Ever since the runup to “Orange Shirt Day,” I’ve been mildly obsessed with issues like settler colonialism, cultural genocide and acculturation in a global society. Known in Canada as a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, Orange Shirt Day is an occasion set aside on Sept. 30 to honor Indigenous children who were shunted off to boarding schools where their language and culture e[were stripped away. It’s a somber occasion, but also one that offers hope for a better future.
All of which has led me, quite unexpectedly to the 20th-century novelist William Faulkner and his novels of Yoknapatawpha County, based on his home in Oxford, Miss. For bettr and for worse, they are widely taken to represent the old South and its legacy of slavery and racism.
Even more unexpectedly, this focus on truth, reconciliation and the broad historical sweep of settler colonialism leads me to to a French poet, literary critic and postcolonial theorist from Martinique named Édouard Glissant.
To slightly misquote his profile in WIkipedia, Glissant “traced [deep] parallels between the history and culture of the Creole Caribbean and those of Latin America and the plantation culture of the American South, most obviously in his study of William Faulkner.” [The link is important, In some ways, we’re all products of a diverse global culture; we have more to learn from the Creoles than perhaps we think we do.]
I’ve read a bit of Glissant, especially a book titled Faulkner, Mississippi, and I want to get back to it. I think Glissant, especially his approach to a phenomenon called creolization, offers us a vision of truth and reconciliation. But, first, we need to take another look at Faulkner.
Faulkner isn’t very high on anybody’s reading list these days, for a variety of good reasons. But when I was a grad student in English at a Southern flagship state university during the 1960s, we all read him. And I came away from my reading convinced that slavery and what we now might call the ethnic cleansing of American Indians left a deep wound in the American soul, as Faulkner’s novels suggest so strongly, an original sin we haven’t yet fully atoned for.
Now more than ever, I believe it’s about much more than slavery, and it’s not confined to the South. Like it or not, Faulkner identified our original sin.
I’m not the only reader ever to feel this way. Here’s what Patrick Reardon, longtime urban affairs reporter and book reviewer for The Chicago Tribune says about a hunting story, “The Bear,” that features the wisdom a white youth named Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, scion of local aristocrats whose legacy is tainted by enslavement, learns from Sam Fathers, a mixed-race hunter of Black and Chickasaw blood who becomes his mentor. Reardon’s point is subtle, and it requires extended quotation in order to get the nuance:
[…] about “The Bear,” I can say it’s something very much like an epic poem.
The Iliad is about a war. The Odyssey is about a journey. “The Bear” is about something internal, an inner rot, a peculiarly American sin, the Original American Sin, if you will — slavery.
This is the corruption that slavery wreaks upon the whites who see themselves as masters, and upon their children and children’s children — often, as in this story, brothers and sisters, cousins and kin of different colors.
And not just slavery, but that particular American skill of turning land into real estate, the soil into a commodity. Using Nature, employing Nature. The way that Africans and African-Americans were used and employed without regard to the requirements of, well, kinship. Of humanity, if not blood.
I had never heard the term settler colonialism 50 years ago when I was reading Faulkner for the first time, but these themes all grow out of it. The term has been used in various contexts, some of them quite controversial, but Wikipedia has a useful a working definition as any:
Settler colonialism is a process by which settlers exercise colonial rule over a land and its indigenous peoples, transforming the land and replacing or assimilating its population with or into the society of the settlers[1][2][3][4][5] Assimilation has sometimes been conceptualized in biological terms such as the “breeding of a minority population into a majority”, but in other cases, such as in some parts of Latin America, biological mixing of populations was less problematic.[6]. [Links in the original.]
All of this is open to futher study, but I think we can safely say it fits the broad narrative sweep of US history, as well as the former French, Spanish and Portugese colonies in the Caribbean and Latin America. Faulkner is one of several American and Creole authors who explore this history.
