A History of Literature in the Caribbean: English- and Dutch-speaking Regions [2] 9027234485, 9789027234483, 1588110419

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A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN

A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF LITERATURES IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES SPONSORED BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION HISTOIRE COMPARÉE DES LITTÉRATURES DE LANGUES EUROPÉENNES SOUS LES AUSPICES DE L’ASSOCIATION INTERNATIONAL DE LITTÉRATURE COMPARÉE VOLUME I EXPRESSIONISM AS AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY PHENOMENON (Ed. Ulrich Weisstein) VOLUME II THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES (Ed. Anna Balakian) VOLUME III LE TOURNANT DU SIÈCLE DES LUMIÈRES 1760–1820 LES GENRES EN VERS DES LUMIÈRES AU ROMANTISME (Dir. György M. Vajda) VOLUME IV LES AVANT-GARDES LITTÉRAIRES AU XXe SIÈCLE: HISTOIRE (Dir. Jean Weisgerber) VOLUME V LES AVANT-GARDES LITTÉRAIRES AU XXe SIÈCLE: THÉORIE (Dir. Jean Weisgerber) VOLUME VI EUROPEAN-LANGUAGE WRITING IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA (Ed. Albert Gérard) VOLUME VII L’ÉPOQUE DE LA RENAISSANCE (1400–1600) I. L’AVÈNEMENT DE L’ESPRIT NOUVEAU (1400–1480) (Dir. Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner, et André Stegmann) VOLUME VIII ROMANTIC IRONY (Ed. Frederick Garber) VOLUME IX ROMANTIC DRAMA (Ed. Gerald Gillespie) VOLUME X A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN (Vol. 1) (Ed. A. James Arnold) VOLUME XI INTERNATIONAL POSTMODERNISM (Eds. Hans Bertens and Douwe Fokkema) VOLUME XII A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN (Vol. 3) (Ed. A. James Arnold) VOLUME XIII L’ÉPOQUE DE LA RENAISSANCE (1400–1600): IV. CRISE ET ESSORS NOUVEAUX (1560–1610) (Dir. Tibor Klaniczay, Eva Kushner et Paul Chavy) VOLUME XIV DIE WENDE VON DER AUFKLÄRUNG ZUR ROMANTIK 1760-1820 (Hg. von Albert Glaser und György M. Vajda) VOLUME XV A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN (Vol. 2) (Ed. A. James Arnold)

A HISTORY OF LITERATURE IN THE CARIBBEAN VOLUME 2: ENGLISH- AND DUTCH-SPEAKING REGIONS

Edited by A. JAMES ARNOLD University of Virginia Subeditors VERA M. KUTZINSKI INEKE PHAF-RHEINBERGER At-Large Editors JOSEPHINE V. ARNOLD NATALIE M. HOUSTON IRENE ROLFES

JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA

Coordinating Committee for A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Comité de Coordination de l’Histoire Comparée des Littératures de Langues Européennes 1992-96 Honorary Members/Membres d’honneur Henry H.H. Remak, György M. Vajda, Jacques Voisine, Jean Weisgerber President/Président Mario J. Valdés Vice-President/Vice-Président Mihály Szegedy-Maszák Secretary/Secrétaire Daniel F. Chamberlain Treasurer/Trésorier Djelal Kadir Members/Membres assesseurs A. James Arnold, Anna Balakian, Ziva Ben-Porat, Jean Paul Bier, Theo L. D’haen, Wlad Godzich, Margaret Higonnet, Linda Hutcheon, John Neubauer, Józef Pál, Mihai Spariosu, Jürgen Wertheimer Published on the recommendation of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies with the financial assistance of UNESCO

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A history of literature in the Caribbean vol. 2 / edited by A. James Arnold. p. cm. -- (A Comparative history of literatures in European languages = Histoire comparée des littératures de langues européennes, ISSN 0238-0668 ; v. 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: v. 2. Cross-Cultural Studies. 1. Caribbean literature--History and criticism. I. Arnold, A. James (Albert James), 1939-. II. Series: Comparative history of literatures in European languages ; v. 15. PN849.C3H57 2001 809’.89729--dc20 94-3353 ISBN 90 272 3448 5 (Eur.) / 1 58811 041 9 (US) ( alk. paper) CIP © 2001 - John Benjamins B.V./Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 36224 • 1020 ME Amsterdam • The Netherlands John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region A. James Arnold

1

P I THE ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN Subeditor: Vera M. Kutzinski 9

Introduction Vera M. Kutzinski Literary Development: A Contrastive History Emergence of Language and Literature

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Language Use in West Indian Literature Maureen Warner-Lewis Popular and Literate Cultures

41

The Institution of Literature Helen Tiffin Islands and Territories The Literatures of Trinidad and Jamaica Sarah Lawson Welsh

69

Guyanese Identities Josephine V. Arnold

97

Genre: A Contrastive History Fiction The Novel before 1950 J. Downing Thompson, Jr.

115

The Novel from 1950 to 1970 Hena Maes-Jelinek

127

vi

Table of contents

The Novel since 1970 Hena Maes-Jelinek and Bénédicte Ledent

149

Short Fiction Victor J. Ramraj

199

Poetry 227

A History of Poetry Edward Baugh Drama Theatralizing the Anglophone Caribbean, 1492 to the 1980s Rob Canfield

285

Essay 329

The Essay Laura G. Yow P II THE NETHERLANDS ANTILLES, ARUBA, AND SURINAME Subeditor: Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger Prospecting the Field: A Contrastive History of Literary Development

355

Introduction Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger Emergence of Language and Literature Notes on Early Printing in the Dutch Caribbean Islands Maritza Coomans-Eustatia

367

Ideological Controversies in Curaçaoan Publishing Strategies (1900–1945) Aart G. Broek

375

The Literary Infrastructure of Suriname: Problems and Changes Michiel van Kempen

387

Language and Popular Culture The Creole Languages of the Caribbean Pieter Muysken

399

vii

Table of contents The Value of Guene for Folklore and Literary Culture Frank Martinus Arion

415

Song Texts as Literature of Daily Life in the Netherlands Antilles Rose Mary Allen

421

Islands and Territories Katibu ta galiña: From Hidden to Open Protest in Curaçao Joceline Clemencia

433

From Oral to Written Literature: St. Maarten, Saba, and St. Eustatius Alida Albus

443

Di nos e ta!: Outside and Inside in Aruban Literature Wim Rutgers

451

Conclusions Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

463

A Mosaic Setting: A Contrastive History of Genre 471

Introduction Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger Overview West Indian Slavery and Dutch Enlightenment Literature A. N. Paasman

481

The Portuguese Jewish Nation: An Enlightenment Essay on the Colony of Suriname Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

491

Curaçaoan Literature in Spanish Liesbeth Echteld

505

Strategies and Stratagems of some Dutch-Antillean Writers J. J. Oversteegen

513

Fiction The Contemporary Surinamese Novel Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

527

Surinamese Short Narrative Michiel van Kempen

543

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Table of contents Poetry

Literary Magazines and Poetry in the Netherlands Antilles Wim Rutgers

563

The Surinamese Muse: Reflections on Poetry Vernie February

569

East Indian Surinamese Poetry and Its Languages Theo Damsteegt

581

Drama Forms of Dramatic Expression in the Leeward Islands Igma M.-G. van Putte-de Windt

597

Banya, a Surviving Surinamese Slave Play Trudi Guda

615

Literary Magazines Civilisadó: A Doomed Civilizing Offensive in Curaçao, 1871–1875 Eva Abraham-van der Mark

625

Prewar Prose and Poetry in Papiamentu Aart G. Broek

633

Literary Criticism Antillean Literary Criticism: Caribbean vs. Dutch Approaches Jos de Roo

645

Conclusions Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger

651

Index to Names

659

Acknowledgments

This project has been made possible by the generous assistance of several institutions and not a few individuals. First among the institutions for consistent support is the University of Virginia, which graciously hosted the editorial colloquium from which this three-volume History emerged in October 1986. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies of the University of Virginia has faithfully provided logistical and technical support since that time. Gail Shirley-Warren deserves special thanks for her efforts. The STICUSA Foundation in Wassenaar, The Netherlands, hosted a symposium in July 1988 during which the outline for the Dutch side of this volume was established and the majority of the research team constituted. The editor wishes to express special thanks to the two subeditors of this final volume in the series. Each in her own way has assured the success of the common enterprise. Vera M. Kutzinski reconfigured the English side of the volume and recruited new contributors in the early 1990s when the project was imperiled. She has assured a high level of editorial expertise to the Anglophone Caribbean division. Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger traveled on several occasions to the Netherlands Antilles to encourage the contributors to persevere. She labored with the editor over many years to assure that all contributions would conform to the editorial requirements of the project and the series. Finally, the at-large editors are to be thanked for their unique contributions. Natalie M. Houston co-wrote the editorial guidelines that have assured the unity of our three volumes and have been adopted as the model for all future projects in this series. Irene Rolfes is responsible for the index, which presented special problems in establishing dates and orthography. Josephine V. Arnold spent two years preparing an essential essay without which this volume would have been incomplete.

A. James Arnold, Editor June 2000

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region A. JAMES ARNOLD

University of Virginia

The world of comparative literary history is rather different now that this three-volume History of Literature in the Caribbean comes to fruition from what it was some fifteen years ago at the inception of our project. In the mid-1980s Theory (usually spelled with a capital T) reigned supreme; the world was presumed to be postmodern; and the postcolonial was aborning. Today the imperial reach of Theory has been shown up for what it was, the deadly embrace of the elites of Northwest European and North American postindustrial societies. The 1990s were marked by repeated demonstrations that postcolonial literatures bear no necessary relationship to the postmodern. Indeed many are premodern in their underlying socioeconomic reality. On most Caribbean islands traditional agriculture no longer sustains the population; it is imperiled because of a shift in the relationship with its traditional markets in Europe. A united Europe cannot permit the preferential treatment of former colonies in the Caribbean by its member states. Consequently both independent nations such as Barbados and the dependent Netherlands Antilles rely progressively on international tourism. As the Caribbean converts rapidly to a tertiary economy, what paradigm will provide an enabling discourse on its literature? What had been the first modern industrial development in expansionist Europe, the Caribbean sugar plantation economy based on slave labor, has become the violent and bloody backdrop to the region’s literatures a century to a century and a half after emancipation. When the techniques of literary modernism, or indeed those of the postmodern, occur in literatures emanating from such societies, are the effects the same as those that were mapped and codified in European and North American literatures in the 1970s and early 1980s (D’haen [1997])? Postcolonial theory has of late tended to recycle “iconic … tropes of Caribbean discourse” (Edmondson [1999], 2). The pretensions of Theory have, to a considerable extent, been replaced by a recognition that interdisciplinary regional studies will be necessary to reveal the functional reality of Caribbean literatures (Arnold [1998], 1–7; Dash [1998], 2). The outline of our first and second volumes was designed to allow for the evolution of such an approach to the region. At the first colloquium on comparative Caribbean literary historiography, held at the University of Virginia in 1986, and at the second in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, in 1988, the editor and subeditors of these volumes agreed that a contrastive approach to the four major literatures of the region was called for. We saw no point in ringing new variations on the already well-established habit of approaching Caribbean literature under headings such as unity in diversity. The editor proposed a model of literary development that was approved by the editorial committee and incorporated into the common plan for volumes one and two. An initial section devoted to each language and culture area (Spanish- and French-speaking in volume one; English- and Dutch-speaking in volume two) would first treat the emergence of literature and of literary institutions (press, schools, publishing houses), language and popular culture (where we

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expected marked differences in regional development), and, finally, the major island and continental territories within each area. We knew at the outset that certain of these literatures and their societies had been much less studied than others, and we realized that to attempt to treat entire regions synoptically and synthetically could only result in further obscuring the salient features of the least-known literatures. In this respect our hypothesis has been proved correct. In preparing volume one it was very difficult to find work on the literature of the Dominican Republic that either compared or contrasted it with the literature of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Haitian literature, too, tends to be studied sui generis, although it shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic (Arnold [1994]; Torres-Saillant [1998]). Volume three, devoted to Cross-Cultural Studies, was to have included a comparative essay on the literature of the Guyanas, which we deemed important to fully understanding the region (Arnold [1997]). We could find no researcher anywhere prepared to tackle such a daunting task in the late 1980s. We can only hope that a new generation of scholars, having profited from our pioneering work, will bring to fruition this aspect of our collective ambition As we conclude our project with the publication of volume two, we can take justifiable pride in bringing the totality of the culture area colonized by the Dutch into fruitful dialogue with its neighbors for the first time, and we note with satisfaction that much of the work appearing in the Dutch-language section is available nowhere else. Whatever its other merits may be, the present project will make truly comparative work on the entire circum-Caribbean literary region possible. The organization of volume two reflects quite accurately the present state of literary scholarship in the English- and Dutch-speaking regions, respectively. The existence of several specialized journals that treat the English-speaking Caribbean as a literary region, as well as journals that study the Caribbean within the context of Commonwealth literature, has fostered the careers of scholars who are at home in surveying the region. It should not be surprising, then, that the English-speaking division should be far more synthetic, as well as condensed and homogeneous, than the Dutch-language division. Indeed, several of the contributions are monographic in nature and could easily stand alone. Helen Tiffin, who was one of the co-authors of the now-classic The Empire Writes Back a decade ago (Ashcroft et al. [1989]), treats the institution of literature as a unit under the rubric Popular and Literate Cultures, whereas several contributors were necessary to give an overview of the salient characteristics of the Dutch side. Similarly, Maureen Warner-Lewis, a specialist in African survivals in Trinidad English, gives a synthetic treatment of “Language Use in West Indian Literature.” In the Dutch-language division we offer a general introduction by Pieter Muysken to the formation of Creoles in the Caribbean generally, followed by a sharply focused piece by Frank Martinus Arion, who posits a proto-Creole called Guene that he finds underlying both Dutch (Papiamentu) and English Creoles in the region. Moreover, the reader will want to supplement these pieces with George Lang’s contribution to our volume three, “Islands, Enclaves, Continuua: Notes Toward a Comparative History of Caribbean Creole Literatures” (Lang [1997], 29–56), which is particularly rich on literature in Papiamentu. The folk element looms considerably larger in the Dutch-language division of this volume than in any of the other three divisions of volumes one and two. This trait once again reflects the state of scholarship in the field. On the Dutch side scholars have only recently begun to systematically collect the folk materials that informed early literature on their islands and in

Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region

3

Suriname. (The signal exception that springs to mind is the body of Anancy stories in Curaçaoan Papiamentu that the Geerdink-Jesurun Pinto family began collecting toward the end of the nineteenth century.) Indeed, a number of the contributors to the Dutch-language division take a combative stance on resistance and cultural nationalism that recalls the spirited debates twenty years and more ago in the English-speaking Caribbean concerning who is to be included, or most privileged, in the concept of the nation. Some contemporary Curaçaoan cultural nationalists give one the impression of reading vintage Kamau Brathwaite. We expect several more decades to pass before these issues sort themselves out. Thus it is far more important to recognize the connection between song lyrics or slave dances and popular literature on an island like Curaçao today than it is for literary specialists of Jamaica or Trinidad. In our third volume Silvio TorresSaillant theorized the necessity of working with such disparate fragments of a whole that is, at present, exceedingly difficult to grasp: “the scholar must develop the rare ability to tolerate impurities, to conceive of a space of in-betweenness, where things enjoy a sort of ontological elasticity that permits them to be neither this nor that. A conceptually flexible framework alone can manage to converse with the multiplicity of components that have gone into the sociocultural formation of the people of the region and can enable the comparative literary historian to delve into the underlying congruity of visibly disparate elements” (Torres-Saillant [1997], 59). An article such as the one contributed by Theo Damsteegt on the languages of poetry written in Suriname by East Indians is positively eye-opening for the rest of us. The literary situation of Suriname in recent decades is so much more complex than in neighboring Guyana or, indeed, French Guiana that it beggars description. This plethora of competing literary languages exists, however, in a country with arguably the weakest literary infrastructure in the region. (See van Kempen below on this subject.) What approach to comparative literature will be able to grapple with the cultural production of one small circum-Caribbean country in which the writer can, in principle, choose among some twenty-two languages? That much of the poetry written in Suriname falls well beyond the original purview of the series in which this history appears — A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages — is just another fascinating dilemma that faced the editors from the inception of the project. All of the Caribbean Creoles are related to non-European languages — primarily African — yet all evolved in contact situations involving early modern forms of the languages of the European colonizers. It should not surprise us that, on the Dutch side, contributors other than Martinus Arion point to the presence of Guene embedded in folk forms where local scholars are themselves inclined to find expression of the national genius. Some of the Creoles whose literature is treated in this volume have evolved in quite atypical situations, due to the complicated military and political history of some islands and territories. Thus the national language of independent Suriname, Sranan or Sranan Tongo, was lexified in English before the takeover of the colony by the Dutch in the eighteenth century. The Creole of the islands of Saba and St. Maarten is likewise related to English for similar reasons. Although Dutch is the administrative language, a local English idiom is the vehicular language. In recent decades Saba, in particular, has begun to produce a literature in English. Dutch has little future as a literary language in such a cultural mix. Nor is it often acknowledged, as it should be, that the second Nobel laureate for Literature from the Caribbean, Derek Walcott, is a native speaker of St. Lucian Creole, the first cousin of Martinican. In that respect he is

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linguistically closer, in some respects, to Edouard Glissant or even the Guadeloupean white Creole poet Saint-John Perse (the first Nobel laureate from the region) than to T. S. Eliot, who was an early poetic and aesthetic model. Walcott’s Creoleness borrowed the forms of English high modernism to express itself, much as Glissant’s early work was imbued with an existentialist ethos even as he strove to create a Caribbean voice in his poetry and fiction. Such forms of literary and linguistic hybridity will be found throughout this volume. To further complicate the linguistic situation, Liesbeth Echteld demonstrates that around the turn of the century in Curaçao the prestige language was Spanish, not Dutch, and local literature in Spanish was not at all uncommon. Local theaters thus took their lead from the Spanish stage, not the Dutch. The course of the twentieth century drew Curaçao away from its Spanishspeaking neighbor, Venezuela, and progressively into the cultural orbit of the Netherlands. The literary production of Curaçao today, one of the most dynamic in the region, is predominantly Dutch or Curaçaoan Dutch; but what does the future hold? Curaçao has integrated its local Creole, Papiamentu, more thoroughly into its national institutions, in anticipation of a promised but delayed independence, than any other island nation in the region has done. Given the dynamics of local society, it is probable that in the 21st century Curaçaoan literature in Papiamentu will experience a flowering, at least for the first decades following independence. The situation in Curaçao is diametrically opposed to that in Martinique where, in 1989, a small band of local intellectuals proclaimed the primacy of Créolité, or Creoleness, to much international fanfare. Martinican Creole is today a seriously threatened language, as Edouard Glissant pointed out over two decades ago (Glissant [1981]). There is no serious prospect of independence for Martinique or Guadeloupe, not to mention continental French Guiana, now or in the foreseeable future. Local literature exists in conditions of neocolonial production and consumption that militate against the emergence of any literature based in the local Creole. Indeed, Raphaël Confiant, one of the co-signatories of the programmatic Eloge de la créolité / In praise of creoleness (Bernabé et al., [1989]), switched from Creole to French as his primary literary language simultaneously with the issue of the group’s manifesto. Worse still, the Créolistes, as the Martinican group have come to be called, remained blissfully ignorant of the dynamic presence of Papiamentu on Curaçao, which could have offered a more realistic model for the evolution of a Creole-based contemporary literary production. At the outset of this project Kenneth Ramchand mused, in a personal communication to the editor, that it would be of capital importance to do a thorough review of the little magazines and even the newspapers that permitted early literary expression on some Caribbean islands. Scholars such as Reinhart Sander have undertaken that task for The Beacon in Trinidad (Sander [1988]). The subeditor for the Dutch-language division, Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger, found this a sufficiently important undertaking that she commissioned three articles on the importance of literary magazines. Rightly or wrongly, we did not commission similar articles for the other three language areas of volumes one and two, although we included an important comparative study in volume three (Rodríguez-Carranza and Lie [1997]). Here again the Dutch team found it necessary to use this project to sponsor basic research into subjects that other language divisions had undertaken in different ways, sometimes significantly earlier. Differences in the state of scholarship on the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean extend into the framing devices used to present to the reader the two divisions of this volume.

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The unity of the English-speaking division is such that Vera M. Kutzinski could content herself with one all-inclusive introductory essay. On the Dutch side Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger found it necessary to include an introduction and a conclusion to both sections of her division of the volume, so as to bring together in a preliminary synthesis those shards or fragments of contemporary research that the reader might have difficulty using otherwise. As we have done in the past, we have eschewed any attempt to impose a uniform vision on the contributors to this volume. Such an effort would have been impossible, in the first instance, but it would also have been self-defeating. We set as our overarching aim a fair and accurate representation of contemporary scholarship in our field. Thus it is that, in the English-speaking division in particular, the reader will find essays written from a perspective informed by contemporary European and North American theory side by side with pieces written by native intellectuals from a quite different perspective. These characteristics are to be expected of a project that inaugurates a new discipline, the comparative literary history of the Caribbean.

