Panthéon of Relation

by Patrick Chamoiseau

​

​

​

The plantation system in the West Indies and the Americas was the laboratory for what we are living through today.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, Western slave ships transported millions of men, women and children towards this enslavement machine that was quite distinct from ancient forms of slavery. The latter still left their victims with a connection, however bleak, to their humanity. In contrast, American-style slavery consisted of an almost ontological dehumanization of an entire portion of humanity, on the sole basis of a fiction—a true narrative damnation—which created the “Negro”: subhuman, avatar of the word “slave,” consubstantial with the savagery invented for Africa. The millions of African captives who arrived alive to these plantations, both on the islands and the mainland, escaped an abyss that within a few centuries would swallow millions of their companions in misfortune—those who could not bear the unthinkable hardship of the crossing. This colossal maritime mausoleum is still referred to by its seemingly innocuous Western toponym: the Atlantic Ocean. Édouard Glissant, in his new vision of the world, associated it with those in the slave ship’s hold, and together they cried out its name: The Abyss!

 

The survivors of the Abyss weren’t simply obligated to resist the servile damnation inflicted upon them—they had to recover their very humanity. They worked at it in classical ways (the First and Second Maroon Wars) which gave us (after the great Native Americans who rose up against their genocide) the very first Afro-Creole-American heroes: the Maroons—majesties without thrones or statues, existing beneath the consciousness of the world. Yet, opposition to the plantation system forged divergent, profound and radical paths as well: paths of creativity. What the mechanisms of domination, whatever they may be, strip from their victims is, above all, their ability to create—to soften or blur the reality of enslavement through Deleuzian lines of flight, unforeseen prospects, deconstructions of the deadly “reality” through murmurs brought back from the unfathomable of the “Real.” For this we need powerful artists… which brings us to Raphaël Barontini.

 

Homo sapiens is an inventor of the world. Inhabiting a demiurgic imagination distinguishes the sapiens from the animal without them ceasing to be one—in this way humans construct a thousand little “realities” that their minds create, which allow them to escape the unthinkable horrors of the “Real.” An escape that is unattainable—its exact perception remains uninhabitable, even terrifying, unless one becomes a sorcerer, a shaman, a poet, or embodies the poetic brazenness of an artist. To reoxygenate our realities, the artist makes excursions into the “Real” and returns with living configurations of materials, forms and forces, epiphanic visions, which set our entire mind in motion, renewing in this way—often from the ground up—our reality. Today, unlike ancient times, our artists go there without magic, without mysticism, but with just the spirit of science and technique, logos, and the cognitive galaxies of the poetic. The slaveholders were keen to this power: they very quickly banned those they had damned from employing even the subtlest sign, symbol, sculpture, effigy, statuette, assemblage or indecipherable shape, which could potentially be part of some allegorical projection, and thus a recourse to ancient orishas, a sort of obscured Oya, likely to stir up a surge of revolt. The tools, utensils, partitions of the huts, and clothes worn by the enslaved remained bare, stripped of any inscription, color, sign, design… A nudity of the absence imposed on oneself. As a result, visual arts would make an unexpected extension in our places…

 

Our first resistance fighters, even before the Maroons, were the artists. The inaugural creator was the one who, in the hold of the boat, managed to swallow their tongue, or to throw themself over the protective netting, into the sacrificial mouth of the sharks—thus combining, in a devastating performance, death and life, decision and renunciation, consuming them together at high intensity in a cardinal negation of all enslavement. The second creator was the sorcerer. They would employ their knowledge of plants to poison the master’s cattle, his domestic slaves, and, on occasion, the master himself. They would conjure the reigning dark forces into small forms in which various improbable elements combined to produce power. Even today we encounter these small “quimbois” (small sculptured charms called as such) at the crossroads of our misfortunes and our hopes. However, these creations existed in the shadows, were never claimed or signed, never openly worn, haunting the night, inhabiting the “sacred wound” of which Aimé Césaire spoke; they were not equated into the global agenda against which waves of Maroons were constantly thrusted…

Yet the subsequent creators found the solution.

