“I Believe in the Future of ‘Small Countries’”: Édouard Glissant’s Archipelagic Scale in Dialogue with Other Caribbean Writers

Abstract

Living in Puerto Rico, one learns early on that country is either best (Puerto Rico lo hace mejor; La isla estrella; Look at our neighbors, we are far better off'; This is small island with big heart and lot of talent) or worst (La isla del espanto; Pueblo chico, infierno grande; need example of larger country; We're so small, how could we ever be self-sustaining?).1 Such polarity is informed by single conceptual structure, one that Eduardo Galeano in recent interview with Baltasar Garzon referred to as the grandote ideology.2 An equivalent to what Brian Russell Roberts labels the of continent, grandote ideology has justified imperialism for centuries.3 The various forms of colonialism and neocolonialism habitually experienced in Caribbean are reinforced by extraneous tyranny of continent, which compels us to believe that we suffer de facto inadequacy and inferiority as result of our anu-grandote and anticontinental qualities. The possibility of thinking, imagining, and creating immanently in terms and scales that are our own (the small and archipelagic) is undermined, if not altogether stunted, on daily basis. Thus, struggle for political, social, and economic freedom and self-determination must be waged on level of our conceptual imagination if it is to succeed materially.Perhaps no one today can claim that we do not have enough scholarly and scientific work substantiating enduring and largescale massacre of species, landscapes, and seascapes perpetrated in Caribbean.4 Work proving equally enduring, large-scale assault of our conceptual imagination is as robust but perhaps less evident, since it necessarily builds on subde rippling of poetics, of art and lived experience. Thus, we owe this work to many of our writers, philosophers, and artists, among whom Edouard Glissant undoubtedly stands out. In what follows, I discuss various instances throughout Glissant's oeuvre that simultaneously constitute disclosure of tyranny of continent's imaginative and conceptual assault as well as an impassioned defense of need to think, imagine, and create on small, archipelagic scale. Glissant achieves this double movement through method of generous observation and analysis of Caribbean lived experience, which he summarizes in Caribbean Discourse as follows:It is against this double hegemony of History with capital H and Literature consecrated by absolute power of written sign that peoples who until now inhabited hidden side of earth fought, at same time they were fighting for food and freedom. . . . [W]e should let weight of lived experience slip in. Literature is not only fragmented, it is henceforth shared. In it lie histories and voice of peoples. We must reflect on new relationship between history and literature. We need to live it differently.5Glissant's work resists tyranny of continent by defending smallness and insularity as vehicles for Relation, concept that emerges from writer's close attention to colonized islanders' nonutilitarian, nonexploitative experience along coast and sea (it is impossible to use sea).6 These are people, we should remember, who live in a place whose only power / is exploding spray along its coast.7 But there is more to Relation. In addition to emerging from colonized islanders' lived experience, Glissant's concept encodes sea itself in its spiraling movement as well as in its primary role as both source of life and of latter's constant movement and displacement.8 By refusing to conceptualize sea as an isolating, hostile, and featureless yet nonetheless exploitable expanse,9 Glissant is able to argue for archipelagic coasts as opening way for Relation, interconnection, and transformation of history's brutal and bloody legacies. Therefore, before embarking on discussion of Glissant's work itself, in what follows I first set minimal historical stage necessary for understanding coast and sea's centrality in his thought. …