Glissant 1997

Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Trans. by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

"The time came, then, in which Relation was no longer a prophecy made by a series of trajectories, itineraries that followed or thwarted one another. By itself and in itself RElation exploded like a network inscibed within the sufficient totality of the world." (29)

"We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments. The poetics of duration (another leitmotiv), one of the first principles of the sacred, founding books of community, reappears to take up the relay from the poetics of the moment. Lightning flashes are the shivers of one who desires or dreams of a totality that is impossible or yet to come; duration urges on those who attempt to live this totality when dawn shows through the linked histories of peoples." (33)

"The landscape of your word is the world's landscape. But its frontier is open." (33)

creolization -- each person in a new dimension, allowed "to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry." (34)