2 Glissant’s exploration of the fiction of William Faulkner, the only anglophone author who attracted his sustained attention and the only writer to whom he devoted an entire monograph, likewise announces its critical cartographical approach in the title of his book, Faulkner, Mississippi (1999). His idiosyncratic elaboration of concepts indicative of transit, such as errance, or errantry, also demonstrates the prominence of spatial metaphors in his later thinking, even when (and, often, especially when) such terms convey a deterritorializing tendency. Glissant at the time was becoming interested in ecological activism as a means of creating a conceptual bridge between his poetics and his politics. Much later, in his novel Tout-monde (1993), Glissant would construct a narrative that corresponds to the geographically “chaotic” dimensions of the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. Soleil de la conscience also introduces the phrase lieux communs (“common places”) in a reversal of the typically negative valence of the term “commonplace,” a topological pun which functions equally well in English and French. Marronnage, the historical phenomenon of maroon slaves transformed by him into a geo-social principle of resistance and reclamation of the island hinterlands, would continue to fascinate Glissant throughout his career. Glissant’s first novels, La Lézarde (1958) and Le quatrième siècle (1964), actively assert a homology between the Martinican landscape and a sense of collective destiny. My time is not a succession of seasonal hopes, there are upsurgings and breaks in the trees’ (25). Mon temps n’est pas une succession d’espérances saisonnières, il est encore de jaillissements et de trouées d’arbres” ‘My countryside is still an enthusiasm the symmetry of planted fields disturbs me. In a memorable passage in that book, for instance, he remarks on the sense of displacement that the European terrain, newly encountered first-hand as he begins his university studies, inspires in him: “Mon paysage est encore emportement la symmétrie du planté me gêne. 1 Glissant’s earliest published collection of essays, Soleil de la conscience (1956), gives some indication of the importance he thereafter was to place on the imagery of land (and, almost equally, of sea). The writings of the Martiniquan novelist, theorist, poet, and playwright Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) frequently privilege place and landscape as central to a concept of Caribbean poetics, and recently critics have tended to place greater emphasis on his use of geographical tropes.

Edouard glissant