Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona
Abstract
:A refusal is also a commitment to continually seek to create forms that do not exist.
To maroon is to dissolve not only the chains that hinder our movements, but also those, invisible and insidious, that hinder our spirit.
In this context of subjugation, repeated violence, and losses of all kinds, the supremacy of the voice of the colonizers imposes itself as the bastion of the colonial and slavery movement. Under the aegis of the single enunciation, promises and stories in the plural are annihilated and the long dark empire of the soliloquy disseminated throughout official chronicles. Beings henceforth become deprived of the multiple possibilities of themselves; somehow incomplete, mutilated individuals.
The socio-cultural history of the enslaved masses of the Western hemisphere is globally the history of the ideological marooning, which allowed them not to reinterpret the Europe of the sword, the cross, and the whip, but to show evidence of heroic creativity, to painfully re-elaborate new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting. The marooning of dominant values allowed them to re-elaborate African traditions.
(T)o designate the Haitian state as being maroon amounts to ignoring by the inherent contradiction between these terms, one of the constituent elements of marronage: it begins where the limits of the state stop, and can only exist at its periphery. This audacious intellectualization of marronage, which ascribes it broad explanatory value, as if it designated a state of mind common to all the actors of a national community, does not aid in understanding because it tends to homogenize and dilute the original meaning of the term.
While serving as a basis for resistance, memories are transformed by the very action that tends to save them; they are taken up in an original, absolutely new meaning, that of revolt against the order of colonization. Those who were regarded for a long time as ‘savages’ and denied any form of action or civic life possess their own concrete utopias, theologies of liberation, and political spiritualities. It could be that in our struggles to come—struggles for a world no longer governed by the fear of the other, by generalized predation and commodification—we will have to learn a few subterfuges from them.(Cf. Price [1983] 2002, p. 56)
(T)he spider is the paradigmatic weaving animal. In many sub-Saharan cosmologies, she plays the role of a trickster, that is to say a prankster deity. Constructing her canvas at the crossroads or in the dark recesses of dwellings, she is one of the powers of the threshold whose ambivalence and versatility she shares. (…) (T)he spider is the master of the passages, mischievous and elusive, always located in between the worlds that it connects. (…) The spider and lyannaj of the vine share the same dynamic of allying and weaving, of linking and tying and relaying all that is disunited. There is not a gesture, an action, a life so miserable that its author cannot be saved by a story, a dance, a change, a barricade. It is through creative storytelling that a community, whatever it may be, recovers the power to act. Our concrete utopias, our active chimeras are not intended to validate states of fact or “objective truths”, our often intolerable present, but to outline our unsuspected futures.12
Because it gave rise to a real movement of migration, the Underground Railroad introduced into the context of young American nations the thorny question of the status of minorities and the right of asylum. Faced with the ongoing stigmatization, criminalization, and repression (retention, incarceration, banishment, etc.,) of ‘migrants’ and with the proliferation of targeted controls (…) we may have to reinvent marronage, “underground passages”, “subterfuges” that disconcert a society obsessed with enclosure, immunity, security. What is fascinating (…) about the Underground Railroad is the way in which the old figure of the fugitive slave and the more recent one of the refugee are closely imbricated, one illuminating the other and vice-versa.15
Capture, predation, extraction, and asymmetrical warfare converge with the rebalkanization of the world and intensifying practices of zoning, all of which point to a new collusion between the economic and the biological. (…) The contemporary world is deeply shaped by ancestral forms of religious, legal, and political life built around fences, enclosures, walls, camps, circles, and, above all, borders. Procedures of differentiation, classification, and hierarchization aimed at exclusion, expulsion, and even eradication have been reinvigorated everywhere.