References Arnold, A. James, ed., with Julio Rodríguez-Luis and J. Michael Dash. 1994. Hispanic and French-Speaking Regions. Vol. One of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———, ed. 1997. Cross-Cultural Studies. Vol. Three of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———. 1998. Who / What Is Creole? Plantation Society in the Americas. 5.1 (Spring): 1–7. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. London; New York: Routledge. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant. [1989]. 1993. Eloge de la créolité / In praise of creoleness. Paris: Gallimard. Dash, J. Michael. 1998. The Other America: Caribbean Literatures in a New World Context. New World Studies. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia. D’haen, Theo. 1997. (Post)Modernity and Caribbean Discourse. Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 303–21. Vol. Three of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Edmondson, Belinda J., ed. 1999. Caribbean Romances: The Politics of Regional Representation. New World Studies. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia. Glissant, Edouard. 1981. Le discours antillais. Paris: Seuil. Lang, George. 1997. Islands, Enclaves, Continuua: Notes toward a Comparative Literary History of Caribbean Creole Literatures. Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 29–56. Vol. Three of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rodríguez-Carranza, Luz and Nadia Lie. 1997. A Comparative Analysis of Caribbean Literary Magazines: 1960–1980. Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 119–60. Vol. Three of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Sander, Reinhart. 1988. The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties. New York: Greenwood Press. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 1997. The Cross-Cultural Unity of Caribbean Literature. Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 57–76. Vol. Three of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ———. 1998. Creoleness or Blackness: A Dominican Dilemma. Who / What Is Creole? Ed. by A. James Arnold, 29–40. A special issue of Plantation Society in the Americas. 5.1 (Spring).

P I THE ANGLOPHONE CARIBBEAN Subeditor: Vera M. Kutzinski

Introduction VERA M. KUTZINSKI

Yale University

Caribbean history — political, social, economic, and cultural — is a history of myriad colonial and neocolonial entanglements with loose ends that reach well into the present. These entanglements, which range from the rise and fall of local sugar plantation economies to slavery and Emancipation and to the near-absence of educational infrastructures, have exerted various pressures on the region’s cultural production, including its literatures. Since literary texts always participate in specific socialities, any literary history of the Caribbean must take notice of such pressures. They go back as far as Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the resulting Papal land grant to Spain in 1493, and the exceedingly lucrative introduction of sugarcane which sparked centuries of fierce inter-imperial rivalries, notably between Spain, France, Britain, Holland, Denmark, and, later, the United States. Once the Caribbean, still exclusively in Spanish hands at the beginning of the sixteenth century, became officially a “satellite of European imperialism” (Williams [1970], 47), the region was systematically underdeveloped as its natural resources — sugarcane, bauxite, or oil, at different points in history — were drained away. Though Spain worked hard to maintain and solidify its economic monopoly, other European trade interests and rivals could not be suppressed. Anglo-French territorial rivalries in particular continued to flare up until 1815. By the end of the seventeenth century, only Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and parts of Hispaniola remained in Spanish hands; the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Danes controlled the rest. Spanish imperial power was finally removed from the Caribbean in 1898, when the Treaty of Paris that ended the Spanish-Cuban-American War made Cuba a virtual U. S. protectorate. The shifts and pressures associated with these and other colonialist and neocolonialist activities in the Caribbean have inspired a wide range of literary responses and representations: among them are protest writing across different genres, from C. L. R. James to Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar; revisionist historical novels as different as Alejo Carpentier’s carnivalesque El reino de este mundo (The kingdom of this world), 1949, V. S. Naipaul’s realist tome A House for Mr Biswas, 1961, and Wilson Harris’s archetypal Palace of the Peacock, 1960; distinct forms of oraliterature and music-poetry hybrids, from Nicolás Guillén’s early poemasson to the poetic calypsos of Edward Kamau Brathwaite; the high-literary “creolity” of Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau which resides alongside the magic realism of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez and, more recently, Trinidad’s Lawrence Scott; the emergence of a new theater represented by Derek Walcott, Michael Gilkes, and Constance Zeno Obi, on the one hand, and by Cicely Waite-Smith and the theater collective SISTREN on the other (see Rob Canfield’s essay in this volume); and, last but not least, numerous literary journals and magazines, from Cuba’s Orígenes to Barbados’s Bim. These are just a few scattered examples chosen very deliberately to emphasize that the parts of the Caribbean formerly ruled by Britannia cannot be effectively studied in isolation from their francophone, hispanophone, and Dutch-

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speaking neighbors who, by the end of the eighteenth century, had either ended up in the hands of different imperial powers or, as in the case of Haiti, in a state of political independence (though Haiti was very much the exception). The British Victorians did not dominate the entire Caribbean region, as some seem oddly to imply (see Donnell and Welsh [1996], 4–5), though certainly not for lack of trying. If Britain never succeeded in ruling the entire Caribbean, she had, by the opening of the nineteenth century, conquered, or otherwise acquired, a substantial number of territories from other European nations (almost as if to compensate for the spectacular loss of her North American colonies): these were Antigua, Barbados, Guyana (formerly British Guiana), Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago, Montserrat, St. Vincent, the Bahamas, and the British Virgin Islands. These islands and coastal areas are still popularly known as the (British) West Indies or, in academic parlance, as the anglophone Caribbean. The countries that officially comprise the West Indies have huddled together uneasily under the tattered umbrella of the British Commonwealth since the 1960s, when many of them gained political independence (see Lewis [1968] and Williams [1970] for details of this period; for histories of individual islands and countries see MacDonald [1986], Searle [1984], Sallhuddin [1994], Tree [1972], and Young [1993]). This umbrella, however, has historically offered little protection against interference from the United States, as, for instance, in the case of the 1983 invasion of Grenada (for documents see Lewis and Mathews [1984]). U. S. naval bases had been set up in Trinidad, Guiana, Antigua, St. Lucia, Jamaica, and the Bahamas as early as 1940, when Britain had granted 99-year leases. But strategic military presence and intervention are only a very small part of the story of North America’s long history of meddling in Caribbean affairs, which dates back at least to the early nineteenth century — to illegal slave trafficking and annexation schemes. While the West Indies (as a geographical area and a tourist destination) are still located in the Caribbean basin, the anglophone Caribbean (as an academic field) by now reaches far beyond that actual region. Its global diasporic proportions may eventually even outgrow the geographical dimensions of what Paul Gilroy has usefully called “the black Atlantic” which, in this case, includes Britain, Canada, and the United States. Geographical distance is clearly not a factor if we consider George Lang’s suggestion, in his essay on Caribbean Creoles in Volume 3 of this History, that, linguistically speaking, the Caribbean rimlands extend as far as the Cape Verdian Islands (see Lang [1997]). David Dabydeen goes even farther in calling today’s Britain the largest of the Caribbean islands, the result of a steady stream of both lower- and middleclass immigrants throughout most of the twentieth century. Significant migration from the English-speaking Caribbean to other countries started in the mid-nineteenth century, when thousands of blacks from Jamaica and Barbados flocked to Cuba, the United States, and especially to Panama and Costa Rica, where they worked on the Canal and on the banana plantations of the United Fruit Company [see Lewis [1980] and Chomsky [1996]). A convincing case can be made that Panama and Costa Rica, along with Belize and the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, are also part of an anglophone Caribbean diaspora (see Smart [1984] and [1994]; Rodríguez-Luis [1994], 4–5). The migration of writers and intellectuals began in the early decades of the twentieth century with such figures as Claude McKay and Eric Walrond, who joined the writers of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City (see J. Downing Thompson’s

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essay on West Indian narrative before 1950 in this volume). This migration steadily gained momentum until, by the end of the 1960s, the majority of anglophone Caribbean writers, many of whom that decade had propelled into international prominence, were quite removed from West Indian local existential realities. Most of these first-generation emigrant writers were male and middle-class; they lived in London, New York, or Toronto, and still do (on Europe see Brock [1986]; on Canada see Anderson [1985] and Henry [1994]). Disillusioned with local politics, many left the islands when the only four-year-old Caribbean Federation was abandoned by Jamaica and dissolved in 1962; others had left even earlier, in the 1950s, feeling stifled by an “atmosphere of middle class materialism and philistinism” (Brathwaite [1996], 346). The West Indies these writers left behind were, in many ways, the “slums” of Empire, an entire region largely without economic and educational infrastructures. To be part of the British Empire, and later the Commonwealth, had never spelled political unity or economic stability for West Indians, for metropolitan attention tended quickly to shift to neglect whenever individual territories lost economic or political importance (one prominent example here is the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion and its political fallout). Absenteeism was the main culprit. One of the principal reason why the British West Indies’ sugar industry was notoriously backward and increasingly noncompetitive, absenteeism had, by the 1890s, led straight down the path to bankruptcy. The West India Royal Commission’s call for diversification was too little and far too late to check abject poverty, large-scale unemployment, and rampant illiteracy. Unlike the French or the Spanish, the British had created so little of an economic and educational infrastructure in these islands that, as Orlando Patterson suggests in the title of his 1967 novel An Absence of Ruins, it might be generous even to speak of ruins. In the 1930s, the decade of violent labor disputes and strikes all over the British West Indies, illiteracy in Trinidad was as high as 43 percent, in Guyana even 60 percent (see Helen Tiffin’s essay in the present volume for more information on education). Even as late as the end of the 1960s, economist and historian Eric Williams, then Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, writes wearily that “the Caribbean area … is one of the most unstable areas in our unstable world” and notes an “appalling degree of economic fragmentation” along with what he politely calls “constitutional diversity” (Williams [1970], 498–99). He continues, no more happily: “Dependence on the outside world in the Caribbean in 1969 is not only economic. It is also cultural, institutional, intellectual and psychological. Political forms and social institutions, even in the politically independent countries, were imitated rather than created, borrowed rather than relevant, reflecting the forms existing in the particular metropolitan country from which they were derived. There is still no serious indigenous intellectual life. The ideological formulations for the most part still reflect the concepts and vocabulary of nineteenth-century Europe and, more sinister, of the now almost defunct Cold War. Authentic and relevant indigenous formulations are either ignored or equated with ‘subversion.’ Even though … literature of world standard and universal validity has been produced by writers such as Lamming, Naipaul, Braithwaite [sic] (from Barbados), Walcott, Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon in Martinique, and even though in Trinidad and Tobago the steel band and calypso have emerged, nevertheless artistic, community and individual values are not for the most part authentic but, to borrow the language of the economist, possess a high import content, the vehicles for import being the educational system, the mass media, the films, and the tourists. V. S. Naipaul’s description of West Indians as ‘mimic men’ is harsh, but true” (501–02).

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Williams’s view of the West Indian predicament of “mimicry” (evidently not in Homi Bhabha’s sense) takes its cue from Naipaul novels such as Middle Passage, 1962, and The Mimic Men, 1967, as did a number of other anglophone Caribbean intellectuals. While one can take issue with the belief that little, or nothing, of cultural “relevance” was created in the West Indies, one cannot get around the fact that the anglophone Caribbean’s intellectual and artistic center was the U. K. To wit, both of Naipaul’s novels were part of the “Boom” of West Indian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, which was sponsored, almost exclusively, by British publishers such as Deutsch, Faber, Michael Joseph, Jonathan Cape, Heinemann, and Longman. Part of this incipient boom was the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) founded in London in 1966 (see Walmsley [1992]). And then there were Wilson Harris’s Tradition, the Writer and Society, 1967, Kenneth Ramchand’s The West Indian Novel and its Background, 1970, and Edward Baugh’s West Indian Poetry, 1900–1970, 1971, to testify, albeit from rather different angles, that much indeed, in the literary realm at least, had been created by West Indians — though not exactly in the West Indies. But even though these significant cultural events all took place overseas, one should not entirely overlook that, despite such an exodus of talent, there were pockets of local artistic activity. Notably, there was the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which had been founded by Derek Walcott in 1959 (see King [1995]), as well as the new little magazines that sprang up in the early 1970s, among them Kalaloo and New Voices. These magazines either replaced those regional journals that had not survived the Federation debacle or took their place alongside those that had, such as Bim, as well as alongside publications that originated in Britain, such as CAM’s Savacou. Other, more academically oriented journals, such as The Journal of Caribbean Studies and The Journal of West Indian Literature, followed suit in the 1980s. Debates about the existence of West Indian literature and culture had been carried out in the little magazines since the 1930s and 1940s, with Albert Gomes’s 1933 Beacon article entitled, “A West Indian Literature” and Peter Blackman’s 1948 Jamaica Gleaner essay, “Is There a West Indian Literature?” as two of the earliest examples (see Allis [1981] and Laura Yow’s essay in this volume). These magazines were instrumental when it came to publishing not only essays but also poetry and short fiction (see Baugh’s and Ramraj’s respective essays in this volume). They continued local traditions of literary publishing in newspapers that date back to the late eighteenth-century (see Lalla [1989] and Tiffin’s essay in this volume on the early history of printing in the English-speaking Caribbean). Historically and conceptually, then, the anglophone Caribbean is a precarious community of exiles grafted onto a foreign landscape of islands and coastal rimlands, an ever-shifting community of migrants who have continued to travel, to disperse, sometimes to return, but more often to imagine their previous home from afar. While all nations are, in Benedict Anderson’s words, “imagined communities,” this phrase has particular resonance for the Caribbean, anglophone and otherwise: the Caribbean is a world imagined and inscribed from afar with cultural coherence where there is neither economic stability nor political unity, invested with cultural authenticity where there is no (longer) indigeneity. Eric Williams’s pronouncements on intellectual life in the entire Caribbean region, cited above, open up a significant distance between importation and indigeneity. Clearly, it would be pointless to deny what he calls the “high import content” of twentieth-century Caribbean societies whose culture industries continue to be largely controlled from the outside, from Europe, Canada, and, especially, the United

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States. At the same time, it might be equally pointless to try to determine exactly which aspects of Caribbean cultures are, at this point in time, “indigenous” and thus, in Williams’s sense, “authentic.” In fact, Williams’s argument, and others along similar lines (see Smart [1994], 75), relies heavily on the slippage between “indigenous” and “authentic.” From an historical perspective, Caribbean cultures and societies consist almost exclusively of imports, from sugarcane (which came from the Canary Islands) and the millions of enslaved Africans who cultivated it, to semi-free laborers from India and China to which the British government turned after Emancipation in 1833. Trinidad was the first colony to turn its attention to India (see MacDonald [1986]), and Jamaica followed suit. After 1672, when Britain officially entered the transatlantic slave trade, the African workforce quickly replaced indigenous populations such as the Caribs, Macusi, Taínos, and Arawaks, of whom few remained only decades after Spain’s conquest. As early as the mid-nineteenth century, Caribbean blacks, more so than the previously indentured East Indians and Chinese, came to replace the Caribbean Amerindians in cultural terms (an early example here is Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda’s Cuban romance Sab, 1841). Blacks were, and continue to be, the Caribbean’s quasi-native population (see Kutzinski [1997], 287), even in a country like Guyana, where a significant Amerinidian population remains today. Brathwaite, in his “Timehri,” 1970, and especially Wilson Harris, in essays such as “History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and the Guyanas,” 1970, and “The Native Phenomenon,” 1972 [Harris (1981)], 20–42 and 49–56], are the most notable writers to have drawn attention to, and commented extensively, on the cultural significance of the Amerindian elements in the anglophone Caribbean. Interestingly, however, even Harris has a “native” character named Poseidon in The Secret Ladder, 1963, who is a black maroon; this is rather different from his treatment of the “vanishing” Amerindians, for instance, in such novels as Palace of the Peacock and Carnival, 1985). The separation I have indicated of the “indigenous” from the “authentic” has theoretical implications. In the Caribbean, for the “authentic” to be derived from the “indigenous,” the “indigenous” first had to be reinvented, and it was reinvented specifically as a site of local cultural resistance to Euro-American cultural hegemony. Marina Warner imagines this process with striking acuity in her 1992 novel Indigo, the most recent instance in a long line of Caribbean novelistic recastings of The Tempest (see D’haen [1997]). Reinvented Caribbean indigeneity has yielded different perspectives on, and constructions of, cultural authenticity: one centers on race and on blackness, the other on cross-racial, or cross-cultural, hybridity. At a time when “black consciousness” movements from the United States gained popularity in the Caribbean and Trinidad-born Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael visited the U. K., Brathwaite’s “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” 1974, an essay based on a 1970s lecture he gave in Barbados, viewed “Caribbeanness” in predominantly Afrocentric terms. In “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” 1970, and “The Muse of History,” 1976, Derek Walcott argued contentiously against such privileging of African “survivals” and denied the significance of pan-Africanism in the West Indies. Many of the earlier critical studies of Caribbean literatures, for instance, Wilfred Cartey’s Black Images, 1970, Ngugi’s essays in Homecoming, 1973, Houston Baker’s collection Reading Black, 1976, Martha Cobb’s Harlem, Haiti, and Havana, 1979, and Richard Jackson’s Black Writers in Latin American, 1979 (which includes the Hispanic Caribbean), responded positively to Brathwaite’s call for taking “the culture of the ex-

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African majority as the paradigm and norm” for Caribbean societies (Brathwaite [1986], 30; see also Kutzinski [1995], 139). With some exceptions, such as Gordon Rohlehr’s Pathfinder, 1981, David Dabydeen and Nana Wilson-Tagoe’s Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature, 1988, and Myriam Chancy’s In Safe Places, 1997, the 1980s and especially the 1990s have witnessed shifts away from racial particularism, either into other kinds of particularism relative to ethnicity (mostly Indo-Caribbean writing) or gender (Caribbean women’s writing). These shifts in emphasis had much to do with the increasing popularity, in the academy, of hybridizing concepts such as “creolization” (Brathwaite [1984]) and what Edouard Glissant has called “créolité,” or creolity (Glissant [1989]). Wilson Harris’s notion of a “cross-cultural imagination” of universal proportions but with very specific local manifestations belongs, in some respects, to the same camp (Harris [1983]). Representation has been a sticky issue for many literary histories dealing with the Caribbean, especially the anglophone Caribbean. Above and beyond the issue of striking ethnic and gender balances is always the problem of national differences between no less than fourteen politically independent entities (fifteen, if one counts Belize). Literary studies and histories of the anglophone Caribbean have tended to marginalize certain countries, most notably Guyana, and focus on Jamaica and Trinidad, the two largest and historically most significant islands. The only notable early exception is Donald Herdeck’s Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia, 1979, which, though outdated in many ways, is still useful; it is also particularly noteworthy for being the first comprehensive volume systematically to offer detailed information about authors from the anglophone, francophone, hispanophone and Dutch-speaking Caribbean (for a recent update see Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard Sander’s three volumes on TwentiethCentury Caribbean and Black African Writers, 1992–95). It should also be noted that many of the anthologies and critical monographs published during the 1980s, among them E. A. Markham’s Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain, 1989, Stewart Brown, Mervyn Morris, and Gordon Rohlehr’s Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean, 1989, and Frank Birbalsingh’s Passion and Exile, 1988, made a concerted effort to represent authors from more parts of the anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora. They also increasingly included women authors and Indo-Caribbean writers; some were even entirely devoted either to women writers — for instance, Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson’s Her TrueTrue Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, 1989, and Evelyn O’Callaghan’s Woman Version, 1993 — or to Indo-Caribbean authors, as in the case of Birbalsingh’s Jahaji Bhai: An Anthology of Indo-Caribbean Literature, 1988. That Jamaica, “island of the springs” in its Amerindian name and most precious jewel in eighteenth-century Britain’s colonial crown, and the formerly Spanish-French Trinidad would have come to dominate literary historical accounts even well into the 1980s — Reinhard Sander’s The Trinidad Awakening, 1988, is one notable example — is, in some ways, not very surprising. Most of the major writers, especially of the first generation, were associated with one island or the other. Apart from the native writers, others such as Kamau Brathwaite, from Barbados, or Derek Walcott, from St. Lucia, established residence in Jamaica or Trinidad. Thus Jamaica boasts Claude McKay, George Lamming, Sam Selvon, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey, Orlando Patterson, Una Marson, Louise Bennett, and, more recently, Erna Brodber, Olive Senior, Michelle Cliff, and Joan Riley. Trinidad was equally well represented by C. L. R. James, Ralph

