Christian Uwe

Over nearly six decades, Martinican author Édouard Glissant built an impressive and original work that, in the words of Nick Nesbitt, established him as “the foremost postcolonial thinker in the francophone world” (2010, 103). Perhaps it was to be expected that a work encompassing fiction, poetry, drama, literary theory, and philosophy would elicit unequal scholarly attention depending on the disciplinary field considered. Indeed, a look at the existing bibliography—such as the digital Library of Glissant Studies (LoGS)1—reveals that scholars have focused on literary criticism, poetics, and postcolonial and/or political theory. However, the strictly philosophical dimension of Glissant’s oeuvre has received less critical attention. To be sure, there exists a good number of journal articles and book chapters dealing with selected aspects of Glissant’s philosophy. However, detailed, book-length studies of the latter remain rare. John E. Drabinski’s Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss is such a work,2 preceded only by Alain Ménil’s Les Voies de la créolisation, which develops a “phenomenology of Relation” (2011, 78), and Alexandre Leupin’s Édouard Glissant, philosophe, which examines Glissant’s critical renewal of European philosophy both from within and outside its traditions (2016, 36).

Taking the philosophical inquiry in a different direction from Ménil’s and Leupin’s, Glissant and the Middle Passage sets out to examine Glissant’s poetics as developed in his theoretical work, with a particular emphasis on the centrality of the Atlantic abyss. Although Drabinski recognizes the fundamentally generic hybridity of Glissant’s writing—a hybridity through which poetry and fiction translate the underlying philosophy; the reverse being also true—he nevertheless focuses on the philosopher’s essays, particularly the articulation of his poetics and a Caribbean geography of reason. Poetics in this context is understood in a uniquely Glissantian acceptation as a philosophical account of art’s potential to problematize human existence, culture, and thought from a historically grounded perspective. Thus, given the foundational nature of the Atlantic abyss for Glissant’s entire work, Drabinski’s main ambition is to “move the question of the Middle Passage to the center of philosophical thinking about language, time, history, memory, embodiment, subjectivity, aesthetics, and the very idea of the task of thinking itself” (x). This centering of the Middle Passage rests on the premise that “philosophy as such—understood as engagement with the conditions of knowing, being, and creating in the mode of the interrogative—has not yet fully reckoned with the transformative experience of trauma and its disruption of all conventional understandings of history, memory, and language” (xi). To be sure, Western philosophy has dealt extensively with traumatic memory in relation notably to the Shoah, the two World Wars and their link to authoritarianism, genocide, and loss. However, the largely Euro-centered perspective of these philosophical inquiries came with the proven risk of neglecting traumatic experiences obtaining in the rest of the world and, as a consequence of the former, the tendency to draw from European experiences critical frameworks that overlook the historical specificities of traumas such as the one occasioned by the Middle Passage. As a result, Drabinski argues, the history of the Americas has been largely ignored in philosophical writings on trauma. It is this neglect that Drabinski’s book intends to alleviate through a critical assessment of the seminal role abyssal trauma plays in Glissant’s thought.

As Drabinski sees it, the problem at the heart of Glissant’s abyss is the task of thinking absolute loss and beginning at the same time. This problem is at once historical, epistemological, ontological, and aesthetic, even though, on Drabinski’s account, aesthetics is the site that federates this multidimensional thought. Indeed, if for European thinkers such as Heidegger or Benjamin it is possible to make sense of existence by reading ruins qua vestigial signs of History—a possibility that implies that there are ruins and there is a history—the abyss does not even afford such a possibility. If the past is an endless series of breaks or disconnections from the present, ruins, for Drabinksi, provide the possibility of connecting such disconnections through “some sort of metanarrative” that makes sense of catastrophe (9). With the Middle Passage, even the breaks are lost, the ruins drowned, “leaving something we might be tempted to call an abyss” (10). As theorized by Drabinski, the abyss is a place of absolute loss, allowing no reference to what precedes, and, as such, it thwarts genesis (replacing it with a digenesis) both in its ontological and epistemological acceptation.

