The Snake, the Shore, and Columbus: Edouard Glissant’s Anamnesis of the French Département d’Outre-Mer

Abstract

Obsessed by the slippery nature of language, and its unpredictable and inexhaustible potential to transform reality, Edouard Glissant’s life-long writing career coincided with a will to connect the sense of identity and belonging of the people of Martinique with their lost and forgotten collective imagination. But the author’s quest for effective remembrance did not imply nostalgia. Though Glissant engaged with decolonization and devoted some of his most political texts to examining and contesting the structures of French colonialism (Nesbitt 2013), he refused to participate in the major anticolonial discourses—pan-Africanism, particularly Négritude, Fanonism, and Marxism—that accompanied the emancipation of the Caribbean from the weight of the past and history. His fiction, his poetry, and his theory attempted from different angles to acknowledge the definitive collapse of the pan-African dream and to find new strategies in the struggle for identity, in the misplaced utopia of decolonization in which free nations were in fact politically and economically subaltern.1 More specifically, Glissant’s poetic system constitutes a report on the memory neurosis of French Antilleans. Its most damaging consequences in the départements d’outre-mer lay in the fact that the Antilleans continued to represent themselves as neocolonial, frustrated, and inferior subjects. Glissant’s anamnesis through fiction, poetry, and theory was meant to trigger the questions that would bring back memory and foster a sense of Caribbean belonging in the overseas départements.