(Up)rooted identities: Caribbean environmental and cultural interplay in Glissant's Mahagony

ABSTRACT

Three years before the publication of Poétique de la Relation (1990), Mahagony introduces a shift in Glissant's approach to the environment. This novel not only uses the landscape to present the historical and political contexts that were at the forefront of Glissant's earlier work, but it also begins to articulate the tenets of créolisation promoting the rhizomatic and dialectic nature of the environment through the figure of the mahogany tree. Thus, the tree becomes a central figure in the text that allows the reader to navigate the fragmented narrative and interrelated histories of the island and its people. Weaving past, present, and future, Glissant gestures to the environment's didactic capacity by interlocking key concepts of créolisation with the landscape of the novel and the Caribbean island. My reading of the novel explores the ecocritical implications of the novel by establishing the links among the tree, marronnage, and Caribbean culture.

Keywords:

• Caribbean
• créolisation
• culture
• ecocritical
• environment
• Glissant
• landscape
• Mahagony
• marronnage
• tree

Notes

1. It is important to note that Prieto is conscious of the overlap of political and cultural issues, which shapes postcolonial environmental literatures in Africa and the Caribbean. See Prieto 236–37.

2. In Le Discours antillais, Glissant defines marronnage as a cultural method of resistance: “La résistance populaire est d’abord ‘coutumière’: c’est l’organisation d’une économie de survie—parfois violente: c’est le marronnage” (113). It enjoys a privileged relationship to the Caribbean, Martinique, and their lands: “Le marronnage a déplacé une petite partie des esclaves des Plantations; le résultat en est que les premiers marrons sont en fait les premiers planteurs parcellaires, ceux qui sont implantés dans les hauteurs” (116).

3. Glissant has often been criticized for a lack of political determinism in his writings, something Celia Britton convincingly refutes, echoing somewhat Prieto's argument of an evolution or shift in Glissant's approach to both political and environmental concerns (“Globalization” 10).

4. The reference to the roots of the trees is a clin d’œil to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Mille plateaux, which influenced Glissant's use of rhizomes in defining créolisation.

5. Mathieu states at the beginning of the novel: “Un arbre est tout un pays” (13).

6. Glissant uses this technique throughout the novel.

7. This information was taken from the “Office de Développement de l’économie agricole d’outre-mer” Web site.

8. Dash explains how the title of the novel relates both to the agony of human suffering and to the tree's own anguish (166).

9. Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley provide an in-depth summary and analysis of Glissant's aesthetics of the earth and their relevance to ecocriticism (3–35).

10. For more on tourism and the consumption of the Caribbean, see Sheller 13–102.

11. The roots here are the complex and dynamic interlaced rhizomatic system that Glissant advocates.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yasmina Fawaz

Yasmina Fawaz is currently a French Studies PhD student at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research interests include Francophone African literature; postcolonial ecocriticism; and race, gender, and ethnicity studies.