Week #9: Poetics of Relation

[jscappettone]

For Tuesday, please read up to "THE VOICE OF EARTH" in Nathanaël's (formerly known as Nathalie Stephens) translation of Édouard Glissant's Poetic Intention (p. 169), or finish the book if possible, and post a question you might have for Nathanaël as translator.

By or before Wednesday at 5 pm, please choose a concept or term from this work that interests or perplexes you. How does this idea or keyword help you to read the Caribbean texts we've encountered in this course? You may instead choose to discuss its value for grappling with a prior text or texts, if you so desire.

[Peter]

For Nathanaël: I am interested in Glissant's idea that an oeuvre has an intention guiding it - and the way that this intention might function in secret, or come to designate something other than the intention of the author. I think this redistribution of the oeuvre's intent is visible in the formula: "These oeuvres break the circle...and distribute it thus: "author's (explicit or non-explicit) intention - reality of the work - (manifested) intention of a people" (30). Translation seems like an interesting place to think through this collectivity of intention in the work. Specifically, I'm wondering how Nathanaël understands the translation of Glissant (and other translations) to be part or apart from her poetic oeuvre?

As for a concept, I was taken by Glissant's use of errancy and the errant through the text. I found it something of an odd encounter, because the concept comes from Kostas Axelos [or at least that seems to be the trajectory, though the note at the end of Poetic Intention, putting the essays between 1953 and 1961, may mean that Glissant's essay on Saint-John Perse might have given the idea to Axelos], a writer who remains something of a future encounter for me, a writer yet to come - both because his works have been largely left untranslated, and because his writing on play and games has transformed his books into fantasies to think with. Eve Sedgwick writes beautifully on this: “Sometimes I think the books that affect us most are...the books we know about—from their titles, from reading reviews, or hearing people talk about them—but haven’t, over a period of time, actually read. Books can therefore have a presence, or exert a pressure in our lives and thinking, that may have much or little to do with what’s actually inside them” (After Sex 283). Glissant cites Axelos for the ideas of the planetary that recur throughout the book, though the connection between planetary and errancy are somewhat subterranean. Here is a Axelos describing the connection (quoted in Deleuze's essay "The Fissure of Anaxagoras and the Local Fires of Heraclitus"): 

Planetary certainly means planet earth, the terrestrial globe, and its relationship to other planets. It is the global. But the extension of this concept remains too great...Planetary means whatever is itinerant and errant, wandering as it follows a trajectory in space-time and performing a rotational movement. Planetary indicates the era of global planning, in which the subjects and the objects of the will to organize and foresee are swept up motionless on an itinerary that surpasses both subject and object. Planetary names the reign of platitude as it spreads and flattens everything, which is also more errant than aberrant. As a noun, moreover, and according to dictionaries, the planetary designates a kind of technological mechanism, or gears and wheels. Therefore, the play of thought and the planetary is global, erratic, itinerant, organizing, planning and flattening, caught up in gears and wheels. (Desert Islands 156)

The whole essay is useful, and clarifies some of these remarks: "Errancy has ceased being a return to the origin...it is as far from error as it is from truth", "Planetary thought is not unifying: it implies hidden depths in space...incommensurate distances and proximities...this is why planetary is not the same thing as the world, even in Heideggerian terms", and "platitude is the movement of errancy..." (156-8). Axelos is concerned with a transformation in the philosophical, technical and geopolitical understanding of the world in this reading, while Glissant usefully articulates errancy in relation to the historical trajectories of specific peoples and groups. This allows Glissant to connect errancy to a poetics.

    On the one hand there is Saint John Perse's regret and assumption of immobility, one that seems infectious: "Immobile? Because of that errance of its race (the regret that errance had dried up to such a degree) convinces him to have to remain" (102), "I in turn remain immobile, not drunken with errance, a prey to errance, feverish for rootedness" (103), "I divine, for the errant, the need first to recuperate: the grave minutia of the one who intends to forget nothing at the place of his encampment" (104). A kind of wanderlust, errancy seems to express itself as a need, almost a petulant one which sulks if unfulfilled, and whose response seems to be cataloging the local (Brathwaite's documentation of the land seems relevant here). On the other hand, as Glissant notes in Poetics of Relation "The thinking of errancy conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claim to sum it up or possess it" (21). The poetics that arises from this renunciation is an assemblage: "He cannot establish himself...at least he will put his glory into assembling...Universal vocation, for the errant who traces the universe 'we assemble, from on high, all of this great earthly fact'" (105). Echoing Axelos' displacement from both truth and error, Glissant argues that what will "drown the...rush of too general an intention, one which may prove to be erroneous" is the error of totalizing truth or "the savor of a country" (172). 

