Abécédaire: Creolization

Miho Hatori

The waters of Ago Bay that November were far murkier than the Caribbean’s emerald green, as if someone had poured oat milk into the sea. I needed a 5 mm wetsuit to dive, and even then, the water was too cold to linger. And yet, beneath the surface, there was a stillness that called to mind Kannazuki—the month when all the gods of Japan have departed for Izumo Taisha Shrine, leaving the world quiet, empty, and still. This inlet is famous for pearl farming. While traveling together, my friend WangShui and I visited one of these pearl farms. The two young farmers were racing against the cold winter ahead.

Unlike other gemstones, pearls are not minerals. They are made by living creatures, and eventually used just as they are—uncut, uncarved. Born from a wound, their layered structure is the result of an accumulation of time. As hundreds of translucent layers build upon one another, light scatters in every direction, producing a soft luminescence that seems to glow from within.

When a foreign substance enters an oyster, the oyster recognizes it as a wound. In defense, it secretes nacre, gradually encasing the intruder, layer upon layer, until a pearl is formed. Without the foreign substance, the pearl cannot form. A completely uninjured oyster makes no pearl. And what is remarkable: the oyster does not expel the intruder. It envelops it, coexists with it, and turns it into layers. Not by erasing the wound, but by carrying it as layers—that is how it becomes light.

When I think about the concept of creolization, I find myself thinking about the mechanism of the pearl.

The small oyster already does this. Why do humans so rarely arrive at the same place?

Perhaps creolization is not a concept, but a way of layering the wound.It is unbearably beautiful, and unbearably fragile. We always live in between.

Miho Hatori is a Japanese vocalist, composer, and interdisciplinary artist based in New York. She is internationally known as a founding member of the band Cibo Matto. Her work begins with the voice—as composer, performer, and storyteller. She has collaborated with artists across experimental and popular music, as well as film and contemporary art. Her practice moves fluidly between music, performance, and visual environments. Hatori’s recent multimedia performance works explore perception, cultural imagination, and the relationship between sound, narrative, and image. Combining experimental composition, voice, text, and visual elements, she creates immersive performances in which sound functions as both musical expression and spatial experience.

Kaiama L. Glover

Translation is the practice I return to when I need to understand what creolization actually does—beyond its purchase as a theoretical concept, and in its resonance as bodily fact. Glissant’s creolization and its corollary, Relation, are what guide me when I carry francophone texts from French into English. As I search for modes of what I think of as Afrofluency,¹ I aim not to render one language transparent to the other, but rather to place them in dialogue—even friction—letting each retain its irreducible strangeness so that something unanticipated might come into being between them. This process of dialogic enrichment is itself a mode of creolization: neither fusion nor dilution, but the alchemical trace of an encounter that transforms without erasing.

Translating makes this visceral. I sit with a sentence that will not cross over cleanly, that resists, that insists on its own opacity, and then I decide whether to domesticate it or to let it remain foreign, though welcome, in its new linguistic home. The ethical translator chooses strangeness. She lets the source language press against the target, deforming it slightly, making it accommodate something it did not know it was built for. The result is a third thing: not the original, not an English equivalent, but a new and unexpected form that bears the memory and promise of both languages and their attendant cultures without being reducible to either. This same phenomenon describes the literature I love best, and often choose to translate: accumulative, refusing synthesis, generating meaning through the tension among voices, registers, and temporalities that will not resolve—what one might call the “marvelous real” or Spiralism or, simply, a creolizing aesthetic.

What Glissant theorized as creolization, I practice as a translational method. Every choice—which word to carry across and which to let go, where to hold the tension and where to release it—is a small negotiation between worlds. Nothing disappears in a good translation. All is transformed. Everything is unsettled endlessly. The languages remain themselves and become something else entirely: a meeting place alive with the residue of contact.

^NOTES
1 See Kaiama L. Glover, “Toward Afrofluency,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 138, no. 3 (May 2023): 850–53.

Kaiama L. Glover is Professor of Black Studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being and Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, and is completing a biography, For the Love of Revolution: René Depestre and the Poetics of a Radical Life and an essay collection, ‘Blackness’ in French: Race Matters in Translation. She is an award-winning translator of francophone literature, founding co-editor of archipelagos | a journal of Caribbean digital praxis, and founding co-director of In the Same Boats, an Afro-Atlantic digital cartography. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the NYPL Cullman Center.