A Caribbean Contribution To a Global Ethic

Relation and Singular Pluralities

A BDENNEBI B EN B EYA

The world is big. Some people are unable to comprehend that simple fact. They want the world on their own terms []. But this is a foolish and blind wish. Diversity is not an abnormality but the very reality of our planet []. Civility is a sensible attribute in this kind of world we have; narrowness of heart and mind is not.1 We live today in the age of partial objects, bricks that have been shattered to bits, and leftovers [...]. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date.2

among other histories of human ordeals, that should be appropriately characterized as shockingly awesome, then it would that of the Caribbean. Not so paradoxically, if there were an ethical relational programme which should be adopted globally, then again, it would be the one suggested in the writings of Caribbean thinkers, fuelled as it is by a horrendous experience of injustice. These two hypothetical statements constitute the underlying argument of the present contribution. As will be examined in this essay, Caribbean thinkers, in particular the Martinicans Frantz Fanon and douard Glissant, challenge the diverse oppressive practices of domination through a poetics of relation aimed at putting an end to the pathological nature of dominant discourses, whose main objective is to contain alterity via a totalizing and essentialist
Chinua Achebe, Bates College Commencement Address (27 May 1996): http://www .bates.edu/now/Comm96/address.html (accessed September 2003). 2 Gilles Deleuze & Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem & Helen R. Lane (LAnti-dipe; Paris: Minuit, 1972; tr. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 42.
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F THERE WERE A HISTORY,

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taxonomy. For a truly new world to be born, a new ethic should be relentlessly sought and established, and this can be found in Caribbean writers patient desire for global recognition of cultural crisscrossing, strengthened by their massive diaspora in the metropolitan landscape. Alongside their intellectual allies, such as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,3 Caribbean writers contribute to fighting the pernicious return of fundamentalist parochialism and attempt to design globalizable politics that can block the current macabre race for terror, and enhance the emergence of a more promising cosmopolitan future. The traumatic Caribbean experience has been repeatedly chronicled in contemporary writers construction of an anti-imperialist creative epic which repeats their ancestors saga of dispossession, produces a hallucinating vision of its processes, and inscribes diverse strategies of insubordination. To take but one instance, consider douard Glissants textual threshold in his Poetics of Relation, where he ponders on the blind will of mastery by focusing on the African slaves lost liberty during their petrifying deportation, through which they were not only confronted with the unknown but also subjected to the most heinous exercise of humiliation and cruelty. Imagine that dark of night, he urges his readers:
Imagine two hundred human beings crammed into a space barely capable of containing a third of them. Imagine vomit, naked flesh, swarming lice, the dead slumped, the dying crouched. Imagine, if you can, the swirling red of mounting to the deck. The ramp they climbed, the black sun on the horizon, vertigo, this dizzying sky plastered to the waves.4
3 The emergence of a decolonizing strain in Western thought in the 1970s and 1980s has marked the break with totalizing colonialist speculations. Thinkers such as Roland Barthes, JeanPaul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze demonstrate what Chela Sandoval calls a shared desire for a post-colonial twenty-first century, by reconstructing a new vision and world of thought and action, of theory and method, of alliance. Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2000): 5. 4 douard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Potique de la Relation, 1990; tr. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1997): 56. So many critical studies have been published about Caribbean literature in general, and Glissant in particular; that my contribution is but an echo, a repetition with a difference, of those I have so far encountered. See Poetics of the Americas, ed. Bainard Cowan & Jefferson Humphries (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P , 1997); Celia M. Britton, douard Glissant and the Postcolonial Text (Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1999); J. Michael Dash, douard Glissant (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1995); JeanPol Madou, douard Glissant: De mmoire darbre (Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1996); Potiques ddouard Glissant, ed. Jacques Chevrier (Paris: Presses de lUniversit de Paris Sorbonne, 1999); and Dominique Chanc, douard Glissant, Un trait du dparler (Paris: Karthala, 2002).

