Finally, in response to the second question on the specific analytic of mortuary poetics, I must confess that at first I was hesitant to use the word “poetics” as an organizing term for my current research project. It already saturates 20th-century Caribbean literary studies. Aimé Césaire’s “Poésie et connaissance” (1945), a conference paper turned article in which the Martinican poet turned politician presents several propositions about what poetry is, or rather what it does; José Lezama Lima’s La cantidad hechizada (1970), a collection of lectures turned essays by the queer Cuban poet in which he develops his “sistema poético del mundo”; and Sylvia Wynter’s “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism” (1984), an article in which the Jamaican novelist and scholar first uses “autopoiesis” to describe the generative work of art — these are some of the many examples that come to mind. And, ever since the 1997 English translation of Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation (1990), the reception of Caribbean literary and cultural studies in the United States has seemed to me to be reduced to the term.
However, my initial hesitation prompted me to ask what we actually mean when we say “poetics” and led me to begin a historical sweep of poetics through ancient Greek texts as well as medieval Arabic and Latin texts. These include Aristotle’s Poetics, Ibn Rushd’s Middle Commentary on the Poetics, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova. This sweep has proved fruitful for my analysis of how death and mourning are worked through in Caribbean literature and art through the rhetorical trope of metalepsis or transumption — that is, the shift of a figure of speech into a new context or the shift of a figure from one textual level to another. And so, my coinage of the phrase “mortuary poetics” emerges out of an ongoing study of poetics that I suspect will continue beyond the current project.
Your research dwells in a space suspended between origin (Africa) and dissemination (the Caribbean). How do origin and dissemination intertwine in your research?
This is a perceptive and beautifully posed question. My own position on or, to borrow from and modify your own language, dwelling within the suspended space between (imagined) origin and dissemination is precisely that — a makeshift dwelling within the suspended space that is structured by melancholy, which, again, I do not understand as a pathological mode of mourning but as the way in which mourning constitutes us.
I think it is important here to situate my position in relation to the field of African diaspora studies and its own history of thinking through questions of (imagined) origin and dissemination — questions that have animated theories and methods of studying diaspora. The field of African diaspora studies has been dominated by the social sciences, especially anthropology. Some key anthropological texts that come to mind are Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, Melville Herskovits’ 1940 The Myth of the Negro Past, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s 1976 The Birth of African-American Culture, and J. Lorand Matory’s 2005 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and it is beyond the scope of this interview to provide a comprehensive history of the field of African diaspora studies.
However, I want to note three things. First, I understand the question of (imagined) origin and dissemination as but one iteration of a fundamental tension between historical continuity and discontinuity. Second, across several important developments in the field of African diaspora studies, this fundamental tension has persisted. For example, although Herskovits’ proposition of “cultural survival,” “retention,” or “Africanism” has lost analytic purchase among anthropologists of the African diaspora, the study of how people of African descent in the Americas claim and enact connections to (an imagined) Africa remains fruitful in understanding broader and contentious cultural politics within and among various African diasporas in the Americas.
This leads to the third thing worth noting. As you might glean from the titles of the anthropological texts I mentioned, religious practices and kinship structures have continued to enjoy special attention in debates about historical continuity and discontinuity. The general direction across these texts has been toward a more granular view of cultural practices in their historical and geographic specificity across transnational circuits. In this sense, their contributions to African diaspora studies have been inestimable.
And yet, I take my cue in response to the broader tension between historical continuity and discontinuity that subtends the question of (imagined) origin and dissemination in African diaspora studies from a pair of seemingly stray paragraphs in Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Here are some relevant lines from that text:
“I want to explore the way in which these practices witness and record the violent discontinuities of history introduced by the Middle Passage, the contradiction of captivity and enslavement, and the experience of loss and affiliation [... T]his past cannot be recovered, yet the history of the captive emerges precisely at this site of loss and rupture [... T]he past is untranslatable in the current frame of meaning [... T]hus the reiterative invocation of the past articulated in practice returns to this point of rupture” (1997, 73-74).
A record of violent discontinuities, of contradiction, of that which cannot be recovered and yet emerges in the rupture, of an untranslatable that in translation returns to the point of rupture — all this language has a melancholic structure to it, albeit a melancholic structure that doubles over on itself. It’s not just an incorporation of both historical continuity and discontinuity into cultural practices, including the practice of literary portrayal, but also the (im)possibility of reducing the Middle Passage to an object of mourning because it is an ongoing structural force.
Guided by Hartman’s words, what stands out to me about portrayals of African diaspora religions in relation to death and loss within Hispanophone Caribbean literature and art is how these portrayals hold out the promise of completed mourning, say, through narratives of restitution or revenge, but without ever being able to close the circle, as it were. The work of mourning is always also the work of interpretation. Therefore, (imagined) origin and dissemination or, more broadly, historical continuity and discontinuity are intertwined in my research in the very work of mourning.