Coda
Departure
Texte intégral
1Setting out the connections between the disorientations my own arrival in a Museum in Geneva generated to a history of other arrivals, I started this study with an extended mediation on what it means for certain bodies to arrive. As Sara Ahmed observes, we never arrive into this world as self-cohering, ready-made beings, but are made out of the histories and inheritances that are always already there before our arrival.1 Moving in the Museum, at least partly due to a student visa which extended my arrival to its institutional space, I stray from my assigned position, switching gazes to consider not the celebration of collecting and civilization that the Museum advertised, but the history of classification and racialization that preceded it. More specifically, as I walked through the Museum, my education forced me to remember different arrivals, arrivals constituted in the wake of the disasters wrought by the transatlantic passage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean and to the New World. Wrenched from their land, and transported to the complete unknown, these were arrivals that precluded the very possibility of collecting that the Museum valorized.
2To think of arrival in this context, meant not de-linking the present from this abysmal past, but required considering how the interminable grief engendered by the ruptures of chattel slavery got re-activated in the contemporary present, in turn collapsing the temporal continuity between then and now. Above all, these were arrivals that could not be mended by simply taking these violent histories ‘in’, but instead called for returning to the imminence of the disaster. Importantly however, this was a return not predicated on a reversal or redemption, but a journey which returns to the founding violence that the disaster initiated, not to recover but to discover new ways of arriving which are always open, multiple and relational. While I started by positioning this work as a response to discovering arrivals in excess of the violent histories of stratifications that originally constituted them, I want to end by reflecting on what departures these arrivals make possible. Crossing conventions that usually presume that a departure is necessarily followed by an arrival, the sense of departure I want to pursue here proceeds after and through a sustained reckoning with the histories and inheritances that make (im)possible certain arrivals. Put another way, to know departure first requires knowing arrival, for to know where we are going requires first knowing how we have arrived.
3In this paper, I have set out to explore these arrivals. However, I have not done so alone, but through a series of philosophies co-constituted in dialogue and relation with Édouard Glissant. In many ways, rather than a paper about Glissant, I have written this paper with Glissant. With this positioning, which places me in deep relation with Glissant, I have attempted to trouble redemptive narratives which reduce these arrivals to either happy stories of diversity or promises of roots wedded to fantasies of inviolable origins. Instead, working with the immanent potentiality that the spatiotemporal configuration of the Caribbean with its attendant history and legacy of slavery, the abysmal aporia of loss, and irreparability affords, with Glissant I have sought to cultivate and centre analytical attention towards a counter-poetics in perpetual arrival. This is a poetics which while proceeding from the fragmentation informed by abysmal loss, simultaneously affirms the multiplicity and inconclusiveness of its own poetics. In other words, this poetics functions not only in its capacity to decentre and deconstruct, but in its potential to open the future to a revolutionary becoming. And yet, before we move to consider the departures these becomings make possible, let us return once more to where we have arrived on this journey with Glissant.
4Obligating us to think otherwise, Glissant shifts the terrain of thinking from the continuity and systematicity associated with Euro-America to the rush, unpredictability and non- systematicity of the Caribbean. Fundamentally altering how we understand and relate to loss and dispossession in the context of New World slavery, Glissant draws on the creative, conceptual and material geographies of the Caribbean. With this interplay of sources, Glissant enables a way of thinking that rewrites histories of dispossession and loss to produce new beginnings within the abysmal presence of the Middle Passage. For Glissant, the memory of the pain associated with the abyss of the Middle Passage was constitutive not only of abysmal loss, but also formed the beginning of a new world one. Rising from the shorelines of the Caribbean Archipelago, Glissant crafts an enigmatic and compelling vocabulary of and for the Caribbean. This is a theoretical and poetic vocabulary that rather than folding identity within roots or lines of descent, produces a rhizomatic and creolised ontology of the subject that is best characterised by multiplicity and becomings. It is a vocabulary that although shared with other thinkers of Caribbean self-formation, is able to take their work into new dimensions by anchoring itself within the spatiotemporal location of the Caribbean. And yet, while Glissant draws the imaginative strength of his vocabulary from the openness of the Caribbean, he constantly subjects his work to that which is opaque. Opacity not only supplements his theories with a crucial qualifier, but also contributes to contemporary conversations around the philosophical question of difference. With his notion or rather his demand that the Other be granted the right to opacity, Glissant encounters Otherness without folding the difference of the Other into colonial regimes of visibility. Instead working with a poetics of difference, he imagines difference not as that ‘which is’, but in and through its always incomplete, partial, and inconclusive movements.
