or, where he does, it is only tothe extent that these particularities of tradition or language must be transformed througha Hegelian negative into a further synthesis that wiU eventuaUy lead to the whole-world(tout-monde) — a singular plane of Deleuzian inmianence that HaUward identifies as a statebeyond binary oppositions. One within which specific confHcts that take place in the activespace of the in-between (between the traces of colonized cultures and colonial ideologies)are set aside for a singular matrix that effectively disables those forms of dialectical changeoccurring through conflict and resistance. In other words, any resistance that GHssantianopacite might offer to French processes of cultural assimilation is set upon a path that ulti-mately moves away from the simple opposition of colonizer and colonized. HaUward endshis account of GHssant's work asking what GHssant's theory of Relation, and its constantdisplacements, offers those who have been displaced.^'' He cites GHssant against GHssant'there is nothing here (in contestation or in opposition) which cannot be recuperated by thesystem' (HaUward 2001: 125). Situating GHssant's work within a genealogy of thinkers andwriters (such as Deleuze, Guattari, Antonin Artaud and Henri Michaux) who advocated arealm beyond relation, HaUward writes: 'GHssant's famous defence of a "right to opacity"[...] must be understood in this context — as a mechanism organized in the interest of itsown eventual dissolution' (HaUward 2001: 78; HaUward's itaHcs). HaUward sets GHssant'swork wdthin one context; Britton sets it within another. Where Britton sheds Hght uponopacite, HaUward argues the logic of opadte's dissolution. Both place GHssant within theterritory of the postcolonial; Britton in praise; HaUward to underscore the political ineffi-cacy of postcolonial thought. For both, opadte is circumscribed by its context and explainedby it.

Clearly, opadti invites scholarly interpretation, indeed sponsors forms of communicationbetween groups and individuals. There is resistance but there is also an openness withinopadti. As Mary GaUagher astutely observes:

certes, l'eloge glissantien de l'opacite semble mettre en valeur justement I'impossibilite de tra-verser et de connaitre l'autre et I'indispensable reconnaissance de la difference comme resistanceet impenetrabilite. Reste pourtant que l'intrigue de la connaissance ou de l'intelligence, denoueeou non, demeure chez Glissant et jusque dans son parti pris de l'opacite, Torientation centrale dela poetique de la relation.^''

What kinds of 'inteUigence' and 'connaissance' are at stake in our readings of opadti?Britton and HaUward provide exegetical versions of inteUigent readings based on contextand argument, but are other readings encoded within opadtil This returns me to thequestion posed earUer regarding the semantic affinity between the prefixes of 'context' and'comprendre' and whether such an approach results in readings that envelope opadti withina structure (postcolonial, philosophical) that determines its shape according to the approach.I want to suggest that there is an alternative to the embrace of the 'con/com' namelythe non-hierarchical 'trans' (the 'trans' of transformations and translations so importantto GHssant's work) that communicates a movement 'across', a movement of change inlanguages and peoples, a transversal poetics.

In La Cohie du Lamentin there is a moment where it seems as if GHssant is indirecdyreplying to HaUward's argument that he forsakes the exigencies of specific relationsbetween peoples and cultures for a singularity that dissolves the in-between:

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Nous decouvrons a la fin, chez Deleuze et chez Guattari, que rintuition de la multiplicite passepar des individus et des specificites. II n'y a pas contradiction, de la multiplicite a la singularity.Celle-ci couvre (resume, revele) des parcours, en faisceaux ou en spirale, elle n'est pas une realiteagregee une fois pour toutes. Le rhizome est un reseau, une alchiniie aussi.̂ ^

Glissant's work may resonate with ideas and operative images first articulated by Deleuzeand Guattari but that is not to say that his work entirely follows their logic. Instead, GHssantoffers a poetic translation of their ideas, the possibility of a poetic transformation of MillePlateaux into something that cotild bear the title Mille Cyclones within a sphere made up ofthe transformative and relational liberties of poetry:

