Mahagony: A Novel

Édouard Glissant's novels explore the loss of history and its social and political effects in Martinique, using a collective narrative of geographic identity and resistance. Mathieu creates a conscious history of these people to uncover the fundamental truths of their history.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 192 pages
Publication date: 01 January 2021
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

Édouard Glissants novels, closely tied to the theories he developed in Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation), are rich explorations of a deported and colonized peoples 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.

Weight: 254g
Dimension: 140 x 215 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781496201782