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de Boissiere, Alfred Mendes, and of course the Naipauls, especially V. S.; more recently, Michael Anthony, Earl Lovelace, and even younger writers, such as Robert Antoni, Lawrence Scott, Claire Harris, Judy Miles, and Dionne Brand, have been added to this already impressive list (see the respective essays by Edward Baugh, on poetry, and Hena Maes-Jelinek and Bénédicte Ledent, on recent fiction, in this volume). But Jamaica and Trinidad no longer dominate literary histories to the extent that they used to. Guyana has become more of a focus of critical attention in recent years, with prominent elder statesmen such as Wilson Harris, Jan Carew, Roy Heath, and the late Martin Carter. This is particularly appropriate when one considers the emergence of a number of younger Guyanese novelists and poets, notably David Dabydeen, Fred D’Aguiar, Janice Shinebourne, Beryl Gilroy, and Pauline Melville. Both the numbers and the high quality of their writing more than justify the inclusion of a separate essay on Guyanese writing, especially because it effectively offsets Sarah Lawson Welsh’s essay on Jamaica and Trinidad in the same section. Traditionally, little attention has been paid to some of the smaller islands which, unlike St. Lucia, Dominica, or Barbados, did not produce any writers of international stature until the 1980s. St. Kitts, for instance, now has Caryl Phillips and Grenada Merle Collins; Belize is represented by poet James Martinez, and Antigua by Jamaica Kincaid. The Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands are still largely uncharted literary waters (an exception is Dahl [1995]). Such apparent diversity cannot but raise the question of what, if anything, unifies anglophone Caribbean literary production. The one shared characteristic on which scholars have typically insisted is language, and the way in which the first two volumes of this History have been organized is consistent with this rule. Important to any discussion of literary language in the Caribbean are the twin concepts of creolization and creolity, which extend the issue of indigeneity vs. authenticity to the complicated, not exactly linear relations between so-called Standard English and various West Indian Creoles (see Maureen Warner Lewis’s essay in this volume). We have to take quite seriously that what looks like “British English,” or a supposed version thereof, may actually be something rather different. George Lang usefully points to the “purely contingent way” in which Caribbean Creoles derive from European languages (Lang [1997], 31). If these “major” languages are but incidental, it would be hard indeed to make a case for their continued “centrality,” as is implicit whenever we gloss anglophone Caribbean literatures as being “written in English.” An additional classificatory difficulty is that while most textual representations of West Indian Creoles — such as Jamaican and Trinidadian Creoles — are fairly easy to spot and categorize, other forms of literary creolization are not. Those poetic and fictional manifestations of what Brathwaite has called “nation language” (Brathwaite [1984]) that do not depend on representing vernacular speech within the conventions of literary realism are considerably less visible. Linguistic borders, be they between different “major” languages and related Creoles, or within a Creole continuum, shift even more rapidly and more frequently that do national borders (see Mario Valdés’s General Preface to the ICLA series of comparative literary histories), and national borders have been particularly fluid and permeable in the history of the Caribbean. It stands to reason that linguistic border traffic would be especially intense in a region into which elements from so many languages have been imported. But if language does not make the anglophone Caribbean a coherent entity, what does? This problem of coherence becomes even more vexing when we train our critical-historical lens on

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the question of “Caribbean-ness,” rather than only West Indian-ness. It would seem that the unruly Caribbean is not easily disciplined into a traditional academic field, perhaps even into a non-traditional academic field. Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo may be after something similar when he calls the Caribbean a “repeating island,” a “meta-archipelago” that lends certain discernible shapes, in the form of cultural patterns, to (largely economic?) chaos (see BenítezRojo [1989].) Benítez-Rojo’s theoretical formulation differs from Brathwaite’s earlier notions either of a “Caribbean matrix” or of “creolization” (see Brathwaite [1974]) in that it seeks to graft a branch of postmodernism onto the tree of Caribbean postcoloniality. What is useful about this formulation is that it calls attention to history, albeit in an ahistorical manner. So does J. Michael Dash’s suggestion that “[the writing of the region] is, perhaps, a matter of demonstrating the opacity and inexhaustibility of a world that resists systematic construction or transcendent meaning” (Dash [1992], 26). The kind of partially shared Caribbean history both statements obliquely evoke is an exceedingly messy sort of history, not history at all by some standards. It is a processual history characterized by the push and pull of conflicting cultural and political allegiances which always exists in the interstices of historiographical linearity, the conceptual home of orderly parades of imperial triumphs and achievements. As Caribbean writers struggle, imaginatively, with the legacies of various colonialisms, their visions create a gravitational field of sorts, whose uneven pull partially offsets that of the fabled imperial “motherland” and, in doing so, holds the islands and rimlands in close, but shifting, cultural proximity to each other. This gravitational field is a poetic “field” (in Charles Olson’s sense, perhaps), one that does not readily translate into an academic one, the similarity in metaphors notwithstanding. To speak of partially, and unequally, shared, messy histories in the Caribbean region also, or again, highlights the sheer impossibility of the kind of order one might derive from contemplating certain Caribbean islands in anglophone (or anglocentric) isolation — the slippage from “(British) West Indies” to “Caribbean” is present in most of the essays collected here, and for very good historical and theoretical reasons. So I end on the same note with which I began: to break the Caribbean down into anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, and Dutch components is a function of the sticky cultural-linguistic residue of the Empire, British and otherwise; it is, at this point, but a convenient administrative fiction that finally jettisoned. Few Caribbeanists, I suspect, would disagree. Yet, residual balkanization remains a problem in Caribbean studies, one that is not easily overcome. It is a problem because it encourages us to focus on what we would like to perceive (or construct) as cultural likenesses, with the result that we do not attend adequately to often intractable differences, such as the existence of various “englishes” and “lesser-known Creoles” (see Pollard [1990]) and the fact that, the Caribbean and its diaspora, like other postcolonial settings, is a gathering of bi- and tri-cultural peoples with multiple standards of reference. These at once local and global frames of reference have long come to replace the unilateral and more limited referentiality of so-called Standard English (see Brydon and Tiffin [1993], 20). If, to return to Benítez-Rojo, the Caribbean is one “island” that somehow “repeats” itself, the result of that process of repetition would be not sameness but, precisely, differences. Local differences and difference as a theoretical construct both come into play, and into inevitable conflict, every time one moves from one Caribbean island or area to another, and not just when that form of intellectual island-hopping also involves the crossing of “major” linguistic boundaries (as it does, in so many intriguing ways, in Volume 3 of this History). One

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always has to bear in mind, especially in the disciplinary context of Comparative Literature, that “To cross boundaries is not necessarily to put them into question. Traditionally, Comparative Literature has worked more often to police boundaries than to question them” (Brydon and Tiffin [1993], 16). The linguistic division of these first two volumes into linguistic sections, with most of the comparative cross-referencing located in the third volume, easily enough creates the impression that certain boundaries are still subject to intellectual policing. It is as if we needed to keep certain borders intact in order then to cross them. The policing of borders by literary and cultural comparatists raises the issue of identity. More specifically, it raises the issue of the limitations of identity politics as they are deployed, in conjunction with victim mentalities, for the construction of nations and other imagined communities based on the same model (this would include academic programs and departments). If academic fields, including Caribbean studies and its potential nemesis, postcolonial studies (see Donnell and Welsh [1996], 438), are imagined communities that behave like nations in that they suppress oppositional voices, then those of us in these fields ought to be wary of any kind of “professional or disciplinary regulation” (see Slemon [1994], 15). At the end of the twentieth century, one of the fundamental questions in Caribbean studies, and elsewhere, is no longer what the markers are of national identity — be they found in language, landscape, race or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, or any combination thereof — but whether “nation” itself can still be a viable conceptual marker. The residual, but persistent, balkanization in Caribbean studies shows clearly that, as Diana Brydon and Helen Tiffin note, “National identity is the last — and most resistant — fiction to be decolonized” (Brydon and Tiffin [1993], 64). In their introduction to the Routledge Caribbean Studies Reader, 1996, Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh make a related point when they warn that “The critical policing of the post-colonial perimeter fence for writers and texts which stray from assigned identities remains a serious issue which readers of the literature need to address” (Donnell and Welsh [1996], 440). It seems to me that the entire intellectual enterprise of Caribbean literary studies, as part of Comparative Literature on the one hand and postcolonial studies on the other, hinges on such “straying” from assigned identities, which include, but are not limited to, nationality. One important instance of such “straying” is the situation where “Caribbean discourse has come to serve as a catalyst for other minority or ‘excentric’ discourses” (D’haen [1997], 318). The survival of Caribbean studies — within postcolonial studies, within the universities — depends on the extent to which it encourages such “straying”; it is in jeopardy only whenever and wherever “culturally specific” comes to mean “culturally bound” (Brydon and Tiffin [1993], 21). Wilson Harris, with typical candor, has called such boundedness “illiteracy of the imagination” (see Harris [1983], 32), and he tirelessly reminds us of the dangers of orthodoxy and dogma, old and new. Caribbeanists can heed Harris’s advice by actively imagining new, less bounded identities for themselves and thus inspire greater intellectual flexibility in all scholarly pursuits.

References Allis, Jeannette B. 1981. West Indian Literature: An Index to Criticism, 1930–1975. Boston: G. K. Hall.

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Anderson, W. W., ed. 1985. Caribbean Orientations: A Bibliography of Resource Material on the Caribbean Experience in Canada. Toronto: Organization for Caribbean Canadian Inititiatives and Williams-Wallace Publishers. Baker, Houston A., Jr., ed. 1976. Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean, and Black American Literature. Ithaca, NY: Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell Unviersity. Baugh, Edward. 1971. West Indian Poetry, 1900–1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonization. Kingston: Savacou. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. [1989]. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Transl. by James Maraniss. Durham: Duke University Press. Birbalsingh, Frank. 1988. Passion and Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature. London: Hansib. ———, ed. 1996. Frontiers of Caribbean Literature in English. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. [1970]. 1996. Timehri. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 344–50. London: Routledge. ———. [1974]. 1986. The African Presence in Caribbean Literature. Roots. Havana: Casa de las Américas. ———. 1974. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Mona: Savacou. ———. 1984. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon. Brock, Colin, ed. 1986. The Caribbean in Europe: Aspects of the West Indian Experience in Britain, France, and the Netherlands. London; Totowa, NJ: F. Cass. Brydon, Diana and Helen Tiffin. 1993. Decolonizing Fictions. Mundelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo Press. Cartey, Wilfred. 1970. Black Images. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Chancy, Myriam J. 1997. In Search of Safe Places: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Chomsky, Aviva. 1996. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Cobb, Martha. 1979. Harlem, Haiti, and Havana: A Comparative Critical Study of Langston Hughes, Jacques Roumain, and Nicolás Guillén. Washington, D. C.: Three Continents Press. Dabydeen, David and Nana Wilson-Tagoe, eds. 1988. A Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature. London: Hansib and Rutherford. Dahl, Anthony G. 1995. Literature of the Bahamas, 1724–1992. The March Towards National Identity. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, Inc. Daly, Vere T. 1974. The Making of Guyana. London; Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dash, J. Michael. [1989]. 1992. In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean Literature. After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing. Ed. by Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, 17–26. Sydney; Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press. D’haen, Theo. 1997. (Post)Modernity and Caribbean Discourse. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 303–21. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Donnell, Alison and Sarah Lawson Welsh, ed. 1996. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge. Dookhan, Isaac. [1974]. 1994. A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States. Kingston, Jamaica: Canoe Press. Harris, Wilson. 1967. Tradition, the Writer and Society. London: New Beacon. ———. 1981. Explorations. A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966–1981. Ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press. ———. 1983. The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Henry, Frances. 1994. The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press. Herdeck, Donald E., ed. 1979. Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia. Washington, D. C.: Three Continents Press. Jackson, Richard. 1979. Black Writers in Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. King, Bruce. 1995. Derek Walcott and West Indian Drama: Not only a Playwright but a Company, The Trinidad Theatre Workshop, 1959–1993. Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press.

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Kutzinski, Vera M. 1994. Caribbean Theory and Criticism. The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth, 138–42. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 1997. The Cult of Caliban: Collaboration and Revisionism in Contemporary Caribbean Narrative. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 286–302. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lalla, Barbara, ed. 1989. Voices in Exile: Jamaican Texts of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Lang, George. 1997. Islands, Enclaves, Continua: Notes Toward a Comparative History of Caribbean Creole Literatures. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 3: Cross-Cultural Studies. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 29–56. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lewis, Gordon K. 1968. The Growth of the Modern West Indies. New York; London: Monthly Review Press. Lewis, Lancelot S. 1980. The West Indian in Panama: Black Labor in Panama, 1850–1914. Washington, D. C.: University Press of America. Lewis, Sybil Farrell and Dale T. Mathews, eds. 1984. Documents on the Invasion of Grenada, October 1983. Río Piedras: Institute of Caribbean Studies, University of Puerto Rico. MacDonald, Scott B. 1986. Trinidad and Tobago. Democracy and Development in the Caribbean. New York; London: Praeger. Mordecai, Pamela and Betty Wilson, eds. 1989. Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean. Oxford; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Ngugi, James. 1972. Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature. London: Heinemann. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. 1993. Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches To West Indian Fiction By Women. London; Basingstoke: Macmillan. Pollard, Velma, ed. 1990. Caribbean Languages: Lesser-Know Varieties. Berlin; New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Rodríguez-Luis, Julio. 1994. Hispanic Literature. Introduction. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Ed. by A. James Arnold, Julio Rodríguez-Luis, and J. Michael Dash, 3–6. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1981. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: the author. Sallhuddin. 1994. Guyana, the Struggle for Liberation, 1945–1992. Georgetown, Guyana: Guyana National Printers. Sander, Reinhart. 1988. The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the Nineteen-Thirties. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Searle, Chris. 1984. Words Unchained: Language and Revolution in Grenada. London: Zed Books. Slemon, Stephen. 1994. The Scramble for Post-Colonialism. De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. Ed. by Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, 15–32. London; New York: Routledge. Smart, Ian Isidore. 1984. Central American Writers of West Indian Origin: A New Hispanic Literature. Washington, D. C.: Three Continents Press. ———. 1994. West Indian Writing in Central America. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 1: Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Ed. by A. James Arnold, Julio Rodriguez-Luis, and J. Michael Dash, 75–83. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Tree, Ronald. 1972. A History of Barbados. New York: Random House. Walcott, Derek. 1970. What The Twilight Says: An Overture. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. [1976]. 1996, rpt. The Muse of History. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh. 354–58. London: Routledge. Walmsley, Anne. 1992. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. Williams, Eric. [1970]. 1989. From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969. London: André Deutsch. Young, Virginia Heyer. 1993. Becoming West Indian: Culture, Self, and Nation in St. Vincent. Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution Press.

LITERARY DEVELOPMENT A Contrastive History

Emergence of Language and Literature

Language Use in West Indian Literature* MAUREEN WARNER-LEWIS

University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

Language comprehends a lexical inventory, a system of word morphology, semantics, syntax or grammar, idioms, and phonology, the latter including stress and intonation patterns. Within any one such system are contained subsystems peculiar to region, class, occupation, religion, gender, and generation. The pragmatics of language regulates who speaks to whom and when, in other words, the properties and proprieties of speech acts. Written forms of language achieve varying degrees of distance between sound sequences and their representative shapes etched on surfaces, as well as attempting by punctuation to delimit breath, grammatical, sense, and intonation groups. The oral literature, or orature, of exclusively oral societies utilizes language as utterance per se, while written literature, just as written language, is based on conventions of both utterance and inscription. West Indian literature, in this century the expressive tool of the region’s literate classes for the most part, has its genesis in the imitation of the printed texts of European literary exemplars. But over time, it has been groping, with increasing assurance and finesse, toward a compromise with the spoken language of Caribbean life and the oral forms of its popular literature, ceremonials, and festivals. Writers have thus been engaged in an ongoing evolution of strategies to lend verisimilitude to the linguistic culture of the Caribbean. This involves the incorporation into their art of lyric, contemplative, dramatic, and narrative voices in various local vernaculars. The manner and extent of this deployment are not merely reflective of the cosmopolitan character of Caribbean society but also signal the nature of class stratification in the region and the concomitant identification between class and language code. The reliance on international English is, in turn, a profound index of the colonial mental residue in the knowledge base, affect, and cultural medium of the region’s creative writers and their indigenous audience. Such reliance is also a recognition of the functional communicative value of European languages (in this case, English) and their link to international publishing outlets. On the other hand, the various strategies creative writers have been devising to appropriate and integrate diverse language codes in their art give voice to increasing national self-confidence and cultural / ethnic self-awareness at the same time that they chronicle the ongoing uncertainties and ambiguities of self-definition, critique concepts of national consensus, and encode the class and ethnic tensions in Caribbean societies. Literary genre has been an important determinant of vernacular usage. Of the three genres under consideration here — fiction, poetry, and drama — it is the last which exhibits the most thoroughgoing exploitation of vernacular speech for the reason that performance is intrinsic to it. By contrast, poetry and fiction in the European tradition have been integrally bound up with

* I wish to acknowledge the assistance of Sandra Gajraj-Maharaj, Katherine Wiggan, Nadi Edwards, and Mervyn Morris of the Department of English, University of the West Indies, Mona, in data gathering for this essay.

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the print medium and with individual mental decoding. In the physical absence of an author, such texts are mediated by the artifice of a narrative or lyric voice rather than by the immediacy of, and interaction between, actor, verbalization, setting, and audience collective. Historically and universally speaking, the further removed from their oral and aural origins both fiction and poetry have become, the greater has grown the distance between the authorial voice and the reader, and the stronger the tendency for that mediating voice to utilize language mechanisms of remoteness. In the context of a diglossic social fabric — one in which code-switching is statusladen and in which the majority of the population speaks a mother tongue other than a metropolitan English dialect — Standard English operates as one such distancing mechanism. Following the mainstream traditions of the English literary canon, some of the early fiction and drama therefore used Standard English exclusively. Examples of such usage are novels by H. G. De Lisser from Jamaica and plays by Douglas Archibald from Trinidad. Not only were these authors white creoles who spoke Standard English, but their themes initially centered on historical romance or on the upper social stratum. When, however, these and other writers began to attempt depiction of a wider spectrum of society and to treat broader social issues, the need for verisimilitude involved them in reflecting the multilingual nature of the Caribbean. Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers, therefore, reserved Standard English for narrative voice and for interior monologues and dialogues of educated characters, while deploying Creole for the speech of uneducated characters. Even at that, there was a reluctance to admit Creole. This would have stemmed from a number of reasons: the writers would have judged Creole as unaesthetic, limited and limiting in its expressive and ideational range, and restrictive in its communicability with an international readership. Correspondingly, there was a concern that the social and aesthetic sensibilities of local audiences, consisting of expatriates as well as of the local intelligentsia, might be offended. Writers designed various strategies to minimize such limitations and offence. One device was subtly to disguise the Creole by according it minimal syntactical and orthographic features of differentiation from Standard English. An example of this occurs in the short story “Blood Out of Stone” by Trinidad’s A. M. Clarke from his Ma Mamba, 1939. Here, the narrative voice speaks the formal, erudite English favored by the colonial intelligentsia, but Clarke breaks this flow to insert an exchange between a Chinese shopkeeper and a young African girl. In addition to recreating significant features of Chinese English, which Clarke is at pains to signal orthographically, he subtly manipulates AfroTrinidadian speech to allow it to maintain the appearance of Standard English. Clarke manages this through lexical and syntactic simplicity. By including an instance of subject-verb number discord and the cajoling sentence-tag nuh, Clarke quietly indicates the speaker’s medium and signals the need for a Creole phonological reinterpretation of her utterance: “As Teresita called for the first item, the short, wizened Chinaman asked, ‘You pringee money, nuh?’ ‘No, but you will get it later.’ ‘Every day same-e ting. No money, You koing ket chob? How-ee you kong pay, nuh?’ ‘No, I haven got the job yet. I expect one soon.’ ‘Vell, come whenee you ket chob. Me canee gee you more now.’ ‘But mother is sick, Chin. She always pay you well. We have no food in the house. Give us some goods, please, nuh?’
” (Clarke [1939], 155). This selective transparency of vernaculars is a subtle index of the author’s attitudes toward his characters. By down-playing Teresita’s Creole identity under an English mask, Clarke seeks to ennoble her suffering and elicit reader empathy with her dilemma. By contrast, his detailed reproduction of

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Chinese English is meant to be laughable and marks the speaker as a social and, in this situation, a moral outsider as well. The assignation of vernacular or English to characters on the basis of author-character distance or rapport is a dominant tendency in the literature of the first four decades of the twentieth century. This coincides with a period in which the dominant relationship of authors to themes of lower-class life is one of voyeurism. Middle-class writers find themselves drawn to the vibrant life style and colorful speech of the underclass, at the same time that they feel moved to agitate against the poverty that is the indifferent catalyst of creativity and frustration, humanity and violence among the underprivileged. All the same, this literature strongly conveys the authors’ wonderment at, or distance from, their subjects’ lives. Such literature is structured around the following: an observer, or participant-observer, of the action who is middle or upper class or, if a peasant or proletarian, is more educated than the rest; an English-speaking narrative voice, a commentator who upholds or takes account of a middle-class European world view. C. L. R. James’ s Minty Alley, 1936, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, 1953, and V. S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street, 1959, are all classics in this genre. The initial avoidance of vernacular also affected the range of the poetic imagination. Derek Walcott of St. Lucia retrospectively recalls: “What I wrote had nothing to do with what I saw. While I honoured and loved them in my mind, I could not bring myself to write down the names of villages, of fruits, the way people spoke because it seemed too raw…. And I found no lines that mentioned breadfruit, guava, plantain, cassava in literature” (Walcott [1973], 42). By the later 1960s, however, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, in Rights of Passage, 1967, would begin to make music out of African and Caribbean place names, the topography and flora of these sites: “the stone had skidded arc’d and bloomed into islands: / Cuba and San Domingo / Jamaica and Puerto Rico / Grenada Guadeloupe Bonaire” (Brathwaite [1973], 48). By the 1970s, Walcott too could dare to “name” St. Lucia — “Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery” — and its fruits: “Pomme arac, / otaheite apple, pomme cythere, \ pomme granate, \ moubain, / … z’aman / sea-almonds / by the crisp sea-bursts…” (Walcott [1976], 35–36). For poets functioning like seers, the act of naming accesses the power to bring things into being in new and unexpected contexts, endowing them with magical presence and resonance for the audience, local and foreign. It is, however, the performance medium of drama which most urgently poses the issue of extending vernacular usage and, in addition, reflects that constant shift in language register so indicative of West Indian cultural, social, and psychological ambiguity. Diglossic language use marks the spate of dramatic productions as of 1948, the year that also signals the birth of West Indian nationalism. For instance, there is Ester, a poor, educated girl who code-switches in Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, 1958, by Trinidadian Errol John. In fellow Trinidadian Freddie Kissoon’s God and Uriah Butler, performed in Port of Spain in 1967, Butler, the labor leader, speaks Creole to his followers in informal situations but Standard English in his public addresses, and Standard English as well in private conversation with a legal advisor and friend who is more educated than himself. Further authorial distinctions are made. For the slum setting of Mamaguy, another short play performed in Trinidad in 1961 and 1966, Kissoon selectively modifies English orthography — as Guyanese writer Eric Walrond had already done in Tropic Death, 1926–not only to signal his characters’ underclass affiliation but also to indicate the specific dialect and voice quality of the Creole appropriate to these speakers: “[Lennox:] Yo eh no boy. Yo eh know