   I'm still trying to work out exactly how to connect all these ideas of errancy, but they seem to come together in the poetry of NorbeSe-Philip. In Zong! there is the imposition of a quest, a necessary dislocation from home, but one that does not lead towards truth but through an errancy that disavows both the categories of truth and error. There is in Zong! the sense that there can be no justification of beginnings, that one must begin where one is. Nonetheless the process of Zong! one directed outwards towards totality, not only adding flesh to the bones, but moving out from them towards the salt of the ocean (Sal), the wind which guides the ship (Ventus), and the basis of western reason (Ratio). If the poem aims at totality from the fragment it must constantly remain short of totality, and create an assemblage rather than a general truth. 

[Patrick Morrissey]

First, a question for Nathanaël:  One of the challenges and pleasures for me in reading Poetic Intention was trying simultaneously to parse local meanings and to track the book’s overall gestures or arguments.  The density and resistance of sentences and paragraphs seemed to command my entire attention, and as I focused on them, the rest of the text almost dropped away, as though an essay or the entire book consisted entirely in each of its sentences.  But I also had a strong sense of longer patterns and rhythms extending across the text.  As a translator, how did you manage the book’s different scales, or how did you think about the relation between local meanings and overall patterns? 

And then a few thoughts on Glissant’s comments about “the Total” and “the Same” and their relation to “poetic knowledge,” which came into sharpest focus for me in his paragraphs about Rimbaud (51-5).  Glissant locates Rimbaud in the tension between two tendencies, roughly identifiable as the philosophy and the poetry.  Associated with philosophy, which according to Glissant dominates the “Occidental” sensibility from Plato’s banishment of the poets on, are “idealism,” “individualism,” “uniformity,” and the desire for “the Same”; on the side of the poetry are “materialism,” “relation,” “unity,” and the desire for “the Total.”  Rimbaud’s “malediction” was to strive for the latter within the climate of the former.  I take it that Glissant’s “the Total” is something like Deleuze’s “multiplicity,” i.e., an overall entity that’s always in flux and, despite its overall-ness, is marked by the difference of the elements gathered into it—a “unity” that doesn’t assimilate its elements into “uniformity.”  Poetry, for Glissant, is a mode of knowing that’s true to the Total, “embrac[ing] a more and more immoderate, complex, implicated (implex totality) object” (53), if “knowing” is understood not as grasping or assimilating objects to an ideal concept but as “relating” to diversity-in-Total.  What interests me particularly is Glissant’s sense of the poet’s challenge: poetic language must be true to the flux and endless difference of the Total, but it must also avoid “unpredictability,” “dispersal,” and “muddling.”  The poem must be at once “dynamic” and “fixed,” which is to say that it formalizes energy and the movement of differences.

Glissant’s characterization of poetry here helps me think about Giscombe’s Prairie Style, particularly the curious relationship in that work between aphoristic individual phrases or sentences and the overall effects of repetition and rhythm that unifies the book.  In our discussion of Giscombe, we puzzled over the uncanniness induced by the regularity and smoothness of his prose combined with the obliquity and surprise of individual locutions; we were tempted to call this his “prairie style”—an expansive flatness nevertheless punctuated by different locations.  We get some sense of this on the very first page, as we move from “Location’s what you come to; it’s the low point, it usually repeats,” to “To me, any value is a location to be reckoned with,” to “Or location’s the reply, the obvious statement about origin” (3).  The word “location” is first defined, then it figures in sort of figurative definition of an abstraction, and then its definition shifts again as location becomes a variety of locution.  We can trace several particles of this first pages as they reoccur later in the book: “Generally, value exists in relation to opportunities for exchange” (7); “To me image is any value in the exchange” (29); “Color’s description; say the erotic overtakes you, like color.  Sooner or later it repeats” (41).  The dominant formal element is the definitional statement (often a subject renamed by predicate nominative), which establishes an attitude of expositional clarity and a rhythm of certainty and regularity.  But within that formalization we have the flux of these abstract nouns, which shift into and out of equivalence with one another.  To recall my question for Nathanaël, Giscombe’s managing two scales here: the local locution (which often is almost transparent but finally opaque) and the overall “prairie style,” in which all the little locutions accrete and relate by repetition and prose rhythm.  Is it fair to say that this is how he achieves “unity” not “uniformity”?

