Glissant begins in the hold of the slave ship: a place that swallows and dissolves, then expels, and that binds strangers into a shared unknown. It is the first of three abysses, the second being the sea floor marked by bodies thrown overboard in irons, the third the loss of everything left behind. From that unmaking he derives not a lost origin waiting to be recovered but another way of belonging.

Against the single root, which takes everything into itself and kills what grows nearby, he sets rhizomatic identity, extended through relation to others; against exile and errantry understood as deprivation, a rootedness that needs no totalising stock. He takes the rhizome from Deleuze and Guattari while declining their faith in nomadism as liberation.

The book's most quoted demand is for opacity — a right not to be made transparent, not to be reduced to somebody else's measure. Relation guards what can touch without being fused.