Writer, poet and educator Sofia Samatar meditates on opacity, by way of Édouard Glissant, translation, sleep rituals and Maud Martha’s glitter.
Text by Sofia Samatar
1. THE SNOW
For about two years now I have been getting up early. I wake up and make my coffee at 4.30am. I used to be a night person, but as I’ve grown older, I find I can’t read at night – I can’t keep my eyes open – so instead I rise early to read. Sometimes, though, I drift off in the morning, too. Around eight o’clock on these winter mornings, after my children have left for school and before I go to work, when the street has a dull blue radiance, light just beginning to filter through the clouds, I sink into sleep on the couch. A few days ago, I awoke with a start when my husband came into the room. I seized the book that had fallen onto my chest and quickly resumed my reading. My husband laughed at this transparent ruse – my attempt to pretend I’d been awake the whole time. Outside, light gathered on the snow.
I don’t know why my reaction on waking is to act like I wasn’t asleep. The impulse comes from the sleep side, before I’m fully conscious. Why do I resist this brief vulnerability in front of a person I’ve lived with for 20 years? Why am I scared of being caught napping?
The book on my chest was Poetics of Relation by Édouard Glissant. I began to write about it by jotting down this drowsy winter scene, trying to find my way into my reasons for picking up the book again after so many years. In it, Glissant examines the ties and terrors between cultures. He writes of his birthplace, Martinique, an overseas region of France wrestling with its plantation past and dependent present. And he argues for what he calls opacity: a force that protects diversity. He asserts the need to keep the world’s languages alive, including and especially the small, beleaguered languages, the creoles, the oral mother tongues, the ones without writing, without a technified vocabulary. For Glissant, the utopian promise of Esperanto is a nightmare. He writes: “Relation struggles and states itself in opacity.” Relation, a link without dominance, requires a certain lack of transparency, a mutual unintelligibility, a fog.
It’s counterintuitive: the idea that connection depends on a lack of understanding. It’s a minority position.
This is the clarion call that brought me back to Glissant: “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone.” I tried to approach it through the memory of falling asleep while reading, through the image of a body both defenceless and inscrutable. I’m not satisfied with this image, but there are things I want to preserve about it. It fails because it’s one-sided: if only one partner is sleeping, their opacity isn’t mutual, which makes the scene a poor figure of Relation. But what I value in the image is rest. A cocoon into which one sinks to rise. The repetition, the ritual of an insistent withdrawal. Intelligence of the body. Brightness pressing gently through the screen of eyelashes. Season of the veil.
In 1957, Glissant gave an interview on French television in which he traced a link between writing and snow. One of the sources of his first essay, Sun of Consciousness, was his encounter with snow in Paris – an experience, he remarked in the interview, less spectacular than that enjoyed by tourists seeing the flame trees of Martinique for the first time, but more profound, because he had heard about snow so much in childhood, having absorbed the French seasons through a colonial education. Against the weight of enforced knowledge he sets the strange “foam” of the snow: “it delivers from expectation,” he writes in Sun of Consciousness, “and luminously it contradicts, it is almost hot.” I remember, when I was a child, when my cousin Ahmed lived with us, going outdoors with him in his first snow. My brother and I watched him with excitement – this cousin, already in college, who didn’t know what we knew, and who spoke with our father a language we didn’t understand. He wore a green scarf tucked into his coat. When I placed some fluffy, bitingly cold snow in his palm, he shook it off, startled. “It burns!”
Thinking of Ahmed’s burning snow, of Édouard Glissant’s snow that is “almost hot”, I brush against the opacity of experience: how sensation can oppose not only another’s description of an object, but also one’s own expectations, internalised knowledge and training. The expression, the cry, the letters home, bring the experience into Relation. The letters Glissant writes in his Paris hotel, describing the winter, catalyse Sun of Consciousness, in which he declares, “Such is the snow to me: an illumination (I am finally touching winter), an opening (I am finally at one with this spectacle), the enlargement, the established communication (snow: as singular, durable, definitive as the heavy sun), the power now to accelerate the dialogue, to hold close its common reasons, as at the fireside.”
The snow: a shimmering surface. Uneven. Full of pinpricks of light. The light has a rhythm. It flashes, falls away in shadow, then springs up again. Maud Martha, the eponymous heroine of Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1953 novel, yearns for the glassy, silvery sparkle condensed in the name “New York”. New York is this young Black girl’s Paris. Desire for wealth, for commodities? Certainly. But this desire does not exhaust the image of glitter any more than colonial previews empty the falling snow for Glissant, or erase the white-hot reality of ice. Maud Martha is drawn to lively objects: “It pleased her to dwell upon color and soft beady textures and light, on a complex beauty, on gemlike surfaces.” It’s the twinkling surface, the surface in motion, that appeals to this young girl whose exterior is so often perceived as dull, monolithic, blank. All of this says so much to me about the desire to be seen on one’s own terms. Not to be cloaked by a stolid, immobile obscurity, but to inhabit both the gleam and the gloom, both expressiveness and retreat, both waking and sleeping, according to one’s rhythm.
