relational poetics

notes 1

je vois un homme épouvanté qui me ressemble et qui me fuit.

"poetics of relation" is the concept provided by Edouard Glissant (Galimard, 1990, University of Michigan, 1997). The writer born in French Antilles invokes as first poets of relation Victor Segalen, Raymond Roussel and Henri Rousseau. Glissant considers them the first creators to prove the kickbak that an event from a remote culture can have over the life of an individual in modernity (op cit, p. 27). As the unexplored territories geographically shrank the act of discovering the other is replaced by the „understanding” of the other as a foreign civilization. But this understanding has a aggressive meaning. The events that take place in a remote space have a bigger importance for an individual than personal and familial events ever can.
Glissant sorts a vocal language and a practical one and calls for a need for de- colonization of creoles languages by a „conspiracy of hiding sense”. The release from conventional forms of transparency in the language, the deliberate use of linguistic opacity is used as an instrument of poetic politics. In the history of literature, the same case can be considered regarding Dante’s choice for vernacular Italian instead of imperial Latin («Patke, Rajeev S., in Postcolonial Poetry in English », Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 98).
The sense is hidden because the sense is aimed to be reoriented by the great colonization processes.