C'est la un choix poetique de Deleuze et de Guattari, et peut-etre qu'en ce qui me concemeje m'arreterais a penser Mille Jungles ou Mille Cyclones, mais le fondement est le meme: la oules geographies des idees, des desirs, des creativites, echappent au Territoire, aux systemescontinentaux, et entrent dans les Archipels. Les barques nues naviguent sur les savanes, la cannea Sucre pousse au plein des vagues de la mer. (Glissant 2005: 137)

Glissant's work, at least according to his own reading, is part of a network, a Relation, thatincludes the work of Deleuze and Guattari but transforms it within an archipelago of othercontexts, rather than according to the contexts that infonned Deleuze and Guattari's work.What matters is that neither work is anchored within a territory but de-territorialized likethe French and African languages of Martinique. At stake here is the totality of transversalcontexts and 'la totalite vecue, oti l'opacite s'ouvre peu a peu et le partage s'etablit' (Glissant1969: 90). This notion of opadti's relationship to communication can be read in Ghssant'scommentary on Segalen's coUection of poems Steles (1912). Glissant feels that Segalen'sSteles is important in that 'Segalen [51c] a penetre ce symbole de la reconciliation et del'unification du divers; il avait ete designe pour aimer cette etemite de la forme, cettemajeste. II n'a pas voulu decrire ces steles, mais en donner un equivalent poetique' (Glissant1969: 99). Glissant considers Segalen to have penetrated the divers (in this instance, the diversof the Chinese stele invested with its own opadti, its own portion of impenetrability) butresists the temptation to describe it and responds instead with the poems that make upSteles. Glissant then cites Segalen's hope that such a process of transposition might restiltin 'un transfert instantane, constant' (Glissant 1969: 99; Segalen's italics) and constitute anecho of the stele's presence. This is the poetic, transversal logic that sees opadti opentowards a non-hierarchical equivalent in the same way that the 'Divers [...] signifie l'efFortde l'esprit humain vers une relation transversale, sans transcendance' (Ghssant 1981: 190).It is this 'relation transversale' that informs Glissant's notion of criolisation: 'La creolisationest un movement perpetuel d'interpenetrabOite cultureUe et Unguistique qui fait qu'on nedebouche pas sur une definition de l'etre' (GUssant 1996: 125).^* This constant movementof inter-penetrabiUty results in the faUure of synthesis and maintains an openness (bothlinguistic and cultural) that implicitly critiques the relationship between purity of languageand national identity propounded by French thinkers both during the EnUghtenment andthroughout the nineteenth century.'^^

GUssant's work, read as a critique of the 'fausse clarte de modeles universels' (GUssant1997: 29), performs and advocates a transversal reading of Western culture and history:'Alors, s'ouvrir h I'ardue complexiti du monde. Non pas i un autre, mais au vceu martyrisi de I'autre.

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Que la terre en chaos nous vienne, pour une lumiere. Le service a te rendre, nautonier d'Ouest,est bien de lire en diagonale ton oeuvre, de t'apposer d'autres men, d'autres rives, d'autresobscurs' (Glissant 1969: 224; GHssant's italics). This reading en diagonale takes the form ofliterature: 'Et Je dirai que les litteratures qui se profilent devant nous et dont nous pouvonsavoir la prescience seront belles de toutes les lumieres et de toutes les opacites de notretotalite-monde' (Glissant 1996: 72). Such literatures are diagonal rather than affihative,transversally relational rather than contextually inscribed. Potentially opaque, they respectthe opadti of the other (as Faulkner did, as Segalen did) and allow for new combinationsunforeseen. These literatures could be claimed for global studies, transcultural studies,postmodernism, or postcolonial studies: it depends upon the frame within which they areplaced. And yet the simplest, and perhaps oldest, category for these literatures wouldbe poetics. Glissant's poetics is, however, a category of poetics that resists Aristoteliancategorization and sponsors illuminating opacities that invite us to rethink what we takefor granted, to seek new translations of old ideas and to forge new combinations beyondfrontiers, territories and schools of thought.