Can this being together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, this undercommons apositionality, be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other, but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? Not simply to be among his own; but to be among his own in dispossession, to be among the ones who cannot own, the ones who have nothing, and who, in having nothing, have everything. (…) Thrown together, touching each other, we were denied all sentiment, denied all the things that were supposed to produce sentiment, family, nation, language, religion, place, home. Though forced to touch and be touched, to sense and be sensed in that space of no space, though refused sentiment, history, and home, we feel (for) each other.16
All of this strangely reminds me of the steel architecture of old transatlantic liners and only makes the lake of a horizon more noticeable. Around me, men walk their loneliness up and down and down and up in the corridors, holds, machinery, between decks and sheet metal stairs of the Titanic prison. They are the forced passengers of a motionless cruise, the scouts of an announced shipwreck; the scuttling of the ‘free world’, in which a rising tide of citizen informers, border guards, devices of control, measures of exception (states of emergency, administrative searches, house arrest of activists), surveillance laws, sentries armed to the teeth are supposed to guarantee our freedom.19
It may be that (it) is less a set of common capacities or an imagined common space—as the term common(s) often denotes—and therefore less about collective living than about a collective being, or better still, being that is both collected and stranded together, both stolen and given away, not enough but already good and plenty, or maybe collective living in uncollected, disheveled, dispersed being. Maybe the question concerning “where” belies or deflects or obscures a radical non-locality, a general displacement, a field of the feel, a social disruption of ontology, or at least of already existing modern ontology’s commitment to a certain classical notion of space/time (…), an openness to ways of thinking and feeling that are focused on (re)creating life from the ruins of homelessness and precarity.
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Conflicts of Interest
1 | Dénètem Touam Bona, “M comme Marronnage: éloge de l’indocilité”, op.cit. |
2 | Ibid., pp. xxii & xxiii. |
3 | Cf. Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitif, où cours-tu? op.cit. |
4 | Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitif, où cours-tu? op.cit., pp. 31–32. |
5 | Ibid., p. 42. |
6 | |
7 | Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitif, où cours-tu? op.cit., p. 94. |
8 | Ibid., p. 95. |
9 | Ibid., p. 80. |
10 | Ibid., p. 85. |
11 | Cf. Dénem Touam Bona, Sagesse des lianes: Cosmopoétique du refuge op.cit. |
12 | Ibid., pp. 103–6; (Touam Bona 2021a) Les Échos du territoire: la Sagesse des lianes avec Dénètem Touam Bona Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, 2021; min.7:33–9:07. https://youtu.be/qyJT-CCJ5Vc (accessed on 10 January 2023). |
13 | Dénem Touam Bona, Sagesse des lianes: Cosmopoétique du refuge op.cit.; pp. 71–72. |
14 | Ibid., p. 73. |
15 | Touam Bona (2016); Dénem Touam Bona, Sagesse des lianes: Cosmopoétique du refuge, op.cit., pp. 48–51. |
16 | Ibid., pp. 94 & 96. |
17 | Dénètem Touam Bona, Fugitif, où cours-tu? op.cit., p. 115. |
18 | Ibid., pp. 130–31. |
19 | Ibid., p. 137. |
20 | Cf. Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage op.cit. |
21 | Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation op.cit.; pp. 170–71. |
22 | Ibid., p. 79. |
23 | Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation op.cit., p. 17. |
References
- Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel. 2010. The Social Value of Voodoo throughout History: Slavery, Migrations and Solidarity. Museum International 62: 99–105. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Béchacq, Dimitri. 2006. Les parcours du marronnage dans l’histoire haïtienne. Entre instrumentalisation politique et reinterpretation sociale. Ethnologies 28: 203–40. Available online: https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ethno/2006-v28-n1-ethno1446/014155ar/ (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Bolster, W. Jeffrey. 1997. Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. [Google Scholar]
- Campt, Teresa. 2012. Image Matters. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 87 & 112. [Google Scholar]
- Casimir, Jean. 2020. The Haitians: A Decolonial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. [Google Scholar]
- Célius, Carlo A. 2004. D’un nationalisme héroïque. Revi Kiltir Kreol 4: 38–48. [Google Scholar]
- Chamoiseau, Patrick. 1997. Écrire en pays dominé. Paris: Gallimard. [Google Scholar]
- Chamoiseau, Patrick. 2018. Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Chinea, Jorge L. 2009. Diasporic Marronnage: Some Colonial and Inter-Colonial Representations of Overland and Waterborne Slave Flight, with Special Reference to the Caribbean Archipelago. Revista Brasileira do Caribe 10: 259–84. [Google Scholar]
