The Power of Silence in Edouard Glissant's The Fourth Century

Throughout his novel, The Fourth Century, Edouard Glissant weaves the recurring motif of silence and its importance. Sometimes this is realized through characters who do not speak, such as Edmee and her mother. Other times Glissant instils his quieter characters with otherworldly powers. The character of Melchior, especially as a child, is depicted as quiet, yet somehow powerful. Glissant writes that Melchior, “took things in passively, neutrally, so that you could not say he was unhappy to be there, but then he also never made the slightest gesture or spoke the least word of acquiescence (Glissant 126). Melchior epitomizes, for Papa Longoue, what it means to be a Longoue. Melchior, for all his silence does not acquiesce, does not accept. This, as Papa Longoue points out to Mathieu early on in their discussions, is what differentiates the Longoues from the Beluses, the maroons from the slaves, “the ones who refused [from] the ones who accepted” (Glissant 50).

The continual interplay between refusal and acceptance, of silence and speech permeates the novel. Though they at first seem divided, the Longoues and the Beluses are tied together. They cannot exist without each other just as the slaves and maroons need each other for survival, and silence and speech need the other to define them. Papa Longoue’s mother Stephanise, “Tall-Stephanise, full of real noise” is contrasted with Papa Longoue’s wife Edmee “with that mouth locked with four locks, that bar across the triangular face”(Glissant 230). It is through her interactions with Edmee that Stephanise “discover[s] to her amazement that stubbornness [can] take root far from shouts and noise” (230). Edmee is stubborn, defiant even powerful, despite her silence.

Glissant’s motif of silence recurs again near the end of the novel when he writes about Mathieu:

He experienced how it was possible for people (he did not even go so far as to say: a people) to leave, to run dry, leaving no descendants, no fruitfulness in the future, enclosed within their death which was truly the end of them, for the simple reason that their speech was dead too, stolen. Yes. Because the world, for which they listened either passionately or passively, had no ears to hear a lack of voice. Mathieu wanted to shout, to raise his voice, to call from the depths of the little land toward the world, toward forbidden countries and faraway places. But the voice itself was unnatural and Mathieu could sense that: he himself, strangely sent off to the frontiers, split there between the straightforward universe of cane and clay and straw (where speech was no help in watching or digging for anything) and the other zone, the one of people who speak but where he sensed that what they said was nothing, just smoke already bluish against the abyss of the great sky. (Glissant 269)

This passage puts one in mind of the postcolonial idea of the subaltern or the “oppressed subject” (Gandhi 3). Mathieu wants, by raising his voice, to speak for those whose “speech [is] dead …stolen” and yet knows at the same time that “the voice itself [is] unnatural” (Glissant 269). He understands that an attempt to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves would, in a sense, take the power of their silence. He also realizes that “the other zone”, where people speak, does not contain the power to return a voice to those from which speech was stolen, if, for no other reason than because those who can speak, truly say nothing (Glissant 269).

This realization by Mathieu helps him to finally understand what Papa Longoue has been trying to teach him all along; that their history cannot be traced down through time simply as a list of chronological events. That history books cannot tell their story because so much of the story is memory and understanding and so many parts of the story are lost through silence. Perhaps the true reason for the enmity between Longoue and Beluse will never be known. Whether it the result of a swap of one man for others with the slave traders in Africa, as Papa Longoue suggests, or not; and perhaps the reason really doesn’t matter. Silence and mystery, that which is unsaid, or unknown, seem to be ever-present in the history of the Longoues and Beluses. Silence plays an integral part in the story by making one acknowledge that some people have no voice with which to speak, no place to speak from which they can be heard.

Works Cited

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Columbia University Press. New York, 1998.

Glissant, Edouard. The Fourth Century. University of Nebraska Press. Lincoln, 2001.