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Glissants text is an address, a call for the reader to interiorize the traumatic event. The authors mental vision functions as a practice of distant witnessing to a history that remains uninterpretable in purely rational terms, but whose emotional effect is so painfully acute that it can only be carried out through a rhetoric of excess which emerges to coincide naturally with what refuses rational explanation. The unspeakable losses place both writer and reader in an ethical relationship, in an empathy with absence, absence of the referential sign, absence of structure, absence of voice, absence of meaning. What is passed on in Glissants testimony is merely a re-presentation, a textual exhumation of the event, hence the exacerbated exhortation of a global duty to right the unwritten history of the dead.5 Uncannily, however, one senses that neither the old forces of exterminating short-cuts nor the current global deracination have managed to eradicate the instinctive will to survive, a will set against the hegemonic attempt at isolation, separatism, erasure, or twisted archival evidence. Such ethics seeks to unnoise the dominant voice and halt its rhetoric of postulation fabricated by the oppressive barbaric power to justify its sadistic practices on the body of its victims. I use the term barbaric as an intentional recuperation against its overdetermined usage in the agenda of the current political discourse with its heralding of a war on terror. Yet the Caribbean experience subverts the distorted determinacy of barbarism which has been unchangeably reproduced from classical Greece, and invariably disseminated to the public.6 Fanon and Glissant, to name but these, have repeatedly corrected the notion, by illustrating its manifestation in the noisy, macabre history of
5 Indeed, for Glissant, the dead, or all those peoples who have been to the abyss [...] live Relation and clear the way for it. Relation is not made for people that are foreign but of shared knowledge. This experience of the abyss can now be said to be the best element of exchange; Glissant, Poetics, 8. 6 Barbarian or barbarous, from Greek barbaros, originally means non-Greek: i.e., according to the Greek criteria of civilization, a member of a primitive or uncivilized people; a coarse, uncultured, vicious, cruel, brutal person; lacking refinement, unsophisticated person. Hence, barbaric, from the Latin barbaricus, has come to mean foreign, outlandish. These definitions are gathered from the readings of Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P , 1997); Tzvetan Todorov, Nous et les Autres (Paris: Seuil, 1989); Robert Jaulin, La Paix Blanche: Introduction lethnocide (Paris: 10/18, 1970) this latter book consists of two volumes: vol. 1 is subtitled Indiens et Colons, vol. 2 Loccident et lailleurs; Ashis Nandy, Zia Sardar, & Merryl Wyn Davies, Barbaric Others (London: Pluto Press, 1993); and Writing and Race, ed. Tim Young (London & New York: Longman, 1997).

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domination, and explained it as a practice of an institutional machinery of bad faith, which is the effort to hide from oneself, to hide from ones responsibility.7 In Il faut dfendre la socit, Michel Foucault defines the barbaric agent in a timely ironic retort that turns the concept of barbarism against the very accuser. A barbaric subject, Foucault explains, is a vector of domination. He only grabs, snatches up, expropriates. He does not occupy someone elses territory but plunders it. Further, when he takes hold of an alien property, he has others the original owners cultivate the land to his advantage, and turn them into a police force that will guarantee his interests. The barbarian never cedes his freedom, Foucault continues,
his freedom depends on someone elses lost liberty, [] which he uses to multiply his powers, to be more potent through his plunder, to be more potent through his thefts and rapes, [] to be an invader who is more and more confident in his own force []. The barbarian cannot be but nasty and mean []. He cannot be but full of arrogance and inhuman.8

For five centuries and more, acts of barbarism have unceasingly ravaged the disarmed world of the periphery. Dream and imagination have been crippled, marking the beginning as death, castrated by the masters demonizing rhetoric against difference. Through a close reading of Western philosophical writings about alterity, Caribbean intellectuals and creative writers, along with their Western intellectual allies, have been intrigued by the discovery that the philosophical formulations of the Enlightenment are surprisingly similar to one another. What is amazing, again, is the degree of contradiction among them. On the one hand, namely, there is an inspiring corpus about ethical notions such as family cohesion, social justice, liberty, tolerance, universal consciousness, and, on the other, a radical exclusion of otherness from these ethical postulates. This is why, Emmanuel Levinas
Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York & London: Routledge, 1995): 17. 8 Michel Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit (Paris: Gallimard, 1997): 175. My tr. The original text reads as follows: Le barbare est essentiellement [] vecteur de domination []; il sempare, il sapproprie. Le barbare ne cde jamais sa libert []. Sa libert ne repose que sur la libert perdue des autres [] pour multiplier sa force, pour tre plus fort dans ses rapines, pour tre plus fort dans ses vols et dans ses viols, pour tre un envahisseur plus certain de sa propre force []. Le barbare ne peut pas ne pas tre mauvais et mchant []. Il ne peut tre que plein darrogance et inhumain.
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argues, the whole of Western philosophy down to Hegel should be read as being bred by the horror of alterity. Western philosophy, he points out,
coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other with an insurmountable allergy, that is, the contempt of the Other that refuses to be contained in the symbolic system of the Self []. Hegels philosophy represents the logical outcome of this underlying allergy.9

