Abécédaire: Tremors

For Another World
Miryam Charles

There often seem to be two worlds that refuse to meet, or even to recognize one another.

I think about this disconnect often. About what I see and feel as a Black woman from Haiti, yet shaped largely by life in the West. Sometimes I wonder if my sensitivity to what surrounds me, my attention to people, to silences, to what remains unseen, comes precisely from that position. From having grown up between two languages, two ways of seeing, only to return to my mother tongue as an adult. A language I speak now with the accent of the country where I have spent the majority of my life, a language that carries tremors beneath its surface, subtle reminders that we are alive, that life will always shift, and that there will always be another path, another way of being.

From a very young age, I developed a gaze. Or was I forced to? A way of noticing what is not spoken about. Of lingering with what we are collectively taught not to see. That gaze carries tremors too: They are necessary. They remind us that we are alive, that nothing is fixed, that change is possible, and that other routes, other ways of living, always exist.

I often return to this fracture: on one side, people who suffer, who are oppressed, brutalized; on the other, a system in which life continues undisturbed by what is happening. A system in which we call ourselves free.

I think about utopia. About Édouard Glissant, who wrote that utopia is necessary. Utopia is not an escape from reality, but a gesture toward it. A way of reconnecting with our shared humanity, of reviving the desire to act for something larger than ourselves, and of creating spaces where empathy can still circulate. But utopia cannot exist without wandering. Not wandering as loss, but as possibility.

To wander freely is to step outside the paths that were drawn for us, paths often designed by others, and for others. Wandering becomes a form of resistance, a way of inventing new routes. Perhaps it is along these uncertain paths, carried by tremors that remind us we are alive, that we rediscover ourselves. That we begin to glimpse what a poetic life might look like. A life that could belong to all of us, if we allowed ourselves the space to exist together.

And perhaps on those new paths, utopia would no longer be a distant dream, but the fragile outline of a more just and open world.

Miryam Charles is a filmmaker of Haitian origin living in Montreal. Her films have been shown at various festivals in Quebec and abroad. Her first feature, Cette maison, premiered at the Berlinale, was presented at the AFI FEST, and was included in the TIFF Top 10 and Sight and Sound’s Best Films of the Year in 2022. Her work has been shown at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; the Galerie Leonard & Bina Ellen Art, Montreal; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; basis, Frankfurt; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. In 2025, Miryam was the recipient of the inaugural Charles Officer Legacy Award, presented by TIFF and CBC. She is currently working on her next feature film, Vers le soleil ou plus près encore.

Pat Noxolo

Édouard Glissant’s “tremorous thought”¹ speaks to a thoroughly entangled planet. As Glissant knew, subatomic particles remain entangled with one another, irrespective of distance.² Here and there are ultimately inseparable. More uncannily, they are superpositioned, or located in many places at once. Since it is measurement that fixes their location, their superpositioned state is effectively “immeasurable.”³ This obscure unfixedness at the heart of matter makes for “obscure channels” that link our bodies directly to and across our “trembling world” and to each other.⁴

And yet, our planetary “throwntogetherness”⁵ highlights a rich diversity that instantaneous global communications have only just equipped humanity to begin to appreciate. Now that we can instantly livestream the diverse and “ongoing catastrophes”⁶ that constantly remake our scientific forecasts,⁷ we might turn again to Glissant for the greater “subtlety”⁸ he advocates in how to understand our planet. Such subtlety erases colonial master narratives that sought to define historical progress by “calculat[ing] . . . the flow of the world’s matter through time.”⁹

Loosening our planetary grip, we need the courage to tremble with the chaotic energy of the cyclone and the earthquake. To paraphrase Patrick Chamoiseau, History can no longer be smoothed into straight lines.¹⁰ All we have now is Time, untrained, “like a leashed dog that steps forward, rolls back, shivers, skids and takes a sharp right.” Glissant’s more seismic “thought” is an energy that can “sink here, rise there, branch off here, run along there,”¹¹ bringing a more humanized and politicized spatial turn. Unlike Time, tremorous thought is not skittish or fearful. Drawing from the earthquake’s powerful mustering of the “energies in the living earth,”¹² the tremor quivers with “possibilities for restorative change.”¹³ Only within bodies and minds that shimmy and shake the channels of entanglement can we hope to intuit the chaotic choreography of the megacity, or the enviro-climatic eruptions of our overworked planet.

Professor Pat Noxolo’s research brings together the study of international culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive, and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices, including dance, visual arts, and literature. She was awarded the 2021 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Murchison Award and chaired the RGS’s annual conference in 2025. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Pat has led two international teams exploring Caribbean in/securities and creativity, funded by Leverhulme and by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and she is co-lead of University of Birmingham’s Stuart Hall Archive Project. She commissioned the report “Supervising Black Geography PhD Researchers in the UK” (2021), and is co-founder and co-lead of the Fi Wi Road internships for Black Geography undergraduates.

^NOTES
1 Édouard Glissant on “tremorous thought” in “Abécédaire: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Patrick Chamoiseau,” recorded in January 2008, trans. Sebastião Nascimento, published in The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant (New York: CARA; São Paulo: Instituto Tomie Ohtake, 2025), 60.
² See Pat Noxolo, “Quantum Black Creative Geographies: Embodiment, Coherence and Transcendence in a Time of Climate Crisis,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 46, no. 1 (2025): 6–17.
³ Glissant, “Abécédaire,” 60.
⁴ Édouard Glissant, introduction to Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 2.
⁵ Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 140.
⁶ Glissant, “Abécédaire,” 61.
⁷ Alexandra Witze, “The Pace of Climate Change Is Speeding Up – The Pace Nearly Doubled in Ten Years,” Nature 651 (March 2026): 569–70.
⁸ Glissant, “Abécédaire,” 60.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, trans. Rose-Miryam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 293.
¹¹ Glissant, “Abécédaire,” 61.
¹² Wilson Harris, Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. Andrew Bundy (London: Routledge, 1999) 187.
¹³ Glissant, “Abécédaire,” 61.