Chapter 2

“Some slave is rotting in this manorial lake”

Derek Walcott and Édouard Glissant are two major Caribbean authors of the twentieth century who are seldom studied in a comparative approach, despite overarching similarities that provide insights into Caribbean literature as a whole. Their approach to a fundamental aspect of history in the Caribbean, that of slavery, is similar in that they perceive these plural histories to be incomplete, fragmentary, and lacking positive meaning. For both authors, retracing the history of slavery means memorializing it through fiction (in the sense of literary invention), used as a tool for questioning dominant narratives and traditional historical epistemologies. They both create idiosyncratic, sometimes voluntarily anachronistic, memories of slavery to represent silenced voices and provide a reconciliatory vision of the past.