Watching Out for the World

Abstract

This interview discusses Le monde incréé, defined as ‘poétrie’, which refers to a destructuring of conventional literary genres. It consists of three ‘unstageable’ plays, the final one of which is devoted to Marie Celat, who features in much of Glissant’s other work. Drama is a place of revelation, more openly than prose or poetry. The uncreated world is a world that proceeds from historical events rather than a creation or genesis: in other words, a ‘digenesis’. The third play also features the ‘déparleur’ or delirious speaker, who is searching for a poetics, and manifests the ambiguous presence of poetry combined with its impossibility. Glissant rejects postcolonialism because he thinks it implies that colonialism is over. Literature is threatened with disappearance, because it has become banal and consumable.