Abyssal beginning in Glissant and the Middle Passage informs reflection on memory and roots and undergirds Glissant’s ontology and aesthetics of the subject as well as his conception of intellectual responsibility. The first two chapters constitute a two-step meditation on “Origins,” with the first chapter articulating memory, roots, and abyss, while the second chapter replaces roots with future in the same equation. Grounding a contrast between European instances and thought of trauma are Benjamin’s meditation on the angel of history and on allegory, Walcott’s “The Muse of History,” as well as Glissant’s own writing on Carthage and on the Middle Passage. The radical loss provoked by the experience of the Middle Passage serves as a point of reference for the third chapter’s discussion of Glissant’s “Ontology of an Abyssal Subject.” Centered around the philosopher’s creative appropriation of Deleuzian propositions on nomadism, the chapter lays out an archipelagic framework that also serves as a basis for the discussion of “Aesthetics of an Abyssal Subject” in chapter 4. In the latter, Glissantian poetics is approached through a comparative reading of Aimé Césaire’s and George Lamming’s conceptions of Caribbean aesthetics. The fifth and last chapter briefly examines the political and critical contribution of Glissant’s philosophy both for critical theory and for civic commitment through a double contrast with Heidegger and Fanon.

Drabinski approaches Glissant as a thinker for whom “the relation between place […] and philosophical thinking is paramount” (2). This characteristic motivates the transformation of the Caribbean archipelago into a geographic metaphor of Glissant’s thought and method. In the introduction to the book, Drabinski contrasts the sense of loss conveyed through this metaphor with Heidegger’s writing on disaster in the wake of World War I. For the German philosopher, subjectivity and language are intimately connected and, insofar as (historical) loss is experienced by the subject, it “transforms and adds nuance to a general theory of signs” (7). Loss shapes, and indeed ruins language in such a way that loss is legible within the sign. To this conception of loss, Glissant apposes abyssal loss that stems from the erasure—rather than the ruins—of signs. Abyssal beginning entails, then, opacity both as “an ontological and epistemological concept” (13). Through abyss and opacity, Glissant articulates at once the radical trauma of the Middle Passage and the emergence of a new reality after and out of disaster. Thus, “opacity functions as a constituting condition of Glissant’s signature idea: Relation” (17). It is through the category of Relation that Glissant articulates the unpredictable movement from abyssal trauma to new origins and aesthetics.

The problem of “Origins” is at the heart of both chapters 1 and 2. The first chapter approaches it from the perspective of memory as it relates to the past, whereas the second chapter proposes an assessment of memory in relation to the future. If both chapters claim “Origins” in their titles it is perhaps because Glissant folds the past into the future in a theoretical gesture that rejects linear and teleological conceptions of time. For Glissant, loss underpins “the existential situatedness of the Caribbean” (24) and as such constitutes not just a pathos but also a method. Indeed, the Middle Passage haunts the Caribbean through countless slaves thrown in the sea without leaving behind bodies to be mourned or any other physical trace save the sea itself. In this light, the sea is what connects islands that share a common traumatic history. But it is also what creates the fragmentary geography of the Caribbean even as it separates the disembarked slave from the drowned. This tortured geography inspires Glissant’s conception of the archipelago, which locates in the materiality of space the philosophical concept of Relation.

Through this concept, Glissant conceives the slave boat as a paradoxical place of loss and birth. Indeed, Drabinski approaches Glissant’s philosophy as deeply paradoxical in method if not in nature. It is a philosophy that seeks to think death and birth at once, not as mutually neutralizing terms but as historical conditions of a new, unpredictable reality. In a comparative approach that contrasts Mediterranean sites of loss (such as Carthage and other historical ruins) and the Caribbean Sea as a site of Atlantic loss, Drabinski observes that in the Mediterranean cases loss and trauma remain legible through Heideggerian vestigial signs. The Caribbean loss and trauma, in contrast, leaves no traces and can only be thought through a metonymic approach of the sea as a double site of loss: loss of human life, and loss of signs of that loss. Therefore, unlike Walter Benjamin’s angel of history who can see the latter’s vestiges as he moves into the future, the Caribbean Sea shows no ruins other than itself. Hence Glissant’s embrace of Walcott’s verse “The sea is History” (39). From this perspective, Glissant’s central task as a writer is to think simultaneously loss and beginning, a beginning that Walcott describes as sacred (48). In Glissant’s work, this beginning is set at the shoreline, an intertidal place where the mangrove provides a vision of digenetic roots, that is, roots that are not African—pace Negritude—but are metonymically linked to the African loss occurred in the sea and to the Caribbean soil that begins here. “The Caribbean context—Caribbeanness—is therefore a method for Glissant, not a state of being,” argues Drabinski (57).

