fotocred: Micheal Ochs

A Giant Falls

Caribbean theorist, poet and novelist, Edouard Glissant has passed away today in Paris at the age of 82. He had been ill for a long time, but his death comes as a sad and sudden shock to me. I never knew him personally, but I have seen him speak and I know his work. His name is synonymous with contemporary Caribbean studies. This is a HUGE loss. 

Kevin Meehan's obituary from Le Monde:

Eloquent defender of diversity and métissage, the great Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant died on February 3 in Paris, at the age of 82. Poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, thinker, [and exponent of the concept of] creolization, he was born in Sainte-Marie (Martinique) on September 21, 1928 and conducted studies in Philosophy and Ethnology in Paris.

His success upon winning the Prix Renaudot in 1958 for his novel La Lézarde made the general public aware of this intellectual, who never separated his literary creation from a militant reflection. Influenced by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, he construed the history and geography of the Caribbean politically, demonstrating his revolt against racisms of any type and evoking the indelible mark of slavery on the relationship between France and Africa and all overseas territories.

Opposing any imposed systems and any rejection of the other, Edouard Glissant has been champion of métissage and exchange, formulating in his essays gathered in the “Poétique” series his theses on Philosophie de la relation [philosophy of relation] andPoétique du divers the [poetics of the diverse]. He refused to be constrained by single genre, moving constantly between the novel, essay, and poetry, even within a single work.

Novels Directed towards the Imaginary

Edouard Glissant, who shared at once a respectful and conflicting relationship with Aimé Césaire, the other great personality of the Caribbean world, also expressed his concern for literary parentage, through writers and “disciples” [I would rather translate this as supporting scholars] such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, or Ernest Pépin.

His novels, from Quatrième siècle (Seuil 1965) to Ormerod (Gallimard 2003), are geared towards a mythical and imaginary world, far from any naturalism, but also imbued with picturesque elements specific to certain Caribbean novelists.

After having created a center for research and teaching in Martinique, as well as a review named Acoma, Edouard Glissant founded in Paris the Institut du Tout-monde, aimed at putting into practice his humanistic principles and to allowing for the dissemination of “the extraordinary diversity of the imaginaries of the people.”

Lumumba's Last Letter

My dear companion [Pauline],


I write you these words without knowing if they will reach you, when they will reach you, or if I will still be living when you read them. All during the length of my fight for the independence of my country, I have never doubted for a single instant the final triumph of the sacred cause to which my companions and myself have consecrated our lives. But what we wish for our country, its right to an honorable life, to a spotless dignity, to an independence without restrictions, Belgian colonialism and its Western allies-who have found direct and indirect support, deliberate and not deliberate among certain high officials of the United Nations, this organization in which we placed all our confidence when we called for their assistance-have not wished it.


They have corrupted certain of our fellow countrymen, they have contributed to distorting the truth and our enemies, that they will rise up like a single person to say no to a degrading and shameful colonialism and to reassume their dignity under a pure sun.


We are not alone. Africa, Asia, and free and liberated people from every corner of the world will always be found at the side of the Congolese. They will not abandon the light until the day comes when there are no more colonizers and their mercenaries in our country. To my children whom I leave and whom perhaps I will see no more, I wish that they be told that the future of the Congo is beautiful and that it expects for each Congolese, to accomplish the sacred task of reconstruction of our independence and our sovereignty; for without dignity there is no liberty, without justice there is no dignity, and without independence there are no free men.

No brutality, mistreatment, or torture has ever forced me to ask for grace, for I prefer to die with my head high, my faith steadfast, and my confidence profound in the destiny of my country, rather than to live in submission and scorn of sacred principles. History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity.

Do not weep for me, my dear companion. I know that my country, which suffers so much, will know how to defend its independence and its liberty. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!

Patrice

Patrice Lumumba

2 July 1925 – 17 January 1961

The Assassination of Lumumba

Georges Nzongola Ntalaja in The Guardian

Adam Hochschild in The New York Times

Hochschild: "...[after the assassination] more fateful was what was to come. Four years later, one of Lumumba’s captors, an army officer named Joseph Mobutu, again with enthusiastic American support, staged a coup and began a disastrous, 32-year dictatorship. Just as geopolitics and a thirst for oil have today brought us unsavory allies like Saudi Arabia, so the cold war and a similar lust for natural resources did then. Mobutu was showered with more than $1 billion in American aid and enthusiastically welcomed to the White House by a succession of presidents; George H. W. Bush called him “one of our most valued friends.

