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A Roving "Γ: "Errance" and Identity in Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove Renée Lanier Black political culmre has always been more interested in me relationship of identity to roots and rootedness man in seeing identity as a process of movement and mediation that is more appropriately approached via me homonym routes. —Paul Gilroy1 Je crois que maintenant c'est l'errance qui amène la créativité. —Maryse Condé2 EDOUARD GLISSANT, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphaël Confiant, and Betty Wilson all have, in some way, linked closed spaces to the Caribbean and its literature. Glissant characterizes the plantation as a "lieu clos" from which emerges "la parole ouverte" in Poétique de la Relation / In Lettres créoles Chamoiseau and Confiant evoke the hold of the slave ship from which "les gémissements, les pleurs, les incantations magiques ou les râles d'agonie" emanated, followed by the silence of the plantation, and the sole voice of the "conteur." Wilson's "espace clos" is the island itself from which women characters flee.4 Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), reclaims these confined spaces in order to reconnect black subjects in the African diaspora. Using the ship in motion between Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean as an organizing principle symbolizing post-slavery's multiple crossings and displacements, Gilroy examines the tension between ancestors and journeys in the process of identity construction , which he formulates as a roots and routes trope. In this study, I explore the ways in which the metaphor functions in Caribbean literature, especially Maryse Condé's Traversée de la mangrove (1989), reading roots not only as ancestors, but as a synecdoque for trees, which signify fixity, and "racine-médecine" as well. Routes Inextricably Bound With Roots: What comes to mind most readily when considering routes and the African diaspora is the Middle Passage, the journey between the oxymoronic slave castles on the West African coast and the plantations in the Americas. (And, indeed, UNESCO is currently sponsoring a research study called "The Slave Route/La Route de l'esclave," which 84 Fall 1998 Larrier traces the mass displacement of Africans.) Glissant posits that the various African customs, languages, and religions brought by the "migrant[s] nu[s]" in contact with one another, with the European "migrant armé" and, later, with the Asian "migrant familial," all contributed to a new Creole culture. Caribbean/Creole identity, the consequence of "Relation," resembles a rhizome rather than a single root, according to Glissant using terminology borrowed from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Mille plateaux (originally published under the title Rhizomes).51 maintain, like Gilroy, that the rhizome trope relates to the journeys experienced across the Atlantic as well. The triangular trade, the rootlike trajectory from Europe to Africa to the Americas of earlier centuries, should be reconfigured in the post-slavery era as a rhizome whereby Black Americans relocate temporarily or permanently to Africa and Europe, Africans to the Americas and Europe, and so on. Roots as "bois d'ébène" and "pied-bois": Glissant's assertion in Introduction à une poétique du divers that landscape is implicated in the plot of Caribbean narratives—"le paysage cesse d'être un décor convenable et devient un personnage du 'drama' de la Relation. Ce n'est plus l'enveloppe passsive du tout-puissant Récit, mais la dimension changeante et perdurable de tout changement et de tout échange" (25)—reflects the fact that trees, or pié-bwa in Creole, are invested with historical and cultural significance. As "bois d'ébène" they designate captured Africans in the holds of slave ships. Forests were often the sites of maroon settlements as well as secret meeting places for planning insurrections, perhaps the most famous being the Bois Caïman where, in August 1791, Boukman gave a rousing speech that marked the beginning of the Haitian revolution. Religious practices are associated with the pine tree, and sacrifices take place underneath the "mapou." In Guadeloupe, traditions surrounding birth and death are associated with specific trees. The breadfruit tree is the site where the father of a newborn used to bury the placenta, the "maman...

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