Sometimes an encounter with a new word can clarify what 's been on your mind. "Omniphone" in my case is one such example. I learned it from Patrick Chamoiseau (1953-), the Martinican writer, when he used it in his book Ecrire en pays dominé (1996). I'm not sure if it's his own neologism or not, but I borrowed it from him and have been using it for six years now. I may have bent its meaning a bit to accommodate what I had to say. Bending the notes a little is an usual trick of a blues guitarist, and I tend to be trapped by the possibility of such bending in anything, any time.
Martinique is a French overseas department in the Caribbean. The island has produced the volcanic poet-thinker Aime Cesaire (1913-), as well as his extraordinary disciples the late Franz Fanon (1925-61) and Edouard Glissant (1928-). The Caribbean has been a sea of conflicts for centuries, where leading European nations behaved each as each other's voracious shark. Through the colonizers' conflicts the islands came to be dominated by the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch languages, overwritten by a continuum of French-lexicon based patois, or Creole. The habitants are mostly Africans in origin, introduced for the plantation labor to raise and harvest sugar canes. The islanders of the Caribbean, the structural motor of the Atlantic triangular trade that generated the European-lead modernity, were forced to speak according to their fate either French, English, or Spanish, while sharing the same historical back ground. Oh, what a nuisance this all was, to be forced to speak the languages of their self-declaring "masters."
If this situation served the islanders to their advantage at all, it must have been their coming-into-awareness of a certain, indelible nature of language. Language is as porous as the volcanic formation; when you fall into a hole you will never fail to come out of another, at another place, in another language. Once you are out, hey, it's your neighbor island! You'll be surprised to see the people with similar faces living in a similar fashion, thinking a similar thought. Only the dominant, domineering language is different. I am forced to speak one language on my native island, but it could well have been another language, chance permitting. By now we know that it is impossible to understand the world in any one language, but a language is never comfortably stable, closed, and resistant to the waves from the outside. When you look at it closely, when you listen to its resonance, in any little language echoes the whole of this world.
The prefix "omni" means "all." Of course nobody (not even the fabulous fabricator Jim Joyce's HCE) can speak all the languages of the world. But any of us are entitled to break the stiff and tight constraints that frame the countable units of languages. "Omniphone" probably is another name for such a will to bend this accepted note of the world.