Building on the vision of the past outlined above, chapter 2 flips the problem of memory to examine its relation to the future. If memory relates to the past through death and trauma, it remains an exercise of the living and, therefore, signifies after disaster. Noting that the Middle Passage “has no precedent” and “only precedes” (62), Drabinski underscores the impossibility for abyssal memory to go back beyond the irretrievable loss. Abyssal memory turns the past into a new beginning. From this perspective, the beginning maintains a relation to the original loss, a loss that occurs in two consecutive phases: first the loss of the original land, which makes the slave boat the remotest place to which one can trace one’s origins; and, second, the bottom of the sea, which conceals all traces of those who fell during the Passage. The boat and the sea constitute therefore one end of memory—the past—while on the other end we observe “the persistence of life after catastrophe” (64). Glissant’s futurity is thus elaborated through the notion of Relation that, in this light, thinks the after-loss in terms of reassembled fragments, scarred bodies, and nomadic, not teleological, displacement.

By framing the Middle Passage as an experience that drowns irretrievably all sense of prior identity, Glissant distinguishes it from other forms of catastrophic loss (the Shoah for instance) as well as from the conception of identity proposed by the Caribbean version of Negritude (74). For Drabinski, this double distinction sheds a light on trace as theorized by Glissant. Indeed, the Glissantian trace conflates time and space to produce an indexical sign different from historical vestiges and whose logic is akin to Derridean différance (87). The trace—which is not to be confused with the trail—is the semiotic twin of Glissant’s Relation. It is also, through its very materiality, what anchors Relation in a physical geography. Indeed, in Drabinski’s reading, the semiotic functioning of traces captures the fundamentally digenetic nature of Glissant’s Relation: “The trace leaves a mark, but never a mark that contains within it the possibility of reactivating the origins” (89). For Relation informs historical experience and, as such, “is inseparable from pain” (88), that is, in the Caribbean context, the irretrievable loss of origins. Drabinski sees therefore the trace as “the site of the interlacing of past and future” that constitutes the logic of memory (90). The impossibility of reactivating origins inspires Glissant’s notion of digenesis, a notion that captures the fundamental secondariness of abyssal origins, that is, the relativity, relationality and relatedness of an origin that is known to be preceded by an unknowable history. The consciousness of this loss poses therefore the problem of thinking the subject that emerges from it.

Chapter 3 tackles that very question from an ontological perspective. Drabinski begins by referencing Peter Hallward’s description of Glissant as a thoroughly Deleuzean author. This description—which underpins Hallward’s criticism of Glissant’s politics3—is misleading, however, for even as Glissant adopts some of Deleuze and Guattari’s key concepts, he subjects them to a creative appropriation to which Drabinski draws attention. To begin with, for its affinity with Deleuzean rhizome and nomadism, Glissant’s interest in fragmentation and historical experience predates Deleuze (100). To be sure, with Deleuzean concepts Glissant expands, in Drabinski’s view, his ontology of subjectivity. Indeed, applied to the Caribbean context, the rhizome and nomadism consolidate a geography liberated from the question of “Being as such,” thus allowing Glissant to further his examination of “how the subject is and becomes in space, time, language” and how “history links subjectivity to abyssal beginning” (100). However, in the very process of thinking the Caribbean subject’s becoming, Glissant not only marks a departure from conceptions of absolute Being and universality, but also from what can be seen as the territorialized premise of Deleuzean nomadism. As Drabinski puts it: “The nomad leaves. In that departure, a rooted beginning, nomadology is already split between Deleuze and Guattari and Glissant on the motif of originary movement” (130). The implied departure of the nomad contrasts with the drowned origins of the Glissantian slave.

