ABSTRACT
Edouard Glissant’s statement that the Caribbean is a land of enracinement (rooting) and errance (wandering, drifting) is appropriate to both the history and the literature of the West Indies. It also forms the central image in his analysis of aesthetics, extended by the metaphor of the deep underground ‘root’, the plant which gets its sustenance from the soil in which it is planted and which wilts or dies when pulled out, versus the ‘rhizome’, a horizontal stem which sends out shoots both above and below the surface to enlarge its field of nourishment. For Glissant, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher, West Indian culture is a hybrid, enriched by the grafting of various civilisations onto the islands of the Caribbean basin.
