Glissant’s exposition and creative development of the concept of rhizome—and all attendant conceptions of times, memory, history, and the nomadic—gives his Poetics of Relation particular complexity. The problematic is really quite straightforward: what and who is the subject? The primary aim – even hope – of Glissant’s work is to produce or render a sense of Caribbeanness, a Caribbean subjectivity, which is something Fanon did not (could not?) accomplish. Why not Fanon? Fanon was the first to live his thinking, to paraphrase Glissant, and this “living” of his thinking delimits his theorizing of subjectivity. Now, Glissant’s remark sounds like praise of militancy, a kind of he-really-means-what-he-says admiration, but Glissant means here to underscore the fact that Fanon returned to Africa – both as a theorist and as an activist. Fanon, then, was seeking Africa, a root, a mother, a home. His work on negritude certainly gives plenty of evidence for Glissant’s remark.

Glissant wants to render Caribbeanness, not Africanness. To think the “tortured geography” of the Caribbean as what tears asunder with trauma, pain, and loss every turn to the past, but also gives possibility to thinking. Without nostalgia, that is, into a future. Yet, central to that future is a notion indebted to a particularly European citation of thinking: Deleuze’s notion of rhizome. What comes into view through the concept of rhizome is a sense of subjectivity attentive to trauma and loss, but also open to a future liberated from nostalgia; the rhizome needs no single root and does not need (or even thrive on) fixity and permanence. Glissant is here playing on the peculiar geography of the Caribbean, of course, but also responding to the abyss of the past we have named “Middle Passage.” The abyssal rooting in the past generates Glissant’s poetics of detour, diversity, and relation.

So, if an abyssal root gives creolized thinking to itself, which is precisely the claim Glissant makes about the relation of traumatic memory to the future, then how are we to conceive subjectivity? Implicit in the interval between traumatic memory and open future is, of course, a subject. This subject is bound by the conditions of the Middle Passage and its production of the Caribbean context within which subjectivity emerges. What is subjectivity born of an abyssal root? Who, what, and how is the Caribbean of “Caribbeanness”?

Subjectivity is generated both by and as temporal interweaving. From past into present toward future, subjectivity emerges as both the product of memory and the bearer of an open future. This ek-static moment is the condition of subjectivity as such, but the function of traumatic memory changes everything. Subjectivity emerges from Glissant’s traumatic memory, rooted in abyss and given to thinking with ghostly figures. If subjectivity cannot appeal to a single root in history, memory, or place as a holder of center, then we have to think the subject without fixity. What names this subject? How can we think subjectivity without what, for Glissant, are ultimately nostalgic undertones and resonances of alienation and dispossession? Glissant’s answer in Poetics of Relation is the rhizome and its peculiar nomadic character. “Rhizome” names the poly-rooted character of Caribbean subjectivity—the creolized subject—and “nomad” denotes the mobility of this repudiation of the single root and assertion of creolization. Without a single root, yet rooted in an abyssal past-cum-future, nomadic subjectivity moves across the rich, even opaque, terrain of creolized intellectual space. It is precisely this movement and this terrain that sustains Glissant’s conception of subjectivity.

Further, Glissant’s appeal to the rhizome opens the question of his relation to Deleuze, toward whom he only gestures. How is Glissant’s rhizome to be distinguished from Deleuze’s conception of the same—viz., what differences emerge when the rhizome emerges out of the historical experience of trauma, rather than the aporias of epistemology and metaphysics? How, for Glissant, is the rhizome to be all at once rendered a noun, adjective, and a verb? How is rhizomatic subjectivity at once thought as collective and particular? How do notions of opacity, relation, detour, and return describe the limits and possibilities of Glissant’s subject? The answer of course lies in Glissant’s development of the rhizome in a critical relationship to Deleuze’s work, a relationship that enacts, at the level of thinking subjectivity within historical experience, something akin to what Dussel calls “trans-modernity.” Dussel’s claim is that the post-modern proliferation of truths, destruction of the meta-narrative, and so on takes place in a kind of conceptual decadence – an excess or surplus within which foundations become untenable, if not absurd. The trans-modern, however, rejects modernity and post-modernity, not out of excess or surplus, but out of a condition of peripherality. From the periphery, there is no modernity to surmount, no single root to be repudiated through an emergence of narratives. Rather, to say it again, the periphery has never had such privileges; the indigenous, the afro-descended, the mixed, all begin without a fantasy or singular origins.

Glissant’s notion of Caribbeanness is exactly this periphery come back to itself. A tortured geography, sure, because of the pain of the past, the trauma of the Middle Passage that gives birth to the literal and figurative space of the Caribbean. But also a geography which has never fantasized itself as modernity, which has always already had its roots in so many cultural fragments. Trans-modernity par excellence. As trans-modern, Glissant’s rhizome decisively transforms Deleuze’s Eurocentric post-modernity from another site and another experience of history, opening Caribbean subjectivity to what Poetics of Relation calls “Diversity.” Glissant’s rhizome does not emerge out of a conceptual excess. It emerges, rather, out of a history that gives an abyss to thinking, which is then translated into a future without nostalgia, diverse in its sources, already creolized, asking only that one say yes.