This contrast underscores Drabinski’s insistence on the idea that “traumatic experience must be thought in relation to a geography of reason” (xiv) because “Trauma, like all constitutive concepts, and indeed the concepts that flow from traumatic beginnings, must be thought in terms of the specificity of place” (xiv). While this might sound like a plea for territoriality, it is important to note that place does not designate here a site of ontological rootedness but, rather, “the blend of geographical space and historical experience” (2). In Glissant’s Caribbean context, the historical experience begins paradoxically with an erasure of history that prolongs upon land the disaster of Atlantic crossing. Hence the particular epistemological and existential dimensions of Glissant’s vision of Relation, that is, Relation considered as “the knowledge in motion of beings” (102). As intransitive, Relation sustains irreducible difference: “Relation is like an intransitive verb,” that is, “a form of knowing that does not take the object to which it is addressed” for through it “the subject is the engagement with a non-possessed, non-seized-upon or grasped (comprendre) Other” (129). In other words, Relation commands a circular nomadic movement from subject to subject (or from a state of identity to another) without ever exhausting identity.

Although Deleuze does not conceive territorialization and deterritorialization as contraries, he does pose the nomad as one who leaves (130). To Glissant, this initial movement hides a territorialized premise that the slave cannot reminisce. Glissant’s nomad does not leave but rather is abducted and the conditions of this abduction are such that it leaves no trace of the original land, no memory of the departure and no memory of the crossing. In that regard, the concept of digenesis is crucial for it marks the irretrievable loss of the initial departure and only leaves a secondary origin that marks the beginning of a circular nomadism. That is why, to Drabinski, “the nomad in Deleuze and Guattari’s work retain[s] the territoriality of what Glissant […] calls ‘continental thinking’ at the point of origin” (130). Consequently, “it is at the moment of beginning, not accomplishment, that Glissant has already marked his distance from Deleuze and Guattari” (132). If I read Drabinski correctly, this distance separates two visions of freedom: while in A Thousand Plateaus the nomad confronts an authoritarian state (through nomadism and its war machine), while this nomad can locate that sedentary regime away from which to leave, the Glissantian adversary is first lived as an interiorized phenomenon (if of external imposition), as proven by the pathos of epistemological and ontological erasure. Hence Glissant’s acknowledgment of a shift from the Deleuzean war machine to (in Drabinski’s words) an identity-machine: “one need only look to Introduction à une poétique du divers, where, upon reflection on his relation to the concept of rhizome in A Thousand Plateaus, Glissant writes that he has ‘applied this image to the principle of identity’” (132). In both instances the stakes are political, but in Glissant’s context politics begins with the undoing of an ontological erasure that is historically suffered and geographically unfigured by an ocean laid bare. The tortured geography of the Caribbean informs therefore Glissant’s appropriation of Deleuzean concepts and leads to a form of Caribbean postmodernism that Drabinski describes as a paradoxical moment that places at modernity’s inception the very conditions of its deconstruction.

Building on the ontological reading of abyssal beginning, chapter 4 argues that “the abyssal subject—Glissant’s ontological claim on the human—is also a subject of aesthetics” (139). At stake is the question of how to think and represent an abyssal beginning of an archipelagic world. The chapter explores the question through a comparative assessment of Glissantian aesthetics on the one hand, and, on the other, the aesthetic visions elaborated by Aimé Césaire and George Lamming, two Caribbean authors who also derive their aesthetics “from a specific geography of thinking, being, and creating” (144). Comparing the three authors helps one appreciate the specificity of Glissant’s poetics and also its particular heuristic potential.

In Drabinski’s analysis, aesthetics covers two kinds of problems that are worth distinguishing and correlating. On the one hand, aesthetics has to do with representation as it relates to imagination and memory. On the other hand, aesthetics is that Hegelian province that, along with religion and philosophy, is the site of the Spirit’s self-liberation from the contingency of worldly existence. Inasmuch as it deals with representation, aesthetics runs into a colossal hurdle when it comes to the Middle Passage: therein all origins are lost, including all trace of that loss. Here one may recall an earlier meditation of Drabinski’s around an intriguing metaphor from Caribbean Discourse, one that designates slaves who drown during the Middle Passage as “seeds of absence.” On Drabinski’s account, “the very phrase fails to make sense except as the failure of memory, not as a failure to recall, but a failure of any relation to recollection” (54). From this perspective, the question for aesthetics is: how does one write a past that has no existence in one’s memory or representations? Perhaps the answer hinges on an aspect of Glissant’s writing that is not given due attention in Drabinski: while, for the slave, the past is not remembered nor given in representation, it is—for that exact reason—suffered, it is lived as psychosomatic pain that compels the slave (or their descendant) to think their existence into history. This overlooked aspect is in fact what articulates aesthetics qua work on refused representation and the Hegelian vision of aesthetics as constitutive of a historical (emancipated) subject. It is through the work of imagination, made necessary by the unbearable pathos of erased history, that one goes from refused representation to a digenetic constitution of oneself as subject. Without the somatic pathos of lost origins, the possibility of an abyssal subject would not be fully accounted for.