In Faulkner, these themes come to a head toward the end of a short story called “The Bear.” In it, Faulkner contrasts the family ideals a young aristocrat named Isaac “Ike” McCaslin got from his biological father – a truth that “covers all things which touch the heart—honor and pride and pity and justice and courage and love” – with something far deeper that young McCaslin got from Sam Fathers, a hunter of mixed Black and Chickasaw Indian blood described in one of Faulkner’s gloriously extended sentences as the “inheritor on the one side of the long chronicle of a people who had learned humility through suffering, and pride through the endurance which survived the suffering and injustice, and on the other side, the chronicle of a people even longer in the land than the first, yet who no longer existed in the land at all save in the solitary brotherhood of an old Negro’s alien blood and the wild and invincible spirit of an old bear.”
Faulkner would return to remarkably similar language in his 1949 Nobel Prize address, when he spoke of “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.” Addressing himself to young writers at a time when the threat of nuclear annihilation seemed both real and imminent, he explained:
He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Stirring words, and words that resonated with me 15 or 20 years later as a young English major But the point here, in Faulkner’s “Bear,” and, I believe, in the narrative arc of American history, isn’t that simple.
The point, as I see it, is this: What Ike McCaslin’s father says about “pride and pity and justice and courage and love” is all true enough, but he has failed to live up to his fine aspirations about truth and the human heart. In Go Down Moses, a 40,000-word novella that expands on “The Bear,” Ike will refuse his family heritage – including his inheritance – and eke out a living as a carpenter and hunter.
Some of the historical implications were easy enough to work out when I read Faulkner in grad school. The McCaslin family obviously stands in for the Southern planter aristocracy. I had a double major in English and history, and I knew the Southern economy relied first on the enslavement of American Indians, then on Black people kidnaped in Africa and transported to the colonies. For complicated reasons, chattel slavery in the British colonies took on racist overtones less present in the French and Spanish colonies.
Others, I had to learn later. It wasn’t until I moved up north, several years after I left grad school, that I fully realized the racism that grew out of mass enslavement wasn’t a Southern problem, but a national, American problem.
Still more realizations came even later. As a grad student in the 1960s, I knew something about the narrative arc of American history: I knew what white folks loftily dismissed as “the Negro problem” was actually a white people problem, and it began with hoodwinking the Indians out of their land – pricing Manhattan real estate at $24?!? – or forcing them out at gunpoint. But I didn’t know much about the Indians until years later.
In all fairness, I guess we could say the same about Faulkner. In “The Bear,” he could write of Sam Fathers as the “son of a Negro slave and an Indian king and an Indian king,” thereby invoking the common Southern white stereotype of a half-remembered uncle who married a “Cherokee princess.” Faulkner’s Indians, in fact, are largely “the product of his historical imagination,” as Duane Gage puts it in the American Indian Quarterly, but he assigns them an important role in his understanding of the arc of American history.
In “The Bear,” he says Ike McCaslin caught glimpses of it when he was out in the woods:
He would hear it, not talking himself, but listening— wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it or Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey. It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in the ancient and unremitting contest by the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter […]
There’s something else here, too, and I don’t know quite what to do with it. Several times in “The Bear,” Faulkner sets key bits of dialog — or interior monolog — in a hunting camp at the edge of the wilderness. “Major de Spain would be there and sometimes old General Compson, and Walter Ewell and Boon Hoggenback and Sam Fathers and Tennie’s Jim, too.”
These characters, white and mixed-race alike (Tennie’s Jim is also of mixed Black and Chickasaw blood), are not only important in Isaac McCaslin’s formation. But they appear in other stories and novels, and some are foundational to Faulkner’s overall epic. Major de Spain and General Compson served in the Confederate army, for example, and represent the doomed planter aristocracy of Yoknapatawpha County.