5As I write these paragraphs, sketching a representation of Glissant’s work while attempting to extend where Glissant might lead us, I feel the heaviness of the impossibility of untangling the two, questioning if there is a strong need or even the possibility of doing so. John Drabinski in a piece written in memory of Glissant writes that the main challenge Glissant poses to us, ‘no matter our location or cultural milieu, is to think, live, and create in this incredibly complicated, entangled, and intertwined intellectual space’ that Glissant lays out throughout his work. 2Indeed, this complicated intellectual space Glissant writes from doesn’t heed to easy clarifications, for reading Glissant is foremost a visceral encounter, an exhilarating experience that disassembles language as it simultaneously awakens it. I first read Glissant by chance, glancing upon his reference in a footnote. Although this quote that introduced me to Glissant was produced in his Caribbean Discourse, my introduction to Glissant was through the reading of Poetics of Relation. bell hooks in her essay ‘Theory as a Liberatory Practice’ starts with a remarkable line that captures to a large extent the joys and desperation I felt when I first encountered Glissant in the pages of Poetics of Relation. hooks starts her essay by writing,
‘I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.’3
6Reading Glissant was to read what theory can do, what theory should do, what theory must strive to do. Most importantly, reading Glissant, I learned that theory could be a location not only of critique, but also of healing, a way as bell hooks writes to ‘make the hurt go away’. Across the opening pages of his Poetics of Relation, Glissant writes some of the most moving, provocative and melancholic lines detailing the suffering, drama and experience of slavery. Glissant offered me the words to speak that which was already implicit in the texts I read, but never fully said. At the first moment I encountered Glissant, I didn’t care how and why the academic literature positioned him, or what critics thought of him. I didn’t care if he was a uniquely Caribbean thinker, a postcolonial critic or a poet. All that mattered was that his words gathered up to find me, in a different place and time from his own, making at that moment his life and work coeval with mine. I want to acknowledge this extraordinary archive Glissant left for us to read, write, and imagine from.
7Glissant took me travelling, but at no point during our travels was I a tourist. Instead, as Glissant took me across the Caribbean Archipelago, each moment, each evocation of space, time and place was saturated by the dislocation, dispossession, and historical disaster of slavery. And yet, these travels were always more than that. Combining his lyrical prose with the insistent and searing force of his poetics, Glissant makes use of a boundless imaginary, an imaginary that allowed me to see new ways of thinking/inhabiting/narrating/feeling in the world. But to partake in this imaginary also required grappling with a difficult language. Employing a form of writing that Neal Allar very appropriately terms as being quite often ‘opaque to itself’, Glissant takes his reader on an extended exploration without ever offering a destination.4 While the first effect of this wandering might be resistance and frustration, one soon understands that it is these apparent obstacles that keep open the force of Glissant’s critique. To read Glissant productively is not to give in to these frustrations, but to walk the shorelines of the Caribbean with Glissant, slowly apprehending the meanings of these meanderings to imagine new travels. The poet Octavia Paz once remarked that the difference between a critic and a poet is that while the critic ‘must reproduce the poem he has before him’, the poet ‘does not know where his poem will lead him.’5 Following Paz, I want to end with saying that we must not become merely critics of Glissant, but poets of Glissant, immersing ourselves within the vast weave of relations he leaves us with, re-constellating his concepts and casting them for our own travels…
Notes de bas de page
1 Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness”, 154.
2 John E. Drabinski, “Shorelines: In Memory of Édouard Glissant,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19, no. 1 (June 13, 2011): 2.
3 bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59.
4 Neal Allar, “The Case for Incomprehension,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23, no. 1 (August 5, 2015): 55
5 Octavio Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters,” in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays, from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 159.

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Creative Commons - Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
The Development of International Refugee Protection through the Practice of the UN Security Council
Christiane Ahlborn
2010
The SWIFT Affair
Swiss Banking Secrecy and the Fight against Terrorist Financing
Johannes Köppel
2011
The Evolving Patterns of Lebanese Politics in Post-Syria Lebanon
The Perceptions of Hizballah among Members of the Free Patriotic Movement
Fouad Ilias
2010
La justice internationale à l'épreuve du terrorisme
Défis, enjeux et perspectives concernant la Commission d'enquête internationale indépendante (UNIIIC) et le Tribunal spécial pour le Liban
Sébastien Moretti
2009
Aut Dedere, aut Judicare: The Extradite or Prosecute Clause in International Law
Claire Mitchell
2009