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.
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Notes
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. |
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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
APA Stylede Laforcade, G. (2023). Exilic Roots and Paths of Marronage: Breaching Walls of Space and Memory in the Historical Poetics of Dénètem Touam Bona. Humanities, 12(3), 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/h12030036