Mahagony

A Novel

Édouard Glissant, Betsy Wing

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496224750
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A New York Times New and Noteworthy Book Édouard Glissant's novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relatio n (Poetics of relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized people's loss of their own history and the ever-evolving social and political effects this sense of groundlessness has caused in Martinique. In Mahagony Glissant identifies both the malaise of and the potential within Martinican society through a powerful collective narrative of geographic identity explored through multiple narrators. These characters' lives are viewed back and forth over centuries of time and through tales of resistance, linked always by the now-ancient mahogany tree. Attempting to untangle the collective memory of Martinique, Mathieu, the contemporary narrator, creates a conscious history of these people in that place—a record that unearths the mechanics of misrepresentation to get at the fundamental, enduring truths of that history, perhaps as only the mahogany tree knows it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Chronology
• LE TROU-À-ROCHES
• Mathieu
• The One Who Serves as Husband
• Eudoxie
• Hégésippe
• Lanoué
• Mathieu
• MALENDURE
• The Descent
• Longoué
• Artémise according to Adélaïde
• A Cock for Asklepius
• Mathieu
• Odibert
• THE WHOLE-WORLD
• Marie Celat
• Ida
• Mathieu
• The Commentator
• Resurfacing
• Passion according to Mathieu
• About Édouard Glissant
• About Betsy Wing