Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles

By SYLVIA WYNTER Introduction to the Argument. During his childhood years 1940-44, Edouard Glissant, like all residents of the French colonial island of Martinique, found himself in a lived situation of double blockade. Outside, the United States fleet blockaded the ships of Vichy France. Internally, not only did the presence of the navy and the naval authority of Vichy France as the cause of the U.S. blockade lead to a lack of food on the exportimport outpost that was the island, but incidents of direct racism inflicted by the French sailors, as colonial occupiers, led also to an intensified sense of dispossession on the part of the islanders. This second effect was one that was common to all the still colonialized population groups of the Caribbean islands, whether Francophone, Anglophone, or Dutchspeaking, since it was based on the common exclusion from all powers of decision-making with respect to our fate in the context of the global conflagration of World War II, and therefore to the recognition that to be a colonial was precisely to be excluded from all autonomous processes of decision-making with respect to one's fate as a collectivity. There was a specificity, however to touch here on one of the major motifs of Glissant's discourse to the situation of Martinique, as distinct, for example, from my own parallel childhood experience in the then British colonial island of Jamaica. The population of Martinique found itself, willy-nilly, on the side of a France which, having had to accept German domination, was now both an ally to and a neocolony of a Germany determined to found the empire of its ThousandYear Reich on European "natives" in place of the series of primary non-European "natives " on whose subordination France, like several other European nation-states, had built hers. Although on the one hand for, British colonies such as Jamaica, however helpless to control events, there was a strong sense among the population as a whole that under all the British propaganda there was indeed a core truth which impelled their allegiances, this was not to be so in Martinique. The core truth in our case was that the delirium of the Nazi system of thought, which was based on the taking to a logical extreme of the social Darwinist discourse of "race" that had been put in place in the nineteenth century as the legitimating "magical thought" of that century's industrial mode of colonialism, would now have to be fought by colonized and colonizers alike. We therefore had the assurance, during the years 1940-44, that we were, as British subjects, on the side of the "good guys," on the side of an opening rather than a regressive dynamics of historical and cultural change. The situation of Martinique differed not only in the accidental sense of finding itself subordinated to collaborationist rather than to Resistance France, but also in a structural-existential sense; for the dual processes of intellectual and social assimilation specific to the Catholic French model of colonization