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de damn trouble we in. We eh getting a black cent. When yo bad luck1 wet paper could cut yo” (Kissoon [1966], 7). A different dialect and voice quality are suggested by the more orthodox setting and the therefore more restricted orthographic changes in the Tobagonian Eric Roach’s Belle Fanto, performed in Barbados in 1966: “[Tan:] But wait, look how the devil visiting my doormouth2 this morning. Hear how these children giggling and cackling in me house. Look nuh. All you mad or what. Who ever think they could come in my yard and play hop frog and leap scotch3 please clean it out at once. I don’t want no jumbie4 to dance in my doormouth tonight nuh” (Roach [1966], 14). Orthography has continued to offer the West Indian writer yet another challenge related to his / her representation of the vernacular. While, in some instances, spelling departures from international English usage may signal a specific class or regional pronunciation, as indicated in the Kissoon extract above, writers also take into account issues such as word recognizability for readers, the distracting overuse of the apostrophe, and the strain placed on the flow of the writer’s own creativity and on typographic habits by considerations of maintaining orthographic divergence, yet consistency. Now that Creoles are increasingly invading formerly formal spaces and that more (not all) persons are aware of the phonological differences between the Creoles and international English, several coping devices are in operation. One is to suppress use of the apostrophe to signal word-initial or word-final consonant substitution, such as dat for “that,” ting for “thing,” mout for “mouth,” and selective use of phonemic spelling, such as fain for “find,” the nasalized negative cyan for “can’t,” sometimes represented as cyaan to distinguish it from cyan (“can”). Some of these devices are used in Mervyn Morris’s editorial rendering of Louise Bennett’s and Michael Smith’s poetry. Another device is the use of popular spellings of some common non-English words and sounds, as “nuh” in the Roach piece and “cheups” to register the ingressive interdental affrication of “suck teeth” that signals dismissal and disdain. The latter strategy is not meant to conceal or minimize the frequency of Creole speech, as in earlier periods, but, rather, is intended for eye comfort, leaving the reader to regulate pronunciation. But this, of course, means that West Indian literature sounds differently to different people, depending on the decoder’s language culture and knowledge of other languages. It means that comprehension gaps occur as the literature is received from island to island of the Antillean archipelago. Since these islands are outposts of several metropolitan languages, not only do their Creoles carry different lexical bases, but even Creoles using the same lexical base show variations from island to island with regard to pronunciation systems, intonation patterns, syntax, idiom, lexical inventory, and signifier-referent correspondence. Both at regional and international levels, therefore, language choice and orthographical usage have implications for the transparency of stylistic elements such as rhyme, word play, and allusion. These are issues also faced by writers in other languages, and they overlap with the challenges faced by literary translators. The differences in pronunciation between Creoles and accepted metropolitan dialects, or subsystems, of English allow for levels of ambiguity opaque to non-Creole speakers. One of the ambivalences that poetry negotiates is that arising from literal, as opposed to metaphoric and metonymic, lexical use; another is generated by combining the resources of spoken and written languages in order to reinvigorate them both and thus maintain vitality in artistic language. The intricacies of sound-meaning decoding, widened in situations of diglossia and multilingualism, offer the writer the option of consciously encoding multiple meanings. Even where these

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ambivalences are unintentional, the possibilities of their decoding serve to further levels of interpretation. Morris diagnoses the different meanings of Dennis Scott’s “More Poem” when both Standard English and Rastafarian English are allowed: On the one hand, the first of the poem’s lines — “A solitary voice is wrong, / Jericho shall fall, shall fall / at the People’s song!” (Scott [1982], 35) — may then yield additionally “a solitary vice” and “a salutary voice,” suggesting at one and the same time the self-indulgence of creative writing as against the communal legitimacy of “the People’s song.” On the other hand, the poem implies that the poet’s may indeed be a salutary voice since “Man must chant as Man can / gainst night,” lines that allude to Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” (Thomas [1973]). The authentic depiction of Caribbean life thus demands sensitivity to speech culture but, even further, a fidelity to and an extension of the appropriateness of speech act to social event and psychological state. Douglas Archibald, in his play Junction Village, 1958, recaptures a ponderous style seen in rural culture as appropriate to serious occasions when the oratorically minded feel moved to euphemism and even malapropism: “[Paul:] We are gathered here, together, on a most lugubrious occasion. [Cordy:] Yo comin’, Paul? [Paul:] No, Cordelia, forgive for some moments if I deter from entering the room of future demise. I suffer from a sensitive affliction to the morbid …” (Archibald [1958], 17). While this style of speech is comic to the urban or urbanized middle and upper classes and therefore calculated to raise a laugh, dramatists also strive to dignify the common people and, in so doing, divert the vernacular to meditative, even tragic, purpose. Errol Hill, in Dance Bongo, 1966, seems to have taken inspiration from the stylistic synthesis fashioned by Jamaica’s Vic Reid — whom I discuss below — to forge a poetic medium: [1st Woman:] Ay, what a day when news appear / Galloping like revelation / The crane collapse and kill a man — [2nd Woman:] It shake my soul5 foundation / Missis, to think that morning self6 / I put his butter-bread one side / Knowing he would o’ smiling come / To fetch it evening-time. / And poor little Susan, how she cry / When they drop him to the hole, / He had promise to bring her a toy. [1st Woman:] So sudden! The world turn upside-down / When the young go and the old remain. / The hand of God in everything / And we must bow before his will” (Hill [1966], 16). The dramatic work of Derek Walcott is itself a microcosm of the gradual change toward greater exploitation of the language varieties available to the West Indian writer. In the 1940s, Walcott writes the historical tragedy Henri Christophe, performed in 1950 and published in 1951, entirely in Standard English. By the time he writes The Sea at Dauphin, a tragedy set among poor St Lucian fisherfolk that was first produced in 1954, Walcott has recourse to an English Creole, suggesting by its syntax the French Creole that such people would speak in real life. It is, in fact, the second-language English Creole spoken in some islands by persons whose first-language is French Creole. “[Afra:] Look, Monsieur Augustin, this fish you know it have now fifteen years, does wait for people line to hook them up? I tired use me tongue and tell you don’t care how you drinking in Samuel Cafe, or talking how you brave in front of them Dauphin women, work is work, and sea and I don’t sleep. I tell you when you pass, pass for the old man. Where he is now? Where this old man?” (Walcott [1970], 49). Lovelace deploys a similar strategy to convey rustic speech in The Schoolmaster, 1968. Hodge points to several syntactic devices engaged here to create a non-mainstream English Creole that functions as an English Creole proxime to the Trinidad Spanish mother tongue of such persons.

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In the sequence, “I bring a message from the schoolmaster, Mr. Dardain. He say for you to come over now. It is important” (Lovelace [1968], 71), there is the (to the Creole ear) stilted “it is” rather than “is” in “It is important.” This follows the quaint expression of volition introducing indirect speech: “He say for you to come…,” and, in the initial sentence, the formality imparted by use of the simple present tense of the verb, a technique more pronounced in a sentence such as “I go to dance now” (42). Another device is the post-verbal placement of the adverb in “He would say that the boy write already his letter” (123). This authenticity of shifting voice and experience is not lost on the novelists and poets. The saga of the struggle to exploit in fiction the available linguistic media is best illustrated in the oeuvre of Vic Reid. The conflicting appeal and functionality of both the Standard and Creole led Reid to experimentation. Here is a writer who, unlike the novelists of the 1930s, speaks from within a culture that bridged the perspectives of the black peasantry and of the black middle class. Indeed, his life work was dedicated to inculcating a sense of Jamaican nationalism through an historical narrative based on African resistance to colonial and neo-colonial oppression. For this reason, Reid often chooses to project his vision through a first-person narrator. But he, too, is caught between a desire, on the one hand, to invest that narrative voice with the intimacy and experiential authority suggested by the vernacular and, on the other hand, to use Standard English to ensure international access to his work as well as give expression to his craftsmanship in the acquired language. The recipe he produced for his first novel, New Day, 1949, then, was to forge an artificial composite: to blend Jamaican Creole structures, vocabulary, and imagery with elements of Burns’s Scots English and Synge’s Irish English and to add to this a Biblical phrasing that would suggest the dominant literary influence among the Jamaican folk. This experiment may have stemmed from contradictory impulses: a reservation about employing vernacular in a work of epic dimension, yet a desire to elevate the vernacular from a language of simpletons and buffoons to a vehicle of prestige and moment. In the following internal monologue, Reid adapts the pejorative Jamaican noun john crow (meaning “vulture”) as an adjective; the effect is labored: “And you too, bloody Governor Eyre and your crow ProvostMarshal Ramsey, are you hearing wherever you are?” (Reid [1970], 2). The syntactic inversions Reid insistently deploys in his dialogues are partly Biblical adaptations — such as “What do you here, Moses?” — partly authorial fabrications, as in “Met up with Father, you?” and “Is Davie it” (88 and 53). The English present tense is preferred to the Creole continuous aspect — “he a gut” — in phrases such as “What he goes to the Gut for?” (88). Another characteristic of this language style is the use of the perfect tense (absent in Creole): “They ha’ locked up Davie too” (53). At times, Reid links this to a Scots-type negation: “he has no seen me” (88). On the whole, this is a stilted, ill-assorted amalgam. Reid’s sortie into linguistic invention comes from a deliberate shunning of vernacular resources and indicates that he felt more at home with Standard English. Indeed, the apogee of Reid’s style — a technique begun in 1949, developed in his children’s novel Sixty–Five, 1960, and more extensively sustained in Nanny Town, 1983–is a use of Standard English rather in the manner of Chinua Achebe in African literature, harnessing that language both for the narrative voice and for dialogue, but so infusing it with lexical and idiomatic Jamaicanisms, with ideophones and concrete images derived from the Jamaican landscape, folk language, way of life, and mannerism that the impression created is that one is listening to a quintessential Jamaican voice and experience. “And although he had his

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eyes on Gato, he had not said the Sun Cat had not slipped. Indeed, many in Nanny-Town had taken the thought but after a good look at it pushed it back in a secret place… Now then. Although we had made the enemy pay for finding that first Nanny-Town, it was yet a stone stubbing our toes, a macca-thorn pricking our pride that they had made us abandon our home to flee deeper into the mountain and live in a refuge-town. It was they who owed us a las’ lick… ‘Kibber,7 Kishee,’ Nanny would say when they talked about the las’lick. ‘We live in a sling-shot town and we slung it at the Red-Ants8 and crushed them’
” (Reid [1983], 111). The history of Jamaica’s scribal exploration of its Creole began early this century when the young policeman, Claude McKay, was persuaded by an English patron to write poetry in Jamaican rather than in British English. The result, Constab Ballads, 1912, is a pioneering effort that betrays McKay’s own commitment to Standard English as his language of conscious thought and writing, since Constab Ballads employs a Creole largely translated from original formulation in English idiom and syntax. Yet McKay’s poems were revolutionary enough to inspire a teenage Louise Bennett to renounce Standard English as her poetic medium and give voice to her experience of Jamaican semi-urban life in the Creole poetry of Verses in Dialect, 1942. By structuring her poetry around the voices of ordinary people, from pastors to street-sellers, and by filtering her often satiric observations through one of these personae, Bennett transforms her poetry from a channel of individual experience to the self-portrayal of a people. Another functional implication of her method is that it imbues her art with a performance dimension, spanning commentary, description, labrish (gossip), abuse, and exclamation. Younger artists consciously operating in the Bennett tradition are eminently Paul Keens-Douglas of Trinidad and Joan Andrea Hutchinson of Jamaica. Both utilize narrative and poetic genres in Creole exclusively or in a fluid melange of Creole and Standard English for purposes of social satire and comedy. The oral dimension of contemplative poetry was introduced by the Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite in the 1960s. He took his cue not from Bennett but from the source of the tradition in which she unconsciously, at the start, fashioned her art: the oral literary performances of Africa. Writing in free verse and in the Eliotesque tradition of the long poem, Brathwaite developed his poems around a series of voices articulating themselves in language styles peculiar to their cultural environment. While the meditative consciousness of the work articulates itself in Standard English, the other personae of Rights of Passage, 1967, and Islands, 1969, speak in various Creoles of the region, or invest Standard English with African-American idioms, all the while reproducing percussive rhythms typical of skin-headed drums and the steelband or recapturing the breath-groups of the calypso, the ska, and various jazz modes. Below, a Rastafarian persona is suggested by a characteristic neologism of Rasta speech, “locksman” (a wearer of hair in hanging, matted clumps or plaits), as well as by the artificially extended use of Jamaican Creole pluralization (noun + them, and of the Creole dem, ‘them’ + noun as ‘those’) to convey the slow, hypnotic insistence of Rasta drumming): “Rise rise / locks- / man, Solo- / man, wise / man, rise / So beat dem drums / dem, spread / dem wings dem, / watch dem fly / dem soar dem / high dem” (Brathwaite [1973], 42–43). Brathwaite’s insistent exploration of sound-effect in his poetry, whether in Creole or in Standard English, accounts for his thrust toward electronically-produced and live readings of his poetry. This has strengthened the performance dimension of poetry since the late 1960s, a

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strategy that, linked, at times, with musical accompaniment, has since been adopted and extended by a generation of younger poets, leading to the rise of performance and dub poetry. Dialogue, personal narrative and commentary, ideophonic phrases and intensive use of the vernacular characterize the poetry of Bruce St. John from Barbados, Michael Smith, Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka, and Binta Breeze from Jamaica, Abdul Malik from Trinidad, Merle Collins from Grenada, Lillian Allen from Canada, and Linton Kwesi Johnson from the U. K.. Their poetry, both by its themes and its medium, addresses itself primarily to the Caribbean community, whether on the islands and in their metropolitan diasporas. It is often, though not always, passionate in tone and seeks to expose injustices of class, wealth, and gender, as well as extreme psychological states. By contrast, Brathwaite himself uses vernacular selectively, tending to allocate it to self-contained poems; he generally tends to avoid diglossia. For his part, Walcott has produced less vernacular poetry than Brathwaite and tends more to code-switching in his poetic expression in which he predominantly uses English Creole. In addition, he sometimes takes inspiration from the kaiso calypso for his Creole-based poetry. This is best exemplified in the long line, rhyming couplet, wit, intertextual allusion, and satiric intent of “The Spoiler’s Return” from The Fortunate Traveller, 1982, where the ghost of the calypsonian Spoiler, returning from the underworld, explains: “I have a room there where I keep a crown, / and Satan send me to check out this town. / Down there, that Hot Boy9 had a stereo / where, whole day, he does blast my caiso; / I beg him two weeks leave and he send me / back up, not as no bedbug or no flea, / but in this limeskin hat and floccy suit, / to sing what I did always sing: the truth. / Tell Desperados when you reach the hill, / I decompose, but I composing still” (Walcott [1982], 53). Among prose writers, the one who has most often and most extensively harnessed the vernacular is Samuel Selvon from Trinidad. Although in the main deploying selective functional assignations to Standard English and Creole in his first novel, A Brighter Sun, 1952, he dared to make a breakthrough in literary language usage by code-shifting from Standard English to Creole as a vehicle for introspection: “Clouds were there because there had to be rain for tings to grow; he knew which ones portended rainfall — not those white ones flying now, but great grey ones, tumbling into one another, until the whole sky was like slate. How high those clouds is? How high the sky? It must be good to fork up the land in the sky, it so blue! And everything you plant, it must be come out blue too” (Selvon [1952], 99). Then, in The Lonely Londoners, 1956, a novel written in England, Selvon opted for the naturalistic flow and immediacy imparted by the vernacular idioms, affect, and speech vernacular. To carry out this tone and intention, he established a participant-observer first-person narrative voice. This device has become a hallmark of Selvon’s most successful works, such as The Housing Lark, 1965, and Moses Ascending, 1975. Selvon also mastered the art of interweaving in his narrative voices various codes of English as well as Creole to the extent that Cromwellian English, a modernist stream-of-consciousness, or an Eliotesque meditation seems as natural to them as allusions to Trinidad calypso. This ease of code transition within a work is a striking feature of younger generations of authors such as the fiction writers Earl Lovelace from Trinidad, Erna Brodber, Olive Senior, poet Lorna Goodison, and dramatist Trevor Rhone, all from Jamaica. Much of the success of these writers derives from their grasp of the inner workings of various sectors of the societies they delineate, the psychological accuracy of their characterization, and the aptness and flexibility of their language range. Rhone’s ear for the realistically appropriate turn of phrase

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never fails to impress. The psychological intricacies of emphasis, distancing, and self-control signaled by Standard English, and of passion, mutual involvement, and lacerating frankness indicated by the vernacular are well illustrated in this heated exchange from Two Can Play, first performed in 1982: “[Gloria is in the bedroom writing a note.] [Gloria:] Dear Jim, There is something I didn’t have a chance to tell yuh, I hope you don’t misunderstand, so I will start at the beginning…. [She stops, look up.] Where do I begin? [Jim enters.] [Jim:] Gloria — you bitch, where yuh is? [Gloria crumples the note.] Yuh never hear me calling yuh? [Gloria:] What is it Jim? [Jim:] Yuh cunning little bitch! [Gloria:] Let me get outa dis house. [She goes to the phone and dials.] [Jim:] You do me dat? YOU woman… After 20 years… You play me for an ass, a damn ginny10… yuh betray me… Man kill woman for less! [Gloria speaks into the telephone.] Send a taxi for me to… [Jim:] [snatches the phone] Yuh not leaving till you tell me the reason why yuh leaving me. [Gloria]: A tell yuh already” (Rhone [1986], 67). In Earl Lovelace’s novel, The Dragon Can’t Dance, 1979, the third-person narrator’s voice moves so effortlessly between standard and vernacular that the reader is as little aware of code-shifting as is the West Indian speaker / listener in everyday speech situations: “Is noise whole day. Laughter is not laughter; it is a groan coming from the bosom of these houses… innocence was in the womb — children imitating the grown-up laughter and big-man pose of their elders…” (Lovelace [1979], 9–10). In The Wine of Astonishment, 1982, Lovelace extends this technique of code-switching by activating the voice of a participating first-person narrator, a perspective which had secured the success of Trevor Rhone’s play Old Story Time, 1979, of Reid’s Nanny Town, 1983, and of almost half the short stories in Senior’s superb collection, Summer Lightning, 1986. The development of this flexible, less inhibited approach to the language medium has characterized the evolution of Indo-Trinidadian literature as well. This writing utilizes various dialects of English in the same way that other ethnic streams of West Indian literature do, including an English pidgin (since it was not the mother tongue of its users) employed by Africans in the nineteenth century but residually retained into the twentieth by Hindi mothertongue speakers. “Yuh talkam nonsene!… me gettam no notice” (Selvon [1971], 148) is one such example. In addition, Indo-Trinidadian literature features a number of lexical items from Bhojpuri, the Hindi dialect composite spoken in Guyana and Trinidad. The Bhojpuri lexicon which enters the language of fiction writers like Seepersad, Vidia S. and Shiva Naipaul, Harold Sonny Ladoo, as well as the poetry of M. P. Alladin, Kenneth Parmasad, and Selwyn Bhajan indicates the range of the Indian cultural milieu in Trinidad. That lexicon underlies certain religio-philosophical concepts which surface in English terms such as “illusion” (maya), “rebirth” (janam), “fate, preordained duty” (karma). But many other lexical categories are overt: names of deities, ritual actions and objects, caste categories, personal names, social groups and institutions, kinship relations, respectful and avoidance terms of address, festivals, domestic objects, clothes, foods, plants, musical forms and instruments, exclamations, and intensives. Sometimes glosses are offered within the body of the text to explain a Bhojpuri term. Seepersad Naipaul, writing in Trinidad’s literary dawn, has recourse to this method in Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales, 1943. Ladoo, born in Trinidad and writing from Canada, offers a glossary to No Pain Like This Body, 1972, while his fellow-countryman Ismith Khan, in The Jumbie Bird, 1961, sometimes uses Hindi and Urdu terms, but, similarly based abroad, he proffers English phrases