' France's presence in Martinique was first marked in 1635 when Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc landed onthe island which was officially claimed for France in 1674 by King Louis XIII. Martinique has been aDepartement d'Outre Mer (DOM) since 19 March 1946 and, as such, is an integral part of France. Fromat least the 1940s, Glissant was politically engaged. A founding member of Franc-Jeu, a political and literarygroup, he supported Aime Cesaire's successful campaign to be elected mayor of Fort-de-France in 1945.As a student in Paris in the 1950s he participated in left-wing movements. He founded the Front Antillo-Guyanais with Paul Niger — a group that advocated the decolonization of French overseas departments.The group was dissolved by Charles De Gaulle in 1961 and Glissant was legally impeded from returningto Martinique. The ban was eventually lifted in 1965. See relevant biographical sections in Dash andBritton (below), and Claude Couffon, Visite a Edouard Glissant (Paris: Caracteres, 2001). Along with theother DOM (Guadeloupe, La Reunion and Guyana), Martinique appears on all Euro notes.

Dash, Edouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 144.^ See Glissant, L'lntention poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1969), pp. 95-102.'' Segalen, Essai sur I'exotisme: une esthetique du divers (Saint-Clement: Fata Morgana, 1994), p. 27.^ On Glissant's reading of Segalen's work, see Charles Forsdick, 'L'exote mange par les hommes', in

Reading Diversity, ed. by Charles Forsdick and Susan Marson (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French andGerman Publications, 2000), pp. 5-24 (pp. 16-23). I am grateful to Charles Forsdick for discussing with methe question of Segalen and opacite.^ Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Gallimard, Folio, 1996), p. 97.' Glissant, Introduction a une poetique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), pp. 71—72.^ Glissant, Poetique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 39.

Glissant, L'lntention poetique (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 51."* Glissant, Le Discours antiilais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), pp. 11—12." Glissant, Poetique de la Relation, pp. 203—09 (p. 209), my italics.

Glissant, Traite du Tout-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 29.Glissant, La Cohee du Lamentin (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), pp. 146—62 (pp. 160-61).

" Aranjo, 'L'opacite chez Edouard Glissant ou la poetique de la souche', in Horizons d'Edouard Glissant,ed. by Yves-Alain Favre and Antonio de Brito (Pau: J+D, 1992), pp. 93-112 (p. 94). For a reading thatemphasizes the metaphorical and philosophical value of opacite, see Clement Mbom, 'Edouard Glissant: del'opacite a la relation', in Poetiques d'Edouard Glissant, ed. by Jacques Chevrier (Paris: Presses de l'Universitede Paris-Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 245-54.'̂ On the relationship between poetry, the cri and the transatlantic transportation of slaves, see, inparticular, Glissant, Poetique de la Relation, pp. 17-21. Aranjo could just as easily have cited Aime Cesaire'smany references to le cri des negres throughout his work.

114 PATRICK CROWLEY

'^ Dash, Edouard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).' ' Carminella Biondi and Elena Pessini also make this point in Rever le monde, ecrire le monde. Titeories etnarrations d'Edouard Glissant (Bologna: CLUEB, 2004), p. 10.'* Celia M. Britton, Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial TIteory: Strategies of Language and Resistance(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999). Subsequent references to this text will begiven as page numbers in parentheses.'^ On creolismes and creolisation see Glissant, Introduction a une poetique du divers, pp. 121-25.°̂ A more generous reading might argue that Britton translates Glissant's notion of opadte rather than

