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ABSTRACT
When the Walls Fall is a manifesto written by Glissant and Chamoiseau against the creation of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co-development established in 2007 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy. The manifesto is a call against the building of walls that separate us rather than relate us one to another in a society. Walls are contradictory to the notion of Relation that Glissant and Chamoiseau advocate, where one would be open to the unpredictable and unforeseeable. Both authors criticize the notion of a national identity that would be fixed and firmly established.
Notes
1. A “Ministry” in France is the equivalent of the United States “Department.” The choice of the word Ministry refers to the particular context in which this piece is written. Patrick Chamoiseau and Édouard Glissant both write against the creation of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration National Identity, and Co-development that was started in 2007 by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and dissolved in 2010. It only had two ministers at its head: Brice Hortefeux (2007–2009) and Eric Besson (2009–2010).
2. The verb faire means as much “to do” than “to make,” the noun monde means “world” in English.
3. The original French version says “en final” rather than the correct grammatical structure “au final.” Obviously, Glissant and Chamoiseau's intentional ‘mistake’ aims to show the already predetermined condition of this ministry. It does not evolve “à” but rather is “en.”
4. A reference to one of Glissant's texts “il n'est frontière qu'on outrepasse,” published in 2006 in Le Monde diplomatique (October 2006: 16–17. Web. 12 July 2016.).
5. Tout-monde means One-World as much as Whole-World and All-World. For more in-depth information on this concept, please consult Édouard Glissant's Traité du Tout-monde (Poétique IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1997): “J'appelle Tout-monde notre univers tel qu'il change et perdure en échangeant et, en même temps, la ‘vision’ que nous en avons” (176).
6. Once again, we kept Chamoiseau and Glissant's concept in the original language in order to reinforce his notion of opacité and mondialité.
7. “A [tree] stump” in Martinican creole.
8. The term relation-nations stems from the concept of Relation. For more information, please consult Édouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990. 145).
9. Glissant used the word entour rather than surroundings, as we do here, or, in French—paysage, nature, or environnement. For a full understanding of this word, please consult Poetry After Cultural Studies by Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2011. 162–163).
10. Open Boat is the title of Glissant's first essay in Poetics of Relation published in 1990.
11. The original French is battre sa coulpe which was a medieval practice to confess one's sins by hitting one's chest.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jeffrey Landon Allen
Jeffrey Landon Allen is a senior lecturer of French and Italian in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at North Carolina State University. He is currently finishing his dissertation in educational research and policy analysis at NCSU.
Charly Verstraet
Charly Verstraet is a Ph.D. student in the Department of French and Italian at Emory University. His interests lie at the crossroads of postcolonial, environmental, and migrant literature during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His articles, interviews, and translations have appeared in Nouvelles Études Francophones, Small Axe Salon, and Francosphères. He is currently writing a dissertation on the representations of the coastline in Caribbean literature, painting, and photography.