On the Marvelous in Literature, Black France, and Diaspora
(pg. 92/93)
Literature possesses tools to give voice to this simultaneity, expressing the modes of this double presence that connects worlds in conflict: to narrate several lands, several memories, the way in which dreams and the materiality of multiple territories are combined, the dismantling of time when the dead remain an indistinct presence alongside the living.
It can describe a double presence -- a ubiquity living in two places at once. It is a question of moving away from a sovereign, transparent subject, as the center of a linear narrative -- for it is precisely through this distancing that the literary marvelous operates.
In the realm of the marvelous, the world is no longer organized according to the laws of shared perception; it is governed by the non-ordinary, which ceases to be an object of astonishment.
The marvelous, to quote the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov, belongs to a class of narratives that admits the presence of the supernatural, in contrast with normal perceptions of reality, based on the principal of identity. Diasporic existing, then, invokes the language of the marvelous to describe:
the refusal to institute administrative borders between two territories as an effective physical limit; ubiquity or double presence; the recomposition of genealogies summoning the living and the dead to the same family banquet; the entanglement of temporalities in which lived, experienced time intermingles with stopped time (as an exile holds in their memory the date of their forced flight, and, after finding shelter, longs to return); the absence of caesura between matter and spirit (while on a real physical land, the country in one's dreams is not just nostalgia but living in spirit).
In the diasporic existence, time and space are dislocated--past and present coexist; future merges with days past. What is lived and experienced takes its place in the register of the marvelous.
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