Retraverser le gouffre sur la terre: La fluidite salvatrice dans L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse

This article argues that in Chamoiseau's novel L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1997), the author translates Glissant's concept of the << gouffre >> into a liquid, earthly rhizome. The forest in the novel is the site of a race which reveals the transformation of chaotic subjectivity into an elderly enslaved man's adaptive prowess, a ferocious animal's empathy for his former prey, and a plantation master's recognition of his mistaken rigidity. The intertwining of these experiences is a re-creation of the process of entanglement, in a setting which demands an openness to the unknown within one's environment, oneself, and the Other. At the end of their race, exchanges of "waters" of the body-saliva and tears-are analyzed as the beginnings of a rhizome of "Relation." L'Esclave vieil homme et le molosse foregrounds a multilateral healing of slavery's destruction, through the acceptance of fluid selves, by descendants of those it opposed.