A Synthesis of Caribbean Discourse: From a Dead End Situation

I had started reading Caribbean Discourse swiftly after finishing The Green Book and went about trying to understand the material in the same manner.
Making a tiktok trying to summarize and connect the ideas that I just read about. But I feel like with this book I am doing the information a disservice like that.

With the information that is provided in these essays I felt it would do me better to synthesize it by making some blog posts about each of the essays I review. In this post we’ll just be playing catch up and reviewing what I’ve already made tiktoks about

INTRODUCTION

Understanding what this book is about is a task at times. I bought it on a whim after hearing Prof. Skye mention some of its themes in an album review I liked. But actually sitting down and reading this reveals something with much more depth than I was expecting.

INTRODUCTIONS
From a “dead-end” Situation

The introduction of Introductions settles us into the grim reality and hopelessness felt by many in the diaspora. An inability to escape and grow from the shackles from the past, forever ostracized and objectified.
It opens with a vision of the future where a Martinique president opens up the island to tourists to show what an old colony looked like. But the thing about this future is that it is forever attached to the pain of its past, the language and the imagery force the mind to return to suffering.

When these ideas where brought up to a French professor they responded with

“That is not important. The essential thing is that poverty has visible diminished. You no longer see malnourished children on the roadside. The problems you now raise are almost irrelevant.”

In this essay Glissant speaks on these ideas entrap his study. How the appearance matters more than the innards.

“These anecdotes, which seem loosely linked with reality, nevertheless circumscribe the object of my study. It was a matter of tracking down every manifestation of the multiple processes, the confusion of indicators that have ultimately woven for a people, which had at its disposal so many trained officials and individuals, the web of nothingness in which it is ensnared today.
An ‘intellectual’ effort, with its repetitive thrusts, its contradictory moments, its necessary imperfections, its demands for formulation, very often obscured by its very purpose. For the attempt to approach a reality so often hidden from view cannot be organized in terms of a series of classifications.
We demand the right to obscurity.”

A right to be unknown, a right to privacy. Throughout this whole essay, Glissant was going on about the suffering that so many people has been through. To be the perfect victim is to be silent from the pain you experienced and grow from it with out any attention.

We transform and turn our pain into something else, a transmutative exercise that turns creativity into therapy.
But the operants that have allowed this pain to occur are still continuing. With this, with how they come to view us, the material conditions is all that is sought after to be changed when it is the obscure, the unviewable that must also be changed, the mind.

This writing is based on the first essay of “Introductions” next is ‘From This Discourse on a Discourse’