The Fourth Century
Title: The Fourth Century
Author: Édouard Glissant
Translation: Betsy Wing.
ISBN: 0-8032-7083-6
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2001
“All this wind…”
These are Papa Longoué’s first words in The Fourth Century by Édouard Glissant. The wind is a constant theme in the novel. It is a wind of enormous force, a hurricane which carries off his silent wife, Edmée, to her death. It is the wind of history, of our own histories which if not known blows us all to our deaths, asleep. The Fourth Century awakens the dead and gives them voice. This is the African descendants’ history of Martinique. A history not written, not examined, trivialized by the French colonialists who, as the conquerors, the ones in power, annihilate the people they must control by annihilating their languages and histories.
History is written by the dominant culture and is primarily concerned with the battles and victories of the most powerful and wealthy in that culture. The Fourth Century departs from that paradigm and presents the oral history of the African descendants’ experience as slave, as maroon, as freed men and women, as toilers in the soil, as individuals and families seeking meaning and life on the island, while never quite able to forget or remember the “infinite country” from which they were torn.
Glissant’s stream of consciousness approach creates a prose poem of a novel, beautiful from the beginning to the end. In many ways it is incomprehensible for the non-African, non-Martinican, but what is gleanable, what is knowable, is so worth knowing that what is unknowable can only be mourned, not ignored. To read Glissant is to begin to scratch the back of the mirror, to see through the slivers to another world.
My rating: stars