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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2024
Echos-monde thus allow us to sense and cite the cultures of peoples in the turbulent confluence whose globality organises our chaos-monde.
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 94ECHO-MONDE
The postcolonial Caribbean-French philosopher, Édouard Glissant, begins his Poetics of Relation (1997) in an echoing womb-like structure of a different kind to the natal womb which gives birth to Nancy's listening subject:
What is terrifying partakes of the abyss, three times linked to the unknown. First, the time you fell into the belly of the boat. For, in your poetic vision, a boat has no belly; a boat does not swallow up, does not devour; a boat is steered by open skies. Yet, the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out. This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. It generates the clamor of your protests; it also produces all the coming unanimity. Although you are alone in this suffering, you share in the unknown with others whom you have yet to know. This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under sentence of death. (6)
This terrifying origin, where Glissant begins his text, is the boat of the Middle Passage, transporting African slaves towards the Americas. Whereas for Nancy, the womb is the origin in which a subject begins listening, where ‘the ear opens onto the sonorous cave that we become’ (2007: 34), for Glissant, the traumatic origin of the boat's womb is the point from which a future collective identity opens: the African diaspora created through slavery, subtended by the unknown terror of the Middle Passage and the clamour in the darkness between bodies. This clamour opens out, as Glissant goes on to develop through his text, into a world of echoes, an écho-monde: a way of conceiving identity not as substance but generated from the many contaminations, feedbacks and echoes of the Middle Passage. For Glissant, this boat and the ocean grave that subtends it is the groundless ground from which an écho-monde resonates forth, expanding and diffusing outwards, across space and time.
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