Writing after Levinas, Julia Kristeva in turn questions the validity of the logocentric philosophy of ethics, and concludes that most European writings about alterity are utterly unethical. Her analysis helps explain the philosophical contradictions in Western speculations about Self and Other, as she examines the inherent intertwining between the desire for mastery and the experience of abjection. For her, when object-Others are encountered, there awakens in the authoritarian subject a desire to comprehend them in order to contain them. Yet, when these escape the subjects comprehension, horror transforms the objects that stand on the edge of interpretation into the abject. The uninterpretability or opacity of these indeterminate objects, Kristeva states, arouses the paranoid rage to dominate [them], to transform them, to exterminate them.10 Similarly, focusing on the perpetuation of the exercise of hegemony in imperialist cultural knowledge and practices, Edward Said locates its politics of containment in what he calls the giants obsessive will to tie up the global space to his agency; to make it girdled, bound to his dogma and fantasies. In this monopoly on coercion, those who remain stubbornly unconfined are monsterized, pointed to as the epitome of primal disorderliness, and immediately quelled, visibly [] and permanently fixed in place.11 Fanon analyses a related experience of such fixation via the black bodys perception, and its simultaneous frozen determination, by the gaze of its oppressor. When this happens, blackness is produced, and is in turn immediately fixed/fixated in the oppressors mind not so much as a dialectically
9 Emmanuel Levinas, The Trace of the Other, in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1989): 34647. My emphasis. 10 Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and the Polis, in Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement, ed. Anna Smith (London: Macmillan, 1996): 79. 11 Edward W. Said, The Politics of Dispossession (London: Vintage, 1995): 352. My emphasis.

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negative term in comparison to whiteness, but as negation itself. To give an example, in his Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon recounts a telling episode that shows the extent to which such fictitious fixations are manifested in a white individuals reaction to a black bodys sudden apparition:
Look, a Negro! [...] Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened! Frightened! Frightened! Now they were beginning to be afraid of me. I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible.12 The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look, a nigger [. . . ], the little white boy throws himself into his mothers arms: Mama, the niggers going to eat me up.13

Fanons text is overwhelming testimony to the devastating effect of the production of stereotypically racist discourses synthesized and contained in that apparently simple exclamation: Look, a Negro, Mama! An exclamation that expresses the horror of the monstrous object. Beauty in his utter repulsion of The Beast. Beauty is arrested by the sudden appearance of the abject, and is now incapable of resisting the fear that animates his gaze. Look! is a pointing gesture that identifies Fanon and accuses him of threat. It points out and induces in him a vague feeling, not only of humiliation, but also of a wounded, incomprehensible shock: I moved toward the other ... and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, not there, disappeared. Nausea. ... [...] What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?14 Fanons ethical gesture when facing the Other (I moved toward the other) is met with the disappearance of the latter, with the sudden eclipse of the little white Other (and the evanescent other [...] disappeared). More surprisingly, something else happens to Fanon. He is broken, amputated, scarred. Why / how so? What has caused the wound? To answer this, we have to extend our interpretative focus. We return here to the intertwined web of relationships between the looking subject and the gaze. In a way reminiscent of his analysis of the precedence of the Symbolic Order over the subjects birth, Lacan provides an explanation of how the
12 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Seuil, 1952; tr. London: Pluto Press, 1991): 112. 13 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 11314. 14 Black Skin, White Masks, 112. My emphasis.