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for commonly used Bhojpuri terms: “fireplace” for chulha, “sweetmeats” for meetai, “loin cloth” for dhoti, “rice water” for mar, “flat bread” for roti, “coriander,” “cumin,” and “saffron” for dhania, geea, and hardi, respectively. Interestingly, this lexical accommodation in favor of English marks V. S. Naipaul’s Trinidad urban-based stories and his metropolitan works, whereas The Suffrage of Elvira, 1957, and The Mystic Masseur, 1964, set in rural Trinidad and reflecting the erstwhile demographic concentration of Indians in rural areas, are saturated with Hindi and Urdu terms. But the communication problem posed by the use of non-English languages and indigenous terms is not one faced solely by Indian writers. In the play Ti Jean and His Brothers, 1958, and in the poems “Names” and “Sainte Lucie” of Sea Grapes, Walcott resorts to alternating French Creole terms and narrative with English translations. Then, as regards syntax, where Walcott found a related Creole into which to transmute the speech of his fisherfolk in The Sea at Dauphin, Naipaul, wishing to reserve Trinidad English Creole for marking participation in creole urban culture, resorted to Standard English to represent orthodoxy in the Bhojpuri conversations in the early Hanuman House milieu of A House for Mr Biswas, 1961. Although the largely oral renditions of Rotiless Ramgoolie, 1982, by Trinidadian Ruth Sawh presume an audience fully cognizant of Bhojpuri terms, writers like Kenneth Parmasad (also from Trinidad), in Child of the Storms, 1987, Edward Brathwaite in Masks, 1968, and Islands, Vic Reid in New Day, and Michael Thelwell in The Harder They Come, 1980, all recognize that their culture-specific terminology is unfamiliar to significant sections of the Caribbean audience. The provision of glossaries is thus meant to facilitate and include a multicultural audience even within the region. At the same time, the lexical and rhythmic authenticity of Alladin’s poem “Hosay Drums,” from The Monstrous Angel, 1969, including the pun on the onomatopoeic jhai and jai (victory) attests the self-confidence of Indo-Trinidadian writing: “Jhim jhim jha! / Jhim jhim jha! / Bass drums booming… / Tassas rolling, / Jhanj clashing… / Rangtaka tang-tang, / Rakka-tikki-tang, / Jhai!” (Alladin [1969], 33). Linguistic heterogeneity mirrors and enacts social cultural differences within the Caribbean. Over the past eight decades, literary artists have moved progressively from ignoring this pluriculturality to initially exploiting it for demeaning and / or comic purposes. But increasing political democratization and its valorization of the ordinary citizen have enabled writers to invest the people’s various dialects with sobriety and philosophical content. In doing this, they are able to represent a wider range of personality types, moods, and emotional states than earlier generations had attempted to do, to confront their characters with more searching paradoxes of perceived and self-ascriptive identities. Writers have also had to pay closer attention to the languages, linguistic registers, and speech acts used in their environments; they have been challenged to harness or devise loan translations from non-English lexified Creoles to project new levels of authenticity of mood and awareness of Caribbean life and ritual enactments of Caribbean world views in order to reinterpret these through lyrical, narrative, dramatic, and interactive language. For the authors themselves, Standard English constitutes an important element of the selfidentification of earlier generations of writers such as C. L. R. James, Vic Reid, and Derek Walcott who acknowledge their colonial acculturation and education as mind-broadening and spiritually liberating factors in their intellectual and affective formation. Indeed, even for

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younger generations, Standard English still functions as the automatic mode of written and formal discourse, as close analysis of Lovelace, Goodison, Senior, and Brodber reveals. While the performance poets tended initially to compose in Creole rather than let attempts at Standard English silence their thoughts or render their work “substandard” and flawed, interestingly, their later work displays an increasing use of Standard English syntax, perhaps due to their heightened exposure to this language medium through reading and travel. This does not mean, however, that they operate in Standard English to the exclusion of the vernacular. Neither is currently a selfsufficient medium. Even so, for all these categories of writers, their readings undercut the foreignness of their international English or stamp the West Indianness of their Creole, since the voice registers Caribbean rather than British, American, or Canadian pronunciation, intonation, stress, voice quality, and rhythm. Indeed, the narrowing gap in the Caribbean between rural and urban life styles, and between the milieux of orality and formal education, and the oral / aural availability of technology to bridge the gap between author and audience — all these factors increasingly allow the artistic interpreters of Caribbean reality and its imaginary to incorporate in their art forms a wider speech range of language varieties and speech acts than was earlier thinkable, and imperceptibly to fuse these into seamless wholes.

Notes 1. “Bad luck,” adjectival, means “unlucky.” 2. “Doormouth,” calqued from West African languages, means “door opening, doorway.” 3. A deliberate concatenation of “hop scotch” and “leap frog.” 4. “Jumbie,” from the Mbundu language of Angola, means “ghost, ancestral spirit.” 5. “Soul,” here possessive, is equivalent to Standard English’s “soul’s.” 6. “Morning self,” calque of a French idiom, means “this very morning.” 7. “Kibber,” literally “cover,” means here “keep quiet.” “Las’ lick,” literally “last blow,” is a reference to a fun game performed when children are parting and in which each tries to be the one to give to the other the last slap to the body. Of course, this involves each side in alternately fleeing and carefully approaching the other in order to win the advantage of delivering, rather than receiving, the last blow. 8. Reference to both Europeans and the red-coated British soldiers. 9. “Hot Boy,” similar to “saga boy,” both of which are Trinidad English, means “dude.” 10. “Ginny,” from “jinal,” means “trickster, deceiver.”

References Abrahams, Roger. 1983. The Man-of-Words in the West Indies. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Alladin, M. P. 1969. Hosay Drums. In the Monstrous Angel: 40 Poems. Trinidad: the author. Archibald, Douglas. 1958. Junction Village. Jamaica: University College of West Indies Extra-Mural Department. Caribbean Plays No. 9. Bennett, Louise. 1983. Selected Poems. Ed. by Mervyn Morris. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s. Bernhardt, Stephen. 1983. Dialect and Style Shifting in the Fiction of Samuel Selvon. Studies in Caribbean Language. Ed. by Lawrence Carrington, 266–76. Port of Spain: Society for Caribbean Linguistics.

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Brathwaite, Edward. 1973. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. Rights of Passage. Islands. Masks. Oxford: Oxford University Press Clarke, A. M. and Ernest Carr, eds. 1939. Ma Mamba and Other Stories. Port of Spain: Fraser’s Printerie. Collins, Merle. 1998. Writing andf Creole Language Politics: Voice and Story. Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature, and Identity. Ed. by Kathleen Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau, 89–95. Gainesville and Barbados: University Press of Florida and The University Press of the West Indies. D’Costa, Jean. 1983. The West Indian Novelist and Language: A Search for a Literary Medium. Studies in Caribbean Language. Ed. by Lawrence Carrington, 252–65. Port of Spain: Society for Caribbean Linguistics. Chamberlin, J. Edward. 1993. Come back to Me, My Language: Poetry and the West Indies. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hill, Errol. 1966. Dance Bongo: A Fantasy in One Act. Caribbean Literature: An Anthology. Ed. by Gabriel Coulthard, 15–34. London: University of London Press. Hodge, Merle. 1998. Dialogue and Narrative Voice in The Schoolmaster. Journal of West Indian Literature. 8.1: 56–72. James, C. L. R. [1936]. 1971. Minty Alley. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon Books. John, Errol. 1958. Moon on a Rainbow Shawl. London: Faber & Faber. Khan, Ismith. 1961. The Jumbie Bird. London: MacGibbon & Kee. Kissoon, Freddie. 1966. Mamaguy. Port of Spain: University of the West Indies Extra-Mural Department. Ladoo, Harold. 1972. No Pain Like This Body. Toronto: Anansi Press. Lamming, George. 1953. In the Castle of My Skin. London: Michael Joseph. Lovelace, Earl. [1968]. 1979. The Schoolmaster. London: Heinemann. ———. 1979. The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: André Deutsch. ———. [1982]. 1984. The Wine of Astonishment. New York: Vintage Aventura. McKay, Claude. 1912. Constab Ballads. London: Watts. Morris, Mervyn. 1997. Sounds and Sense. Paper presented at the 16th Annual West Indian Literature Conference, “Representations: Voices and Visions,” University of Miami. Naipaul, Seepersad. 1943. Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales. Port of Spain: the author. Naipaul, Vidia S. 1957. The Suffrage of Elvira. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1959. Miguel Street. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1961. House for Mr. Biswas. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1964. The Mystic Masseur. London: André Deutsch. Parmasad, Kenneth. 1987. Child of the Storms and Other Poems. Diego Martin, Trinidad & Tobago: New Voices. Reid, Victor S. 1949. New Day. New York: Knopf. ———. 1960. Sixty-Five. London: Longman. ———. 1983. Nanny Town. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House. Rhone, Trevor. 1981. Old Story Time and Other Plays. London: Longman. ———. 1986. Two Can Play and School’s Out. Kingston: Longman Roach, Eric. 1967. Belle Fanto. Trinidad: University College of the West Indies Extra-Mural Department. Scott, Dennis. 1982. Dreadwalk. London: New Beacon. Selvon, Samuel. 1952. A Brighter Sun. London: Alan and Wingate. ———. 1956. The Lonely Londoners. London: Alan and Wingate. ———. 1965. The Housing Lark. London: MacGibbon & Kee. ———. 1975. Moses Ascending. London: Davis-Poynter. Senior, Olive. 1986. Summer Lightning and Other Stories. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Smith, Michael. 1986. It A Come. Ed. by Mervyn Morris. London: Race Today. Thelwell, Michael. 1980. The Harder They Come. New York: Grove. Thomas, Dylan. 1973. Miscellany One: Poems, Stories, Broadcasts. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Walcott, Derek. 1951. Henri Christophe. Kingston, Jamaica: Extra Mural Department, University College of the West Indies. ———. 1970. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus &Giroux.

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———. 1973. Another Life. Holograph MS. Book 1. ———. 1976. Sea Grapes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1982. The Fortunate Traveller. London: Faber. Walrond, Eric. [1926]. 1972. Tropic Death. New York: Collier Books. Warner-Lewis, Maureen. 1982. Samuel Selvon’s Linguistic Extravaganza: Moses Ascending. Caribbean Quarterly. 28.4: 60–69.

Popular and Literate Cultures

The Institution of Literature HELEN TIFFIN

University of Queensland

Educational and Literary Models: Centralized Versus Decentralized Colonial Systems In Images in Print, 1988, a study of bias and prejudice in Caribbean textbooks, Ruby King and Mike Morrissey note that, although some of the countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean have been independent for twenty-five years, many aspects of colonialism persist in ideas about education as reflected in syllabi and curricula, textbook choices and contents. Their study, and more general ones such as Philip Altbach’s “Education and Neocolonialism,” 1971, direct our attention to the potency of a colonialist history of education in the Caribbean, to its interactions with popular culture, specifically the relationship between oral and “literate” cultures, and to the entire history of publishing both about and in the area. In short, the importance of educational and literary models for understanding contemporary Caribbean literature and literary history is inescapable. The 1838 abolition of slavery throughout Britain’s empire was, not unreasonably, expected to have profound implications for the Caribbean’s entire social order. Schools of various kinds, both secondary and primary, had existed prior to Emancipation, but it is the post-Emancipation history that is of greatest significance here. In preparation for emancipation, the British government, in 1835, commissioned John Sterling to produce a document on governmentsupported education in the West Indies. This report, which offered the first educational plan for the area, was written by a man whose experience of the region amounted to little more than a prolonged visit to St Vincent. But he had been recommended for the job because of his “practical acquaintance with the state of the Negro population and his knowledge of educational inquiries in England and Europe
” (Gordon [1963], 3). As Trevor Turner notes, Sterling’s report was written against the background of an assumed maintenance of pre-Emancipation hierarchies and of racist assumptions “regarding the character of the Negro.” Sterling warned that “if measures were not taken to keep the mass of the people within the civilising reach of British influences and values, society would surely collapse” (Turner [1977], 81). Social control, the maintenance of stability, required “a way of reaching into the minds of the people in order to socialize them into desired patterns of behaviour”: “what was needed was an institution that could adapt the Christian ethic to secular goals, a socialising instrument with universal rather than parochial values, one whose objectives, structures, and process of operation could be shaped, supervised, and continually evaluated by the rulers of the colony” (Turner [1977], 51). Education was regarded as such an important part of this socializing mission that the British Government was prepared to adopt compulsory attendance for Jamaican schools as early as 1880. As Sterling’s report indicates, social control, though allegedly focussed on adapting “the Christian ethic to secular goals” and on “universal” rather than on “parochial” values, was

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deeply imbricated with the belief in the superiority of British civilization, of English culture, and in “an acceptance of English methods of administration and subservience to English imperialism” (Turner [1977], 63–64). The concern for inculcating in West Indians the ideals of “the peace and prosperity of the Empire” and due regard to “profitability to others” were necessary corollaries to these beliefs. Sterling urged an unwilling white plantocracy to support a postEmancipation Negro education by warning them that only education would continue to afford planters “power over the minds of the labouring classes.” If education were neglected, this would lead to a consciousness on the part of these masses of their own independent value as rational beings without reference to the purposes for which they might be profitable to others (Bacchus [n.d.] and Gordon [1963]). Several important educational assumptions — ones that, in many cases, persist today — may be traced to these early aims. These assumptions inform literary as well as other educational spheres. That the society needed to be carefully controlled and the populace at large be assumed to be “depraved” was still reflected in the setting up of teacher training within the context of the “total institution” of 1890 (Turner [1977], 58–59). Secondly, apart from education’s social and civilizing intent, its specific focus on English civilization, English texts and values, and its adoption of English curricula placed a great emphasis on the so-called universal and the decorative to the detriment of the local and the vocational in education. Moreover, as in India, literature — together with, indeed sometimes in place of, religion — would have special valency. Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the colonies (1895–1903), affirmed in 1895 that “the British race is the greatest governing race that the world has ever seen. I say this not merely as an empty boast, but as proved and evidenced by the success we have had in administering the vast dominions…. We have to carry civilisation, British justice, British law, religion and Christianity to millions and millions, to people who, until recently, until our advent, had lived in ignorance and bitter conflict, and whose territories have fallen to us to develop. That is our duty. It is our great duty. It removes altogether from us the reproach of selfishness, of a parochial politics” (Turner [1977], 65). But, of course, a deeply parochial politics lay at the very heart of British colonial educational policies. Early syllabi, curricula, and teaching methods “were closely patterned after English models with a time lag of one or two decades” (Cutteridge [1971], 7). The Jamaican Revised Code of 1895 reflected the civilizing intent of “these missionaries of English Culture” and its effect on educational content: “To the general outline of world geography was added the more specific political and commercial geography of the British Empire. History, which prior to 1893 had been taught incidentally in the reading classes, was given its own place in the syllabuses with the requirement for the teaching of the broad outlines of English and Jamaican history. In addition, the study of history was to include biographies of six leading persons in English history, such as Alfred the Great, Queen Elizabeth, Cromwell, Rodney, Nelson, Wellington, and should include the principal events in the life of Queen Victoria” (Turner [1977], 65). Thus, as King and Morrissey note, in the Caribbean, “the nineteenth-century primary school curriculum was a diluted version of working-class education as it was provided in England — emphasising the rudiments of reading and writing, the basics of computation and agriculture. The subject matter of these courses was derived from English texts written by English authors for English children and taught by English masters and mistresses. The British influence became even stronger when the Cambridge Local Exams and

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later the ‘island’ scholarships were introduced. Caribbean children in secondary schools learned how to select materials for fall and winter outfits, how to dissect the dog-fish, imported from England for the purpose, stinking of formaldehyde, and strove to visualise ‘a host of golden daffodils.’ They imbibed the stereotypes, myths, biases and distortions in the British Geography and History text books which they read” (King and Morrissey [1988], 21–22). This was as true for the Caribbean East Indian populations, the descendants of nineteenthcentury indentured laborers, as it was for the populations of African descent. Governor Keate explained in the middle of the nineteenth century that the special purpose of the Tacarigua Orphanage in giving an “English” training to Indian children was “the separation of even a small number of persons of Indian extraction at an age when lasting impressions are most easily formed, from the debasing influence of caste heathenism” (Gordon [1963], 70). In a passage that directly echoes Macaulay’s infamous Indian “Minute,” Keate adds: “When it is considered that this is to be done in a country so far removed as Trinidad from the land where those influences are rife, and that all other ties to that land are severed at the same time, it will not appear too much to predict that this asylum may prove to be the cradle, so to say, of a local Indian population, Indian that is, in descent and natural characteristics, but English in education and feeling, and having no home associations beyond the limits of the Colony” (Gordon [1963], 70, italics mine). Moreover, as in India, a classical (or English) literary education would take the place of a bynow problematic Christianity. In Trinidad, the problem was focussed on the French cultural threat, and the “educational solution” was hence invoked against a background of Catholic / Protestant rivalry. In India, it was the strength of Hinduism which deterred the British from using Christianity as a means of colonialist control and which led to their adoption of literature and literary criticism as alternatives in a “Gramscian” strategy of “domination by consent” (see Vishwanathan [1989]). In his speech to the Legislative Council of 2 September 1857, the Attorney General of Trinidad averred, “Undoubtedly, as unhappily, the lines of religious distinction are of late deepening in this Colony.” But he goes on to hope that in the Collegiate School he is opening, “boys of all denominations will be allowed to meet” and that “in the common pursuits of literatures and the common development of their faculties,” they will learn how it is possible for “men to live and act together, striving to a common end, without dwelling on points of religious difference” (Gordon [1963], 234). “Denominations” is the key phrase here. The Queen’s Collegiate School, established by Charles Warner and Governor Keate in 1859, was an ethnic English response to fear of French influence and aimed almost exclusively at Trinidadians of European descent. It was deliberately non-denominational: “Warner and Keate wanted this college to educate youths in English modes of behaviour and thinking, much as the lyceés of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the later nineteenth century were designed to assimilate youths into French civilisation. The Queen’s Collegiate School was to teach the English language, inculcate English loyalties and English habits….” (Campbell [1992], 25). In India, Macaulay’s “Minute” of 1835 established English as the language of education throughout the subcontinent. In the British Caribbean of the early 1830s, there were no obvious indigenous rivals as there had been in India, for the conditions of the slave trade and plantation economies had virtually eradicated the mother languages of the kidnapped Africans — or rather, partially eradicated, since African survivals persisted in popular speech, dance, song, and in folk

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culture. However, as Devonish notes, by the twentieth century, “the education system inherited from the colonial power was one in which English, in addition to being a subject to be taught, was the sole medium by which literacy was acquired, as well as the sole medium of instruction. The assumption underlying this language education policy was that those who entered the education system were, in fact, native speakers of English, English-lexicon Creole being no more than a form of ‘broken English’ which had to be corrected by the education system” (Devonish [1986], 102, italics mine). The resulting legacy for contemporary Caribbean societies was, as Allsopp claimed in 1972, that “it imposed British English as the desirable standard in all matters of anglophone Caribbean language (not just syntax, but actually pronunciation and vocabulary); it also instilled a sense of apology in all Caribbean speakers of English for every aspect of their local English that differentiated it from British English” (108). Devonish’s observation that “the very use of a language in the education process, as a medium for acquiring literacy etc establishes the validity of the language in the eyes of the pupils as well as the society at large” (119) attests to the fulfillment of one of the aims of educators in the previous century as outlined in a circular despatch enclosing a suggested 1847 scheme for industrial and normal schools in the colonies. This purpose was “to diffuse a grammatical knowledge of the English language as the most important agent of civilisation for the coloured population” (Gordon [1963], 58). Colonial education in the English Caribbean was designed for, and continued to be promulgated in the service of, colonialist control. It thus stressed the universal / imperial at the expense of the local; it fostered and validated the importance, centrality, and excellence of all things English and instilled its pan-colonial obverse, the “cultural cringe”; and, since its focus was on a social control whose effective mechanism was the spread of English values, it focussed disproportionately on the language, religion, and, in particular, the literary culture of England. These general educational principles are not unrelated to a more particular consideration: they affected not just the place of literature within the West Indian curriculum but also the specific literary models available to West Indians. The exact extent of a general readership and the kinds of books imported from pre- and post-Emancipation times to the present is difficult to estimate. But literary texts encountered in the processes of formal education have potent and long-lasting effects, especially those of the primary curriculum. When coupled with an important learning technique so dear to teachers of English in primary schools up to a generation or so ago, for instance, the learning of set pieces “by heart” (Gordon [1963], 44), the emotional as well as the intellectual impact affords a strong and subtle mechanism of colonialist control. The phrase itself is an interesting one that merits more attention. To learn “by heart” is to absorb into the very processes of one’s being the material so taught — to absorb that text as part of the emotional and sensory core of one’s nature. Like the use of language, memorization is one of the fundamental processes that produces persons who are Indian in blood and color, but who become English in taste, opinions, morals, and intellect. Space limits me to a symptomatic account of literary curricula in the primary and tertiary sectors. In these particular arenas, literary works are likely to be most influential — first, because of the more widespread nature of primary education; second, because local literati and intellectuals with a tertiary education tend directly to influence policies or disseminate ideas and have a significant influence on secondary curricula. But it should be noted that, until very recently, most West Indian academics obtained their higher degrees abroad. (Obviously, they had