2. THE WIND
I returned to Glissant for opacity. As I read, I encountered another term, one I’d forgotten, which now caught my attention: donner-avec, which means “to give-with”. It’s the expression Glissant uses to talk about understanding. His translator, Betsy Wing, explains that donner-avec has two meanings: “to give-with” and “to give-on”. It means to give with the motion of something else, as a young tree gives with the pressure of the wind, and it means to give on, as in to face, to be oriented toward, to open onto, as a window gives on the beach.
I’m fascinated by this way of thinking about knowledge: that “to understand” could mean “to give-on-and-with”. For Glissant, this is how people understand one another in Relation, a way of knowing opposed to the more conventional verb, comprendre. Comprendre – to comprehend – includes the verb prendre – “to take”. In this context, the closest English equivalent is “to grasp”. To understand something by grasping is a deadly way of knowing for Glissant: acquisitive, dominating, imperialist. Grasping something, grasping a person, “getting” what they’re about, is an attempt to render them totally transparent. By contrast, “giving-on-and-with” honours the opacity of the other, their fundamental difference and autonomy, “considerate,” Glissant writes, “of all the threatened and delicious things joining one another (without conjoining, that is, without merging) in the expanse of Relation”.
I have a theory that more and more people are becoming interested in opacity. I think there’s a turn to Glissant in progress, which will soon become widely known. His concerns with connection and self-representation in a global context have only grown more urgent since Poetics of Relation was published in 1990, between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the advent of the World Wide Web. Today, Poetics of Relation feels almost uncanny, prophetic, as if in 1989 Glissant had anticipated the internet age, as if he already knew how desperately the coming generation would need a philosophy of illegibility, pliancy and care. For if it sometimes seems today that his “expanse of Relation” has made its way from his book onto my cell phone, ’m also painfully aware that this digital form of connection doesn’t resemble his ideal. Online information is ranked, to be grasped as quickly as possible. Participants are encouraged to make themselves graspable for advertisers, which serves the purposes of other corporate, state and political agents. The internet affords unprecedented opportunities to relate, but through a regime of transparency.
My laptop screen emits a steady light, without a flicker. In this light, I scroll through my growing collection of evidence for what I call the Opaque Turn. Teju Cole writing in 2015 of photographer Roy DeCarava’s work, situating it in terms of Glissant’s opacity: “a right to not to have to be understood on others’ terms, to be misunderstood if need be." Eric A. Stanley in 2017 using Glissant to develop a theory of trans opacity: “Opacity with representation: an irreconcilable tension that opens to something other than the pragmatism of the transparent and its visual economies of violence.” Fred Moten, interviewed in 2018 about his trilogy consent not to be a single being, which takes its title from Glissant, noting that, “opacity implies … a kind of ongoing devoted thinking”. Cher Tan, in 2020, stressing the importance of Glissant’s philosophy “in an age of surveillance”, when the “pressure to be transparent appears even more acute for those on the margins”. So many others. My catalogue of quotations starts to feel bewildering. I sense an endless roar from my laptop screen, a ceaseless clamour for opacity seeking expression through the arrangements that foster, reward and enforce transparency.
I stop and dwell with Dionne Brand’s An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading, which evokes a Trinidadian childhood shaped by the pedagogy of English literature, the kind of education that taught Glissant stories of snow. As an alternative to colonial narratives that depict Black people as inanimate and abject, Brand offers the example of Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, a novel that, she writes, “practices what Édouard Glissant calls opacity”. She quotes this passage:
Up the street, mixed in the wind, blew the children, and turned the corner onto the brownish red brick school court. It was wonderful. Bits of pink of blue, white yellow, green, purple, brown, black, carried by jerky little stems of brown or yellow or brown-black, blew by the unhandsome gray and decay of the double-apartment buildings, past the little plots of dirt and scanty grass … There were lives in the buildings. Past the tiny lives the children blew.
The children are fluttering, whirled by the wind, giving-on-and-with. “The mindbox opens in the reader,” writes Brand. It’s a strangely cold day for June, with a bleak grey sky, yet the sun is “making little silver promises somewhere up there, hinting”. These hints of sunlight through the clouds return me to Maud Martha’s glitter. They echo the bits of effervescent colour that make up the crowd of children. They remind me of the flicker of leaves in the wind, and of the doll’s houses of artist Adia Millett, which Elizabeth Alexander describes in her essay, “The Black Interior”. Inside the doll’s houses, Alexander writes, one sees “Doritos, Crisco oil, and Pasta-Roni on the counter of the kitchenette, a plastic-covered couch, a shopping cart of miscellany, all the markers of specific homes and how their imaginary residents live … You have to walk up to the dollhouse and approach it on its own terms, stoop and squint into the windows to take in detail after detail.” Such work might feel voyeuristic, but Alexander perceives it as staging a complex negotiation between the public and the private: “Notably figureless, Millett’s dollhouses make the act of looking explicit even as they control how much a spectator can see.”
