The Interdependence of the Maroon Identity

The social structure found in Edouard Glissant’s The Fourth Century depicts a bizarrely interdependent society initiated and based on the presence of master and slave. Although, power does not solely reside in one set of hands. The differentiation between maroon, slave, and plantation owner society exists from the moment that Longoue and Beluse are brought to island and, therefore, to the paradigm of slave and master. The hierarchy that is established on La Pointe des Sables and the surrounding hills and plains is a three-fold system. Slaves exist at the bottom of this hierarchy and above them are both the maroons and plantation owners. As independent societies the maroons and the plantation owners are mutually as powerful. The owners derive their power from the Eurocentric discourse that legitimates the domination of Europeans over people of colour. While the maroons draw power from their assertion of defiance against the slave system and, consequently, their acquirement of freedom. Both groups clearly recognize each others’ potential and present power which keeps them locked in an interdependent relationship based upon fear, respect, and self-assumed superiority. However, ultimately the maroon needs the presence of both slave and plantation slave owner to prolong his power and special status.

Longoue’s escape from La Roche is an escape from a future of inevitable servitude and a bold defiance to the enslaving structure. Already he is a "maroon from the first day" and even a "maroon from the first hour" (Glissant 38). The existence of the maroon society is a firm assertion that they are not slaves. The maroons will not adhere to being enslaved to the plantation owners, but they also view themselves as superior to the slave. In their minds’ eye, as those who have "refused" the maroons’ defiant spirit will always elevate them above the slaves who have chosen to "accept". At the same time, the maroon needs the presence of the slave to dialectically secure his position as non-slave. Because of their decision to take freedom and assert their power the maroons exist literally and figuratively above and beyond those whom they left behind. As dwellers in the hills, the maroon society literally looks down upon the slave society: a constant reminder of the differentiation. In fact, it is a conscious thought in the maroon’s psyche that questions "why don’t [the remaining slaves] all become maroons?" (90) and turn to the hills and embrace freedom. The two must exist separately in order for the maroon to remain as the powerful overseer.

The maroon society exists apart from the world of the plantation and therefore exists outside of its laws and hierarchies. The maroons were intended for slavery but they have decidedly cast off the slave mentality. They do not fit into the subordination of the plantation for they have physically removed themselves from it. However, from the plantation perspective the maroons, as clearly neither slave nor plantation owner, retain a status similar to their own. Both plantation owners and maroons are independent, self-sufficient societies who do not answer to a higher authority. The power that each holds is mutually respected, for it is recognized that one needs the other to exist to prolong this balance. Specifically, the maroons have the power to greatly damage the La Roche plantation in their revolts; likewise, the La Roche, with enough will, could ultimately seek out the maroons and destroy them. Longoue proclaims that "the whole time [he] protected [La Roche]" (108) from attacks and raids. Both groups are primarily motivated by self-interest and require their interdependence for survival. The maroons need the presence of the plantation to vindicate their existence. They ultimately need something to remain in opposition to: a subject to turn their defiance towards. The initial existence of the maroon society is based upon a dialectic with the enslaving plantation, and without its presence the foundation of the society is negated.

Headache and History:
Mathieu’s Disenchantment and Remembering of the Spiritual Past(s)

“He longed for the place so distant that its light would reach him like an arrow of flame in the region where eyes can no longer see. There was another past, there were other nights to get through before, breathless, he would reach a morning’s half-light. He sensed this with all his body. And of course, for as long as he did not come out there he would be afraid of the dark. And though he was sceptical and no longer believed in the power of the quimboseur, behind that wrinkled forehead and beneath the words spinning faster and faster, he also was watching for a country whose quaking, whose extinguished or forbidden truths now freely rekindled, troubled him even more seriously” (Glissant 265)

“The past. Tell me about the past, Papa Longoue! Just what is it?” (7) Found at the beginning of Glissant’s novel The Fourth Century, and said by the curious Mathieu Beluse, this question sets up the argument for the rest of the novel between a child and a quimboiseur. The previous passage also concerns Mathieu Beluse and is found at the end of. What is striking about this passage is the language that is used, and the importance it has for the psyche of Mathieu at the end of the novel and its importance to history, and how history is fragmented like a rhizome and remembered, which is a main theme that Glissant uses in this novel.
The language in this passage is tremendously loaded with symbols, ambivalence and emotional distress. The first line denotes that what Mathieu is searching for is almost ungraspable. Seeing is related to the linear way of thinking that Mathieu represents; so the part that says “in a region where eyes can no longer see” (265) means that he will only understand the spirit of the ‘pasts’ (or “place”) and will be unable to grasp the past in a linear form that he wishes. “[L]ike an arrow of flame” denotes the militaristic and violent past of the slave trade (allegorized by the brawl between Beluse and Longoue in the first part of the story). Ambiguity is seen in “words spinning faster and faster.” Here, words spin and morph into different meanings, similar to Derrida’s deconstruction. A country that quakes, sounds to me like a country that is on the brink of losing everything that could give them their true identity.
Mathieu is in the hospital with a headache. Mentally, he is fighting with what Longoue has told him; his linear, school-trained brain is having trouble believing that the present is not what it seems and that the past was fragmented in a series of multiple pasts lined up side by side. Beluses fear of the dark means his fear of the past and what might come of him when he understands the anger, the darkness and the rhizome-like nature of the past that Longoue has narrated for him. Although, he is said here to have disbelieved everything that the quimboseur had told him, he is starting to see reality in a different light and is searching for those hints of oppression and colonization.
In a greater context this quotation deals with history and the remembering of history through understanding that their is no “real” history, but multiple histories and pasts, organized in a rhizome like fashion. “There was another past” is a clear example this. Only by understanding and “living” these multiple pasts can someone understand the present.
Mathieu’s struggle is on an epic scale, as he relives the past(s), he is seeing the pain and suffering that has created his present. A present he is now starting to reconfigure as the veil of forgetting has been lifted by the quimboiseur. It s a step forward in the need to remember the past that so many have forgotten.