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no other option before the establishment of the campuses of the University of the West Indies in the 1960s. Even so, much tertiary literary education still takes place abroad, though no longer exclusively in Britain). The Bible provided the early basis for learning to read in pre- and post-Emancipation nondenominational schools. Increasingly, however, English literature replaced the Bible as raw material for learning the skills of reading and writing. In Trinidad, the Governor’s noticeexamination for the Normal School that opened on 31 January 1852 prescribed: “(i) Reading: To read with correctness, ease, fluency and intelligence, any passage in any English author. (iii) Spelling: To write from dictation with correct spelling any passage read slowly from any English work. (v) Grammar: To parse any short easy sentence in prose, and to exhibit an acquaintance with the elements of Grammar” (Gordon [1963], 65). An 1870 Circular from The Board of Education prescribed “(1) Reading aloud a passage from some English prose author and also a passage from some English poet. (2) Writing from Dictation. (3) Writing a short English composition. (4) English grammar, including the analysis of sentences. (5) Geography with special reference to the West Indies and the British possessions and their products” (201). Among the conclusions and recommendations of the 1940–42 West India Royal Commission was that “the literary curriculum in the primary schools requires to be simplified and brought more into relation with the environment of the children” (Commission Report [1940–42], 432). The Commission’s members also noted that “although much thought has recently been expended on this matter, and some developments have taken place, curricula are still out of touch with the needs and interests of the bulk of the population. There is too great a stress on purely literary work, and on rote as against training in clear speech and thought …” (125). Consequently, their recommendations were for “The revision and simplification of the cultural curriculum, concentrating on clear and connected speech and thought, and giving subjects where possible a West Indian background rather than an English one” (125). The Commission further recommended that history and geography be taught with special reference to the West Indies and radiating from there, and to the use of “local topography and historical monuments” (125). Most significantly perhaps, it argued for the lessening of the dominance of Cambridge “by abolishing the Junior Cambridge examination which is used in the West Indies for a purpose for which it is not intended in England, and which is not taken in English schools maintained or aided from public funds” (126). But attempts to alter the biases and prejudices inculcated through the education system during the previous century now met with local resistance. Ten years later, the 1952 Commission found that “Book learning” still held the keys “to settled employment in Government Service and to the ‘learned professions,’ and is normally preferred to a more practical type of education” (Commission Report [1952], 43). The 1960s saw the last fully administered “O” level exam from Cambridge. But only in the 1980s was the Junior Cambridge Certificate exam replaced by a locally administered one, the Caribbean Examinations Certificate. Today, in the 1990s, Cambridge still controls the senior literary examination in secondary schools, even though the curriculum for both “O” and “A” levels now has a substantial West Indian component. (V. S. Naipaul in Miguel Street, 1959, satirized this persisting Angloorientation and domination through Elias’s struggles to please “Mr Cambridge.”) One of the most influential teaching texts throughout the Caribbean (and elsewhere in Britain’s colonies) were the Royal Readers, and / or the Irish Readers and their descendants. Used

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throughout the Empire, these texts, and their role in education generally and in literary education in particular, was an especially potent one. These Readers, or very similar versions of them, provided the basic reading texts in most primary schools at least till the 1950s, and into the 1960s at some levels. Their replacement by Nelson’s West Indian Readers in the early 1970s signaled localization of much of the older ethnographic, economic, and agricultural material. But the literary orientation remained generally English in spite of the inclusion of some Caribbean material. In the 1980s, Ann Walmsey and Nick Caistor’s Facing the Sea: A New Anthology from the Caribbean Region for Secondary Schools, 1982, which was exclusively Caribbean in orientation, was set as a textbook but is about to be replaced by the Caribbean-produced and generated Sun Song II, which contains Caribbean, English, and American literature. The first series of Royal Readers (also published by Thomas Nelson), which was used in schools throughout the Caribbean from the early part of the century until the 1960s, includes sections headed “Useful Knowledge.” As with many lessons in these Readers, a series of catechistic questions is appended: “Questions: Into how many seasons is the year divided? Answer: Four: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter” (Cutteridge [1971], 92). In this way, not only the English seasons but English domestic animals and the English “House” were rendered normative and authoritative. As V. S. Naipaul and other Caribbean writers and commentators have noted, the total environment — social, climatic, economic — of the West Indian child was seen at best as a poor rendition and at worst a shameful aberration of that imperial norm. In the direct transfer of English material to the Caribbean context, no concessions were made to readership. The coffee plant “is a shrub that resembles the laurel” and “two kinds of tea are imported into this country” (126, italics mine). Empire and Crown loyalty are prominent in “About Kings and Queens,” Caribbean children learned: “Queen Elizabeth’s time is not her own. She cannot always be seeking to please herself; for God has given her a great empire to rule over. The Bible tells us to honour those who rule over us; therefore it is our duty to obey the laws of our country. Questions: What are Kings and Queens? Who rules over the British Commonwealth and Empire? Why is the Queen’s time not her own? What are we taught in the Bible?” (Cutteridge [1971], 117–18). Even though Captain J. O. Cutteridge, in Nelson’s West Indian Readers, supplied “a long-felt want — viz., that of local text books specially prepared for West Indian schools,” the colonialist educational legacy was still apparent. “It has been my endeavour,” Cutteridge writes in his prefatory note, “to include local names and terms whenever possible, as my experience has been that the pupils have great difficulty in spelling common words which they seldom if ever see in print.” Coffee is now localized as a Jamaican product, not an “import.” Kings and Queens have gone, the animals, insects, plants, and crops (nature study and agricultural products) are localized, and the folk tales of Grimm and Aesop — Aesop’s tales were still assumed to be Greek rather than African in origin — are now accompanied by Creole ones. Nevertheless, “Poetry for Reading and Recitation” remains almost exclusively English and English oriented — Swift, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kingsley, Keats, and others of less canonical stature are included. In all of the poems — poems for learning by heart — English and white are inevitably normative, from Kingsley’s “I once had a sweet little doll, dears / The prettiest doll in the world, / Her cheeks were so red and so white dears, / And her hair was so charmingly curled” (57), to the “gift” of a “sunny day” — a wonderful exception in England, but not, of course, in

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the Caribbean. The ultimate effect of such colonialist literary education is that, as Leigh Dale notes in the Australian instance, “England is constructed as text and is therefore inviolable; Australia is constructed as context and therefore ultimately irrelevant” (Dale [1993], 131). The power of such primary Readers–and the practice of reciting poetry (or catechistic answers on prose pieces) by heart — is, and has been, interpellative to a very high degree. Such exercises and effects were not confined to primary school children. The pupil teacher syllabus for Antigua, 1926, required aspirants to “recite not less than 120 lines from a poem or poems or play of Shakespeare selected by the Department for study, 12 months previously.” Both the pedagogy of recitation and the relevance of English material and English norms to the West Indian context are satirized by the The Mighty Sparrow in one of his calypsos, “Dan is the Man in the Van,” c.1958, which singles out J. O. Cutteridge, to whom Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas also has a particular antipathy. Well into the 1970s, curricula of the English Departments of the University of the West Indies and Guyana, like those of most postcolonial Universities, were still dominated by the study of the works of Shakespeare, Spencer, Johnson, Donne, Herbert, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Keats, Eliot, Defoe, Fielding, Emily Brontë, Dickens, George Eliot, despite the inclusion of V. S. Naipaul, John Hearne, Vic Reid, and Andrew Salkey. A survey of courses and papers to the present suggests that while there have been radical changes in proportion of West Indian and other to English material and in the inclusion of many courses on West Indian literatures and a more significant structural placement of them, students entering the University from high schools do so through an “English” exam paper still controlled from Cambridge. What the 1952 Commission advocated has been effected for junior exams, now locally organized and controlled, but not for final year high-school ones. Set texts for this exam include West Indian works, but the critical orientation evidenced by exam questions remains generally Anglo-centred. (For instance, confusion was caused in the Caribbean over the mathematics paper in 1972 when Britain’s currency changed from old pounds to new. Children in many Caribbean schools sitting the Cambridge paper had not been apprised of the change by those controlling the syllabus from England. Candidates who passed had picked up the necessary information quite adventitiously from English newspapers and women’s magazines.) The history of education, in particular literary education, in the West Indies, as in many of the ex-colonies, is one of persisting Anglo-control and Anglo-orientation. The proportion of West Indian content has increased, but many imperial ideas about education remain. As Bacchus notes, educational institutions tend always to the conservative. While it is “true that by substituting the study of the hibiscus for the daffodil, the knowledge which children would acquire would be more meaningful in their environment, and learning would be made less difficult and more realistic for the study of live specimens,” the real question is “why do we teach biology in the first place, and are the aims and purpose of teaching this subject the same whether we are dealing with children in industrialised and urbanised societies or in rural agricultural societies?” (Bacchus [n.d.], 16). The same question is also a particularly potent one in terms of literature and literary education. As Gauri Viswanathan has shown, educational questions are indisputably political in the context of empire, not just in terms of their discursive effect but in terms of their deliberate and active institutional deployment as a means of colonialist control (see Viswanathan [1989]).

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As my essay focuses on educational and literary models, the meaning of the term “model” within this particular context requires discussion. For if educational changes have been slow and their movement and direction conservative, the writers this education has produced have often been radical, innovative, and subversive. Literary models came to West Indian writers from “the magic land of abroad,” particularly from England. That these models came from “abroad,” that they were given absolute authority within the education system, that they were internalized (learned by heart, that a literary education was prioritized for a number of political reasons has had significant effects, ones similar to those in other parts of Britain’s former empire. The first reason stems from the necessary inhibition of local writing that colonialist history produces. The world of everyday, of speech — the context is the Caribbean; the other world is that of the Anglo-written — of the authoritative text, of “books” themselves. Radule’s “Suggestions for the Improvement of Church Schools 1849” has been echoed, albeit in different form, by contemporary West Indian writers: “Our West Indian ‘world’ is too small and too much of a colour to supply children with a sufficient stock of fundamental ideas for the purpose of understanding the language of Books. Until some device of Education enlarges the horizon and endows the mind’s eye with telescopic power to see things and customs and the social state of the country from which books come, not only, will most little story books meant particularly for the children’s edification appear full of enigmas, but the Bible, Liturgy and Sermons will in great part remain in language ‘not understood of the people’
” (Gordon [1963], 63). Radule’s commentary was farseeing but apparently inefficacious, echoed, as many of its sentiments are, in the 1952 West India Education Commission report and in the plea by Devonish and others for the teaching of Creole in schools. But its not unreasonable 1849 assumption that books “come” from somewhere else and are written in a different “language” was to be the originary problem for aspiring West Indian writers in the twentieth century. Naipaul’s Mr. Biswas, like most aspirant postcolonials, believes that all writers are either dead or live far away. He is amazed to be asked to interview a live one and rather appalled by the sheer ordinariness of the man. Moreover, he has been schooled, not only formally but also through his correspondence course with the school of writing in England, to an inevitable association between writing, books, and the metropolitan center. In A House for Mr Biswas, 1961, Naipaul does use literary models, some that could be translocated from another culture, for instance, H. G. Wells’s Mr Polly. But more significant in this novel is a certain kind of relationship with English texts and English education as a whole, which Naipaul pioneered in his early works but which appeared more fully fledged in Guerrillas, 1975. This relationship to models is the characteristic postcolonial one of critique, of counterdiscourse where “models” are not adopted but re-read, re-written, and re-placed to interrogate the whole of that discursive field within which texts and textuality itself were and are situated. It is perhaps in the West Indian novel, but also in poems such as Brathwaite’s “Islands,” 1969, Walcott’s “The Castaway,” 1965, or Collymore’s “La Plume de Ma Tante,” and in plays such as Walcott’s Pantomime, 1980, that this subversive relationship to English literary models was pioneered and that it has been most extensive and successful. It is, indeed, the educational and literary models that create the conditions of possibility for West Indian writing but within a counterdiscursive rather than an affiliative framework. To establish the conditions of possibility for a West Indian tradition, many contemporary Caribbean works directly critique West Indian education and the discursive fields within which

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it existed and often continues to exist. Educated, as was V. S. Naipaul, by Canadian missionaries — the pioneers of rural Indian education in Trinidad (see Campbell [1992], 19) — Harold Sonny Ladoo, in Yesterdays, 1974, envisions a Hindi mission to Canada, reversing the course and effects of slave / colonial education and history: “In my mission all children will have to learn the Hindi alphabet. They will study only Indian history and Hindi literature. They will have to dress like East Indians. Then I will build more schools and open Hindu temples for the white people to worship the Aryan gods…. My mission is to make white people good Hindus. I am going to make them feel that their culture is inferior; that the colour of their skin can justify their servitude. Within a few decades I will teach them to mimic Indian ways. Then I will make East Indians buy up all their lands and claim all their beaches. Then I will drain all their national wealth and bring it to Tola” (Ladoo [1974], 77–78). This “education” — where its processes cannot be reversed or reperpetrated on the perpetrator, as in Ladoo’s fantasy — is regarded at best as an ambiguous benefit of colonialism in works by quite different writers: Merle Hodge in Crick Crack Monkey, 1970, Earl Lovelace in The School Master, 1968, Austin Clarke in Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack, 1980, and George Lamming in In the Castle of My Skin, 1953. In the latter, the connections between imperialism, capitalism, Christianity, and education are exposed in the author’s representation of the deliberate, and accidental, confusions and obfuscations occasioned by Anglo-dominated and Anglo-oriented education in Barbados. But it is in Erna Brodber’s Myal, 1988, and in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John, 1985, and Lucy, 1990, that colonialist education, particularly literary education and its effects, is most thoroughly and imaginatively scrutinized. In A Small Place, 1988, Kincaid encapsulates this interpellative educational process through the image of the Antiguan reader in the British library: “You loved knowledge, and wherever you went you made sure to build a school, a library (yes, and in both of these places you distorted or erased my history and glorified your own)…. If you saw the old library, … the beauty of us sitting there like communicants at an altar, taking in, again and again, the fairytale of how we met you, your right to do the things you did, how beautiful you were, are, and always will be” (Kincaid [1988], 36, 42). Education itself and the interpellative power of particular works within their colonialist contexts are interrogated through such West Indian responses and their authority, and their normative codes and functions are unmantled and dismantled. The English language itself becomes the object of Selvon’s seriocomic critique of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in Moses Ascending, 1975. Most famous of all perhaps is Jean Rhys’s dismantling of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966. Wilson Harris has interrogated the white mythologies of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Palace of the Peacock, 1960, and in Heartland, 1964. In Guerrillas, V. S. Naipaul examines the destructive effect of Anglo-written texts in a representation of the career of Michael de Frietas, here fictionalized as Jimmy Ahmed. George Lamming, in Natives of My Person, 1972, and Water with Berries, 1971, and Selvon in Moses Ascending, 1975, challenge the assumptions on which that peculiarly colonialist canonical text The Tempest is based. But, like the work of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, all of Lamming’s novels issue a challenge to the discursive field of British canonical literature. In The Pleasures of Exile, 1960, Lamming writes: “I cannot read The Tempest without recalling the adventure of those voyages reported by Hakluyt; and when I remember the voyages and the particular period of African history, I see The Tempest against the background of England’s experiment in

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colonisation …. My subject is the migration of the West Indian writer, as colonial and exile, from his native kingdom, once inhabited by Caliban, to the tempestuous island of Prospero’s and his language” (Lamming [1960], 13). Lamming’s subject in all of his fiction is the condition of possibility of a truly West Indian literary history, and the sophisticated conversionary ironies expressed in this statement are the inescapable process and result.

Popular and Literate Cultures There is a moment in Samuel Selvon’s The Housing Lark, 1965, which offers a useful commentary not only on the subversive operations of West Indian textuality on the British literary tradition or a critique of the colonial education system but also on the subversive relationship between so-called popular and literate cultures; between the oral and the written; and between mind and mind / body which might be said, at least in part, to characterize the relationship between English and Creole under colonialism. The West Indians of Selvon’s The Housing Lark have migrated, in Lamming’s terms, from their “native kingdom” to “the tempestuous island of Prospero’s and his language.” In the passage that follows, they are on a bus excursion to Hampton Court, an imperial center whose history they know through their primary education, in particular through the Readers mentioned in the first section. Though this is a historical and literate occasion, its potential seriousness and authority are subverted from the outset by the oral and the popular, by the conception of the fete itself and its representation of English history. In this passage, the scripted and elocutionary is confronted by the popular and performative: “By the time the coach pull out from behind the market, like if fete start up right away. Fellars begin beating bottle and spoon and singing calypso … three bottles of rum start to make the rounds as if they have no owner … and a mother encouraging her child: ‘Go on Elouisa! Say that recitation that the English people teach you in school! Go on, don’t play shy’ and she turn to her neighbour and say, ‘Just wait, she could really say poultry good, is only shy, she playing shy!’ The neighbour say, ‘Albert not good at poultry, but if you see him twist! Albert? Where he gone to? Albert!?’ And Elouisa stand up in the gangway biting her finger and swinging from side to side, like how little girls do when they shy, and my boy Albert as if be sense a partner, begin to twist in front of she” (Selvon [1965], 108–09). “By the time the coach reach Hampton Court,” Selvon’s novel continues, “you would think the party went out for the day and now coming home to roost in the palace” (112). The West Indians are indeed the colonial “chickens coming home to roost,” taking possession of their rightful inheritance, that which their education taught them was theirs, while their skins and bodies, their history and their language relegated them to the status of colonized others. The play on poultry / poetry, the echo of the English expression “chickens coming home to roost” is elaborated over the next five pages. The West Indian visitors / owners imagine Henry VIII himself looking out the window and sizing up his “chicks” — his women, all envisaged as existing simultaneously, and this “historical” imaginative flight is followed by: “And suppose Old Henry was still alive and he look out the window and see all these swarthy characters walking about in his gardens!” (117–18). These are not his “chicks” now, but the “chickens come home to roost,” the return of a history of exploration, genocide, and exploitation that began in the Renaissance period. What

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these passages from The Housing Lark also indicate is the entry of popular Creole speech into the “literate” context of the novel and into the authoritative discourse of English history, transgressing a boundary English education had attempted to police. But if Selvon’s novel provides one kind of instance of the subversive interpenetration of oral and literate cultures, other contemporary works attest to the effectiveness of a divisive imperial education, a division present in any community but particularly persuasive and politically potent in the Caribbean context. Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, 1980, charts the difficulty for the protagonist, Nellie, of reconciling middle class and underclass, rural and urban, body and mind, written and oral, education and folk traditions, white and black. Brodber’s novel traces this process of systematic division to its origin in the interpellative strategies of (English) education and its inculcation of European racism and Victorian middle-class sexual fastidiousness. Although in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home Brodber traces through Nellie a move away from such values and their educational bases in the Caribbean community, “scholarship … ranks high on all standards in all sectors in all Caribbean societies, ushering individuals from the underclass of poor African and Asian ex-slaves and indentured laborers into a Euro-centred middle-class in relatively short time. But this scholarship with its transforming potential has traditionally been based on book-learning. By association, the printed word assumes high value in all sectors of Caribbean societies, and knowledge consequently becomes defined as ‘that which is found in books’
” (Brodber [1983], 2). Since knowledge — book-learning — is the key to this upward mobility, Miss Millie of Sybil Seaforth’s Growing Up with Miss Millie, 1988, is outraged to learn that her son Wilby will encounter the popular and the local — the calypso — in the context of the schoolroom. Moreover, Lenny, Wilby’s father, writes lyrics for calypsonians, something with which Miss Millie has difficulty coming to terms: “
‘How come you here now anyway?’ asked Miss Millie. ‘I think you would be by the Brigade Calypso tent trying to sing wid them for …’ ‘Milly,’ interrupted Lenny, ‘I don’t have to join a tent; I write lyrics for calypsonians.’ ‘Write what?’ ‘The words, Milly, the words.’ ‘But what you really telling me? What a Kaiso man want wid words on paper? They does just sing so, right there on the stage.’ ‘That was long time Milly, nowadays …………….’ ‘Pa, you know only yesterday Miss say that we going to have a Junior Calypso King Contest and carnival band at our school.’ ‘But, oh my Gawd! What, yuh saying? Carnival in school! Wilby, tell me yuh lying, yes, or yuh dreaming or something,’ uttered Miss Milly, greatly disturbed by the news Wilby had just revealed …. ‘Carnival and Common Entrance just don’t mix, man’
” (Seaforth [1988], 97, 99). For the upwardly mobile — those initiated into the education system like Wilby as opposed to those who admire it from afar like Miss Millie and Lenny — a dilemma of the kind Brodber outlines through Nellie’s career ensues. Unless an attempt is made to have local material enter the classroom at all levels, “the history he [the Caribbean subject] has studied and must know in order to maintain his social position does not mirror his past.” Brodber continues, “this fact has disturbed the Caribbean literati into asking that their history be written, and indeed that a new kind of history — social history — take its place in the academies alongside political and military history … a social history of the region which sees the oral accounts of the people’s past as a significant part of its data” (Brodber [1983], 2). Writers had already thematized this dilemma in novels, poetry, and plays. As Carolyn Cooper observes, Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, 1969, and George