(I wonder if we might also think of some of Braithwaite’s work, especially a poem like “Guanahani,” under this rubric, though he’s working with very different formal resources than Giscombe is.  In that poem, Brathwaite seems interested in some kind of unity of places (though my first impression is that he runs a higher risk of assimilating them to uniformity).)                       

[Michael Dango]

1. My question for Nathanaël is about the publication of her translation through Nightboat, whose website explains: "The name Nightboat signifies travel, passage, and possibility—of mind and body, and of language. The night boat maneuvers in darkness at the mercy of changing currents and weather, always immersed in forces beyond itself ... A writer trusts the symbiosis between body, mind, spirit, heart, and those things larger than the self. Her allegiance lies with the written word, not unlike the sailor and the sea, or the mountaineer and the mountain. The writer is the vehicle, the guide, and the terrain all in one, yet she’s none of these things."  I'm interested in how Poetic Intention is or is not a part of this mission, and whether the publishers see the translation as a confirmation of their writer's manifesto or not.  The language is very similar, but what seems for Nightboat a metaphor (the writer like mountaineer) also seems more literal in Glissant, whose poet should seek "To experience the landscape passionately. To disengage it from the indistinct, mine it, ignite it among us. To know what it signifies in us. To carry this clear knowledge to the earth" (228). What are the politics of Nightbook's absorption of Glissant through a symbolization that purifies the poet's project of sometimes non-linguistic intention?

2. I'm trying to make sense of Glissant's concept of the "One."  Glissant introduces the term internal to a poetic fantasy, as the "consensual lack" each seeks to "attain" through "spark and revelation" (7).  The One appears something like the Lacanian Real that exists before the entrance of the subject, whose enters the world when he does through a castration that bars access to the Real and demands an impossible and therefore perpetual desire to fill the lack. Glissant's call to "leave the dreams of childhood, the daydream of Truth; deny the One" is therefore a call for a movement from masculine to feminine sexuation, that is, from an eternally self-generating and impossible desire within language to a satisfaction outside language: a movement from a cosmos of linguistic castration to one in which "part of the world ... is saddled with non-existence" (9).  This part outside existence is a jouissance outside the logics of castration and language. Glissant's move to embrace the opacity of the other as the consensual universality of relation is therefore also move to escape the (especially colonial but also ontologically ethical) violence of the One, whose universalization is false, whose totality is totalitarian, and which must therefore be understood not as a metaphysical truth but as a historically produced psychological reality (thus there is a "time of the One," belonging to the place and epoch of the "acting race" [199]). In this dominant reality, the poem is the "poetic tool of the One," which the new poet must transcend by letting the uncertainty and opacity be determinate (200).  Why the apparent redundancy of the "poem" as a "poetic tool" (why not just "tool")? Of course this clarifies it is one of many tools of the One.  But it clarifies also that only the poem's poeticness is the tool.  The non-poetic of the poem remains not fully captured by the One: the poem is subject to the One, but not totally. There is a part outside.

This helps me a bit with a difference between Brathwaite and Philip, but I think my reading is still a little naive and I'm looking forward to discussion.  As I tried to begin thinking in class: Whereas Philip seeks to exercise violence against a language mimetic of a violence that language's administrators exercised against racially abjected bodies, in order to generate out of cutting a haunted space in which both ghosts and repaired subjects can endure, Brathwaite seeks to stylize the word with an excess of appearance that produces parts outside of language's authoritarian demand to signify.  Brathwaite more than Philip, therefore, seems in line with Glissant's project, not to mention they both share an interest in landscape as an extimate a priori that produces a subject.  But both Brathwaite and Philip deny the One in their utopian futurities, which seek ethical divisions on the horizon instead of a totalitarian division of the historical past.  For both, a non-Oneness, a Lacanian feminine sexuation, particularizes in order to escape total symbolic enchainment.

 

On Sun, May 26, 2013 at 3:41 PM, Peter <pdouglas...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Suzannah Spaar]

Glissant writes in Poetic Intention: “as the being approaches the realization of intention, he discovers that the created reality is not, properly speaking, the one he had ambitioned, and that the truth of the intention was ripening less in his intentional consciousness than in his subconscious mass of facts understood by intention. The oeuvre that achieves its purpose reveals another (hidden) purpose of the author’s, and which remains open: to be accomplished. The writer is always the ghost of the writer he wants to be (30).”  

