5 - Towards a theory of Antillanité: La case du commandeur, Le discours antillais

Summary

Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous, que ce serait être fou … de n'être pas fou.

Pascal, Pensées

Approximately two decades after the deaths of Frantz Fanon and Jacques Stephen Alexis, and at a time when the fathers of negritude had begun to succumb to creative exhaustion, Glissant published two major works. In 1981 La case du commandeur (‘The Overseer's Cabin’) and Le discours antillais (‘Caribbean Discourse’) appeared simultaneously. The former, a novel that picks up where La Lézarde left off, has been praised as ‘the most beautiful story in a Caribbean language’. The latter, a massive book of theoretical essays, was greeted by the reviewer in Le Monde as ‘a great book, only three or four of which appear in a decade’.

Both works, which are necessarily related to each other, are marked by the research into and diagnosis of Martiniquan reality that were done at IME before Glissant left for Paris as editor of the UNESCO Courrier in 1980. Indeed, as the author states at the end of the notes in Le discours antillais, the themes and ideas of this work were drawn from a series of public lectures sponsored by IME between 1978 and 1979. In particular, the sections on ‘Lé vécu antillais’ (‘The lived Experience of the French West Indies’), ‘Sur délire verbal’ (‘Verbal Delirium’) and ‘Théâtre, conscience du peuple’ (‘Theatre, the People's Consciousness’) had already appeared as essays in the review Acoma.