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Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin are but two of a number of West Indian novels that “analyse the ambiguous process of defining personal and communal identity in Barbadian society in terms of an evocative paradigm; the oral folk tradition of the ex-slaves.” This tradition and “the scribal neo-colonial ideology of the ex-slave masters” constitute the oscillating extremes of a “finely graduated continuum of cultural values” (Cooper [1985], 3). If, in the educated and literate West Indian’s view, oral history and the oraliterary tradition have gradually come to seem vital components of restitutive identity and decolonization, that has been a slow and difficult process. For centuries, the oral, African (or Indian) folk survivals were denigrated and outlawed, like Creole speech itself, first by white planter culture and, later, in and through the official institution of the school. Although not educated herself, Miss Millie is outraged that folk culture should enter the serious place of book learning. Perhaps she intuits what the white plantocracy understood as its inevitably subversive effect: if popular forms increasingly enter into West Indian education, this process emphasizes the local and calls into question those foundations of English literary education that allow a “Major in English” to produce, in poet Les Murray’s comments on the Australian situation, “Minor Englishmen.” Increasingly, however, festivals like carnival, junkanoo, or the lyrics of reggae, Anancy tales in performance, as well as dub and rap have become not just objects of serious aesthetic, historical, and sociological study (an irony in itself perhaps), but their very visibility and their forms and content question the nature of what was accepted as “poultry”, “literature”, and “art.” Like the rewriting of canonical texts, the effect of the spoken or singing voice, of body movement, of dance, and of masquerade has had a radically interrogative effect on the adulation of the literary and the book — Albert in Selvon’s novel “sense a partner” in the shy Anglo-reciter Elouise — but his “twisting” in front of her is also a parodic comment on white peoples’ “learnin.” Contemporary verse collections like Brown, Morris, and Rohlehr’s Voiceprint, 1989, or Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice, 1984, stress, like the comments of the sociologists and novelists referred to above, an increasing interpenetration of the traditionally popular — the oral and the Creole — and the Anglo-literary — the scribal. This trend had earlier roots in Claude McKay’s poetry in the first decades of the century (and in prose works like his Banana Bottom, 1933). Walter Jekyll’s collection Jamaican Song and Story, 1907, also began to legitimize folk traditions in authoritative scribal reproductions (see Jekyll [1966]). Louise Bennett, in “Bans O’Killing” from Jamaica Labrish, 1966, wreaks comic havoc on those who would ban Jamaican Creole speech and writing. Interweaving song and story, and playing on the ironies of a British scribal tradition whose own folk and dialect roots English and Anglointerpellated middle-class Jamaican educators seem to have conveniently forgotten, Bennett dismantles some of the mythology attaching to the Anglo-canonical by using Jamaican folk humor / history: “So yuh a de man, me hear bout! / Ah yuh dem sey dah-teck / Whole heap o’ English oat sey dat / Yuh gwine kill dialect!” (Bennett [1966], 218–19). Increasingly, too, literary criticism is less exclusively focussed on the written, being also concerned with the performance poetry of Louise Bennett and Paul Keens-Douglas; with dub poetry, DJ, and with the question of what actually constitutes genres of various kinds in different cultural circumstances — what is dramatic production or, indeed, a work of autobiography and fiction? The Sistren Collective’s Lionheart Gal, 1986, problematizes a number of associated class, gender, and genre categories. But if the oral and popular increasingly interrogate and erode the scribal and the Anglicized

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middle-class values with which writing has been associated, the oral / popular / Creole has been similarly troubled by the idea of education, of authority, and of an educated elite. If education enters the realm of the popular to be regarded with some awe, as Brodber notes it does in most Caribbean communities (see Brodber [1983]), it is there also to be subtly, or directly, subverted. Two examples of this interaction are instructive. One draws on a contemporary popular intervention in education; the other has its sources in carnival and in the history of carnival in the region. The first, the contemporary instance, appears in what Daryl Cumber Dance refers to as “Big Boy Tales.” Collecting folktales in Jamaica, Dance found that “Jamaicans are inclined to give collectors the Anancy tales and a couple of other traditional pieces. They tend not to even mention to outsiders some of the more popular contemporary tales, particularly if they are at all ribald” (Dance [1985], 53). Dance found in 1971 that “Big Boy” stories go at least as far back as the 1920s. In marked contrast to another popular Caribbean folk hero, Anancy, “Big Boy” is large and relatively slow-witted. But his slow wit allows him to triumph by the back door, subverting the authority of adults, teachers, school inspectors, and what they all try to teach him. In a number of tales the joke turns on Big Boy’s inability to spell “egg” or his lack of knowledge about Jesus Christ. He escapes these potentially embarrassing questions often by accident, but accident is frequently occasioned by the unwitting or instinctive employment of a popular Creole against the English scribal: “One time Big Boy went to school and the subject was spelling. Eventually it was his turn to spell egg, but he could not spell it. However, his donkey G. G., who was outside the class window, was walking away and Big Boy cried out, ‘E-G-G!’ Teacher and Student began to applaud Big Boy” (55). Similarly (and significantly), Big Boy is able to produce the answer to the question, “Who died for your sins?,” only as an expletive “Lawd Jesus Christ” when another student stands on his foot or pricks him with a pin. Most interesting, perhaps, are instances where the use of Creole speech enables Big Boy accidentally to produce the answer. The teacher asks, “which country does the plane stop at when it leaves Jamaica?” (56). Big Boy, of course, does not know; but he has just swallowed his friend’s bubble gum, and as his friend insistently seeks to reclaim it “Big Boy say, ‘Mi nyam it. Mi nyam it.’ So the teacher say, ‘That’s good, Big Boy, that’s good!’ Because the State that she was talking about was Miami” (57). An older, more complicated interaction between literate and oral traditions is the one presented in the contrast between two traditional Trinidad carnival characters, the Pierrot and the Pierrot Grenade. In a study of their contrasting linguistic performances, Al Creighton found some interesting cooptions and subversions of authority, class, and education. The Pierrot is also known as “the English Pierrot because his performance is in the English language, which is in keeping with his status and good breeding…and this stands in contrast to the language of the Pierrot Grenade which is French Creole … patois [being] the dialect of the underprivileged” (Creighton [1985], 61). “The English Pierrot recited stilted epics about great kings and battles and portions of English history, and was known to recite orations from Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Brutus, Othello and excerpts from English and classical literature. He would also arm himself with questions on the literatures and histories with which to battle his adversaries. While the English Pierrot’s linguistic performance reflects a Renaissance education and lofty literary tastes, the Pierrot Grenade, known as a supreme jester, entertained the audience by debasing and making fun of his own language, his Grenadian background, while lacing his

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performance with topical references and commentary, burlesque, badinage and satire” (61). These relative positions are, however, complicated by a number of ironies. When they begin to work “in the differences between the Pierrots … the Princely English Pierrot has some of his dignity torn away and is reduced to a less regal state” (62). The beggarly Pierrot Grenade, by contrast, gains. “When English Pierrots challenge each other with questions on history or literature, they would most often receive unsatisfactory answers … and here the real fun would begin because the rivals would fall into battle” (63). As Creighton notes, “English Pierrot performances became so violent that an 1896 law made it necessary for masques to obtain a special licence from the police and deposit £5 against good behaviour,” and “a series of arrests, fines, and sentences helped to cause the gradual decline of Pierrot appearances on the streets” (63). “As an ironic contrast, the Pierrot Grenade who had to be cautioned about good behaviour upon leaving Grenada does not have violence as his main weapon. He is unschooled, rustic, and from him coarseness would be expected; but his main asset is cerebral” (64). The Pierrot uses wit, words, imagination, and, in a further inversion, he aspires not to the conquest of territory but to the supposedly nobler ideal of academic power. Where the English Pierrot exploited the literary epic for its violence, its potential for authoritative “blows” and territorial conquest (Pierrots fought verbally and physically against each other for control of street “territories”), “Pierrot Grenades usually appeared in groups of two to four and the climax of their act was the spelling of words” (61). As Creighton notes, this “spelling” was not a testing of the kind of conventional academic skill, as that required of Big Boy was, but “a linking together of a series of verbal hieroglyphs in which words are spelt syllable by syllable, depending on puns and homonyms.” In contrast to the English Pierrots, Pierrot Grenades did not study speeches or set pieces, but used their wits on the spot in these encounters. As in the case of Miss Millie, their attitude to education, to the literate, the scribal, is double edged. On the one hand, education is regarded as something to ridicule and subvert; on the other, it is something to which they aspire. The Pierrot Grenades conceive of it as a weight: “What you cannot spell you have to haul, what you cannot haul you have to drag, what you cannot drag I will make you hoist it” (66). If the Caribbean scribal tradition begins as institutionally grounded and inevitably Angloaffiliative, its trajectory is increasingly subversive of Euro-inherited authority, and its subversive strategies have taken two complexly interrelated paths. First, an interrogation and dismantling of canonical texts and the whole of the discursive field within which these have operated in the Caribbean, and secondly, as a concomitant strategy, the deployment of the oral Afro-inheritance against Anglo-scribal authority. These have both been characteristically (and increasingly) subversive of the Anglo-authoritative in society and education, yet the relationship remains a complex one, shot through with ironies. Whereas this has been the trajectory of the scribal, the trajectory of the oral, the popular has been different. From the outset, its characteristic modes were interrogative, irreverent, parodic, and subversive; in their earliest forms they issued a challenge (however cryptic or clandestine) to Euro-planter authority. Dances like the quadrille parodied European-style dancing while nocturnal slave gatherings parodied European political organization and its hierarchies at the same time as they invested (however briefly) the potentially powerless with the trappings of power. But it is above all through calypso and carnival (and their progenitors) that creole societies evolved their own complex traditions while parodying those of their European masters.

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Carnival and calypso, although closely associated in contemporary Trinidad through the tents, the Road March, and the carnival bands have rather different origins. As Keith Warner notes, “pre-Emancipation Carnival was originally a white upper-class celebration with masked balls, house to house visiting, street promenading and not-too-harmful practical jokes” (Warner [1982], 10). Moreover, the tradition of canboulay (from “cannes brûlées”) became a part of carnival celebrations as “planter aristocrats not only assumed the costume of their black slaves but also performed slave dances — the belair, bamboula, ghouba, and calinda — to African drums” (Hill [1972], 11). If pre-Emancipation plantocracy celebrated by imitating / performing slave dances, slaves parodied not only European dances, behavior, and institutional roles but sometimes even European dramatic performances. Errol Hill cites the observations of a Mr. Barclay, who, in 1823, “spent Christmas on an estate in Jamaica where he experienced ‘a novelty I had never before witnessed, in a rude representation of some passages of Richard III which they made sufficient farcical. The Joncanoe men, disrobed of their paraphernalia, were the two heroes and fought, not for a kingdom but a Queen whom the Victor carried off in triumph. Richard calling out ‘A horse! a horse!’ etc was laughable enough … How the Negroes had acquired even the very imperfect knowledge they seemed to have of the play we could form no idea’
” (12). Emancipation became effective in Trinidad in 1834, and the carnival of that year “already exhibit[ed] signs of a takeover by working-class elements that had previously been restricted from joining the celebrations” (11). As the freed Afro-Trinidadians celebrated carnival “with songs, street dancing and stick-fighting which often became open rioting, scores were evened … houses stoned and scathing criticisms [were] levelled at the powerful by the powerless” (Warner [1982], 10). Calypso, however, had a rather different genesis. As Gordon Rohlehr explains, the “history of the Calypso is that of urbanisation, immigration and Black reconstruction” (Rohlehr [1990], 1), whose roots “lie in the West African traditions of social commentary,” folktales, praise songs, songs, and addresses of “blame.” In Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, 1990, Rohlehr describes the relationship between West African origins and communal catharsis and subversion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Caribbean societies: “African music often served the purpose of social control, and the roots of the political calypso in Trinidad probably lie in the African custom of permitting criticism of one’s leaders at specific times, in particular contexts, and through the media of song and story. The leaders of society recognised the value of such satirical songs in which the ordinary person was given the privilege of unburdening his mind while the impact of his protest was neutralised by the controlled context within which criticism was permissible. An understanding of this wise West African convention might help us to understand the mixture of astringency and ineffectuality which exists even today in Trinidad’s Calypso texts, where political calypsos annually perform a cathartic function similar to what must have obtained in the satirical songs of various West African societies” (2). Rohlehr here construes calypso as a “licensed” carnival. But within the contexts of cultural exchange between popular and literate cultures, both calypso and carnival have had a comic-subversive effect and often effectively undermined the seriousness of the scribal: “According to the education you get when you small / You’ll grow up with true ambition and respect from one an all / But in my days in school they teach me like a fool / The things they teach me I should be a block-headed mule. / / … / / All they teach me is about Brer Rabbit and Rumpelstiltskin / …O / / They wanted to keep

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me down indeed / They tried their best but didn’t succeed / You see I was dunce and up to now I can’t read. / / Peter Peter was a pumpkin eater / And the Lilliput people tie Gulliver / When I was sick and lay abed / I had two pillows at my head / I see the Goose that lay the golden egg / The Spider and the Fly / Morocoy with wings flying in the sky / They beat me like a dog to learn that in school / If me head was bright I woulda be a damn fool” (Brown et al [1989], 129–30). The 1970s calypsonian Lord Chalk Dust was threatened with dismissal by the Education Board if he did not give up the tents. He chose to resign his teaching position. The persistence and undiminished popularity of Trinidad carnival, with which calypso became increasingly involved, is attested by the fact that every year almost a fifth of the entire population participates in one way or another. As Errol Hill argues: “For many years the focus of expression for the variegated cultures of the island, Carnival remains the principal cultural repository and contains indigenous materials from which a national drama and theatre can be fashioned” (Hill [1972], 4). While the timing of calypso contests, the Road March and carnival (at the beginning of Lent) still suggests a Christian genesis, much of the songs’ satirical drive and the band themes conjure various African roots. Yet both calypso and Trinidad carnival remain prime examples of a specifically Caribbean syncretism and hybridization. In the early 1990s Jamaicans began to hold their own carnival close to Lent but timed so as not to clash with Trinidadian ‘mas. As it had in Trinidad, Jamaican carnival attracted a large percentage of the population as both participants and spectators in spite of its very different genesis: it was a recent local adaptation of the Trinidad festival. It is perhaps ironic that both Trinidad and Jamaican carnivals have become increasingly institutionalized and have a prominent place in capitalist economies, both domestically and through tourism; they are also increasingly middle-class events. Hill ends The Trinidad Carnival with a chapter entitled “Towards a National Theatre,” arguing that carnival might be seen as a progenitor of national theatre in the Caribbean. The idea of a national theatre, such as Rex Nettleford’s very successful Jamaica Dance Theatre and Company (see Nettleford [1985]), signals important moves away from Anglo-authority in taste and judgment, offering mandates for genuinely national or regional performances. Something of this same movement is evident in the career of Anancy as he moves from folk / popular forms to an increasingly important place in the literate / scribal, even though his deployment, albeit within middle-class culture, still remains deeply interrogative of the Angloinherited written culture. Just as carnival is centered in Trinidad, so the Anancy stories are associated particularly with Jamaica and circulate throughout the Caribbean. Among the cultural survivals of the infamous Middle Passage was the trickster-hero Anancy. Anancy plays an important role in the folk pantheon of many West African peoples, notably the Akan, a group with historical and cultural precedence in early Jamaican slave society. In his New World home Anancy came to assume an importance he had not enjoyed in his ancestral West Africa, persisting as the dominant folktale hero in Jamaica to this day. In the phrase “Nancy story” Anancy gives his name to a genre of storytelling and to a general expression of distrust; he figures a history of subversive activity and attests to the beguiling power of fiction. But in much contemporary Caribbean literature, he becomes a complex metaphor and archetype for Caribbean experience. In the 1970s, Laura Tanna recorded many urban and rural Anancy performances (see Tanna [1984]), and, though most of the performers were elderly people, the audiences were

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young. Like many African folk survivals, “nancy stories,” synonymous with lies, were outlawed by and in educational institutions. But they persisted in folk culture and have been extensively adopted by the scribal: from children’s poems such as Andrew Salkey’s to Dennis Scott’s use of the wily Anancy as a metaphor for the implacable trickery of time and to Brathwaite’s extended exploration of the figure in his poetic trilogy The Arrivants, 1973. In Andrew Salkey’s Anancy’s Score, 1974, Anancy is deployed in the service of political allegory, while in Wilson Harris’s works, notably Palace of the Peacock, 1960, he becomes the “limbo gateway” of New World possibility (see Harris [1981], 27). If, for Brathwaite, Anancy is both archetypal Caribbean man and the region’s link to African holistic traditions, for Harris Anancy points away from tribal strictures and ethnocentric “monoliths” towards the freedom of a non-traditional, culturally and racially hybridized future. Anancy’s capacity as artist-creator of a new world lies in his release from a single enclosing cultural matrix. An aspect of Anancy as folk hero that is important for later writers is his language. Survivals of African languages persisted in the folktales and in Anancy’s speech within them. Yet, in New World slave societies any evident remnant of the African heritage was regarded as potentially rebellious. Like dance and drumming, Anancy tale-telling seemed dangerous to a white plantocracy. With the rise of a post-Emancipation black middle class whose values were largely white, Anglo-Saxon and Christian, Anancy tale-telling further fell into disrepute as both a “lower class” and suspiciously immoral activity. The curious mixture of good and evil in Anancy’s character was too unsettling, and his speech, his greed, and even his irreverent creativity both offered disturbing reminders of the slave past and were regarded as inherently anarchic by a rising middle class intent on establishing or reestablishing a tradition. In West Africa the actual telling of Anancy tales had been a traditional and hence inherently conservative activity; but in the Caribbean its associations were subversive and radical. If the career of Anancy is illustrative of the persistence of a popular oral tradition from Africa and slave times to the present and its subsequent acceptance by and absorption into literate culture characteristic of the oral / scribal trajectory, reggae (and other indigenous popular musical forms like calypso, kaiso, mento, and ska) provide contemporary examples of Caribbean music with roots in folk culture and important repercussions in literate cultures. Not only the lyrics and sentiments of reggae but its association with Rastafarianism — and with the radical Rastafarian experiment of indigenizing an imported and imposed language, English, to an “exiled” Jamaican underclass (see Owens [1976]) — has been and is significant in the works of, among others, Erna Brodber, Kamau Brathwaite, and Roger Mais. But while both popular and literate cultures are increasingly colonized by Western capital and Western pulp genres, it is comforting to note that, in addition to the international stature of writers like Walcott, Brathwaite, V. S. Naipaul, Harris, Paule Marshall, and Jamaica Kincaid, popular Caribbean forms such as calypso and reggae have made a major international impact.

