Open Boat Blues

How does the musical genre of the blues complicate diaspora narratives that inadvertently privilege Eurocentric aesthetic models of diasporic experience? How might we find formal evidence of the blues in Martinican poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant’s work on migration? And in what ways does Glissant lend a Caribbean inflection to this blues-based diasporic thinking? In what follows, I attempt to “creolize” diaspora theory by reading Glissant’s Poetics of Relation through the lens of blues music. Reframing Glissant as a blues thinker is not evidence that he is teaching readers a “blues lesson,” the term Daniel Barlow uses to describe literary moments when characters explicitly connect the blues to their own diasporic experience. Nor do I intend to link Glissant to one specific blues artist. Rather, this essay suggests that Glissant gives us a literary rendering of blues aesthetics, by which the experience of diasporic movement to and from the Caribbean can become recognizable, legible, and finally, listenable.