Caribbean Interorality: A Brief Introduction

Abstract

“Interorality” is a terminological neologism I have created following Julia Kristeva ’s “intertextuality”.¹ It emphasizes a new and overlooked approach concerning the Caribbean culture of “the spoken word” inasmuch as it provides a critical spotlight on Caribbean epistemology and philosophy . It offers fundamental insights as to the seminal and philosophical importance of language and of “the word” or “ pawòl ” in the formation and articulation of what can be called Caribbean psychology and Caribbean philosophy, hence my attempt to pinpoint its hermeneutics. Interorality translates the complex phenomenological and epistemological process by which pre-existing oral texts are transmuted into new ones whose symbolic meaning and significance are intrinsically independent. It is a literary process whose mode is transposition , and at the same time, a philosophical approach to meaning, aesthetic, ethics and speech production in the Caribbean. Interorality critically distinguishes and specifies Caribbean orality . As a concept, it is a revealing indicator of Caribbean axiology and ontology . It encapsulates critical factors for examining, comprehending and establishing what can be termed, the metaphysics of Caribbean “pawòl.” I define the Creole term “pawòl,” which means “uttered word,” “speech” or “statement”, as the product of the long and constant epistemological and ethical struggle of the African enslaved in the Caribbean to proffer speech whose meaning, significance and purpose are outside of the unethical and a-human terms of the enslaver’s paradigm of thought and speech. It is an intelligible discourse characterized by historical, cultural, psychological, and philosophical factors, and brought about by ethical values.

This chapter is part of a much larger work that I described in my book , L’Interoralité caribéenne: Le mot conté de l’identité (Vers un traité d’esthétique caribéenne), (Saarbrücken: Éditions Universitaires Européennes, 2011). I am here offering a synthesis of some of the main points of interorality.