Animesh Rai on Glissant!

"Today the individual, without having to go anywhere, can be directly touched by things elsewhere (...).
This immediate and fragmentary repercussion on individuals, as individuals, permitted the premonitions of Victor Segalen or Raymond Roussel or Douanier Rousseau." Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

As promised here is an entry from Animesh Rai where he relates his experience with Edouard Glissant and introduces the subject of his thesis which he will develop in an upcoming blog entry .

Arabella:
"Some of Glissant's writing is hard for me to understand. I read a small passage at a time and let it sink. I get the impression that Glissant does not give a definition of the Poétique de la Relation, or Poetics of Relation, but paints it with repeated brush strokes. Does that seem right to you?"

Animesh:
"I think you hit the nail on the head for that is what Glissant is all about. He would rather not define things. He expects you to diligently work through the writings and form your own opinion. He is actually very influenced by the style of William Faulkner whom he considers to be the greatest living writer ever. Faulkner is in fact also very difficult to understand. In one of my conversations with Glissant, Glissant said that actually Faulkner becomes clearer when translated into French. So I did get a few copies of some of Faulkner's works among them "The Sound and the Fury" which Glissant inspired me to read (he made that novel sound so interesting that at that point there was nothing more that I wanted to read) and I think that he was right about the French.

Prior to entering the CUNY Graduate Center French Ph.D. program, I had heard about Glissant from people at Columbia and at NYU and understood that he was famous, at least in Francophone scholarly circles. When I first took classes with Glissant, I realized I was in another world for no other class I ever took was as interesting to me. I used to brand them as sessions of escapism for there was very little work involved in the conventional sense. They were stimulating beyond words. I kept taking classes with him semester after semester until I reached the dissertation stage and then I discovered that there was nothing stimulating about him any more for at that stage, everything had to come from me. He expected me to do my own thinking and not to latch on to his own definitions etc. That being said, even during my non discussions with him, I would latch on to every word he said (being very intense and charged) and that was inspiring beyond words as well.

For my Ph.D. thesis, I had to determine whether or not nearly three centuries of French presence in the former French territories of India had produced a new reality given the initial circumstances. This is what Glissant defines as creolization. To put the conclusion of the thesis in a nutshell, when I examined the former French territories of India (tiny enclaves isolated from one another in the vast land mass of India), it was difficult for me to perceive any creolization. However, I was able to perceive creolization when the territories were put into the larger context of India, that is the parts relative to the whole and hence, perhaps, the Poétique de la Relation."


More about Animesh Rai:
Dr Rai earned a doctorate in French literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York under the guidance of the Martinican writer and leading theorist of creolization, Edouard Glissant. He has taught French language and literature at the Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pennsylvania and at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York.