Racial protocols of the era are observed, as Tennie’s Jim keeps the white hunters well supplied with whiskey and Brunswick stew, but I can’t help but wonder — is there a glimpse. of something that might lead to truth and reconciliation hovering, maybe just out of reach, in General Compson’s hunting camp? Even though Sam Fathers and Tennie’s Jim are clearly subordinate — subaltern, in the language of postcolonial theory — do the scenes set in the hunting camp hint hint at what a creolized space might look like? I don’t want to push this too far. Faulkner was a man of his time, and I use the pronoun advisedly, but I think I see glimpses, and I want to pursue them.
Faulkner, to be sure, is a flawed messenger. And a 19th-century hunting camp, imagined by a white Mississippian in 1942, is no model for race relations in the 21st century. Agreed. But we still have a lot to learn from Faulkner. The website Shmoop maes a case that resonates especially well with me. Written and curated for high-school and undergrad English students, Shmoop sets upwhat looks suspiciously like a straw man:
:Faulkner was a white male in the old South. He inherited its values and ideas about race, and many of his early writings contained racially stereotyped black characters and pretty disturbing views on race-mixing.
But, you protest, “That was then. This is now. We live in a post-racial society! We elected a biracial President! Twice! A film about slavery won the Academy Award for Best Picture! Some of my best friends are— .”
But they go on to inject a little nuance into the argument, linking a particularly vile personal letter Faulkner wrote in the 1920s:
What we’re saying is that, regardless of how much we think we embrace diversity, we all have a long way to go. Faulkner struggled his whole life to overcome the stereotypes he grew up with and to create a body of work that reflected that. Faulkner critics admit he had a “conflicted psyche” when it came to race (Source). He knew that as a white man, he had serious limits in understanding and portraying the African American experience. But he kept at it. [Link to letter in the original.]
So, the editors of Shmoop suggest, can we all.
“So, dig into this novel with your eyes wide open for both sides of Faulkner’s conflicted psyche,” they advise students who are assigned Go Down, Moses. “And more important, learn about your own.”
Which brings me back around to Édouard Glissant.
I first came across him several years ago by a circuitous route. When I was researching Swedish-American immigrant communities, I encountered a theme in postcolonial theory known as creolization. Best defined (by the Cambridge dictionary) as “the process of two or more cultures that were originally from different parts of the world mixing to produce a new culture”
The term “creole” was coined by linguists to describe mixed languages, predominantly in the Caribbean, that arose when Europeans, Africans and indigenous people were violently thrown together on colonial plantations. But over time, the concept was adopted by cultural anthropologists worldwide and used to describe everything from Swedish popular culture to the old-time “polkabilly” music of the upper Midwest in the 1930s and 40s. In a historical paper titled “Swedes in Roger Williams’ Garden: Acculturation in Immigrant Churches, 1848-1860,” I wrote:
In recent years, cultural anthropologists have used metaphors of hybridity, bricolage and creolization for the phenomenon. Especially influential has been Ulf Hannerz of the University of Stockholm, who borrowed the term creolization from linguists, to whom it signifies a colonial language with mixed new- and old-world antecedents, usually reflecting different racial and cultural backgrounds; Hannerz uses it to describe a generalized process whereby subordinate, or peripheral, cultures create hybrid forms that “put things together in new ways.” Like other students of the phenomenon, he quotes post-colonialist novelist Salman Rushdie, who once said his writing “rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.” While creolization theory can be seen as a post-colonial reaction to what cultural anthropologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse perceives as a “McDonaldization” of global culture, processes of creolization and decreolization have been going on at least since the ancient Greeks encountered the Egyptians and Persians and continues to the present.
(That paper I quoted extensivley in a 2022 blog post I headlined “Creolization: Jingoism v. jambalaya in France (with excerpts from my historical papers on the subject).”
Now here’s a plot twist I didn’t anticipate when I started this essay. Not a plot twist in Faulkner but a plot twist in my own engagement with the subject. It turns out I’d been researching creolization, and its impliations for the rising racism and xenephobia in America, in the summer and early fall of 2022. But in October of that year, I was diagnosed with cancer and forgot all about it as, to understate things a little, my mind turned to other things like chemotherapy; . So the next couple, three paragraphs are going to read like we’re going through a time warp.