To be sure, for Drabinski, “the abyssal subject fundamentally changes the conditions of representation precisely because, when thematized, it breaks narration and unification at its root” (139). Accordingly, the shoreline thought of Glissant captures this aesthetic conundrum through the very image of an encounter between loss and beginning. What lies beyond the shore is removed from knowledge and yet intuited as an originary loss. Moreover, the affects related to the loss lead to a new aesthetic register in the sense that abyssal loss, by nature, forecloses any idea of transparency. However, it is at this point, perhaps due to the book’s sole focus on Glissant’s essays (at the exclusion of his fiction), that a fuller exploration of such affects would have illuminated the lived necessity of imagination at the site of lost loss (i.e., abyss). Despite this limitation, Drabinski correctly notes that Glissant’s poetics of loss is not just about fragmented space but also affective fragmentation in a semiotic context wherein loss itself is lost. It is that aesthetic problem of fragmentation that invites a comparative reading of Césaire, Lamming, and Glissant.

In examining Césaire’s treatment of aesthetic fragmentation, Drabinski looks mainly at three texts: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Discourse on Colonialism, and Césaire’s speech at the 1956 International Congress of Black Writer’s and Artists. A central idea in Césaire’s texts is that the horrors of the colonial undertaking make Europe indefensible. The hatred of reason asserted in Notebook takes aim at a geographically rooted reason—European reason—which Drabinski reads “as an affliction that afflicts its pain from the interior, yet, in its interiority, functions at the same time as an external force” (146). Cast metaphorically as a whip, European reason meets the somatic memory of historical pain in an aesthetics that “makes the event of remembering, just as it is made by remembrance” (147). Therefore, for Césaire as well as for Glissant, poetics speaks to memory. However, in Césaire’s work, the History that emerges from the work of memory is abjection, and the blood that is shed calls for a bloodline, a recourse to African roots in response to the dismembering effect of History.

In contrast to Césaire, Lamming’s is an existential approach that dwells on the effects of racial prejudice as the basis of both an external and an internal violence. In the context of a racialized world, Lamming envisages the relation between the writer and the world in three ways: (i) the relation with the writer him or herself, a “priceless possession” (153) that harbors affects, values, and also poetic potential; (ii) the relation to the world that intervenes in and affects the writer’s inner life; and (iii) relation to humanity as such, which leads to a broader “sense of world” (155). The first two relations are written about whereas the third constitute a horizon toward which the writer writes. For Césaire and Lamming there is thus a link between blackness and aesthetics (155), and both share with Glissant a common, fragmentary, and theoretical geography. If all three writers posit a fragmentary experience at the origin of their poetics, Césaire and Lamming view fragmentation as an alienating experience that must be overcome, whereas for Glissant it is originary and, as a method, fecund. In that perspective, Glissant’s thought, for Drabinski, is postmodern in that it is an immanent critique that eschews metanarratives and asserts the irreducibility of difference (159–60). Thus, by shifting away from Negritude and existentialism, Glissant’s poetics puts difference at the heart of aesthetic subjectivity. Contrary to Derrida’s différance, which it otherwise brings to mind, Glissant’s difference underscores a “structure of delay and deferral,” which rests not on the play of signs but rather on the composite nature induced by abyssal beginning (175).

Drabinski closes the chapter with an illustration of the heuristic potential of Glissant’s abyssal aesthetics. Glissant’s own oeuvre is obviously an excellent example, but Drabinski finds an illustration elsewhere by analyzing Raoul Peck’s documentary Lumumba, la mort du prophète (1990). Despite its title, the film fails to document the death of the prophet not only because the event has no video archives but also because whatever traces may remain are made inaccessible by the Congolese government’s decision to deny the crew the necessary visas, leaving them stranded in Brussels Airport. This refusal inspires a scene wherein the camera “stares down empty airport hallways with mediocre lighting” (179) in a perfect rendition of an irretrievable loss: the airport scene makes clear that “there is no repetition possible in emptiness, in the abyss that spaces relation and Relation” (180).

