Sounding out the Storm: Echoes of the Abyss in Édouard Glissant’s La Terre Inquiète

In this article, I argue that Atlantic hurricanes can be understood as an echo of colonial injustices inflicted upon the Earth and its more marginalized inhabitants during the period of Plantation Slavery. I turn to Glissant’s concept of the écho-monde to make sense of the destructive turbulence of the “modern tempest.” The écho-monde is an often sonic structuring of the chaos-monde that gives meaningful expression to the constantly evolving, transhistorical relations between different cultures, geographies, and events. The échos-monde refers to structures through which the chasmic silences and brutal dissonances of New World history are made audible. I suggest that the poems from one of Glissant’s earliest collections, La terre inquiète (Citation1955) provide a poetic patterning of the écho-monde, despite being published over three decades before it was conceptualized in Poetics of Relation. In La terre inquiète echoes of the past become intelligible only as they are whispered through the eco-historical matrix that gave rise to them. Instead of being interred at a physical site, historical memory in La terre inquiète echoes across oceans, islands, and generations, becoming meaningful through its indissoluble relation with the island environment.