    Do we tend to think of the translator as the ghost of the original author? Yet if there is no such thing as an original author, if even he is trying to achieve something that he can’t  summon up alone, singularly, from just his own experience and language--then can we give the translator more agency? Throughout the quarter, we’ve discovered a lot of ways in which all language, and all art is a form of translation (translation of history, people, language, &c). Should the translator claim more ownership for a text? Are the intentions the same, and is there some sort of ownership that you feel when translating a text? Do you feel more like the parent or the babysitter? Both translator and author must focus on the precision of language. Finally, a more general question: is there a line drawn where a translator is given credit as author? (I’m thinking of varied samples of text, from Anne Carson’s Antigonick to something like Seamus Heaney’s Beowolf  translation).  How and why do we consider a book or a poem a new text, rather than a ghost or version of the original language?

On Friday, May 24, 2013 1:35:15 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Tala Radejko]

The density of the text is something that I struggled with, and on many occasions I found my self re-reading and re-examining passages to figure out how they fit within the wider patterns of the books. One thing that struck me throughout was his manner of writing and, for lack of a better way to put it, his choice of diction and wording as well as the way in which he constructed sentences. My question for Nathanael therefore has to do with word choice and sentence structure: when was the translation more of a literal exercise, and in what instances was more direct translation sacrificed in order to maintain the sense of the text/ reflect wider patterns in his writing and the book? In what instances was the choice most difficult?  

[Ingrid Becker]

Maybe this is not totally possible but I have been trying to think of some questions about the task of this translation that are not totally laden with questions/assumptions about some of Glissant's claims or visions in the text. But whether that is possible or even desirable is a question in itself. But here are a couple basic things:

1) Did Nathanaël take different tacks on approaching some of the more "critical" versus more "poetic" sections of the book? Although the poetic methods soaks right into all the prose Glissant is also making real claims about other writers/historical figures and taking account of the history and present of the postcolonial world. Did she feel a conflict about making the prose cohere more or less depending on whether she felt a need to deliver a particularly weighty point or a desire to make an argument emerge (even on the sentence level)? Was there ever such a desire at making things "clear" for Nathanaël, and if so, what did she do about it (I'm a little effected in this question by our discussion around Philip's efforts at balancing coherence/disorder to be faithful to a story she felt had to be told.)

2) Where did she feel amongst the pronouns here? The many I's, you's, "man" (mute or not), they, or we which the "I" identifies with (for instance on p 32).

Will bring more!

[Margaret Mcfee]

I have a question that echoes or reformulates some of what has been said, but it seems that translation of Glissant's oeuvre is particularly difficult given his commitment to the idea of opacity. This is sort of a reformulation of what Tala was pointing to, but in what sense did she feel that fidelity to the text required leaving it opaque? Did she feel any need to increase the opacity by maintaing the sentence structures?

Another has to do with reading around the text. Given the significance of Glissant's work to theorists who followed him (for example Chamoiseau or Confiant), to what degree did those later voices influence her translation of the text? How does the abundant writing around Glissant's oeuvre influence the translator's relationship to the text?

[David Gutherz]

My translation-based question and conceptual concerns are all knotted together so, rather than untangle, I’m going to try to pitch them all in a ball. So: I was struck by the profusion of need-related terms in the text. Almost everything (but history especially) is suffused with lack, need, exigency, urgency, privation. Typically, these words are accompanied, trailed, or followed by images of absence, void, or loss. My first question for Nathanaël would be—how much does the slight variation in meaning (between, say, lack, privation, and exigency) matter? Is there one expression that you think captures the force of Glissant’s intention most accurately or is the chain of concepts itself integral to the idea being communicated? Secondly, how should we understand the relation between these figures of emptiness and the Glissant’s sense of urgency? Is the absence of ____________ (nation, language, history, collective consciousness) presented as mute evidence (the way one might display a wound to police officer to prove abuse) as a need to be tended to (the way one might display a wound to a nurse) or a void awaiting articulation (the way a cartographer, explorer, or novelist might start approach “blank spaces” on a map)? To make this a little more concrete, on page 173 we read:

 “Collective memory is our urgency: lack, need. Not the “historical” detail of our lost past (not that alone), but the resurfaced depths removal from the matrix of Africa, bifid man, the refashioned brain, the hand, violent, useless.”