This valued friend bled his country dry, amassed a fortune estimated at $4 billion, jetted the world by rented Concorde and bought himself an array of grand villas in Europe and multiple palaces and a yacht at home. He let public services shrivel to nothing and roads and railways be swallowed by the rain forest. By 1997, when he was overthrown and died, his country was in a state of wreckage from which it has not yet recovered.
Since that time the fatal combination of enormous natural riches and the dysfunctional government Mobutu left has ignited a long, multisided war that has killed huge numbers of Congolese or forced them from their homes. Many factors cause a war, of course, especially one as bewilderingly complex as this one. But when visiting eastern Congo some months ago, I could not help but think that one thread leading to the human suffering I saw begins with the assassination of Lumumba.
We will never know the full death toll of the current conflict, but many believe it to be in the millions. Some of that blood is on our hands. Both ordering the murders of apparent enemies and then embracing their enemies as “valued friends” come with profound, long-term consequences — a lesson worth pondering on this anniversary."

Martin Luther King on Ghana

[Independent] Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have work for it. Freedom is never given to anybody. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance.

- Martin Luther King Jnr
(1957)

RIP Lews Nkosi

pic jacked from BooksZA

I had the honour of being taught by Professor Lewis Nkosi, one of the Drum generation writers in SA, and I was very saddened to learn of his passing. He was one of the coolest, funniest and sharpest lecturers in African Studies, coming to his class was such a relief after being tortured with contemporary literary theory. You could laugh out loud in his class and engage in thought-provoking discussions with this koolkat - that's what he was a very wise, engaging smooth cat rather than stodgy academic - you know them types.

Lewis Nkosi, you will be missed.  

This is from Books SA:

The giant of South African letters and one of the last remaining voices from South Africa’s famed Drum generation of writers, passed away yesterday in Johannesburg, after a long illness. He was born in December 1936 in KwaZulu Natal, making him 74.

Nkosi’s first novel, which won worldwide acclaim, was Mating Birds. It was banned by the apartheid government; Nkosi lived for long periods in exile, particularly in Switzerland. His last novel, which I [Ben Williams] had the privilege of editing, was Mandela’s Ego. It was shortlised for the Sunday Times Fiction Prize.

His publisher, Annari van der Merwe said:

“If I think about Lewis, two things come to mind: the brilliance of the man’s mind, and his sense of irony – of self-irony. And of course he was quite naughty, but endearingly so. For all his bravado, he was sensitive in a way that few men truly are. There was a real empathy with people – and he had a very broad perspective, from having lived in a different cultural environment for so many years. The devil inside him prevented him from taking things too literally. It’s difficult to think of somebody so vibrant not with us any longer. He will be greatly missed.”

Monday Reading For Squares...comme moi ; )

The notion 'postcolony' identifies specifically a given historical trajectory -that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic, yet it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The postcolony is characterised by a distinctive style of political improvis- ation, by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by distinctive ways in which identities are multiplied, transformed and put into circulation. But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery which, once they are in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence In this sense, the postcolony is a particularly revealing (and rather dramatic) stage on which are played out the wider problems of subjection and its corollary, discipline.

...In the postcolony the commandement seeks to institutionalise itself, in order to achieve legitimation and hegemony (recherche he'gmonique), in the form of a fetish. The signs, vocabulary and narratives that it produces are not meant merely to be symbols; they are officially invested with a surplus of meanings which are not negotiable and which one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge. So as to ensure that no such challenge takes place, the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; but they also have resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain.The basic goal is not just to bring a specific political consciousness into being but to make it effective. We therefore need to examine the way the world of meanings thus produced is ordered, the types of institutions, the knowledges, norms and practices that structure this new 'common sense' as well as the light that the use of visual imagery and discourse throws on the nature of domination and subordination.

From Provisional Notes on the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe (1992)

Gone Too Soon

The Poetics & Politics of Relation

fisttap Dollarbrand for link to the video

I believe that Relation is the moment when we realise that there is a definite quantity of all the differences in the world. Just as scientists say that the universe consists of a finite quantity of atoms, and that it doesn’t change – well, I say that Relation is made up of all the differences in the world and that we shouldn’t forget a single one of them, even the smallest. If you forget the tiniest difference in the world, well, Relation is no longer Relation.
Now, what do we do when we believe this? We call into question, in a formal manner, the idea of the universal. The universal is a sublimation, an abstraction that enables us to forget small differences; we drift upon the universal and forget these small differences, and Relation is wonderful because it doesn’t allow us to do that. There is no such thing as a Relation made up of big differences. Relation is total; otherwise it’s not Relation. So that’s why I prefer the notion of Relation to the notion of the universal.

....we were talking about what’s specific in the definition of the Other. Whether in the Francophone, Anglophone, Arab, Chinese, Japanese world, what’s specific in the definition of the Other is that this Other is not just considered different. The Other is considered as contrary. Now, in the world, there is no contrary.
The dialectic of differences is something I agree with, but not the dialectic of contraries, because the dialectic of contraries assumes that there’s a truth over here, and its contrary over there. Now I don’t believe there is a truth...

nothing is true and everything is alive,

nothing is absolutely true,

meaning [t]here isn’t one absolute truth, but truths. Everything is alive;

everything is a Relation of differences, not contraries, but differences.

Edouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara

August 2009, on board Queen Mary II.