"Poetics of Relation" by Édouard Glissant

'The Slave Trade came through the cramped doorway of the slave ship, leaving a wake like that of crawling desert caravans. It might be drawn like this:

African countries to the East; the lands of America to the West. This creature is in the image of a fibril.

African languages became deterritorialized, thus contributing to creolization in the West. This is the most completely known confrontation between the powers of the written word and the impulses of orality. The only written thing on slave ships was the account book listing the exchange value of slaves. Within the ship's space the cry of those deported was stifled, as it would be in the realm of the Plantations. This confrontation still reverberates to this day.' p.5.

'Not just a specific knowledge, appetite, suffering, and delight of one particular people, not only that, but knowledge of the Whole, greater from having been at the abyss and freeing knowledge of Relation within the Whole.' p.8.

 
Édouard Glissant. (1990, 2025) The Open Boat. Poetics of Relation. Dublin: Penguin.

The above image runs within the text in the book.

My image source: https://annstreetgallery.org/Nolan-Oswald-Dennis

After Ethnos - acknowledgements

Book (review to follow) 

 

 individual 

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group

"This much I learned: Every relation one has, offers a singular possibility to actualize one’s being — one no other relation can offer. The powerful implication of this observation is that it is through relations that one is in the world. No relations, no self. Acknowledgments, then, the maps of relations they are, are akin to a map of one’s history of being, of being in the world."
After Ethnos

 

My source: 

Rees, Tobias. After Ethnos, (2018): Durham and London. Duke University Press. Acknowledgement.