Quote by Édouard Glissant: “The right to opacity is the right not to be understood.”

Not everyone is obligated to make themselves legible, explainable, or transparent to others — especially to those in power. People have the right to exist on their own terms without being forced to justify or simplify who they are.

Glissant published Poetics of Relation in 1990, at the end of the Cold War, when Western liberal democracy was declaring itself the universal endpoint of human civilization. He pushed back, insisting that cultures and peoples had the right to remain irreducible to Western frameworks of understanding.

Martinican philosopher, novelist, and poet whose concept of 'Creolization' theorized Caribbean and global cultural identity as perpetually mixing and transforming. His 1990 work Poetics of Relation reshaped postcolonial and world literature theory.