Creolization in the Making of the Americas

Abstract

Inscribed in the American landscape, opening up through it, living in and manifsting it, there is a civilizational region, real but long unnoticed, perhaps because it was balkanized by occidental colonizers. This is the region of the plantation system;' composed of the West Indies and the Caribbean, the Caribbean coast of Latin America (that is to say, the coastal part of Venezuela and Colombia, which is different in many respects from the South American Andes), the Guyanas, the northeastern part of Brazil, and part of the southern United States. It is connected to Mexico and Central America, whose West Indian character is obvious both in Panama and in Belize. The boundaries of Panama and Belize define a more extended area, between South America, of which these countries form a part, and North America. Some call this region the of the Americas;' but this parallel seems vague. Historically, the spinning, revolving movement of the cultures that have lived on its edges have made the Mediterranean a concentrating sea. All around it, the contacts and conflicts between cities and ethnic groups have gradually led to the reality of the Imperium (that is, the inland sea of the Romans) and to the concept of the One. The Mediterranean certainly cannot be considered a monolithic entity; it has generated, given birth to, the nations and the nationalism of a large part of Europe. Nevertheless, its cultural diversities, through osmosis and successive conflicts, have given rise to a universalizing expression of rationality or spirituality. It is not a coincidence that most of the principal monotheistic religions (Hebrew, Christian, Islamic) appeared there and were in opposition to each other. By contrast, and in accordance with the same revolving movement of contacts and conflicts, the Caribbean Sea is the sea that diffracts. Since 1492, it has been a preface to the continent (in the seventeenth century, it was sometimes known as the Sea of Peru), a place of passage, of transience rather than exclusion, an archipelago-like reality, which does not imply the intense entrenchment of a self-sufficient thinking of identity, often sectarian, but of relativity, the fabric of a great expanse, the relational complicity with the new earth and sea. It does not tend toward the One, but opens out onto diversity. The concept of diversity, which expressed itself as one of the poetic dreams of the expanding Occident, and simultaneously as an antidote to the universal empire that this expansion subsumed, is an immediate, real-life experience of the people in the area I mention here - no longer a dream nor an aspiration, but for them, a firsthand, basic reality. These people were both deported and imported: the natives of the islands Caribs and Arawaks - were all slaughtered, except for a tiny handful at present living in a reservation on the Dominican Island. At the same time, the slave trade brought to the Caribbean the determining factor of the African population. This experience of diversity, and the long-unnoticed process it spawned, 1 label creolization. Creolization is not an uprooting, a loss of sight, a suspension of being. Transience is not wandering. Diversity is not dilution. When we speak about creolization, we do not mean only metissage: crossbreeding, because creolization adds something new to the components that participate in it. Why do we use this term? It refers to the Creole languages, and we must now examine the reasons for this. In our search for the explanation, we must distinguish between creole languages, pidgin, and dialect, but without applying any hierarchical notions to these distinctions. A creole language is not a type of pidgin. A pidgin language plays with the elements of one language, and disturbs them, lexically and syntactically. The principal characteristic of a pidgin form of communication is its aggressive treatment of the language in which the pidgin forms appear. …

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