D’outre-monde : du fantôme de la perte vers une mémoire de l’oubli, ou le moteur caché de la relation à l’autre

Abstract

In a post-colonial situation, the criticism of the way colonization operated leads to a radical questioning of the notion of “territorial identity”, that splits, in a hierarchical way, the same and the other, center and periphery(ies). As Édouard Glissant puts it, the target is therefore to liberate oneself from such limits, be they stereotypic or stereotopic, in order to create a new relation to the world, a creolization of space – geographical, linguistic, identity-related, that celebrates the birth of a “poetics of Relation”. Is not such a wish merely utopian? When they consider the experience of de-centering only as a glorified starter to the opening to the other, the advocates of creolization are utterly oblivious of the ordeal in which it consists – brought to its acme by colonialism. Roger Toumsoun (1998) nevertheless reminds us that the West Indian reality is still at grips with the disillusionment that made it. Therefore, “root-identity”, as well as “rhizome-identity” are similarly utopian. And, even worse: “rhizome-identity” as a rejection of “root-identity” might perpetuate the denial of the suffered loss, thereby reinforcing the power of the model that was to be rejected. Césaire, is the author who made this loss perceivable, and thinkable. La tragédie du roi Christophe shows that “la Négritude” is a broken line of ascendance to Africa, whereby we are invited, in a cathartic way, not to exorcize it, but rather to give it a place of remembrance – a “remembrance of oblivion” (Agamben) capable of preserving the relation to the other from the ghost of loss it unknowingly contains.