L’Œil du cyclone

Abstract

This article probes the convergence of meteorological disaster and memory in L’Île et une nuit by Daniel Maximin and La Case du commandeur by Édouard Glissant, reading fragments of these novels through reflections lifted from spiritual autobiographies by M. Jacqui Alexander and Mimerose Beaubrun. While anglophone Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe employs weather systems and climate as figures to apprehend the pervasiveness of antiblackness in today’s world, hurricane disaster takes another form as a device used by francophone Caribbean authors to observe and disrupt the ontological negation of Black people. Tracing the multiple resonances between ‘the wake’ (Sharpe, 2016) as a prismatic theoretical tool and meanings of water, passages, and wakefulness generated by hurricanes in Glissant and Maximin, this article explores the relation between this meteorological disaster event and an expansive consciousness of the human disasters of deportation and rupture. It pays attention to homonymic language tethering the eye of the hurricane and other manifestations of suspended wind and saltwater to the ‘vision’ or modes of sensorial knowing this phenomenon confers, addressing the ways in which African diaspora authors and spiritual practitioners understand the disaster of the Middle Passage through the disaster of the hurricane as temporally amplified, immanent, and beyond human.