• 4 In the absence of a published English translation of Ormerod, I hazard the above translation of the (...)

It is said, with the certainty of sciences and prophecies, that very soon, tomorrow, a monstrous scraping together of plates in the depths will unleash – like shattered shards of a writing that seethes with rage and mutilates itself – the apocalypse which will swallow these lands and submerge the sea itself, in a fury of tides beyond scale or intention, and of winds bereft of direction.4

3Taking this further, one may say that there is a paradigm of cultural tectonics at work, one which resonates with contemporary discourse of fragments and the whole, collage and métissage, chaos theory and unanticipated transformations mentioned earlier. What emerges is a theory of transcultural tectonics. Here, binary definitions of the global totality against the local detail are discarded in favour of a more dynamic framework where both become floating plates, enunciative planes of “inquiry” and “injury,” to use Bhabha’s twin terms, perpetually interacting through violent collisions or more complicit coalescences.

5Postcolonial engagements with the epic also re-position the nation at the centre of narratives that sometimes tend towards totalization. Shashi Tharoor’s narrator in The Great Indian Novel aspires to recite nothing less than the “Song of Modern India,” singing of “past, present and future, of existence and passing, of efflorescence and decay, of death and rebirth” (18). Pablo Neruda sees Canto General as his “Common book of mankind” which anchors a common Latin American identity in peasant struggles and populismo. He thus proposes an epic where “broken bread / is this geography of my song, / and a community of peasants / will one day harvest its fire” (399). Finally, Derek Walcott in Omeros retrospectively describes his poetic project thus, “I sang our wide country, the Caribbean Sea” (320), widening the reach of his small island home through intertextuality, in much the same way James Joyce did for Ireland in Ulysses. However, Walcott, Tharoor and Neruda exhibit a critical awareness of the weaknesses of epic projects, whether imperial or nationalist. They do so by embracing a certain openness to the role played by global forces of colonization as well as resurgent ethnicities in the shaping of present postcolonial identities. As much as they are writing back to the empire, they are also writing back to the flawed postcolonial nation. These narratives are marked by an acute awareness that when a new continent emerges, there are always fissures within and without, making it impossible to isolate global and local phenomena in tidy compartments. As Bhabha points out, the global that existed beyond the local is now indelibly re-inscribed within the local, so much so that Glissant can say that the “Antilles have become the estuary of America” (Discours 427) and Neruda, that “At the bottom of America without name / was Arauco among the vertiginous / waters” (26).

7Despite its merits, the paradigm Glissant proposes is still a somewhat polarized one (Old World = excluding epics/New World = participatory epics). Within this scheme, the United States of America occupies a problematic, chiasmatic space as both colonized and colonizer, criss-crossing between the two positions and consequently producing epics that straddle the excluding and the participatory. As part of the New World but also a colonizer of regions of Asia and Central America, the United States both confirms and contests this bipartite distribution. Glissant’s distinction would therefore gain further depth were we to see the excluding and participatory epics as both convergent and divergent, drawing towards and away from each other at the same time. The New World epics that spoke for the age were not imitative Homeric verse-epics of Hartford Wits such as Timothy Dwight’s The Conquest of Canäan (1785) and Joel Barlow’s Columbiad (first published as The Vision of Columbus in 1787), modelled on the stylistic conventions of exclusionary epics. The New World spirit of the emerging nation seemed to be captured in the more novelistic, transcultural works of Walt Whitman and Herman Melville who move towards relational, participatory epics. That said, the emerging American political and cultural hegemony is evident in Whitman’s verse and perhaps best exemplified by his penchant for lists, binding diversity within a single federal unity. It has often been pointed out that the epic bard who claims to be “large” and “contain multitudes” (“Song of Myself” 86) becomes a synecdoche of America, “the Great Nation, the nation of many nations” (44). His famous poem, “Passage to India,” is a condensed epic in itself, mid-way between a Camoensesque celebration of the expeditions of Alexander, Marco Polo, Columbus and Da Gama, and a prophetic ode to globalization, to “The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work” (412). Yet despite the proclamation of “the marriage of continents, climates and oceans,” hierarchical binaries persist as America is glorified as the New World, as opposed to the Old World, which itself is represented by an indiscriminate clubbing together of “Europe, to Asia, Africa, join’d” (416).