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gaze functions by initially highlighting its shadowy panoptic pre-existence to the eye. As he writes, what we have to circumscribe is the transcendental and powerful pre-existence of a gaze I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.15 This split between the eye and the gaze produces what Lacan calls the scopic drive.16 The pre-existence of the gaze creates its transparency in the looking subject. It traverses, passes through him/her imperceptibly, but can be revealed symptomatically through behavioural patterns, or compulsive gestures, such as in our case, Look, a Negro! Without the full and powerful action of the gaze in the unconscious of the subject, the vision of this subject remains incomplete, and its effect limited. We may even think of it as harmless. Yet what makes it damaging, or at times murderous, is when the look is overpowered by the gaze: i.e., when, unconsciously, it is the gaze that becomes manifest when the look disappears and yields to the gaze. It is as though, when the look is displaced, the looking subject him/herself disappears, or is annihilated. Fashioned by the gaze, the subject mechanically tries to adapt him/herself to it. Lacan explains the gaze as functioning like a regulatory system. From the moment that the gaze appears, he states, the subject tries to adapt himself to it.17 Therefore, the regulatory power of the gaze annihilates the eye/I of the subject. It watches in its place, and it speaks inside the subject. This is, perhaps, why Fanon does not condemn the Other as a person. His intellectual intuition makes him realize that the Other is not the material individual (the boy) met by accident. The Other is an abstraction. In short, He is a construction. Actually, the little boys eclipse from Fanons vision tells us that the lower-case other is replaced by a capitalized Other. To explain this point, had not the little boy been repeatedly taught that the black body is frightening, his Mama, see the Negro! Im frightened! would not have been uttered. Further, because a Negro is not a name in the little boys exclamation, it therefore does not refer to a specific object. What it refers to is neither recognition nor identification. A Negro is simply a disembodied psychic conception, or, to use the by now over-applied discursive clich, he remains a signifier without a signified. As Richard Wright testifies,
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, tr. Alan Sheridan (Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1973; tr. New York: W.W. Norton, 1981): 72. 16 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 78. 17 The Four Fundamental Concepts, 83.
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The word Negro, the term by which, orally or in print, we black folk in the United States are usually designated, is not really a name at all nor a description, but a psychological island whose objective form is the most unanimous fiat in all American history; a fiat buttressed by popular and national tradition. [...] This island, within whose confines we live, is anchored in the feelings of millions of people, and is situated in the midst of the sea of white faces we meet each day; and by and large [...] its rocky boundaries have remained unyielding to the waves of our hope that dash against it.18

We understand, then, why in Fanons text, as in the passage by Wright, the materiality of the white Other, whom Fanon encounters, in turn collapses. As the little boy has no say, then he, in turn, is not. He is simply a tunnel through which a master signifier commands the utterance. The voice that emerges is more dangerous precisely because it is immaterial because, in short, its violence is epistemic. The little boy is substituted for by a faceless executioner. Faceless because, as Levinas tells us in Entre nous, an executioner is the one who calls for violence and hence no longer has a face, hence is non-relational.19 We therefore come to sense the bleeding effect on Fanon as being produced by an unconquerable abstract Other. Fanons haemorrhage is then caused by a sharper weapon. The cut is deep and everlasting. The more abstract the weapon, the more effective, the more deadly. It is this hidden unjustifiable hostility and hatred flowing through the veins of the innocent child that fixes, immobilizes, freezes Fanon in his insurmountable pain. The supreme ordeal, Levinas states, is not death but suffering, and
This is known very well in hatred, which seeks to grasp the ungraspable, to humiliate, from on high, through the suffering in which one exists as pure passivity. Hatred wills this passivity in the eminently active being that is to bear witness to it []. The one who hates seeks to be the cause of a suffering to which the despised being must be witness.20

Myriad testimonial stories, like Fanons, continue to be disseminated. Survival nevertheless prevails. By creating a space based on an ethico-poetics
18 Richard Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1947), quoted in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993): 14950. My emphasis. 19 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: On thinking-of-the-other, tr. Michael B. Smith & Barbara Harshav (Entre Nous: Essais sur le penser--lautre; Grasset & Fasquelle, 1991, tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1998): 105. 20 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Totalit et Infini: Essai sur lextriorit; The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961; tr. Pittsburgh P A : Duquesne U P , 1969): 239.

