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The Overseer's Cabin
By ÉDOUARD GLISSANT University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 1997
Éditions Gallimard, Paris
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8032-3479-6
Chapter One
Trace of the Time Before
Pythagore Celat went around loudly trumpeting "we" though there was not one soul who could guess what he meant by it. A "we" that perhaps, when all was said and done, we would never ever form, this unique body that would make it possible for us to begin entering into our spread of earth or the violet sea around it (today, its birds extinguished, riddled with splotches of tar) or into the protracted repercussions weaving the faroffness of the world for us; we who act so crazily scattered; we who rolled our separate selves around, bumping up against each other without ever managing to adjust and settle into this belt of islands (not to mention just into this particular one here, discovered on the day marked now as belonging to Saint Martin—Martinique, that is—as if there'd been only a puddle where its land is, just a bit of this Caribbean sea whose name we never even question) and let's leave unsaid that we have settled not even as much as our shadow, like that of scrub growth outlining the absence and the darkness where it drifts against the sky—and yet we felt there was some hugeness about to burst overflowing from this us, that a boundless energy would polish it into shape, that the selves would knot together like strings, tied just as badly as the ones binding the last canes at the end of the day when the sun sinks into the body's exhaustion, but just as stiff and stubborn as wormgrass when it's gotten inside your mouth. And yet each self, when it became I or he against the damp radiance of the day, locked itself into uncertain and impenetrable opacity, like an island vanished and elusive in the distance. Because we never set out to sing our stories or carve them in stone or wood. We never draw pictures of where we hid in the land of our long ago birth, that we didn't used to call Africa, never scratch it in the vaporous dust that seems to have sifted through from that village. At the edge of the savanna, when herds charge from our minds (with the heavy beat of the rain), we never talk about the passion to betray and how it devoured one dried-up self until it hurtled him to the front of the line of captives to stand there thunderstruck at the cabin doors, never even benefiting from the capture of that other self (the one he'd meant them to carry off) how the absence of self locks me inside myself; nor do we talk about how things turned around on him so that the most treacherous self found himself roped to the same storm bench as the betrayed self. No. Those are knots we no longer grasp. Do we see that, meanwhile, the world has raced along, splicing together its island guts and continental planes, sweeping along rivers of those gutted, that it has built its pyramids, pierced the depths of space where the unknown used to hide in safety? We don't see that. Life gone by, fallen trees, forbidden loves are things that never show themselves to us in the sculpted clarity of what can be known. What darkness and what light have joined to hide the meaning of this time and give it to us as burning heat? We don't place or describe; we don't draw the line of a graceful shoulder, the curve of a weapon, the furrow in the ground, never name which river, never mark out which sands, or point to the cabin (how could we, after so many seas and terrors, so much night blue in the depths of the sea where we sank down, balls buried in our bellies like suns), and yet we have a vague sense that we relive the suffering, the ludicrous indignities crashing down on us as we crossed. We relive them. But when one person pitches camp in his passion and shouts some mumbo jumbo about having caught sight of these earlier days, saying he hears that moan all over again, that it makes him laugh how stupid he was and that he is going to tamp the earth down all around to prove to himself that it's his, we don't connect with what he's doing and have no idea what he's saying. We pretend that he's joking or that he's got the crazy hurricane's eye on him, or that the sun has done a job on his head. At the crossroads a thought blew in and struck this man; he remembers. He hops on one foot, he snaps his head back, he shouts: Odono! Odono! Cars honk their horns, passersby laugh but don't stop. The man, midday's magic man, catches glimpses—bits and pieces. It doesn't come to mind—it runs through his entire dislocated body, it devours him like a manioc-ant (island echoes of manian-ants). It isn't, of course, the past laid out clearly; there are no places, or dates, or filiations in a neat, visible order the way you'd check off lined-up sacks of guano. How could anyone imagine that at this highway crossing, between signs saying "Trinité 17 kilometers" and "Gros-Morne 9 kilometers," right next to the