Glissant’s Linguistic Analysis + Movement

Part of the struggle against a single-axis cultural and historical narrative lies in the contestation of power via language, or the creation of a new language marked by struggle against hegemonic paradigms of knowledge and subjectivity. Glissant asserts that a national literature, borne of the “urge for each group to assert itself” (Glissant 99), is an enactment of this struggle. A community goes in search of itself and its subjectivity by creating a literature that gives voice to its beliefs, its memories, its pains etc. In this literature, a new language emerges from the colliding forces of orality – which are, in the case of the Caribbean, found in the phonetics of resistance found in Creole – and the written forms of European languages. Glissant acknowledges a “forced poetics” faced by the Caribbean speaker (specifically by the Martinican) in encountering the tension between French and Creole.

Glissant defines the basis of Creole’s orality as located in the body. Creole mobilizes the body’s reproductive functions that allow African traditions to persist and reappear in the context of the Western Hemisphere, where they are perpetually carried in the body and consciousness of the Caribbean speaker. This logic of reproduction imbues the Black Caribbean body with the power of resistance, which is deployed in the making of national literature. Describing the nature of Creole as conceptual, Glissant is able to illustrate the ways in which linguistic orality is and does as music, in that it embodies collective resistance and is carried across temporal and corporeal bounds. Glissant’s explanations offer insight into the workings of the literary impulse as an alternative to the fragmentation and chaos of Black subjectivities. In giving voice to these suppressed and undermined subjectivities, literature creates the conditions for the persistence and expansion of Black expression.
“Shange’s multilingual poetry puts languages in Relation in order to encourage people to connect in the transnational web of Relation that Glissant envisions.” (Spyra 793). Ntozake Shange produces a national literature that transcends borders by linking languages in the Western Hemisphere. Shange’s work, specifically the choreopoem, is described as “‘an ancient African form’ enriched with influences from European experimental theater and dance” (786). This allows us to view the body and its movements as an extension of language and literature. Thus in Shange’s work we not only see the body reproducing timeless resistance through spoken and language, but also enacting forced poetics in its breath and movement. There is a continuous link then, between knowledge, language, and corporeality.