After Édouard Glissant’s Abécédaire
“The urge to exist throbbing within and around us—we strive to bring it all together.” —Édouard Glissant
On the occasion of The Earth, the Fire, the Water, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant at CARA (on view through May 10, 2026), we engage with Édouard Glissant’s Abécédaire (2008), an ABC primer of sorts that takes the form of a thirteen-hour, filmed conversation with Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau, as a prompt for polyvocal dialogue around figures, themes, and specific terms central to the poet and philosopher’s thought. From the duet to the many, CARA invited scholars, poets, artists, and thinkers to attend to the four of these term-concepts. Nolan Oswald Dennis, Sylvie Séma Glissant, and Chang Yuchen on “Alphabet”; Michel DeGraff, Kaiama Glover, and Miho Hatori on “Creolization”; Chris Cyrille, Christopher Rey Pérez, and Sónia Vaz Borges on “Errantry”; and Miryam Charles, Olivier Marboeuf, and Pat Noxolo on “Trembling” (also translated as “tremors”) or “Trembling thought” (la pensée du tremblement). Their reflections, collected on CARA’s digital research page, will continue to be published throughout the exhibition and after its closing.
Excerpts from L’Abécédaire d'Édouard Glissant are on view in the exhibition, through May 10, and a selection has been translated into English and published for the first time in the exhibition’s accompanying publication.