8Against a vague Oriental backdrop of “Asia’s, Africa’s fables,” a detailed American cartography emerges through enumeration as the poet admires “my own continent […] the grandest scenery in the world”: from the Pacific Railroad winding along the Platte to Monument mountain and the Laramie plains, down to the “plentiful larkspur and wild onions” (413). This unity in diversity is emphasized both on a national level (America as a federation) and an international, even cosmic level through a transcendental vision of “one-Soul.” This is accomplished in a Miltonian gesture wherein “The whole Earth […] shall be completely justified […] by the son of God, / the poet” (415). While Allen Grossman wrote in 1985 that Whitman’s verse was marked by “pluralization (the getting of many into one) without the loss entailed by the exchange” (qtd. in Moretti 191-2), contemporary readers might be inclined to feel that there is indeed a loss or, at least, a lack of exchange: the epic remains a national narrative which, though opening itself to other cultural horizons, still favours a centripetal focus on the nation as a microcosm of the global. This remains a one-way traffic of ideas rather than an exchange or cross-fertilization of cultures.

9This should, nonetheless, be put into historical perspective. Given the context in which the poem was produced, “Passage to India” (first published in 1871) offers a multicultural vision in a massively colonized era, marked by the Scramble for Africa, the British Raj in India and the plantation systems in America and the Caribbean. From this perspective, Whitman and Melville stand at the crossroads between teleological and relativizing cultural perspectives, or, to use Glissant’s geological terms, “continental” and “archipelago” worldviews. In Tout-monde, Glissant argues that the thick continental thought-system weighs down on us by virtue of its teleological conception of the humanities, a conception no longer suited to contemporary history, with its dispersions and “sumptuous wanderings.” Contemporary cultural theory for him is that of the “archipelago,” for “the world has been dispersed into archipelagos of diversities” (31).

12Walcott’s epic thus rings an avowedly “conciliatory” note of “sumptuous wandering” in lieu of imperial founding and settlement. In a much neglected passage in Omeros, Achille, a simple fisherman, thinks of fleeing the island with its “hotels, marines and […] pink tourists” in order to “find some place […] he could settle like Aeneas, founding not Rome, but home, to survive in its peace” (301). The paronomastic association of Rome and home differentiates and blurs the global and the local at the same time. This is reinforced by the simultaneous use of “like,” creating similarity, and “not,” marking difference in the line that follows, showing that the text is both attracted towards, and repelled by the Aeneid and the centripetal pull it represents: indeed, the more transcultural parallels it establishes, the more indigenous differences it brings to the surface. Glissant articulates this double dynamic of indigenous and global, each redefining and undermining the other in a state of perpetual tension when he says,

• 10 “Oui, nous commençons à peine de concevoir ce gigantesque frottement. Plus il concourt à un ordre o (...)

Yes, we are just barely beginning to conceive of this immense friction. The more it works in favour of an oppressive order, the more it calls forth disorder as well. The more it produces exclusion, the more it generates attraction. It standardizes – but at every node of Relation, we will find callouses of resistance.” (Poetics 138)10

13In Walcott’s transcultural, intertextual universe with its “Greek manure under the banana leaves” (271), Greco-Roman antiquity and Caribbean lived experience incessantly fuse into and fertilize each other: Achille the Caribbean fisherman is likened to Aeneus the high-born Trojan prince, who, we must recall, was himself “Expell’d and exil’d […] before he won / The Latian realm, and built the destin’d Town” (3). In this sense, Aeneus, seen synchronically through the prism of Achille the Caribbean fisherman (and not the other way round), also becomes a temporary victim of conquest, a migrant-figure not unrelated to Ulysses, perhaps the proto-type of the diasporic subject, “Expell’d and exil’d.” However, Achille’s goal is not aggressive colonial resettlement, but is based on the pragmatic live-and-let-live philosophy of the oppressed postcolonial subject, deprived of agency in a neo-colonial world of standardization, of “hotels, marines […] and pink tourists.”

14We will never know whether Achille will really find a home untainted by neo-capitalist forces in much the same way as we will never know whether Walcott’s lyrical persona will ever stop seeing “All that Greek manure under the banana leaves.” What we do know, however, is that neither one can be seen in isolation without the other. The relationship between the two, an obscure fisherman whose way of life is profoundly endangered and the renowned Nobel Prize-winning poet, is representative of the contradictory yet co-existing and co-producing forces of marginalization and elitism. Rather than polarizing them, one may see these phenomena as interacting problematically, reinforcing and undermining indigenous and international enunciative spaces. The cultural tectonics unleashed by globalization suggests universalizing, macro-processes as well as the interstices between the plates, where, to use Bhabha’s terms, we find the simultaneous self-construction of the individual as the “subject of global inquiry” and of “injury.” The texts of Walcott, Tharoor, Neruda, Joyce and others crystallize the chaos-monde of cultural tectonics because they foreground local positions from which inquiries and injuries may be articulated through their relation to this “earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,” as Whitman put it. More precisely, rather than being “spanned,” the earth can now only be inscribed in localized songs of place. From this angle, the specificity of New World epics would lie in their projected cartographies of a distinctly un-Hegelian configuration of multiple and movable tectonic plates of many nations (or Glissantian “places”) and many epochs.