Theatre, Memory and National Consciousness in the Work of Édouard Glissant

Abstract

Theatre is act by which collective consciousness sees itself and, as a consequence, moves beyond itself. There is no nation without theatre.- Edouard Glissant, Theatre: Conscience du peupleAFTER RETURNING TO MARTINIQUE IN 1965, Edouard Glissant founded Institut Martiniquais d'Etudes (IME) in November 1967, with central focus of its educational activities to provide Martiniquan population, and particularly youth, with an education relevant to their social, cultural and psychological Antillean heritage in broadest sense. If, as Juris Silenieks contends, following Albert Memmi, greatest crime committed by colonisers is obliteration of collective history as part of effort to assimilate colonised into imposed culture,1 then Martinique, by ceasing to be a colony through its political, administrative and economic integration into 'body' of France, was perfect object of study for institute's working groups.2 The IME project was intended to be a robust intervention into an extremely constrained, compromised situation in which political resistance to forces of departmentalisation was drastically limited. The institute, through publication of journal Acoma, documented and analysed obstacles which would make independence virtually impossible for French Antillean islands, while attempting to articulate a framework for shifting structural relations of Martinique's almost passive, neo-colonial dependency on metropolitan France.3Glissant and his IME colleagues were acutely aware of culture's complicity - through literature, painting, sculpture, music, song, theatre, dance, and so on - in process of powerfully encoding and thereby deeply influencing day-to-day experiences of French neocolonial domination in and of Antilles. In fact, it was in second volume of Acoma that Glissant would first publish his seminal essay on theatre: Theatre: Conscience du (Theatre: Consciousness of People).4 In essay, Glissant sees theatre as a conduit through which to give expression to nascent political capacity of people to contest and thereby dismantle determinants of their collective domination. For Glissant, multiple modes of Caribbean cultural practice bring collective memory (that is, folklore: ritual and play aspects of Caribbean culture) and collective consciousness (identity) into profound dialogue. Theatre is at once a political and agentive medium whose participants are tasked with reflective and reflexive action, or, in other words, acting out of mythical composition and manifestation of nation to come. For Glissant, acts of cultural define and confirm identity and lived realities of Antilleans in process of nation-building. This essay attempts to tease out this radical form of both embodied performance and creative transformation that Glissant envisions.Archival detoursUnifying his interests in philosophy, poetry and ethnography, Glissant, his IME colleagues and students would criss-cross island of Martinique, going from village to village in an attempt to document socio-cultural realities of Francophone Antilles. The IME group's activist agenda to engender a critical consciousness among people focused its attention squarely on what Glissant would call the presence of things.5 It is in this concrete presence of things that Antillean attempts to negotiate points of historical entanglement which have produced sense of nonhistory in Caribbean, but more urgently so in Martinique and Guadeloupe. In Glissant's articulation, Antillean is in a state of conflict on both conscious and subconscious levels. On conscious level, French Antillean population is thoroughly convinced of its fundamental claim to universal (in other words, French) civilisation and its entitlement to rights, privileges and obligations of French citizenship. …