 

In these sinister plantations, the most resolute creativity was, in fact, ambiguous. To be adopted by the greatest number of those aspiring to rehumanization, the creations had to be accepted by the master. This required them to be integrated, in one way or another, into the obsessive preoccupation of the slavers: the production of sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other shitty products ensuring their fortune. Dancing, drumming, singing, and of course the elocution of primordial storytellers, were woven into the workshops, accompanied the work in the fields, adapted to the chains. Nevertheless, these creative veins blossomed like midnight flowers in the places where the enslaved could gather for themselves.1 The masters had noticed that these practices appeased the mood of their captives, dissipated their heavy melancholy, reduced suicides and apparently brought more enthusiasm to collective work. Despite everything, an unsuspected dimension infiltrated. In these assemblies, led by the improvised artists (very singular individuals, all creators of themselves and creators of others), mysterious revelations of another possible existence would occur. Dancing, drumming, singing, and storytelling are at once individual and collective arts, in mutually generative ensembles. The work of art creates the one who receives it, who prolongs and diffuses it through the fruitfulness of their reception of it, and in this way creates it in return. It is through this alchemy that “nations” would appear, historical singularities to which two or three of the various ancestors of Raphaël Barontini certainly belonged. 

 

During their nighttime assemblies, the enslaved first adopted the strategy of gathering by “nation”—nasyon in Creole. Slave owners applied this term to people of the same ethnic group or African origin. Usually, slaveholders were careful to mix people together in order to avoid concentrations that would be conducive to the dreaded revolts. But, in the long run, they eventually allowed groupings of “nations” based on the good behavior of certain peoples—those who appeared the most docile, who would upkeep their gardens, were hardworking, who did not commit suicide “over nothing” or excelled despite whatever difficulty… This meant that in certain places, groupings of ethnic groups occurred—fortuitous, partial, favoring the survival of a handful of wisdoms carried over from a lost land, from a missing humanity. Those who saw themselves gathered like this formed a “nation,” like shipwrecked people clinging to a floating object. However the term would very quickly expand. Whether you were of African birth (Bossale) or were Creole (born on the plantation), or even whether you were of mixed race descended from unexpected mixtures, one found oneself faced with the same dehumanization, estrangement from the world, that had to be resisted by the underground creation of another world. 

The “nations” therefore became open congregations.

They practiced common dances, songs well connected to each other, specific tales, culinary practices, they cultivated special techniques and chosen beliefs. They got together for evenings, vigils, events and seemingly innocent social rituals. They thus weaved existential structures, and outlined, in the very middle of the plantation, an architecture of oblique meanings and values that the slaveholders could not perceive. The “nations” appointed themselves kings, queens, viceroys, vicequeens, ladies-in-waiting, squires, treasurer and flag bearers, masters of ceremonies and guardians of offices, with a flight of dignitaries (Governor-this, Consul-if-you-will, Captain-that, Marshall-nice-blouse…). Dressed in spectacular costumes, they adorned themselves in the trappings of the colonial powers: crowns, decrees, flags, braids, seals, insignia, hats, which appeared to the masters as mimetic attestations of submission. They referred to each other in such innocuous ways the slavers could only welcome it: names of Christian saints, flowers but also colors (Rose, Garnet, Violet…), underneath which were hidden martial designations or guised valor. Whereas slaveholders saw it only as mere operetta theatrics, feeding their own imaginations, the “nation” was a forum for narcissistic restoration and a majestic proclamation of humanity. It established mutual aid between the enslaved people for all stages of existence, accompanying births, marriages, and baptisms with brilliance and style, instituting social significance and relational networks, enlivening emotions foreign to plantation life, and above all: accompanying death.

When your life is stolen, you at least want control over your death. 

Everyone dreaded being buried haphazardly anywhere, whatever way, like a toad, without a beautiful lace garment, without a coffin, without even a grain of dignity, in some razed corner. The “nations” offered burials (usually hasty and desolate), and a cheerful ceremony, with dances, rhythms, songs, stories, official saints, authorized prayers, and loads of old, invisible forces. With the earnings from their resourcefulness, the members of a “nation” would contribute to tontines, bit by bit, penny by penny, which fueled the functioning of the group. And so, these organizations would serve as a generic matrix for the first mutualist societies, mutual aid societies, and other brotherhoods of cooperation, which were the basis for the trade unions and political parties in our countries. They would also be the unsuspected foundations of the Maroon revolts (starting in Martinique with the revolt of May 22, 1848) which, stitch by stitch, tore away at the official suppressions. And this is where we get even closer to Raphaël Barontini: these “nations” did not miss any opportunity to appear in broad daylight—to present themselves with sharp and high standards. Release the “convoys”! Or in Creole, the “konvwa”!...

