Among those who have sought beyond négritude for a more realistic approach to the problem of Caribbean identity, perhaps the most assured and convincing is the Martinican author Édouard Glissant. (p. 361)

In place of négritude, Glissant offers in his poetry, novels, and theater a new world view, of which the Caribbean is the center. Africa remains present in his system of thought, but not as a metaphor for black beauty or vanished dignity: Africa is, for Glissant, an instructive actuality, a paradigm of social cooperation. The African pattern of sharing, the prizing of the community above the individual, is opposed by Glissant to the European cult of personality and free will which militates against the concepts of participation and universality. (p. 362)

Poetry, in European tradition the most arcane of arts, is seen by Glissant as an obligation to explore and reveal, to understand the nature of things and to share this understanding. Where the conventional European lyric was content to immortalize an "anecdote"—a moment of joy or suffering—modern poetry should be concerned with man and his destiny, not with men and their personal concerns. (pp. 362-63)

The idea of history is omnipresent in Glissant's work: much of his poetry is devoted to what he has called "a prophetic vision of the past." Glissant shares with many West Indians a desire to restore and elucidate the vast areas of the Caribbean past which have been ignored by European historians or else recorded with an unjust bias….

[History] is viewed optimistically as a possible means of arriving at prescriptions for the contemporary situation. But history is also viewed in a wider context, as a particular obsession of those born in the Americas, who are impelled by the urge to define their own heritage and to establish a tradition apart from Europe. (p. 363)

[Underlying] all of Glissant's works is a deep political commitment to the concept of Martinique's independence from France. This concern is evident not only in the themes of his novels, but in the painful descriptions of Caribbean aimlessness and improvisation, and in the familiar dichotomy of brilliant nature and abject humanity which recurs in much of his poetry. Among the many poetic symbols in Glissant's work, the one which seems above all to encapsule the predicament of Martinique is the symbol of the serpent. For Glissant the serpent is an icon of historical ambiguity: potentially beneficent (in Africa a tutelary spirit associated with the mythology of creation, in Europe the symbol of knowledge), yet in fact deadly in Martinique, which is infested with poisonous snakes. (In a certain tradition of despair and resignation, the belief is held both that the European colonizers imported snakes deliberately and set them against the runaway slaves, and that at the same time the snakes of Martinique represent Africa's revenge on her Caribbean descendants for having rejected their ancestry.) (pp. 366-67)

Glissant's ultimate message seems to point the way beyond the present impasse, to come to terms with the twin serpents of alienation from Africa and intellectual dominance by Europe. It is interesting to recall that the phallic symbolism of the snake is present in both cultures, in the Ashanti myth of procreation as well as in Genesis, and Glissant's solution is bound up with the phenomenon of cultural synthesis. (pp. 367-68)

Glissant's attitude to cultural synthesis is … directly related to the social realities of the Caribbean and to the vexed question of métissage (race mixing). He sees négritude, a reaction to white cultural supremacy, as paradoxically defined and limited by reference to, and comparison with, European culture. This simple black-white opposition fails to take into account the undeniable fact of the extent to which the races have mingled in the French Caribbean. Glissant proposes an undramatic acceptance of this fact and a willingness to move forward naturally along Caribbean—that is, culturally mixed—lines. In place of profitless anxiety to establish an instant local culture, he proposes that the Caribbean should permit a métis way of life, a mixed culture, to shape itself naturally and gradually, with no frantic seeking after roots outside the Caribbean area. For too long the métis has been the outcast of all the "pure" races, the unwanted bastard of the Caribbean. For Glissant, West Indians are unquestionably à mi-chemin des races, halfway between the races, as he says in Les Indes. They are, in fact, a symbol of racial synthesis, and the anthropologist who speculates as to whether the juxtaposition of so many races, customs, and ways of looking at the world can possibly lead to any form of unity can easily find his answer in the living presence of individuals such as Glissant himself. Pride in métissage has always been undermined by racism, and the complex racial neuroses of the Caribbean are perhaps colonialism's most lasting legacy. Glissant, however, calls on us to see racism not as an absolute but as a phenomenon with certain motivating factors—social, economic, and political—which must be brought to light and resolved. (pp. 368-69)