Édouard Glissant Quotes

The opaque is not the obscure, though it is possible for it to be so and be accepted as such. It is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.

Creolization ... is a new and original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, lost in the mountains and free beneath the sea, in harmony and in errantry.

Agree not merely to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity.

The tremulous thought is not a thought out of fear, not scared thinking. It is thought that is opposed to systematic thinking. We understand the world better if we tremble with it. Because the world trembles every which way. It trembles organically and geologically. It also trembles with the climate. But the world also trembles through the relations that we have with each other.

Diversity, the quantifiable totality of every possible difference, is the motor driving universal energy, and it must be safe guarded from assimilations, from fashions passively accepted as the norm, and from standardized customs.

As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence; I shall also pay attention to not mixing it into any amalgam. Rather, it does not disturb me to accept that there are places where my identity is obscure to me, and the fact that it amazes me does not mean I relinquish it.

If we examine the process of "understanding" people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.

Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.

It is difficult for a French Caribbean individual to be the brother, the friend, or simply the associate or fellow countryman of Fanon. Because, of all the French Caribbean intellectuals, he is the only one to have acted on his ideas…to take full responsibility for a complete break.

What is here is open, as much as this there.

I thus am able to conceive of the opacity of the other for me, without reproach for my opacity for him. To feel in solidarity with him or to build with him or to like what he does, it is not necessary for me to grasp him. It is not necessary to try to become the other (to become other) nor to "make" him in my image.

In creolization, you can change, you can be one with the other, you can change with the other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself. You are not lost because you are a multiple. You are not broken apart, because you are multiple.

For me, the arrival is the moment where all the components of humanity ... consent to the idea that it is possible to be one and multiple at the same time; that you can be yourself and the other; that you can be the same and the different.