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of relation, the centrifugal subversions, initiated and carried out by the silent majorities of the globe, are impelled by a corporeal interaction between differentiated interlocutors who live reciprocally together by respecting each others secrets, each others opacity, each others diversity. The centrifugal, Glissant argues in Poetics of Relation, are better suited than the centripetal to enter into relation, for the latter are essentially imposers of knowledge, seekers of closure and totality; imperialist impostors who cling obsessively to their conception of a world they are determined to comprehend and control rather than simply a world in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others.21 Diversity, as the uncontaminated value of relation, opens up different social bodies to a dynamic encounter in which people who are free from the constraints imposed by the One move in and out as relentless errants who meet one another while they explore what Glissant calls the chaos-monde, and embrace it in its endangered beauty. The chaos, he prophetically explains, emerges out of the fact that
we are revising together as Westerners, Africans, Americans, Caribbeans, etc. the ancient conception of founding mythology, and the monolithic conceptions of time. What is fascinating about todays world poetics is our ability to reconstitute chaotic universes. Chaos is now not meant as disorder, nothingness [. . . ] chaos is confrontation, harmony, conciliation, opposition, rupture. It is the seam between diverse dimensions, between all conceptions of time, [. . . ] between all cultures. It is indeed the very poetics of such chaos-world which [. . . ] contains the future reserves of todays human beings.22

With his concept of chaos-world, Glissant preaches a new kind of freefloating relational intercourse. As such, no one norm can account for it, he
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 114. douard Glissant, Le chaos-monde, loral et lcrit, in crire la Parole de nuit: La nouvelle littrature antillaise, ed. Ralph Ludwig (Paris: Gallimard, 1994): 124. My tr. The original read as follows: Cest que nous sommes en train de rviser tous ensemble Occident, Afrique, Amrique, Carabe, etc. lancienne conception du mythe fondateur, les conceptions monolithiques du temps, et cest ce quil y a de passionnant dans le monde actuel, dans la potique du monde actuel: que nous soyons en train de reconstituer des univers chaotiques. ce moment-l, chaos ne veut pas dire dsordre, nant, [...] chaos veut dire affrontement, harmonie, conciliation, opposition, rupture, jointure entre toutes ces dimensions, toutes ces conceptions du temps, [...] des cultures qui se joignent, et cest la potique mme de ce chaos-monde qui [...] contient les rserves davenir des humanits daujourdhui.
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tells us, since it is conceived as and based on intuition rather than on predetermined essentialist criteria of measurement. This polyphonic language of the related, as a centrifugal language of safety suggested by Glissant, is an ethically utopian one, which Levinas also conceptualizes by distancing it from what he calls discourse politics. In our errantry, Levinas claims, the journey cannot be conceived without interaction, without an encounter with the face [that] announces its inviolable exteriority.23
The relation with the face, with the other absolutely other which I cannot contain [] does not consist in grasping him in his negative resistance []. The face resists possession, resists my powers []. But the relation is maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity. The resistance of the other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical.24

Levinasian relational ethics, like Glissants or Fanons above, suggests that this kind of situation may not transpire unless it is governed by a willingness, a desire, to get out of ones hermetically enclosed shell and meet the other in her/his naked alterity. Only the other as Other, as radically irreducible singularity, is the source of every possible alterity. Only this kind of ethical relation, Levinas claims, would free us from our hopeless and fatal confinement in an insensible dead-end existence. Henceforth, the relation to the Other, as equal yet differentiated interlocutor, will be conceived as a cutting edge to the melancholic solitude of the Self; it marks the end of the absurd noise (in French, bruissement) of the Selfsame, he asserts. In Being Singular Plural, JeanLuc Nancy, in turn, advocates the plurality of the singular, precisely inherent in the very idea of Being. Being, for him, is inconceivable without otherness. Being is being-with; it is being-inrelation, without losing ones freedom or singularity. As he states,
From one singular to another, there is contiguity but not continuity. There is proximity, but only to the extent that extreme closeness emphasizes the distancing it opens up. All of being is in touch with all of being, but the law of touching is separation; moreover, it is the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other.25

Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 216. Totality and Infinity, 197. 25 JeanLuc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, tr. R.D. Richardson & Anne E. OByrne (tre singulier pluriel; Paris: Galile, 1996; tr. Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2000) 5.
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Nancys argument may be read as a palimpsestic synthesis of most of the Caribbean thinkers utopian preoccupation with the establishment of an imaginary relational bridge between separate subjectivities that yet have been globally united by that very history which had meant to divide them, to alienate them, to exterminate the heterogeneity of surfaces that touch each other. Hence, with reference to my initial argument about barbarism, as well as to Fanons experience, it becomes clear that a dominant oculocentric culture which sees and refuses to be seen, and a monologic one which knows how to speak but not how to listen, also establishes a system which will undoubtedly fail to constitute itself without oppression, a system in which, in the words of Gemma Corradi Fiumara, there is no room for listening. As she points out clearly,
When Western knowledge tries to frame the entire world and its history by making use of the power that basically emanates from the voice of our rationality then, perhaps, an excessively logocentric culture emerges in which there is no longer any room for listening. In fact, there is one voice only as the accredited source of knowledge []. [Therefore,] as long as we move in a noosphere that is saturated with both scientific and intellectual discourses constantly reaching out to inform, permeate and mould, the process of listening can never be more than a minimal philosophical aspiration or the concern of a minority.26

This is why, following Corradi Fiumara, todays ethical interpellations insist on the emergency to unceasingly keep on producing against the deafened ear of narcissistic paranoia, more resistive narratives, dictated by the need to re-write the pages of history, wherein a philosophy of speaking is transformed into a philosophy of listening. Because the formers historical resonance reaches deep into our minds and our psyche, the ethics proposed by Glissant, Fanon, Said, Levinas, and others, are timely, but these may not be achieved without our full performative adherence to their values, which will ultimately lead us not only to eschew the trap of, but to thwart, all forms of violence. Constructed out of pain and silence, such relational ethics stress the cathartic effect of the touching caress and directs our attention to the unspeakable utterances of the Other.

26 Gemma Corradi Fiumara, The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening, tr. Charles Lambert (Filosophia dellascolto; Milan: Jaca Book, 1985; tr. London & New York: Routledge, 1990): 19. My emphasis.

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Whatever the unexpected outcome of future events, minority thinkers, while bearing the scars of past and current violations through language, will continue to enter it, engaging with it in a painful relationship from which emerges, in Glissants terms, a counter-poetics nourished by a lived history to which [they] are introduced by [their] struggle without witness. Such a displacing move acts as an efficient theoretical model and a performative gesture in the long and exacting process of insubordination:
For history is not only absence for us, it is vertigo. This time that was never ours we must now possess. We do not see it stretch into our past and calmly take us into tomorrow, but it explodes in us as a compact mass, pushing through a dimension of emptiness where we must with difficulty and pain put it all back together.27

Glissants testimonial utterance, which points to the absence of the oppressed from the violent disruptions of dominant History, is actually a blissful, albeit painful, opportunity to reunite the surviving victims of terror, impelling them to report on those events which were meant to be without witness. Testimonial relation relinks (relays), relates (relie [relaie], relate), Glissant writes in Poetics of Relation.28 It is the threshold of narration (la mise de la premire pierre) of a damaged structure. What is related must be preserved.29 What must be preserved is, in the words of Celia M. Britton, that very damage and fracture, the remnants of a complex exacerbated history, relayed from one person to another, forming an ocean of narrative relations, an ungraspable flow of those unspeakable opacities. Relayed language is a utopian strategy of diversity that resists the oppressively singular version of the monologic text, replacing it with a plural text made up of a number of different subversions, a counter-myth in which no one person has control of the whole story,30 in which no one person is reducible to the status of invisibility. Such achievement is nothing but an ethical call for unconditional recognition and solidarity: All I wanted was to be a man among other men, Fanon laments. I wanted to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together.31
27 douard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, tr., sel. & intro. J. Michael Dash (Le Discours antillais, 1981; Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1996): 16162. 28 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 173. 29 Poetics of Relation, 120. 30 Celia M. Britton, douard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory (Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 1999): 164. 31 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 11213.

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