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.