inscribes it within the postcolonial. One could cite Glissant: 'La pratique d'un texte litteraire figure ainsiune opposition entre deux opacites, celle irreductible de ce texte, quand il s'agirait du plus benin sonnet,et celle toujours en mouvement de I'auteur ou d'un lecteur. II arrive que ce dernier prenne litteralementconscience de cette opposition, auquel cas il dit que le texte est "difficile". L'apprentissage et la traductionont ceci de commun qu'ils tentent de redonner au texte "de la transparence". C'est-a-dire qu'ils efforcentde Jeter un pont entre deux series d'opacites: d'un texte oppose a un lecteur novice pour qui tout texte estrepute difficile (c'est le cas de l'apprentissage), d'un texte aventure au possible d'un autre texte (c'est le casde la traduction)'; Poetique de la Relation, pp. 129-30. In the light of this, Britton could be said to offer anacademic translation of Glissant's work that provides a non-reductive 'transparence'.^' Glissant's treatment of history often places the 'History' of colonizing nations in counterdistinctionto the ruptured histories and effaced histories of colonized peoples. The problematics of this approachwithin the context of the weight of Haiti's history is given critical treatment in Martin Munro, 'PetrifyingMyths: Lack and Excess in Caribbean and Haitian History', Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and itsCultural Aftershocks, 1S04-2004, ed. by Martin Munro and Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw (Kingston, Jamaica:University of the West Indies, forthcoming 2006).^̂ Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester and NewYork: Manchester University Press, Angelaki Humanities, 2001). Hallward's formidable critique of thepolitics of postcolonial literatures is centred upon their denigration of the nation-state. His reading of thework of Edouard Glissant, Charles Johnson, Mohammed Dib and Severo Sarduy combines close literaryexegesis with a subtle, rigorous and consistent philosophical focus that makes a powerful case for thenation-state.^' Hallward's point is pertinent but could be applied to any cultural analysis not directly tied to aprogramme for political action. Cultural critics and poets raise questions and trace possible horizons.How these notions inform collective action through the public sphere is an old question. For his part,Glissant has written specifically on forms of collective resistance in Martinique in Le Discours antillais(pp. 67-73). He delineates its failures due, amongst other things, to the lack of a national project thatwould bring together subsistence farmers, the assimilated middle class and a beke minority incapable ofautonomous political action. Opacite matters to the extent that it preserves, in the first instance, a diversitywhilst opening Martinique to a network of cultural relations that subsumes metropolitan France.More recently, in La Cohee du Lamentin (2005), Glissant has offered a critique of globalization andneo-imperialism.'̂' Mary Gallagher, 'La poetique de la diversite dans les essais d'Edouard Glissant', in Horizons d'Edouard

Glissant, ed. by Yves-Alain Favre and Antonio de Brito (Pau: J+D, 1992), pp. 27-35 (P- 33).^̂ Glissant, La Cohee du Lamentin, p. 140.'̂' If we look at the previously quoted passage on opadte that appears in Le Discours antillais ('Nous

reclamons le droit a t'opacite. Par quoi notre tension pour tout dru exister rejoint le drame planetairede la Relation'), the syntactical arrangement of 'notre tension pour tout dru exister' is an example ofcreoUsation that combines familiar words in a way that is unfamiliar. A close, linguistic study of Glissant'sspecific uses of syntax (French and Creole) would be useful if it has not already been undertaken.^' To take one example Antoine de Rivarol's Discours sur I'universalitc de la langue franfaise (1784) privilegesthe clarte of the French language. For further examples and an erudite critique of this view of 'la clartefranfaise', see Henri Meschonnic, De la langue franfaise: Essai sur une clarte obscure (Paris: Hachette, 1997).Meschonnic cites a wide range of French texts, from the Renaissance to the present, which claim thatthe French language embodies clarity, in order best to serve analytical thought, and to be most suited tobe a universal language. Glissant's implicit critique is made more explicit in Jean Bemabe, PatrickChamoiseau and Raphael Confiant, Eloge de la Creolite (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), a text which, in many

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ways, is influenced by Glissant and Segalen: 'Notre plongee dans la Creolite ne sera pas incommunicablemais elle ne sera non plus pas totalement communicable. EUe le sera avec ses capacites, Fopacite que nousrestituons aux processus de la communication entre les hommes' (Bernabe et al. 1989: 52-53). This comeswith a footnote that brings the reader to a quotation from Segalen's Essai sur I'exotisme 'Partons done de cetaveu d'impenetrabilite. Ne nous flattons pas d'assimiler les moeurs, les races, les nations, les autres; mais aucontraire rejouissons-nous de ne le pouvoir jamais; nous reservant ainsi la perdurabilite du plaisir de sentirle Divers' (Bernabe et al. 1989: 67-68).