Rhiz(h)oming Achille: Walcott, Glissant, and the politics of relation and creolization

Titre: Rhiz(h)oming Achille: Walcott, Glissant, and the politics of relation and creolization; Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Titre du volume: 6
Volume: 53
Date: 2017
Langue(s): English
Issn: 1744-9855
Résumé: This article explores how Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990) critically engages with the concepts of home, roots and identity, and dismantles their essentialized constructions. Its interpretation of the poem illustrates how filial determinacy and the quest for genesis are bound to fail in the Caribbean context of massive transplantations and dislocations. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s concepts of errance, digenesis, rhizomic identity, relation and creolization, the article demonstrates how the African Caribbean protagonist Achille comes to understand that any stable association of roots and home with genealogy and geography will fracture in this landscape. Instead of locating an ancestral home/land, Achille learns that the New World inhabitants should try to develop a sense of rhizomic at-homeness in the ambivalences of their new location.
Creator: Haleh Zargarzadeh
pages: 715-728
short title: Rhiz(h)oming Achille