Tennessen


I think it is more likely that nobody understands
language anymore (except, of course, the loa) which
makes it even more exclusive and more sacred than ever.
Only the ritual abolishes meaning, Baudrillard reminds
us. Ritual discourse resists the arbitrariness of
language not by rejecting that authority (i.e. by merely
opposing it) but by imposing an even more arbitrary
ritual which, in the case of language, has become
completely incomprehensible to those who make use of it.

 One could also say that circular discourse brings
about an overturning of the signified and furthermore,
it does so by throwing into confusion binary opposition
like those of positivist thinking: truth versus error,
etc. Returning once again to the example of French and
Creole, we might argue that French, like most modern
Western discourses, is logocentric, that is, it assumes
that the word can yield immediate access to "true"
meanings. Creole, on the other hand, makes no such
claim and, in fact, prefers to take detours instead of
the straightforward path. In the D.O.M. French still
functions in the context of a male-governed society,
that of Paris, while Creole is an element within this
society which undermines it. The struggle is political
as well as linguistic because Creole disrupts both stable
meanings and institutions--the Catholic church and the
institution of marriage are frequent targets of the
Creole joke. The very structure of the Creole language,
in addition, illustrates this point. Verb tenses, for
example, are sometimes open to more than one interpretation
--li manj6 in Haitian Creole, for instance, corresponds
to il mange and to il a mange in French, that is, to both
the present and past tenses. In general, distinctions
between masculine and feminine do not exist in Creole
and the plural is only indicated when a noun is determined
(in the grammatical sense). Creole talk is disorderly
because it rearranges a status quo that we have come to
take for granted. This disorder, it should be added, is
not so much an absense of order as it is a reversal of
an established order, a reordering, so to speak; that is,
it does not do away with definitions and categories but
rather reconstitutes them.

 In the Creole folktale it is the political status
quo which is turned upside down. Certain characters
such as le roi, who symbolizes Europeans, and Compere