mangrove where the hollow splendor of the departmental slaughterhouse stands with its mechanical choppers and winches for blue meat, how could one guess that the word Odono (hardly even a word: a sound) might have a meaning, hide some allusion to an exceptional event? How could anyone track something over so many ocean swells, how trace the howling heap of bared flesh that had once been called Odono? How locate or how find, and where; what calculations or what measuring devices should one use? Could we quietly sit ourselves down at the foot of a Mission Cross and provide a commentary: "The inhabitants of this country were brought over from Africa to what they called the New World on the slave ships where heaps of them died. At best guess this is how about fifty million men, women, and children were ripped out of the Ledger to sink to the bottom of the ocean or wash up like foam along the shores of America. The southwest of what is now Guinea probably yielded the majority of our population." The assumption behind this calm speech would be that everything since the day they were shipped over had been stirred by the same powerful and peaceful breath reinforcing everyone's memory; that the years piled up quietly one after another in the hill of secrets where every people keeps the trace of how it got there. But the load of darkness lies heavy and covers us. We say that it's madness. Odono is the tragic shriek of a hawk in your head. The noisy gulp when a zombie has drunk your soul. But this man at the crossroads keeps at it. He sees in fits and starts; he has pins and needles in his throat. Not a tranquil piece of work, not a painstaking investigation, but a blast of fire, a pepper plaster against the skin. And together with it, from time to time, the harsh savanna smells vanished into the land-before, and, to blur all memory, the steamy, heavy smell of tuberoses that had flooded the childhood of this land-here. Yet the man is catching a glimpse. He is alone inside the amazement of his eyes. And, though we don't understand him, though we make fun, we are carried away by him—just a lot of selves buffeted onto hillsides and volcanoes, on roots set down in the ocean. And the world moves forward, distorted as it is in our dreams and true in our visions. It upends inside us the din of days and years, the voiceless nights where we foundered. We overflow with all these solitary selves pouring into a single us pierced by hazy knowledge, through all this wasted energy, beginning thus to spell out this word with a meaning we don't understand. Mixing together the dry earth and the damp night crazed with cries. And when the man shouts Odono Odono again it is not because at that moment he is back at the entrance to the village in that land in Africa where the betrayer led the conveyers of flesh. No. The man has not descended that deep into the ocean abyss. He is simply hearing once again the grave impact of sounds that not so long ago conveyed to the cane fields and cabins the announcement of death—and this time the birth of a child—the sounds we made to spread the violated space of the land-before over the land-here. And therefore, this call that he let out, so chock-full of soul-death, into the heat and dryness of noon (in the days when he still remembered his name was Pythagore Celat) when Cinna Chimène gave birth, practically right there on the polished earth of the cabin floor, and with the rough, sure help of Ephraïse, to this descendant whom she called Marie for ever so long, and who, with no other explanation or logic than imagination's grace and collective whim, later was called Mycéa. As the man stood there at the intersection of the highway and the road to Lamentin, it was this memory of Marie Celat that burned in his head like a specter. At the very same moment, not far from this crossroads, Marie Celat (most likely as used to the name Mycéa as we were to calling out "Mi Celat!" Here's Celat! whenever she suddenly turned up right in the middle of everything) is, herself, struggling to round up her wide-split herd of memories so she could use them to help her stand existence. Just maybe, Pythagore had said, Just maybe, I'd like a boy. It had been a girl. And Pythagore, who felt that every leaf of his body was attached to the sweet tree that was Cinna Chimène, considered, the way any other man of the hills would have in his place, that he had been deprived, so to speak, when this girl arrived as his first born. Anyhow, he thought, at the very least she can bring up the others who'll be along later. But Pythagore didn't know Marie Celat. Not even during the period when he would sit around at night for hours, all broken up and gaga with swallowed rage, just sharpening the edge of his machete that he (and we all) called, like any big knife, his koutla: because the little four-year-old girl had looked him straight in the eyes (something no child in this country should have dared do to an adult) for one whole afternoon, both of them squatting at the