A project of opacity

As a strategy of protection, opacity sometimes takes the form of simple concealment: hiding from the oppressive Other. Thus, one image for it is the forest into which the slaves escaped and where the maroon communities lived, and which was "the first obstacle the slave opposed to the transparency of the planter" (CD, 83). But the forest is disappearing, and its loss is symbolically as well as literally destructive. In Malemort Glissant writes of "the vast leprosy of erosion of deforestation eating away at the great mountain wringing your heart with all the present woes and all the woes that are still to come" (179). The forest provided invisibility, in other words, but is no longer an adequate metaphor for opacity; the concept of opacity in general is part of a far more complex structure of seen and unseen, seeing and not seeing, that determines the relations between "discoverer" and "discovered." In the first place, the colonizer's power obviously depends to a large extent on surveillance. He cannot control what he cannot see.26 In Le quatrième siècle, the newly arrived slave "learned right from the first day that the master only really existed when he was looking at you; despite the permanent fear and the leaden hand that seemed to keep you forever down in the mud; that the master lost some of his power when he had turned his back on you, as though he could command only by imposing the flux of his gaze, which dried up as soon as he turned away from you" (79). But, as the immediate, face-to-face nature of this encounter implies, the master's power depends also on the slave seeing that the master sees him; that is, the colonizers exercise their domination not only by seeing but by being seen, and by being seen to be powerful. And, since the masters were heavily outnumbered by the slaves, it was the individual figure of the master that had to inspire fear and obedience. As Fanon puts it, the master had to be an exhibitionist: "The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native [colonisé] out loud that there he alone is master." The extraordinary ostentation and visual extravagance of colonial life (in clothes, architecture, etc.) in the period of slavery was a strategy of intimidation; as Roger Toumson writes, "The system of terror calls for a system of sumptuous extravagance." 27 But the relationship between colonial master and slave is not limited to a purely rational exercise of power. It is widely recognized (since Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, if not before) to include also a dimension of unconscious desire and fear. Similarly, in "Poetics and the Unconscious" Glissant makes it clear that opacity is not simply a practical, rational strategy on the part of the colonized, but a constituent of their collective unconscious (CD, 159). It is thus not surprising that the interchangeability of the two forms of power that is, surveillance and intimidation, seeing and being seen and the ease with which one crosses over into the other are also reminiscent of the reversibility of the psychic drives analyzed by Sigmund Freud. Indeed, one of Freud's main examples is the relation between voyeurism and exhibitionism, the two closely connected variants of the scopic drive. Sight and visibility, in the colonial relationship, relate to a domination that goes beyond conscious, rational concerns of imposing or eluding control and includes a strong element of unconscious fantasy. Power and pleasure merge together, in the way outlined by Bhabha in his analysis of "the peculiar visibility of the nature of colonial power," to result in a form of exhibitionism that exceeds the narrowly practical aim of imposing control. Significantly, it is this exhibitionism, rather than the colonizer's powers of surveillance, as common sense might dictate, that is given in "Poetics and the Unconscious'' as the reason for the colonized subject's desire for opacity. This desire is provoked not by the gaze of the master but by the exaggerated "transparent" visibility of his presence not the master as all-seeing, but the master as seen: "The only source of light ultimately was that of the transcendental presence of the Other, of his Visibility colonizer or ad- ministrator of his transparency fatally proposed as a model, because of which we have acquired a taste for obscurity, and for me the need to seek out [opacity]" (CD, 161). 28 The oppression inherent in the master's gaze is repeated in that of historically later types of "discoverer," such as the ethnologists for whom the colonized peoples are merely visible objects of knowledge. But it is significant that, in his discussion of this relationship in L'intention poétique, Glissant states that the colonial subject's desire is not to escape the master's gaze, but to participate in the scopic exchange on equal terms. He writes, "We hate ethnography. . . . The distrust that we feel toward it is not caused by our displeasure at being looked at, but rather by our obscure resentment at not having our turn at seeing" (128, emphasis added). The problem is, in other words, the inequality and lack of reciprocity of the relation, in which those who are seen cannot themselves "see" those who see them. Pursuing the psychoanalytic dimension of the colonial relationship that is, its imbrication, alongside political and economic motivations, in unconscious fantasy and desire reveals a further sense in which opacity resists the domination of the discoverers. This depends upon Bhabha's analysis already suggested in the work of Fritz Gracchus of the racist stereotype as fetish. Bhabha argues that the stereotype is the result of a complex unconscious dynamic, which derives from the ambivalence at the root of all colonial power: both civilizing mission and violent subjugation. Thus, the stereotype is "the primary point of subjectification in colonial discourse, for both the colonizer and the colonized." He notes the irrational, compulsive, and ever-renewable quality of racial stereotypes and sees them as the product of the same mechanism of disavowal that Freud defined in relation to the sexual fetish. That is, just as the fetish is a defense against the anxiety aroused by the man's knowledge of sexual difference, the racial stereotype represents an attempt to disavow racial difference insofar as this poses a threat to the white person's own sense of identity.