“Interorality” is a terminological neologism I have created following Julia Kristeva ’s “intertextuality”. 1 It emphasizes a new and overlooked approach concerning the Caribbean culture of “the spoken word” inasmuch as it provides a critical spotlight on Caribbean epistemology and philosophy . It offers fundamental insights as to the seminal and philosophical importance of language and of “the word” or pawòl in the formation and articulation of what can be called Caribbean psychology and Caribbean philosophy, hence my attempt to pinpoint its hermeneutics. Interorality translates the complex phenomenological and epistemological process by which pre-existing oral texts are transmuted into new ones whose symbolic meaning and significance are intrinsically independent. It is a literary process whose mode is transposition , and at the same time, a philosophical approach to meaning, aesthetic, ethics and speech production in the Caribbean. Interorality critically distinguishes and specifies Caribbean orality . As a concept, it is a revealing indicator of Caribbean axiology and ontology . It encapsulates critical factors for examining, comprehending and establishing what can be termed, the metaphysics of Caribbean Pawòl. I define the Creole term Pawòl, which means “uttered word,” “speech” or “statement”, as the product of the long and constant epistemological and ethical struggle of the African enslaved in the Caribbean to proffer speech whose meaning, significance and purpose are outside of the unethical and a-human terms of the enslaver’s paradigm of thought and speech. It is an intelligible discourse characterized by historical, cultural, psychological, and philosophical factors, and brought about by ethical values.
The formation and occurrence of interorality, that carries the Caribbean ethics and signals Pawòl , are respectively a founding moment and phenomenon for the Caribbean. Phenomenologically speaking, interorality could be seen as the first carrier of Caribbean aesthetics , that is, the first manifestation of works of art bespeaking that particular critical disposition on the universe, the human person, and beauty. Indeed, such a disposition is highly determining in the conception and expression of cultural, moral, ethical, political, and intellectual values.
Given the unspeakably violent mode of formation as well as the specific nature of interorality, I am most interested in the overlooked philosophical value and scope of the Caribbean tradition of speech, speech production, utterance and meaning.
Caribbean scholars and philosophers such as Édouard Glissant, among others, have intensely reflected and proffered invaluable and powerful epistemological propositions. However, it remains that the predominating approach to Caribbean phenomena and history, especially with regard to the deported Africans, is often disturbingly mechanical and technical, almost mathematical and descriptively numerical. It is quite detached from their core value as an unprecedented statement about humankind and their capacity to raise poignantly critical issues related to philosophical considerations. Through the deportation and enslavement of Africans, Europeans directly brought to the forefront notions of philosophy and humankind related to consciousness, the fight for social justice and equality, and the reaction of the oppressed concerning both their existence and their awareness of it. One tends to neglect the fact that, in the so-called encounter of the Africans’ and Europeans’ worlds, there was also and, in a paramount way, an encounter between two philosophies. Even though the Europeans’ outlook discarded Africans as human, the fact remains that they were indeed encountering members of humankind, and in this light, the issue of philosophy simply cannot be bypassed. This issue needs to be placed at the center of reflections on this period and its historical events because it is intrinsically concerned with the question of humankind on the one hand, and on the other, because colonization and slavery as experienced in America 2 created a severe and lasting crisis for the human species.
The importance of interorality as bearer of pawòl would not have been paramount had this history not been founded on the painful predominance of anti-aesthetic and unethical ideologies, at the core of which were fierce violence, intentional separatism, exclusion, deprivation, total lack of communication, and an ongoing, persistent attempt by one group to efface the other by reducing them to silence. This attempt has proven to be critical to the ensuing and enduring general relegation of the African groups to the lowest considerations of humankind.
Therefore, through interorality, I also wish to stress a largely ignored phenomenon—the role assumed by Africans in forming, through the critical emblem of speech and discourse, a Caribbean philosophy which concerns itself with humankind. Too often, the deported Africans are portrayed as passive bearers of their fate, intellectually, ideologically, and also politically, although sometimes reacting physically and instinctively through visible revolts. My purpose is to underline one of the numerous metaphysical reactions of these Africans and their offspring who resisted in the very place—the mind (and its productions)—where they were disqualified and attacked.