It was when I was looking to expand my paper on “Swedes in roger Williams’ Garden,“ that I discovered Glissant. I hadn’t paid much attention to actual Creole writers before, but in June I discovered a special issue of a magazine called Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies. So I posted some links to the magazine (now all dead, alas!) and to a Feb. 13, 2011, obituary in The Guardian, by Celia Britton, author of Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance and professor of French literature at the University of Aberdeen and University College London. Two quotes from her obit stand out:
As a young man he campaigned for Martinique’s independence within a federation of Caribbean states. But in the 1980s he abandoned this project as unrealisable and broadened his focus to what he called the “tout-monde”: a view of the whole world as a network of interacting communities whose contacts result in constantly changing cultural formations. The concept of “relation”, earlier presented as a goal to which the isolated society of Martinique aspired, now became a worldwide reality: we are all in relation with each other and we all have a chance of making our voices heard.
And, in the lede of the obit, this assessment of the value of his oeuvre:
[…] Glissant’s body of work, comprising eight novels, nine volumes of poetry, one play and 15 collections of essays, constitutes not only a profound reflection on colonialism, slavery and racism, but also a powerful vision of a world where cultural diversity flourishes. He was shortlisted for the Nobel prize for literature in 1992.
All of this led me to Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi.
(Another plot twist in what I try no tto call my cancer journey: I sent off for the book in the summer of 2022, and I know it’s around here somewhere, either in my home office or a cardboardbox in the basement. I plan to find it and re-read it, along with a book on Faulkner and postcolonialism and a set of essays by the late Richard Marius, one of my history professors at UT-Knoxville. In the meantime I’ll just play the cancer card and ask Professeur Google to summarize Glissant’s book for me.)
So here’s what Google’s AI Overview had to say when I asked it to tell me about Glissant’s Faulkner Mississippi and creolism since, after all, we are talking about creolism here:
Édouard Glissant’s 1996 book Faulkner, Mississippi reclaims the American novelist William Faulkner as a “Creole” writer and uses his work to explore the dynamics of race, place, and creolizationn. [1, 2]
My newfound Google AI buddy listed several “core concepts,” of which these stand out:
- Reclaiming Faulkner as a Creole: Glissant bypasses standard critiques of Faulkner’s Southern racism by reading him instead through a Caribbean lens, viewing his dense, tangled regionalism as an intuition of cross-cultural mixing. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
- Atavism vs. Creolization: Glissant contrasts closed, “atavistic” cultures—which rely on pure lineage and rigid origin stories—with open, creolized societies that embrace transformation, relation, and the mixing of identities.
- Rhizomatic Style: Glissant characterizes Faulkner’s literary structure as rhizomatic—root-like and interconnected rather than linear—anticipating a global poetics of relation (la pensée archipélique). [1, 2]
- [The highlighting, which reflects the question I posed to Google AI, and links are in the original.]
There’s more to Glissant. A lot more. And there’s a lot more to his idea of creolization — which takes Ulf Hannerz’ and other anthropologists’ sense of the word, turns it on its head and thereby creates a metaphor for how people, athnic groups and societies can get along together in an increasingly atavistic, polarized world. In fact, left-wing French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon has already used on the campaign trail, according to this account on France 24, the French public television website:
During a December [2021] campaign rally, Mélenchon offered his own take on the idea. “Whatever one’s gender, colour or religion, we are called upon to love one another, and so we pool together our tastes and our cultures. That’s créolisation. Créolisation is the future of humanity,” he told a crowd of 5,000 at a venue west of Paris.
Expect to hear more of it in coming months. (In fact, I’ve been blogging about it since August 25, 2022, shortly before I got my diagnosis.) Mélenchon has already announced his candidacy in next year’s presidential election, and every indication is he will again offer a creolized alternative to right-wing leader Marine Le Pen and others who promote the grand remplacement great replacement theory advanced by French author Renaud Camus, US Vice President JD Vance and others.
