Excavations: On Glissant’s Trees

It isn’t easy to understand how the sea can be history. As Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants patiently reconstructs, for various African peoples, from the continent’s inland to its West Coast, “The sea is a divider. It is not a life-giver” (164). It is the space of the formless where death reigns. Life, animated forms, signs, meanings, and the history that they contract reside in various other geographies: inland lakes, trees, bush, desert, and slow rivers. As Brathwaite reveals, his understanding of this environment draws on Marcel Griaule’s account of Dogon cosmologies, related to him by Ogotemmêli, a Dogon thinker (Roots, 193, 242). For the Dogon, the globe is a piece of pottery cooked in water: “The earth was molded clay and it is from water…that its life is derived” (Griaule 19). Water is “the substance of the life-force of the world, from which derives the motion…of the created being” (18); it is inherent to every particle of matter, so that “even in a stone there is this force” (19), even a stone is living. Because the matter in which water inheres is heavy, its movement is not fast, and the forms are stable; because there is water in all matter, all matter comes alive and, in living, “says” something; hence Ogotemmêli teaches that “speech” is given to “all beings” (20). “Fibers” and trees which are “full of water” are full of “words,” as are the “undulating movement of reptiles” and the “eight-fold spirals of the sun” (20). The slow movement of water in everything functions as a speech act performed by all beings; everything speaks, and everything is a point of view. In speaking, everything is in time and history. Its speaking is its history. Trees, stones, and landscapes are rich annals of history, documents archiving what has happened. The sea, on the other hand, is a shapeless force; lacking in form, it doesn’t speak or testify; it doesn’t remember and can’t be read. It destroys what it hosts, abandoning it to oblivion.