 

The “nations” marched in fervent procession at even the slightest religious occasion. However, the ideal circumstance was Carnival. The settlers practiced it in their villages and cities, in their own way, with little wolves on their eyes, Venetian disguises, precious costumes and powdery makeup. The “nations” arrived there in “convoys,” processions imbued with ironic gravity, baroque solemnity, or in the joyful parades that the Creole language calls “vidés” or emptied. Adorned in ceremonial costumes, the kings, queens and extravagant series of dignitaries displayed their signs, insignias, banners, flags, canvases, colors, tattoos, shoes, stockings, English embroidery, collars and splendid laces… Their bodies were living canvases, standing banners, dancing sculptures that in Africa or Asia animate divine masks. Their very skins, adorned with vegetal hues, jewels, bracelets and necklaces were bases for creation. Each one created and recreated themself, beneath an indecipherable role which they performed with what smiling solemnity, cunning grace, vain decency, crazy pride and wild will can contain projecting joy. Europe in its diversity mixed with African and pre-Columbian presences, religious symbols that had fallen from the buccaneer ships so far from their ports, abandoned colors of all pallets spurned unprecedented intoxications. A rainbow of multiple symbolizations, linked to flowers, materials, repurposed objects, with refrains, cavalcades, recounted declarations… an excessive pomp in which the colonists saw nothing but grotesque, quirky, good-natured joy, but which, we now know, imposed on them a determined humanity.

 

One of the characteristics of the plantation system is that it was the primer, not only of the global capitalist regime that would plunge the globe into economic gehenna, but of a general state of shock. Cultures, civilizations, languages, gods, their imaginations, signs and symbols, were thrown into a maelstrom of fluidity and vertebral forces that Glissant would call: Tout-monde (All-world, or the world in its entirety). Everything is connected to everything. By shock, violence and domination, but also by secret circulations (fermentations, hybridizations, unpredictable mixtures, marvels of the composite, links between antagonists)—a creolization by which individuals will be freed from the monolithic envelopment of the old communities. Édouard Glissant would name this unpredictable fluidity: the Relation. The world over, these individuations would find themselves (like our creators in the sumptuous convoys) without any existential ready-to-wear models, with only the exhortation to create themselves, one by one, alone, improvising a meaning to their own existence, precipitated onto the neverending ladder of the interconnected world. They will be forced to solitarily invent new solidarities, not through community fusions, but on the relational basis of an “I,” creator, creative, committed and conscious, developing a foliage of “we” (shared dreams, ideals, struggles, utopias and potential follies). In a “convoy” of enslaved Black people, there might be Native Americans or even some poor white folks. Women could hold eminent positions. All were integrated into the processions and found themselves reborn into the collective intention. The “convoys” went beyond the sole level of resistance to envisage, beyond a solidarity of the dominated, the mobilization of a general meeting where everything could (on the basis of the parade, the song, the dance, the word, the sign and the symbol) be reborn, move forward, pulse lines of flight, recompose the world, live the world—where everything could enter into Relation.

 

I smile at the idea that the old Panthéon, asleep in its icy darkness, hesitating between the house of the gods, the church and the tomb; transfixed in its function of celebrating national history by wielding a large ax; excluding other stories, memories, the junctions of our diversities from its initial project; closed in by its narrow celebration of great men, to which the people, even less so the women, and even less so the Black people, could never reach; apical selection, inaccessible to persistent minorities; this vertical edifice of nation, created in an exclusive logic that guards borders, thus subjecting the world to a solitary vow; having recently experienced small openings, sparingly welcoming what had not been planned, modestly honoring what had never been envisaged until then; yes, I like the idea that this time, this monument of an old world, suddenly reveals this ovation of materials, forces and forms, fabrics, leathers, rhythms and colors, this

artistic “convoy” that triggers in through Raphaël Barontini.

I see Barontini as the son of the nasyon, heir to the “convoys,” a global meta-mestizo for whom the border is but the threshold of a flavor, an artist who is solitary yet in solidarity with all imaginations, who inhabits the world differently, who dreams of it differently, exercising the slogan of a collective trans-encountering that colonialism and the imperial spirit have so deeply distorted, and exercising it according to the sole credo of Beauty, to the point of transforming this age-old palace into a home—lively, sparkling, which resounds with the enthusiasm of solemnity, and the acclaim which Saint-John Perse ascribed to the highest esteem…

Raphaël, seer of chimeras, may this old monument be transformed through you in beautiful metamorphoses, may it resound—in its crypt, through its galleries, under its trinitarian dome—with a whole new world, and may it finally become—valid for all, with concern for all—a true pantheon of Relation.◆

​

​

Text commissionned for the Book "We could be heroes", published by JBE,

with the support of Mariane Ibrahim.

(2024)