But that all come later. As you can see, I’ve been sniffing at several promising rabbit trails the last couple, three weeks. (Who doesn’t love to go baying down a fresh rabbit trail?) And this whole idea of creolization, créolité or whatever you want to call it, may just have legs.
But, in the meantime, Iwant to get back to what I promised at first — some thoughts about Faulkner, racism, the participation of Blacks and American Indians in a racist society and, perhaps tying it together, what I’m beginning to think of as the great American bear hunt.
But first, a word from Celia Britton, in an essay in a 2012 collection of essays published by Liverpool University Press. It’s long, and it’s not an easy read. Britton quotes Glissant in French, then follows with an English translation in brackets, so we’re ping-ponging back and forth. But she lays out far better than I can how some of the rabbit trails I’ve been chasing converge. and they lead us to an understanding of America’s original sin. At one point, she concludes:
So there are three possible candidates for the status of the original sin: miscegenation, the theft of the land, and slavery. Throughout Faulkner, Mississippi, they reappear in varying combinations: miscegenation is the result of slavery – ‘la damnation, le métissage, né du viol de l’esclavage’ (FM, 124) [the damnation and miscegenation born of the rape of slavery (Glissant, 2000: 88)] – but is that the only reason why slavery is a crime? In fact, slavery is more often seen as a parallel crime to the appropriation of the land, a ‘perversion’, which undermines the attempt to found a legitimate community, but one which is ‘liée (sourdement, obscurément), à une injustice, une oppression, en l’occurrence, l’esclavage’ (FM, 169) [tied (secretly and nebulously) to injustice and oppression – namely, slavery (Glissant, 2000: 122)]. The two crimes are brought together in Go Down, Moses, where the Indian chief sells to the white settlers both the land which is not his to sell, and slaves (FM, 165). But in general terms there is no necessary link between them.
In a word, I would submit, settler colonialism. But I think there’s a glimpse of something else hovering — mostly unspoken, but in Google AI’s remarkably subtle word choice, “an intuition of cross-cultural mixing” in General Compson’s hunting camp.
I’d like to chase this rabbit further. There’s another essay in the Liverpool collection, by Michael Wiedorn of Georgia Techon how (and why) Faulkner can say more tan he says without really saying it, or, sa he puts in in his title, “Saying the Unsayable in Édouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner.” (Besides, strained metaphors about chasing literary rabbits, on the one hand, and a hunter of Black and Chickasaw heritage dishing out Brunswick stew in the hunting camp, on the other) are already dancing around in my head). But I promised to let Britton have the last word.
Besides, something keeps calling me back to General Compson’s hunting shack on the edge of the woods in Yoknapawtha County.
Even in my tweed-jacketed English major days, when we’d talk about the “great American novel,” I liked to speculate if one were ever written, it would be about a bear hunt. And I remember suspecting, even then, maybe Faulkner’s already written it.
Stray links and further reading
Celia Britton, The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant and Condé,” American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South, ed. Martin Munro and Celia Britton, (Liverpool, 2012; online edn, Liverpool Scholarship Online, (May 25, 2012) https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/19691/chapter/178489701
Michael Wiedorn, “Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Édouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner,” ‘, in Martin Munro, and Celia Britton (eds), American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South (Liverpool, 2012; online edn, Liverpool Scholarship Online, 20 June 2013), https://doi.org/10.5949/UPO9781846317200.011, accessed 3 Oct. 2026.xxxxx https://academic.oup.com/liverpool-scholarship-online/book/19691/chapter/178489254.
“Go Down, Moses: Introduction,” Shmoop University, Inc., Sco\ttsdale, Ariz. https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/go-down-moses/.
Also my blog post “Creolization: Jingoism v. jambalaya in France (with excerpts from my historical papers on the subject)” https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2022/08/25/creolization-jingoism-jambalaya-france/
[Uplinked Oct. 10, 2026]