But I can’t decide whether this means, “What we urgently need is to construct collective memory.” Or “Our collective memory is what the Occident lacks, what it needs.” Or “We need to figure out how to recollect our lost past without (merely) reconstructing it, to remember what was lost as lost.” Of course, a certain high degree of hesitancy is necessary for the interpretation of this or any poetry…but are we meant to decide? Or is it our task as readers, and your task as a translator, to find more ways to “seriate the madness?”    

On Friday, May 24, 2013 1:35:15 PM UTC-5, jscappettone wrote:

[Ingrid Becker]

I’m interested in what I found to be a fascinating articulation of the relationship of a literature, its works, and the (urgent) need for a common will in “The Voice of Earth.” This follows up on my interests in Brathwaite’s nation language. Brathwaite, I think, wanted to use “nation language,” an existing phenomenon, to build up some kind of (national?) literature that is continuous with the experience of Caribbean peoples. In class we were a bit skeptical about using language or poetry to index a collective identity in terms of a “nation” and whether this retains a Western schema of how identity and language construct one another. I was also left with a sort of chicken and egg problem: is it the actuality of nation language that motivates Brathwaite’s methods, or his writing that ends up solidifying the idea of nation language? I couldn’t quite work out the nuances of this relationship, and, after reading Glissant, I think that may have been in part because of how (as we talked about in class) affirmative or utopian the whole project felt.

 

Glissant’s poetics of “intention” seems to suggest a willful literature or oeuvre, and it offers us a new model for thinking about the relation (causal, indexical, illustrative, reflective) between a body of works, a “literature” and the experience of a common consciousness. At the moment when oeuvre desires to do more than reflect its surroundings, this alternate model (not without its own complications) arises: “yes, at that moment, the oeuvre ceases to entertain with other works the usual relationships from which a literature is generally formed: it is no longer out of the existence of works that literature is born, it is out of the exigency and the vital necessity of a literary conduct (intention, direction) that in our view (for now) the works proceed.” (172) It is the coming-to-consciousness of a collective of the lack of works that proceed from their common will, of the need for a literature, that intends a “literary conduct” into being. As Glissant says, this configuration risks “literature” seeming to predetermine individual works, laying out a reductive “parti pris” for what follows, consigning works that do not forward a “totalization of expression” to the sphere of error or failure, or precluding acts of spontaneous production. But I think we can get around these risks by looking to a similar configuration in Glissant’s reading of Mallarme: “the global relation oeuvre-intention-works” in which the last term “constitutes the real negative of the set”: “The Oeuvre-absence is thus (yet) the only present, whose books evermore are the revealers in the negative” (59). The oeuvre or literature is intended but unfulfilled; a willful literature comes into being along with the common consciousness of the urgency of its production.

 

Here, an oeuvre isn’t the sum of works, and works cannot merely be read as illustrative of the trend of an oeuvre, etc. So what does this tell us about Caribbean writing? I’m inclined to say something like: because of the radical displacement and lack of historical continuity of the inheritors/descendants of the slave-trade, there has not been a sense of gradual progress, of works slowly building some kind of oeuvre that reflects a geo-temporal space. As Glissant says, we “can’t forget history because we haven’t learned anything”—there has been only an abyss of three hundred years that cannot erase the past by recording and assessing it, as might be done in Western “History.” I don’t fully understand the leap I’m making here, but it seems like the post-colonial recognition of the violence of that lost 300 years “introduces (besides the vertigo of its operation) a solution of utter immediacy: the community of the nation. A poetics: the share in everyone of reconquered duration.” Duration is another heady term. Perhaps, the “poetics of intention” that relates oeuvre and works in which the latter are the negative marker of the former ends up construing “duration” as an alternative to “History,” for example. This might also be making the claim that “History” or historicism itself depends on oeuvre as affirmative totality of its (same?) works, and that oeuvre as impulse to literary conduct dissembles History with all its potential “histories” and future works that will always inflect back upon each other and an oeuvre that endures in multiplicty.

 

Then there’s the question of what story Glissant is telling with his own readings of various poets’ often canonical oeuvres. Maybe we will talk more about it in class.