Among other people’s works, Lafcadio Hearn , Elsie Clews Parsons , Walter Jekyll and Harold Courlander have published volumes on the French-, English- and Spanish-speaking Caribbean, gathering tales passed down from generation to generation over centuries and collected in the region from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. These tales attest to a critical vibrancy of oral communication in this period. It is a truism that speech and the tradition of the spoken word are meaningful in the Caribbean, as proposed by, among others, Edward Kamau Brathwaite in History of the Voice. However, it is also my aim to revive and further discussions on Caribbean orality, on which much has already been said, but taking a new approach. My intention is not to specify a concept that captures the metaphysical situation in the Caribbean as it relates to crucial existential questions, but to apply a methodical reflection with the aim of establishing a base of pertinent, extensive and reliable knowledge about the region. It is all the more important to revisit Caribbean orality in the heavily globalized and “technologized” millennium because, by exacerbating the value of material tools, the digital revolution provokes questions concerning immaterial and metaphysical issues. Furthermore, it brings many hyper-ephemeral communicative principles and paradigms, as well as new visions and meanings of language and oral practices that put pressure on the practice and perspective of orality.
It has been proposed that the interoral phenomenon observed in the Caribbean is also present in the geo-cultural space that Rex Nettleford names “Neo-America,” comprising some continental American countries as well as some southern states of the United States. However, my discussion will be restricted to the Caribbean, 3 otherwise called insular America. These territories, which extend from the Bahamas to Aruba, experienced both enslavement and colonization for an extended period. The autochthonous people were very rapidly eradicated in most territories and the first Indians and Asians did not arrive until much later, so it was the two civilizations embodied by two sets of people—Africans and Europeans—who shaped what has come to be known as Caribbean history and culture today. 4
Interorality: Some Characteristics
Since Propp indicated that the content of tales is permutable and transformable, 5 it has become accepted that, in any oral system, borrowing is possible. As a matter of fact, the European and African traditions comprise mutual borrowing and borrowing from other oral canons. It also goes without saying that many folktales were born in the Caribbean and not derived from transposition . This said, in the Caribbean, transposition remains the foremost means of interoral text production and systematism its paradigm. At its root, interorality presents multiple sources because the canon embodies tales from Africa mostly, but also from Europe . Although the new whole—the interoral tale—shares some of the same features as its sources, it is distinguished by its semantic autonomy.
The indicators of an epistemological transformation may be shared with Glissant ’s theory of créolisation, 6 but this approach to interorality does not aim to propose any métissage, créole, créolisation, créolité or unspecified mélange discourse. These discourses, which are prevalent in the French Caribbean, are based in essentialism and idealized transcendence as promoted by Lafcadio Hearn in Two Years in the French West Indies and some of his followers, including the Créolité movement pundits. 7 Given Glissant’s method of emphasizing the result rather than analyzing in depth the ethics of the mechanisms leading to it, he appears to regard all of the elements at play in the transformational process of “creolization” as constituting in the same way and at the same level, through a very complex relation, a totalité, a Tout-Monde or a totalité monde resultant—a sort of aesthetics favoring a “renewed energy of the matter of the world”. 8 He also proposes that, sometimes, meaning manifests “not-one transparence nor any kind of clarity,” 9 and that the resulting créolisation and aesthetic exudes a legitimate and fertile opacity, whose source cannot or should not be deciphered. 10 Glissant claims an egalitarian and cleansing objective designed to combat and counteract the very unsound concepts developed and actions perpetrated during enslavement and colonization. 11 However, despite his moral stance, he chose not to identify and to consider critically the level, symbolism and nature of the constituents’ role and meaning, and thus, to leave the result epistemologically unspecified. Ideal and transcenden...