Islands and Images
In the film, One World in Relation (2010), the great Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant embarks on a transatlantic cruise. During the journey, conscious that he is folllowing a similar itinerary to those millions of Africans sold into slavery, he remarks that while Christopher Columbus left, he is the one who returns.
Return here means more than the physical act, it implies a profoundly expansive claim for autonomy, meaning, and community in the face of a devastating departure. For those forced to leave Africa and traverse "the middle passage" as slaves, the Atlantic Ocean was an abyss. An emormous, unmarked mass grave consuming the bodies of those who perished away from their homes and communities and stripped their social agency; depiriving them if their languages, religions, music and untold, myriad ways of being and self-definition, both individual and communal. For Glissant, there is a way to live with and beyond this harrowing mass unmooring. The way out of the wreckage is to recognise and embrace the Atlantic as a nest for a multiplicity of new identities, communities, and cultures, evident not only in the many peoples of the Caribbean and their rich cultures, but the African disapora overall and its continuing ability to give and draw influence to and from the homeland. Through this radical view, the ocean is transformed into a font for new possible ways of being and relating, rather than the nullification of community and meaning...Read the full article in the printed issue. Get OVER Journal 4
