Resisting Memories: The Creole Identities of Lafcadio Hearn and Edouard Glissant

THE APPARENT SWING AWAY FROM AN ESSENTIALIST IDENTITY politics in recent discussions of colonial and postcolonial identity, and toward a vision of cultural hybridity that destabilizes any and all such identitarian markers, has resulted in a heightened interest in “that process of mutation and adaptation we call creolization,” as Paul Gilroy puts it (Small Acts, 209). This is a process that the Caribbean poet Kamau Brathwaite, follow- ing in the footsteps of Cuba’s Fernando Ortiz, began theorizing in the early 1970s in his various studies of how, even at the height of slavery, white and black Jamaicans were creating and participating in a common culture. Just as the Creole languages of the Caribbean, spoken by white and black alike, were born out of the mixing of European and African languages, so too did the existence of this creolized culture hold out the possibility for Brathwaite of going beyond what Edward Said has called “fixed ideas of settled identity and culturally authorized definition” (225). Creolization offers a response to the manichean tendencies of colonial discourse-tendencies to which, moreover, “Third World” theorists eager to dissociate themselves from the sort of existential complicities that were an inevitable result of colonial practice, if not of segregationist colonial theory, all too easily fell prey.