In Elited Prose, from his collection Yokes (1979), we see an example of Édouard Glissant’s broader creative view. Whereas in Gorée, his condemnation of slavery is clear and direct, Glissant does not repeat a militant Négritude sensibility in all his poems, for his vision is more complex.
Elited Prose, as its title suggests, is a prose poem in six lines that is actually only one sentence long. It is, however, a perfect expression of Glissant’s view of opportunity—of the capacity of blacks to achieve virtually anything, in spite of (or perhaps because of) racial or cultural heritage.
The unnamed “He” of the poem is perhaps a poet himself, a man who “filters golden speech through the quick of his mind” and is equally adept in a rural environment, knowing how a “sheep is threaded on a spit.” The man has experienced certain privileges, as have some Africans who served as “aides” to colonials, but he has also been hunted as a slave and so is like “not the Trojans but Hector whom they [the Greeks] hunt.”
His resiliency and adaptability allowed him to reside in “Real France,” but he has suffered racial prejudice nonetheless. In spite of this, he has refused to be bitter and retained his optimism in humankind: “[He] is nigger but universal, adapts his level as he goes along, in short has faith in man.”
Glissant, in his personal experiences of exile, has likewise been a student of other cultures, never completely at home in any one, and yet never completely alien. History, as horrific as it seems, also informs the present and admits the possibility of hope in the future—all of which the narrator of Elited Prose expresses in several short lines.
Bibliography
Glissant, Édouard. “Elited Prose.” In Black Salt, translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.