- Copeland, Huey. 2013. Bound to Appear. Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- da Rocha, Vanessa Massoni. 2019. Paroles d’antan et devoir de mémoire dans Le Quatrième siècle d’Édouard Glissant. Matraga 26: 594–615. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Depestre, René. 1984. Bonjour et adieu la négritude. In L’Afrique en Amérique Latine. Edited by Manuel Moeno Fraginals. Paris: UNESCO. [Google Scholar]
- Diouf, Silviane A. 2014. Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. New York: New York University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Do Nascimento, Abdias. 1980. Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative. Journal of Black Studies 11: 847–71. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Eddins, Crystal Nicole. 2021. Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution. Collective Action in the African Diaspora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Eddins, Crystal Nicole. 2022. Maroon Movements Against Empire: The Long Haitian Revolution, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries. Journal of World-Systems Research 28: 219–41. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Fick, Carolyn E. 1990. The Making of Haiti: Saint Domingue. Revolution From Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. [Google Scholar]
- Fouchard, Jean. 1972. The Haiian Maroons: Liberty or Death. Translated by A. Faulkner Watts. New York: Edward W Blyden Pr. First published 1811. [Google Scholar]
- Gaillard, Roger. 1982. Les Blancs débarquent (1918–1919). Charlemagne Péralte, le caco. Port-au-Prince: Le Natal. [Google Scholar]
- Glissant, Édouard. 1984. Poétique antillaise, Poétique de la Relation (entretien avec Wolfgang Bader). Komparatistische Hefte 9: 94. [Google Scholar]
- Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. First published 1990. [Google Scholar]
- Glissant, Édouard. 2006. Une nouvelle région du monde. Paris: Gallimard. [Google Scholar]
- Glissant, Édouard, and Manthia Diawara. 2011. One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara. Nka. Journal of Contemporary Aftrican Art 28: 4–19. [Google Scholar]
- Gonzalez, John-Henry. 2019. Maroon Nation: A History of Revolutionary Haiti. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Grubačić, Andrej, and Dennis O’Hearn. 2016. Living at the Edges of Capitalism. Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid. Oakland: University of California Press. [Google Scholar]
- Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, p. 94. [Google Scholar]
- Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2016. From Cooperation to Black Operation: A Conversation. Transversal Texts. April. Available online: https://transversal.at/blog/From-cooperation-to-black-operation (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Hector, Michel. 2019. Les deux grandes rébellions paysannes de la première moitié du XIXesiècle haïtien. In Rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises, Ruptures et continuités de la politique coloniale française (1800–1830). Aux origines d’Haïti. Edited by Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny. Paris: APECE/Maisonneuve et Larose. [Google Scholar]
- Higinbotham, Kathryn. 2017–2018. Runaways. Afterlives of Slavery. An Encyclopedia Documenting Contemporary Representations of Transatlantic Slavery. Available online: https://afterlivesofslavery.wordpress.com/visual-art/runaways/ (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Hunold Lara, Silvia. 2010. Palmares and Cucaú: Political Dimensions of a Maroon Community in Late Seventeenth-century Brazil. “American Counterpoint: New Approaches to Slavery and Abolition in Brazil”. Paper presented at 12th Annual Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA, October 29–30; Available online: http://www.yale.edu/glc/brazil/papers/lara-paper.pdf (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Joseph, Celucien. 2011. The Religious Imagination and Ideas of Jean-Pierre Mars (Part 1). Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Religion 2: 1–31. [Google Scholar]
- Klotz, Nicolas, and Elisabeth Perceval. 2020. Fugitif, où cours-tu? Paris: Shellac Sud. Available online: https://shellacfilms.com/films/fugitif-ou-cours-tu (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Kuser, J. Dryden. 1921. Haiti, Its Dawn of Progress after Years in a Night of Revolution. Boston: R. G. Badger. [Google Scholar]
- Last, Angela. n.d. Glissant, Édouard. Global Social Theory. Available online: https://globalsocialtheory.org/thinkers/edouard-glissant-2/ (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Lebrón Ortiz, Pedro. 2020a. Filosofía del cimarronaje. Cabo Rojo: Editora Educación Emergente. [Google Scholar]