edge of the big mammy apple trees, until he slowly shakes his head and tells her in his humiliated voice that he is stronger than she. And Cinna Chimène, for whose sake men from all around would cheerfully go out of their way to pass Pythagore's yard, and who too was astounded by the child's inflexibility, laughed softly in the cabin darkness and for the umpteenth time asked (but in the singsong, confidential voice she might have used to talk to herself ) if the edge of that machete was going to give him the answer; was Marie Celat really (he being jealous) his own offspring and the child she'd given birth to? Because in those days Cinna Chimène was what we called a matadò woman—not to be trifled with. She had a way of bending her body over to bind up canes, one hip slung out as if she were about to dance the polka, her wide straw hat tied under her chin with its string fringe covering her breast with a patch of openwork. She flung her leg out as if, armored in old rags, it could defy any snake, any longbeast that had escaped the cutters. But she never had to confront any fer-de-lance; those long creatures knew that they stood to gain nothing from this woman and that, faced with her, their best bet was to keep a low profile or else vanish into some corner of a furrow. She understood that her provocative bearing was torture for Pythagore, though he'd never admit it, and that he wondered if the child had not inherited her mother's implacable haughtiness just to torment him. Pythagore had absolutely no idea what kind of merry-go-round spun inside this girl's head with the hair that refused to grow but stuck out in all directions like the skin of a soursop. He imagined that when his other descendants arrived sooner or later he would get the upper hand. He put down the koutla and went to lie next to Cinna Chimène, exclaiming (though conscious of not uttering a word) that they still needed at least two boys and a real girl. Pythagore did not know Mycéa. And not even when, returning from work at one in the afternoon, his hoe on his shoulder, he suddenly spied her shape in silhouette, an apparition planted motionless on the top of a hill, as if to defy the sun's cook-fires. Pythagore then heard across the flowering cane the heavy cry of the conch shell that he had blown the day his daughter was born, roaring up at the sun as if to announce the death of his hope. None of the people living down below could figure out why Cinna Chimène's man had celebrated this birth the same way you sounded a horn for a death). Then there seemed to be a thread of fire running from the small statue stuck up there on the side of the ridge to the heavy land-clearing machine following in its own tracks back through the rows of cane. The saturated air glistened on the bleached rocks and on the red clay ridges, yellowed on the surface and hardened by the sun, as Pythagore walked between them. On the left, in the woods a twittering flycatcher sent its tickling jingle of short, sharp, unvaried calls sifting through the lianas. Along the edge where the canes had not yet won out over brush, muffled thuds meant a charcoal kiln was being opened, sounds you heard at the same instant the smell began to envelop you like a real cloud. The heat was steady, forging its place out of each leaf, each stray breath of air, each bit of earth. Pythagore floated motionless, nailed to the ground, bound only by an invincible web of heat to the eight-year-old turned to stone who stood just as stock-still in her stretch of silvery grass; she dominated him still. A word came knocking back in his breast and he murmured Odono, Odono as he went along the round curve of the hill while pretending not to see the child who didn't turn her head or lower her eyes toward him. Her short, stiff hair flamed in the sun. Perhaps, thought Pythagore, all of this has been created (he meant: the bare savannas, the mud ravines, the netfuls of transparent, gray crawfish, the pools of water, the blue mass of the woods, the smell of burned breadfruit, the copper coins jingling after payday in his unbleached linen bag, even the squeals of a pig wandering aimlessly about, and he wanted to say even more things but his mind was reeling, unable to encompass so much at once) to arrive at that which is like the eternity the Lord made from day and night and never grows weary of hammering out (meaning, in a nutshell, that the this had begun ages earlier in a nameless land of which not a speck remained and that that boiled down to his current chagrin over a little no-count black girl—born of his doings yet so completely eluding him). And wherever Pythagore turned he came up against this child, everywhere a challenging or sarcastic reminder of Cinna Chimène's sparkly comings and goings. He withdrew into a dark place full of hoarse sounds that he hoped, perhaps, would somehow numb him; Cinna Chimène saw him vanish into his distance and couldn't help flaunting the ease and detachment that had long ago made her empty. Darkness thickened above them at the same time that the girl grew like the wild banyan whose branches turn into roots. Pythagore filled his water gourd from the spring then swished it gently around to make real gourd-sized storms that he pondered for a long time. He unearthed from recent memory the fact that on the very day the child was born the volcano (the presence in the North, the energy of the upper reaches; invisible but never forgotten) had launched one of its great rock and ash assaults. Inside his head the sun merged spring water and volcanic ash. Recent things remembered opened onto other fiery fields in his memory. But what?