Chapter 5 concludes the book with a discussion of Glissant’s vision of the intellectual and national literature. Drawing from Heidegger’s conception of poiesis, the chapter elaborates on the notion of thinking as building. Heidegger’s concept was developed in the context of a Europe in crisis and, in that light, it addresses the problem of “thinking after” (185). For Heidegger, poiesis is central to human dwelling, but its authenticity or inauthenticity is determined by the degree to which it appropriates its existential conditions. Therefore, “[historical] experience intersects with the exigency of poiesis when the intersection is a site of memory—namely, conceptual, existential, or political memory (often all at once)” (189). Drabinski thus argues that “if poiesis is a response to loss” then the way in which it registers loss and rebirth is crucial to thinking and building futurity (189–90). Hence the role of the Glissantian intellectual who “places transmission within what Glissant calls, in a non-Lacanian register, ‘the imaginary’” (192). Articulating loss and transmission makes abyss the starting point of Glissant’s intellectual whereas, for Drabinski, Fanon’s intellectual “begins with the crisis of language” (194). This difference in starting points explains why Glissant dwells on a haunted geography when Fanon “is remarkably indifferent to the ghostly character of the land” (195). Drabinski observes a leap in Fanon’s thought “from Africa to the colonial Americas after enslavement” (200). That leap frames Fanon’s conception of inferiority in essentially economic terms. Glissant on the other hand explores the margins, seeking a retrieval of vernacular black life in its geographic specificity and the transformation of digenetic margins. Thus, if both Fanon and Glissant are threshold thinkers, they do not view the pain of the past in the same way. For Drabinski, Fanon insists on a “return to the pure future as the site of revolutionary meaning” whereas Glissant treats “the past and its sedimentation of vernacular culture as already a site of resistance,” resilience, and transformation of a globalizing cultural formation (208).

Drabinski’s discussion of thinking as building offers a compelling response to criticisms of an alleged later Glissant who moved away from politically committed thought (Hallward 2001; Bongie 2008; Kaisary 2014). Against the purported split between an earlier, political Glissant and a later, Deleuzean and quietist one, Drabinski rightly argues “for a continuity across Glissant’s work” (x; 100). Drabinski’s attentive discussion of Poetics of Relation—the supposed turning point in Glissant’s thought—convincingly shows how the Martinican author appropriates and adapts Deleuzean concepts to coherently incorporate them in his earlier propositions. One might add, as Glissant’s archives, in addition to the published works, show, that all of Glissant’s main concepts are present, in logic if not in letter, in his earliest writings.4

Glissant and the Middle Passage articulates a rigorous account of Glissant’s philosophy of History, which leads to an ontology of Relation and an aesthetics of the abyss. The centrality of the Middle Passage in Drabinski’s account underscores the historical and geographical grounding of Glissant’s archipelagic thought. The abyssal subject, which embodies an improbable life after radical loss, reconfigures both ontology and aesthetics and informs our sense of futurity. In this perspective, the Caribbean landscape and vernacular life as elaborated by Glissant illustrate, for Drabinski, the importance of appropriation through poiesis of place and history even as the poet thinks the Relation that links the place to a creolizing world. Perhaps one may regret that the book does not sufficiently examine the full implications of somatic and psychic expressions of lost loss given that such a meta-loss constitutes, in Glissant’s fiction, the perfect illustration of what Drabinski calls the abyss as it pertains to the Middle Passage per se and to the Plantation that emerges out of it. A focus on this aspect would enrich the author’s comparative confrontation—and serve as a missing articulation—between European philosophies of ruins/disaster (Benjamin, Heidegger, Blanchot) and the smooth surface of Atlantic catastrophe. Nevertheless, Drabinski’s book constitutes a compelling contribution to studies of Glissant’s work, the first in the English language to offer a comprehensive account of the Martinican’s philosophy as it relates to history, ontology, and aesthetics.

Christian Uwe is assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His research interests include Sub-Saharan and Caribbean literatures, African diaspora, and critical theory. He serves on the editorial board of the digital Library of Glissant Studies (LoGS) and is author of Le Discours choral: essai sur l’œuvre romanesque d’Édouard Glissant.