A rhythm of opening and closing, of gap and block. Silver promises through the clouds. The Opaque Turn will demand a Relation in motion. (It will also, I predict, involve a turn to Gwendolyn Brooks; Alexander concludes her essay with a study of Brooks’ poetry.) The windows of Millett’s doll’s houses reveal the “tiny lives” of which Brooks writes, they give-on the visiting spectator, but the viewer must also give, lean, crouch to perceive these interiors made so small they could nestle in a child’s hand. The Opaque Turn will require the “complex beauty” of Maud Martha’s “gemlike surfaces”. It will call for the “lustrous rainbowlike play of color” that, according to Merriam-Webster’s definition of iridescence, is “caused by differential refraction of light waves (as from an oil slick, soap bubble, or fish scales)” and “tends to change as the angle of view changes”.
Glissant’s concept of donner-avec necessitates this movement. In order to see, you have to give. The angle of view must change.
“It was wonderful. Bits of pink of blue, white yellow, green, purple, brown, black…”
We clamour for the right to iridescence.
3. THE BEACH
It is now a different winter. Balmy. Yesterday flooded with sun. In a light jacket I walked to the top of the hill. Why Édouard Glissant, and why now? The virtual world, of course, the reign of algorithms, and also the material world, so blue to my eyes yesterday, the town streaked with white smoke from the poultry plant. “We have the right to be obscure,” writes Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals – a perhaps unconscious echo of Glissant, whose philosophy of Relation treats human cultures in a way that extends easily, even insistently, toward the more-than-human world. In reverence for the opacity of that world, Gumbs addresses the elusive giant beaked whale: “I celebrate your right to evade and avoid me. I celebrate your journey however deep, however long. I respect you as so much bigger than my own understanding. And me too. I don’t have to be available to be eligible for breath. I don’t have to be measurable in a marketplace of memes. I don’t have to be visible to be viable on my path.”
Édouard Glissant walks on the beach in Martinique. He describes the sparkling sand, “neither dull nor bright”, but vibrating between different states, churned up by waves and gales, bubbling, chaotic, littered with strange riches: nets of seaweed, dripping tangles of sea grape and manchineel. The beach is a zone of opacity and wind. Its tumbled plants and sand evoke another key term of his book, the baroque, which for Glissant is not only an art-historical category, but also a universal impulse against the transparent. “All human cultures,” he explains, “have experienced a classicism, an age of dogmatic certitude, one that henceforth all must transcend together. And every culture, at one time or another in its development, has contrived baroque disturbances against this certainty.”
The baroque mode resists the notion of a fully knowable world. It unfurls like a fern. It favours circumvention, repetition, concatenation, abundance. He writes, “With the dove grey of thought you touch a tousle of vegetation, a cry of morne and red earth.” On the beach, Glissant’s thought takes a baroque form, shapeshifting like a fog, supple enough to slip through sensation into the tissue of history, touching the soil, the plants and the morne – the hill where fugitives from slavery once took shelter. This is thought like an unlatched window, giving-on-and-with. He writes, “Also endeavouring to point out this blue tinge to everything…” A sentence he doesn’t finish. It opens out, the ellipsis a string of beads. Baroque thought is beaded, embroidered, embellished, always gesturing beyond, like the chapter of Maud Martha called “kitchenette folks”. In this chapter – the longest in the novel – Maud Martha’s consciousness, usually absorbed in her immediate surroundings, expands through her apartment building, wandering among the shimmering deeps, briefly touching the nodes in a network of interiors. At first, the sections of this chapter begin with Maud Martha’s thoughts about her neighbours, but as it continues, her direct commentary falls away, and the sections begin simply, “There was”, each inhabitant of the building flashing up into view for an instant, then receding. The last of these is a woman of great mystery, companionless, haughty and cold, supported by income from an unknown source, her walls “hung with tapestry, strange pictures, china and illuminated poems”, her ageing body swathed in pink lace on Sundays. The other tenants find it almost impossible to talk to her. She responds to casual comments with belligerence, refusing to listen to anyone, so that conversations gutter out and she can settle back into her chair, alone. The last words of the chapter – “What could be done? What was there further to be said?” – comment on this woman’s stubborn isolation. They also echo back through the chapter in a baroque spiral, casting their blue tinge over all the people in the building, suggesting that there is always something further to be said. The lives of the kitchenette folks are not contained by these vignettes. There is something more even to the most tiresome of them, the most contrary and remote, who snaps at innocent remarks with the swiftness of some wild creature, and is known behind her back as “Madame Snow”. ◉
Many thanks to K’eguro Macharia for his comments on an early draft of this piece.All images from Jean-Vincent Simonet, Waterworks, 2021. Courtesy RVB Books