[Tala Radejko]

I was most interested in Glissant’s discussion of language, literature, and his comments on ‘country’ and ‘nation’. These came up several times: towards the end of “From the Vow of the Total to the Sites of the One”, in the beginning of “The Voice of the Earth”, in his discussion of Carpentier’s work, as well as in “Open Lands” and the concept of “We”. I thought his discussion on the above was particularly interesting in comparison to Brathwaite’s notion of nation language, and also because, like nation language, Glissant’s comments on country, nation, the past, and literature also serve in way to problematize Western ideas about nation/identity and national belonging. For Brathwaite, nation language was not a theoretical construct as much as a fact – a manner of expression already in existence that he sought to use to create a literary space in and through which the experiences of Caribbean writers could be more accurately reflected and portrayed. Given that he discusses nation language in relation to the Caribbean rather than a specific island or nation-state, Brathwaite’s use of nation already pushes at Western notions of a ‘nation’ or a country as a specific entity with defined borders and a national language. The question on the difference between nation language and national language I think was brought up in class, and while I’m not sure how to answer that I think that distinction is interesting to think about in the context of Glissant’s comments on country, nation, language, and literature. His discussion as well on the challenges of finding a mode of expression that reflects conflicting and diverse ‘national’ heritages gave me more of a sort of background to look at Brathwaite’s work in, for example in comparison to Carpentier and Matta.

For Glissant, ‘country’ is “the rooted necessity of the relation to the world”, while a nation is the “expression, now grouped together and matured” of that relation (64). I understood country to refer to the physical landscape of a particular space, while nation was the more abstract construction of a political state. The fact that for Glissant, country is also the “modality of his [the poet’s] participation” (64) reflects the complexity of attempting to disentangle a sense of belonging to one’s home and one’s “land” with notions of national belonging, particularly in the context of the Caribbean where the conflicting and enmeshed multitude of ‘national’ heritages problematize questions of national language as well as national identity according to Western definitions/understandings of the two. The poet’s relationship with his or her landscape is unquestionable and perhaps more straight forward – the contours of the hills, rivers, beaches, and forests that constitute the poet’s image of home and space of belonging are relatively stable in comparison to the contours of his or her language and history.

Another aspect that struck me was Glissant’s discussion on origins and the necessity to achieve the “vocation of an organic universal” (126) in which all of the varying cultural elements were ‘married’ to one another. While I took Brathwaite in a way to be advocating a turn to the future, I also thought it was interesting how Glissant seemed to be advocating the same – a search for linguistic and cultural origins only in so far as they would help better marry varying cultural elements to create his organic (though not ideal) universal. His emphasis that doing so was not achieving an ideal seemed to me to better understand the complexities of attempting to express the conflicting forces of history, language, etc. on Caribbean forms of identity, than Brathwaite, whose nation language (project?) seems to ignore those complexities by being a blanket term itself. Not sure I articulated that quite well but I’m still trying to sort out what I think about it. 

[Dani Fox]

I'm sorry this is in so late, everyone.

What I have found myself thinking about so long after having finished the book a first time and even gone back to reread a few parts that were maybe too hazy is not exactly one term in particular but the state of exile as it appears in the following lines: "And I, so far from myself, do I not wander also? I wander.  Yet one land alone cries for me, one house alone." 

Immediately I found myself thinking about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and this concept of a tethered wanderer.  Dictee wanders quite frequently from the home that would be not just country or native place but even from genre itself.  The prose weaves in and out of stories, histories, biographies, mythologies, and Cha's own life which I suppose might be an interesting place to think of as a foundational land from which everything else comes out of and somehow returns to.  Though I do think these lines could apply to most everyone we have read, especially Prairie Style. But I want to stick with Cha for a moment.

A few paragraphs later, Glissant: "the poet thus becomes combined with the voyager: his only shelter is the poem.  Against the principal disturbance, the assurance of the verb.  Having no place, the seer founds exile.  He claims it, provokes it if necessary. 'I will inhabit my name.'" 

I'm really struck by Glissant's use of the quote at the end of this chunk (all of this is page 106-107 I think) and the meaning it takes on in his context.  The name, the exile, both of these make their mark from already inside of the poet.  The poem, or in Cha's case the--??--though is shelter.  The weaving of the various modes of Dictee and the stories of the various women leaves the state of Cha's own I in her present or perhaps leaves the form of autobiography as it is typically practiced in a destabilized position.  Cha as a singular person is both highlighted as well as transcended.  And yet she does inhabit her name as well as the line of descent she calls upon in her narrative through powerful women who have in some way known suffering. Exile, more than negation or even an end, is a place of new creation though destabilized--away from home yet imbued perhaps out of a since of yearning or forever tethered to that very place.  Glissant locates exile rather internally, an active site rather than the passive forbiddance.  Could not then we locate a particular type of exile in the temporal in Cha's work--one created in the wake of her mother, Joan D'Arc, and the muses so forth who all have somehow clearly constituted Cha?