—unable to be specific, he became more and more moronic. "Damned Guinea Niggers," he hollered at Cinna Chimène's suitors (but he could hear perfectly well that the shout was inside his head; all he did was walk by all stiff as if he hadn't seen a thing); "It's like you're some béké on horseback galloping through other people's patches Get back to your savannas Damn Nigger gangs Beelzebub excrement Louse-ridden ape asses you'd think you came down from your demon carnivals and landed in 1928 just to torment Pythagore I see your trick-bag on every street corner but I know what trick will untie it Pythagore can walk through burning coals with his fingers crossed over his head like God's burden." He was sinking down like this into a heap of curses broken only by this kind of blinding vision, when he came to a bend in the path and saw above him the stiff little silhouette that he refused to acknowledge and that didn't even do him the favor of seeming to notice his refusal. He went back over it all: from the day she was born (so, the same time as they'd heard rumors that the land up there was about to take another pounding from the erupting volcano and, according to those fleeing, bombs of rock and ash had flowed down the Roxelane river this morning like a burning prelude to the childbirth that he certainly pictured as uncontrollable eruption) what he had most feared was that he would discover in the daughter her mother's relentlessly petrifying ways: a way of arching her back and carrying her forehead high, a way of walking without seeming to move and talking without appearing to speak to anyone at all. And that it was this fear, above all, that had driven him to blow the conch shell the day of this birth just as if his offspring had been stillborn. And that the vexation over not having had a boy (to protect him) had perhaps tormented him less than the fear of confronting another woman of the same sort as Cinna Chimène every day and every year to come without being able to stop either the days or the years. One thing for sure about Pythagore's torment was that, though he could see perfectly well that Cinna Chimène never looked at anybody and, you could say, literally did not see anybody other than him, and though he knew perfectly well that he just simply could not bear the idea that this erect and imposing woman might look away from him—all this knowledge was more fragile and naked than dew on the leaves, already drunk dry by the dawning sun. What was the use of being sure of their mutual ties if he could not master how shaky he felt—how obsessed? This was the time (when he began to feel he couldn't stand the way Mycéa would suddenly appear up above his path, and he complained bitterly that this school where Cinna Chimène had enrolled the child seemed only open just about long enough to air out the classroom) when he launched his inquiry concerning something that was bound to be beyond the comprehension of the locals. This began with a flurry of questions that he would ask anyone he met along the traces, in the ravines, questions that drove even the most intrepid talkers from his path; he ended up by sitting down every evening until about nine o'clock in front of the plantation store at a table lit by a candle stub, where the overseer's wife served rum. He would take a seat and then begin to say out loud the words that for the past hour or so each of those present had been repeating in a low voice. Some of them, in the shelter of darkness, spelled the words out with their lips or waved their hands—keeping time with him as he spoke: "Can anybody tell me what folks around here know about Guinea or the Congo?" Sometimes fireflies danced in front of his face and it seemed that they shone a pale light on the words and brought credit upon Pythagore himself. The night, the people, the animals, and the words sank in silence. No one dared move. Solo, Pythagore quietly prayed. "I see the cane," he said. "It is planted in a backwater that is still plowed the macaques go climbing down from the tall silk-cotton trees they go pulling up the cane to eat it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Overseer's Cabin by ÉDOUARD GLISSANT Copyright © 1997
by Éditions Gallimard, Paris . Excerpted by permission of University of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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