- Lebrón Ortiz, Pedro. 2020b. Resisting (Meta) Physical Catastrophes through Acts of Marronage. Radical Philosophy Review 23: 35–57. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Lefrancois, Frédéric, and René Louise. 2016. Manifesto of modern Maroonism. A Philosophy of Aesthetics. Working Paper. November. Available online: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324899468_Manifesto_of_modern_Maroonism_A_philosophy_of_aesthetics (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Louise, René. 2017. Manifesto of Modern Maroonism: A Philosophy of Aesthetics. Translated by Frédéric Lefrancois. Paris: Yehkri.com A.C.C. [Google Scholar]
- Loureiro, Marilia. 2022. Capture and Space: Notes to Imagine Refugee-Spaces. In De montanhas submarinas o fogo faz ilhas. Edited by Yina Jiménez Suriel. São Paulo: Pivô, p. 76. Available online: https://www.pivo.org.br/app/uploads/2022/02/pivo-kadist-reader-vf.pdf (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2021. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Marchand, Bastien. 2022. Certains estiment, dans une vision un peu archaïque, qu’on ne change pas le monde en fuyant. Usbek & Rita. March 21. Available online: https://usbeketrica.com/fr/article/certains-estiment-dans-une-vision-un-peu-archaique-qu-on-ne-change-pas-le-monde-en-fuyant (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Martins, Angelo, and Julia O’Connell Davidson. 2022. Tracking Towards Freedom? Bringing Journeys Out of Slavery into Dialogue with Contemporary Migrations. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48: 1479–95. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Memmi, Albert. 2003. The Colonizer and the Colonized (Portrait du Colonisateur, 1957). Translated by Howard Greenfeld. London: Earthscan Publications. [Google Scholar]
- Pargas, Damian Alan. 2022. Freedom Seekers. Fugitive Slaves in North America, 1800–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Price, Richard. 2002. First Time. The Historical Vision of an African American People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 56. First published 1983. [Google Scholar]
- Quijano, Aníbal. 1992. Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena 13: 19. [Google Scholar]
- Roberts, Neil. 2015. Freedom as Marronage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar]
- Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity. The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Scott, James. C. 2009. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]
- Sojoyner, Damien M. 2017. Another Life is Possible: Black Fugitivity and Enclosed Places. Cultural Anthropology 32: 514–36. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Svadphaiphane, Boulomsouk. 2022. La sagesse des lianes, la cosmopétique du refuge de Dénètem Touam Bona. Hiya. May 32. Available online: https://hiya.fr/2022/03/31/la-sagesse-des-lianes-la-cosmopoetique-du-refuge-de-denetem-touam-bona/ (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Touam Bona, Dénètem. 2013. M comme Marronnage: Éloge de l’indocilité. Madinin’Art. Critiques culturelles de Martinique. November 12. Available online: https://www.madinin-art.net/m-comme-marronnage-eloge-de-lindocilite/ (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Touam Bona, Dénètem. 2016. Fugitif, où cours-tu? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. [Google Scholar]
- Touam Bona, Dénètem. 2021a. Les Échos du territoire: La Sagesse des lianes avec Dénètem Touam Bona. Bordeaux: Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA. Available online: https://youtu.be/qyJT-CCJ5Vc (accessed on 10 January 2023).
- Touam Bona, Dénètem. 2021b. Sagesse des lianes: Cosmopoétique du refuge. Paris: Post-éditions. [Google Scholar]
- Touam Bona, Dénètem. 2023. Fugitive, Where Are You Running? Translated by Laura Hengehold. London: Polity. [Google Scholar]
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2015. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press. First published 1995. [Google Scholar]
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2021. Stirring the Pot of History. Translated by Mariana F. Past, and Benjamin. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. First published 1977. [Google Scholar]
- Wilder, Gary. 2017. The Promise of Freedom and the Predicament of Marronage: On Neil Roberts’s Freedom as Narronage. Small Axe 24. [Google Scholar]
- Wright, Willie Jamaal. 2019. The Morphology of Marronage. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110: 1134–49. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2023 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Share and Cite
de Laforcade, G. Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona. Humanities 2023, 12, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030036
de Laforcade G. Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona. Humanities. 2023; 12(3):36. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030036
Chicago/Turabian Stylede Laforcade, Geoffroy. 2023. "Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona" Humanities 12, no. 3: 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030036