Printing and Audience Printing began in the English-speaking Caribbean during the first half of the eighteenth century on three islands: in Jamaica in the early 1720s; in Barbados in the 1730s; and in Antigua in the

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1740s. Presses were started in Dominica and Grenada around 1765. Most early printing was of government records and documents, as well as of newspapers, some of which, like The Weekly Jamaica Courant, persisted for many years in social and intellectual climates that the English metropolis would have regarded as not conducive to publishing (Cave [1977], 5). In addition to government contract work and newspaper sales, the presses also supported themselves by printing a considerable body of writing about medical problems peculiar to the tropics (see Swan [1970], 45). These treatises addressed questions of public interest and often generating heated public debate. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many tracts against antislavery material from England were produced locally, along with plantership self-help manuals. Swan notes the relative scarcity of sermons and religious tracts during this period, compared to the relatively high ratio of belles lettres: “It is not surprising that in a slave society there should have been leisure for those interested in composing poems or writing history, and both these forms of belles lettres are fairly prevalent in West Indian printing of an early date. We have, for instance, four books of poetry and an English grammar printed at Antigua in the eighteenth century. At Jamaica Bryan Edwards wrote histories and poems. His famous history of the British West Indies went through five editions in rapid succession” (45). In early literary production, the newspapers were particularly influential. Fifteen newspapers had been started in Jamaica before 1800, and four more began publication during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Antigua and Grenada each produced four papers over the same period, St. Kitts three, and two appeared in Barbados and Dominica. By 1810, there were two newspapers on St. Thomas, and St. Vincent had one by 1826 (see Swan [1970], 14). The Barbados Gazette, first published in Bridgetown in 1731, produced a literary spin-off in Caribbeana, “a selection of articles, poems and other pieces which had appeared in the Gazette and were being reprinted in London in 1741” (17). This pattern repeated itself not only elsewhere on the West Indian islands but also in other colonial and postcolonial countries, as London firms picked up locally produced works and republished them, often to re-export them to the colonies. In 1777, the publishers of the Barbados Mercury printed John Singleton’s A General Description of the West Indian Islands written in verse (see 18). In 1748, Thomas Smith, who had formerly been employed in the United States by Benjamin Franklin, established the weekly Antigua Gazette and, in the following year, printed William Sherrington’s Occasional Poems (see 21). Smith was also the publisher of the popular Essay on Plantership, 1750, that ran to nine editions over half a century. In 1767, William Smith, publisher of The Freeport Gazette; or the Dominica Advertiser, printed The Shipwreck, “a poem in three parts, by a sailor, addressed to his Royal Highness, the Duke of York.” And in 1790, the printer of the St Christopher Gazette published Richard Nisleet’s The Source of Virtue; A Poem (see 30). Though brief and necessarily inadequate, this account of pre-twentieth century publishing and inferred audience suggests a tenuous genealogy of publishing patterns in the Caribbean. First, there is an early connection between newspaper publishing and local literary production, with a largely local readership, except for a limited number of London republishings and limited private circulation of locally published material by English officials or absentee planters and visitors on their return home. Secondly, and just as significantly, what was produced in the West Indies was either overtly or implicitly enmeshed in an imperial / colonial dialectic, whether that was filiative with British publications, as in the case of the sailor’s poem, or antagonistic to

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them. Newspaper articles and pamphlets on slaving and plantation economy were produced in response to debates in Britain, even though their audiences and their impact would have been largely local. In 1793, a reply by Augustus Matthews to J. B. Moreton’s Manners and Customs of the West India Islands, entitled The Lying Hero or an Answer to J. B. Moreton’s Manners and Customs of the West Indies, was printed in Montserrat (29). This kind of direct dialectical tradition was continued in Froudacity: West Indian Fables Explained, 1889, J. J. Thomas’s spirited reply to J. A. Froude’s derogatory account of the islands in his The English in the West Indies, or, The Bow of Ulysses, 1888. Metropolitan representations of the West Indies and West Indians, and local counter-discursive responses, prefigured a major strain in twentieth-century West Indian writing, of which direct replies and the rewriting of canonical English texts are the best examples. The typical colonial and postcolonial dynamic of interaction between metropolitan power and colony persists into the present not just in publishing and in literary thematics but in all matters concerned with printing and audience. Writing in the 1930s, C. L. R. James summed up the Caribbean writer’s situation as it pertained almost until the last decade of this century: “If we wanted to write and do something, we had to go abroad. We couldn’t make it at home. Mendes and I had work published before we left, but that was because distinguished people came to the island, we were introduced to them as ‘literary persons,’ and they took our work away and gave it to editors; that’s how I was first published” (James [1970], 55–56). By the time to which James refers, the relationship between publishing, writing, and audience had long been established between Trinidad and England. It was a relationship in which the possibility of local publication and local audience had, to some extent, contracted since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the face of metropolitan mass production, mass marketing, and the control of literary publishing from London and, later, from New York. Writers like James began their careers in the West Indies, publishing in newspapers and little magazines, and a substantial number of them, Roger Mais and Derek Walcott included, also had their early works published and distributed locally. Written reminiscences are themselves part of the London-Caribbean complex. It is not without significance that James’s account appeared in the Jamaican journal Savacou in the 1970s, whereas Derek Walcott’s was published in London Magazine in 1965: “I sat on the landing of the stairs and asked my mother who was sewing in a window for two hundred dollars to put out a booklet of poems. She did not have that kind of money and the fact made her weep, but she found it, the book was printed, and I had hawked it myself on the street corners, a dollar a copy, and made the money back” (Walcott [1965], 12). These recollections, geared as they may be to their particular audiences, nevertheless characterize Caribbean experiences of publishing in this century as a continuing, and often unequal, exchange between local “cottage industry” printing and distribution and the metropolitan center. But it also introduces an important development: the exodus of writers to London and to the London publishing houses. This movement reached its climax in the 1950s and 1960s. The pattern since then has been a combination of expatriate writing and publishing, with the slow growth of a domestic market for reimported works, a drift more to the United States in terms of both expatriation and publishing, and, particularly for poetry, the establishment of local presses with an overseas distribution of their own. In the case of drama, most publishing and audience have historically been local, except in the case of writers like Derek Walcott, whose plays have been

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published by overseas houses in conjunction with his poetry. Prior to the 1950s, as Alvona Alleyne notes, few West Indian writers were known abroad, and most literary publishing continued to be local. Early twentieth-century exceptions to this are H. G. De Lisser, Claude McKay, and W. Adolphe Roberts. There are also two anthologies of Jamaican poetry, compiled by J. E. Clare McFarlane, and two issues of Life and Letters edited by Robert Herring and devoted to Jamaican writers (see Alleyne [1978], 223–24). With these few exceptions, however, printing and audience had from the eighteenth century generally continued to be local. In the early decades of this century, Thomas Henry MacDermot (aka Tom Redcam) attempted through his All Jamaica Library to foster local writing and local readership. Redcam published his own Becka’s Buckra Baby as the first book in this series in 1903, and his Publisher’s Foreword emphasized the need for a local audience to “develop [Jamaica’s] neglected resources of mental and aesthetic wealth.” To encourage local talent, Redcam attempted to produce and sell his All Jamaica Library “at a price so small as to make each publication generally purchasable.” But, as Ramchand (who quotes Redcam’s Foreword in full) notes, only five volumes were issued, “and there were only two supporting authors” (Ramchand [1970], 53). If Redcam’s ideals of a local supporting public remained unrealized, his example seems to have initiated a trend: “When the Gleaner Company published H. G. De Lisser’s Jane: A Story of Jamaica, 1913, after newspaper serialisation, it must have seemed that Redcam’s example was catching. And a British edition of this novel in 1914 had the appearance of the export model of a product tested and approved first in the country of origin” (Ramchand [1970], 54). In spite of such an auspicious beginning to local literary publishing and the creation of a local readership, the pattern of publishing and literary relations between Britain and the Caribbean has rarely reflected these early endeavors. Some of the major newspapers set up their own commercial printing companies during the first half of this century: The Chronicle in Guyana, the Advocate in Barbados, and The Guardian in Trinidad. The most important of them was the Pioneer Press, financed by the Jamaican Gleaner. “Between 1903 and 1947 there was no attempt at organized commercial publishing in the area. Una Marson, the Jamaican poet, and one of the early editors of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices, drafted plans for a general publishing house along lines she obtained abroad. Contracts would be made with the authors, and the firm would undertake printing, editing and selling and the paying of royalties to the writers. The Gleaner Company underwrote the expenses, and by 1958 the press had issued twenty-one titles. Marson designed the books using the Penguin series as a model” (Alleyne [1978], 234). Pioneer Press published Edgar Mittelholzer’s fable, The Adding Machine, 1954, as well as novels such as W. G. Ogilvie’s Cactus Village, 1953, evidence that the editors recognized the importance of local folktales and Creole-based writing. Such material is a crucial foundation for a West Indian literary tradition. But until that tradition has been firmly established, Creole-based texts are unlikely to be published abroad or to be accessible to overseas audiences. The Pioneer Press also published historical novels that were more popular with local audiences than was creative writing. S. A. G. Taylor’s Capture of Jamaica, c.1951, sold over twelve thousand copies, but “the sale of non-historical creative writing was not as impressive, an indication perhaps of the reading public’s distrust of West Indian authors whose books had not been published abroad” (234). In addition to the Gleaner Company and the Pioneer Press, The Jamaica Times, by 1912, and Public Opinion, 1937, in Jamaica, as well

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as The Trinidad Guardian, sporadically encouraged creative writing through active publication programs. Between 1940 and 1943, Public Opinion printed many of Roger Mais’s short stories, and in the 1940s and 1960s when Derek Walcott was “critic-at-large” (229), the Trinidad Guardian ran monthly short story competitions and published the poetry of new writers. West Indian journals were also crucial to the establishment of Caribbean literary traditions by encouraging local writing both through publication and reviews and by creating a climate in which literature was part of the national or local scene and an integral part of the political agenda of independence. Alleyne lists the following early-twentieth-century magazines: Planter’s Punch, 1920–45; Pimento with a Dram of Common Sense, 1927; The West Indian Review, 1934; Trinidad, the 1930s; the Beacon, 1931–1933; and Plummer’s Magazine: A Jamaican Literary Magazine, 1972. Of these, the most important was probably the Beacon, though its influence was never as great as that of Bim in Barbados, Focus in Jamaica, or Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana, all of which gave initial local circulation to many of the writers who later achieved prominence in the international arena — novelists such as John Hearne, Vic Reid, Peter Abrahams, and Wilson Harris, to name only a few. Bim continues publication into the present, joining journals begun in the 1960s, such as Caribbean Quarterly, Kaie, Jamaica Journal, Voices (Trinidad), and Savacou, in keeping literary production available to local audiences and in offering opportunities for new talent. As well as publishing by regional newspapers, journals, and institutions, literary production in the West Indies was particularly stimulated during the 1940s and 1950s by the BBC’s production of the program “Caribbean Voices” under the editorship of Henry Swanzy. Early works by writers such as V. S. Naipaul were first broadcast to the Caribbean from here and as George Lamming declared in The Pleasures of Exile, “no comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be written without considering his [Swanzy’s] whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel” (Lamming [1960], 67). Beamed from London to the West Indies once a week (the “Sunday reprieve” as Lamming termed it), “Caribbean Voices” helped support struggling writers in exile in London, and was also of inestimable importance to “those writers who had remained in the Caribbean” (65). Again, according to Lamming, it also provided a rare connection between islands, enabling writers “to keep in touch with the latest work of writers in another island” (65, 66). It is worth quoting Lamming’s account of “Caribbean Voices,” for its production and reception helps to highlight many of the ironies inherent in all postcolonial literary production and consumption; the continuing dialectic of colonial and postcolonial “raw materials,” imperial “manufacture,” and colonial and postcolonial consumption / audience. Considering “Caribbean Voices,” Lamming wrote: “You see the magic of the B. B. C. box. From Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica and other islands, poems and short stories were sent to England; and from a London studio in Oxford Street, the curriculum for a serious all-night argument was being prepared” (66). Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile is an important source book for conceptions and conditions of writing, and of attitudes to audience and publishing during the great period of the flowering of the West Indian novel in the 1950s and 1960s. This period was characterized by the predominance of male writers, and by writing in exile from major metropolitan centers such as London. The Pleasures of Exile explains this wholesale shift to literary publishing abroad and its importance for a writer’s conception of his or her audience. For the West Indian writer of the

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1950s and 1960s, as for other colonial and postcolonial writers, the “myth” of “England’s supremacy in taste and judgment” is akin to the “nutritive function of milk received at birth” (Lamming [1960], 26–27). As apparently natural as “milk,” this “myth” that the West Indian accepted as “fact” is inculcated, and then reinforced, through education. Its result is the colonial “cultural cringe,” since this “supremacy can only have meaning and weight by a calculated cutting down to size of all non-England. The first to be cut down is the colonial himself. This is one of the seeds which must later bear such strange fruit as the West Indian writers’ departure from the very landscape which is the raw material of all their books. These men had to leave if they were going to function as writers, since books, in that particular colonial conception of literature, were not — meaning, too, are not supposed to be — written by natives. Those among the natives who read also believed that; for all the books they had read, their whole introduction to something called culture, all of it, in the form of words, came from outside: Dickens, Jane Austen, Kipling and that sacred gang. The West Indian’s education was imported in much the same way that flour and butter are imported from Canada. Since the cultural negotiation was strictly between England and the natives, and England had acquired, somehow, the divine right to organize the native’s reading, it is to be expected that England’s export of literature would be English. Deliberately and exclusively English. And the further back in time England went for these treasures, the safer was the English commodity” (27). It is not surprising, then, that in Lamming’s 1960s view, “the West Indian writer writes always for the foreign reader, … and the word foreign means other than West Indian, whatever that other may be” (43). In this watershed decade, West Indian novels were published largely by English and U. S. presses such as Cape, Deutsch, Oxford, and Faber & Faber. In the last thirty years, the publishing situation has changed in some significant respects, though by no means in all of them. Male writers no longer dominate the scene. Smaller local presses continue to acquire more effective distribution systems (Sandberry Press in Jamaica is an example) and to export the work of contemporary Caribbean poets. The potential for greater local control of West Indian publishing in the future is inextricably interwoven with education, literary criticism, and with the writers’ perceptions of their societies and their audiences. Institutional publishing in the Caribbean has continued to play a major role in intellectual decolonization, decentralization, and indigenization. Since the 1970s, while “the University has the distinction of publishing the largest number of titles” (Alleyne and Mordecai [1978], 583), the Institute of Jamaica, the oldest active institutional publishing concern in the English-speaking West Indies, continued its tradition, publishing its first literary monograph, Reid’s The Jamaicans, in 1976 (see 584). The University College of the West Indies’ Extra-Mural Department at Mona in Jamaica produces the Caribbean Quarterly, which includes much literary material, and, in the 1950s began an extremely important publishing venture of Caribbean playscripts, producing sixty-three titles by 1978. It still publishes sporadically. Educational publishing is of paramount importance in the decolonization and localization of literary discourse. Since the 1950s and 1960s, such publishing has had some limited success in conjunction with revised curricula and changes to the system of examination in the education system. Alleyne and Mordecai note, in particular, that the Jamaica Reading Association’s Guinep Series Publishing project, is “an interesting example of the kind of publishing agency which has managed to identify and service a critical need by producing inexpensive but eye-catching,

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mimeographed high-interest / low-vocabulary reading materials for use at secondary levels” (Alleyne and Mordecai [1978], 581). They also note that curriculum development activity in Jamaica and Guyana at both primary and secondary levels is “not inconsiderable,” and that Caribbean Educational Publications (C. E. P.), located in the Institute of Education at the University of the West Indies, has been quite significant since its 1964 inception. Nevertheless, they still conclude that “no major inroads have been made by local publishers, government or otherwise in the enormous primary and secondary school textbook market presently serviced by the multinationals” (581). Some of these have responded to “the cry for cultural relevance by adapting to Caribbeanizing materials” (588). But Alleyne and Mordecai are forced to agree, in the late 1970s, with Bloomfield’s earlier analysis: “The Caribbean book trade, with few exceptions is still characterized by some or all of the following features: Decentralised production, with the initiative coming from institutions, individuals, bookshops and printers rather than from commercial publishers; small editions which soon go out of print; a high proportion of mimeographed and unpriced publications; limited distribution, incomplete bibliographical control” (575). While the 1980s may not have produced any radical alterations to this general position, there have, nevertheless, been some significant developments. Critical commentary on Englishlanguage Caribbean literature, while still persisting in overseas professional journals, has become more focussed in the Caribbean since the appearance of the Journal of West Indian Literature, edited from Barbados and Jamaica, in October, 1986. What West Indians think and write about their own literature is now available to them from the Caribbean and does not flow so exclusively in the reverse direction. Local control of criticism, taste, and judgment is crucial to the processes of literary decolonization, and the presence of the Journal of West Indian Literature is a major step in this direction. Continuing the association between newspapers and literary publishing, West Indian critics such as Gordon Rohlehr choose to publish their material locally, in his case in Tapia (Trinidad and Tobago Review). Rohlehr’s detailed work on Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy, Pathfinder, 1981, was privately published in Trinidad by the critic himself and, like Rohlehr’s Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad, 1990, is available only directly from him. While this has clear disadvantages, it does mean that foreign critics have to go to a Caribbean publishing house to obtain requisite work. And though more an important political gesture than a likely future development, Carolyn Cooper’s interrogation of the persistent use of a metropolitan standard English as the language of literary criticism, and her deployment of Jamaican Creole in analyzing Sistren’s Lionheart Gal, 1986 (see Cooper [1989]), raises interesting questions about criticism, audience, and publishing within literary discourse. But aside from such individual gestures, and from the development of exclusively critical and theoretical journals, the context within which West Indian works are written, published, and read has altered significantly. Poets such as Lorna Goodison and novelists such as Erna Brodber are published in London, but by small presses, like New Beacon or Bogle-L’Ouverture, even if they are, like Olive Senior’s work, later published by the international giants. Moreover, branches of multinational publishing houses in the Caribbean are being increasingly localized to cater more to a West Indian readership. While, in the early 1980s, Jamaica still had an illiteracy rate of 23%, there are signs of an improvement in local publishing consumption figures. (The audience for creative writing in most countries is not large — a recent Australian estimate is that less than

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50% of the population ever reads (or indeed buys) a book after leaving school — but in accord with education, general reading and the reading of literature is increasing in the Caribbean.) The writer’s conception of her or his audience seems to have changed markedly from Lamming’s time, and the myth of “England’s supremacy” and (the ideal foreign reader) no longer holds. The “sacred gang” of English writers who exclusively dominated West Indian reading in his youth, have themselves both lost some purchase on curricula and been replaced by local writers; and their once dominant position and the reasons for the control they exercized have been interrogated by West Indian works themselves — in Lamming’s Water with Berries; Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966; Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending; V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas; and Wilson Harris’s Heartland, 1964. Such counter-canonical dismantling inevitably changes the relationship between a literature and its audience, and, moreover, implicitly and explicitly interrogates the relationship between education, writers, publishers, and readers. In Erna Brodber’s Myal and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, this relationship is thematized and dismantled. Brodber’s Myal draws its primarily West Indian audience’s attention to the importance not just of what a text says, but the ways in which such works are read and / or taught, to the whole of the discursive field within which literary production and consumption takes place and has taken place in the Caribbean. Kincaid in A Small Place appears to be directly addressing her foreign audience; but this second-person address has an eye to both the inevitable foreign and Caribbean readership, and like Myal, it thematizes the dialogic (and often destructive) interplay between the two: “If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him — why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument? You are a tourist and you have not yet seen a school in Antigua, you have not yet seen the hospital in Antigua, you have not yet seen a public monument in Antigua. As your plane descends to land, you might say, What a beautiful island Antigua is — more beautiful than any of the other islands you have seen, and they were very beautiful, in their way, but they were much too green, much too lush with vegetation, which indicated to you, the tourist, that they got quite a bit of rainfall, and rain is the very thing that you, just now, do not want, for you are thinking of the hard and cold and dark and long days you spent working in North America (or, worse, Europe), earning some money so that you could stay in this place (Antigua) where the sun always shines and where the climate is deliciously hot and dry for the four to ten days you are going to be staying there; and since you are on your holiday, since you are a tourist, the thought of what it might be like for someone who had to live day in, day out in a place that suffers constantly from drought, and so has to watch carefully every drop of fresh water used (while at the same time surrounded by a sea and an ocean — the Caribbean Sea on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other), must never cross your mind. You disembark from your plane. You go through customs. Since you are a tourist, a North American or European — to be frank, white — and not an Antiguan black returning to Antigua from Europe or North America with cardboard boxes of much needed cheap clothes and food for relatives, you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease” (Kincaid [1988], 3–5). The inscription of the white tourist / colonizer / reader as apparent target audience within the text itself provides a useful contrast with George Lamming’s 1960s remarks on the

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ironies involved in the transmission of the “Caribbean Voices” program and indicates a very significant shift in the perspective of Caribbean writers and their audiences. While the major multinationals still effectively control educational and literary markets — something that seems inevitable in the current multinational capitalist climate — West Indian writers, like other postcolonials, can increasingly base themselves “at home,” psychically, if not as yet commercially.

References Alleyne, Alvona. 1978. Literary Publishing in the English-Speaking Caribbean. Twenty Years of Latin American Librarianship. SACALM Secretariat, Austin, Texas. 222–48. ———and Pamela Mordecai. 1978. Educational Publishing and Book Production in the English-Speaking Caribbean. Library Trends. 26.4: 575–89. Altbach, Philip G. 1971. Education and Neocolonialism. Teachers College Record. 72.4: 543–58. Anon. 1870. Circular from the Board of Education. Trinidad: n. p. Bacchus, M. K. n.d. Education and Decolonisation. Unpublished paper delivered at a staff Seminar on “Decolonisation” held by the Institute of Social and Economic Research, U. W. I. Bennett, Louise. 1966. Jamaica Labrish. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1973. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1984. History of the Voice. London: New Beacon. Brodber, Erna. 1980. Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. London: New Beacon. ———. 1983. Oral Sources and the Creation of a Social History of the Caribbean. Jamaica Journal. 16: 2–16. ———. 1988. Myal. London: New Beacon. Brown, Stewart, Mervyn Morris, and Gordon Rohlehr, eds. 1989. Voiceprint: An Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean. London: Longman. Campbell, Carl. 1992. Colony and Nation: A Short History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago 1834–1986. Kingston: Randle. Cave, Roderick. 1977. The First Printers in Jamaica. Working Papers on West Indian Printing. Series 3: 27. Clarke, Austin. 1980. Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack. A Memoir. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Cooper, Carolyn. 1985. The Oral Witness and the Scribal Document: Divergent Accounts of Slavery in two Novels of Barbados. West Indian Literature and its Social Context. Ed. by Mark McWatt, 3–11. Cave Hill: University of the West Indies. ———. 1989. Writing Oral History: SISTREN Theatre Collective’s Lionheart Gal. After Europe: Critical Theory and Post-Colonial Writing. Ed. by Stephen Slemon and Helen Tiffin, 49–57. Aarhus: Dangaroo. Creighton, Al. 1985. Commoner and King: Contrasting Linguistic Performances in the Dialogue of the Dispossessed. West Indian Literature and its Social Context. Ed. by Mark McWatt, 55–68. Cave Hill: University of the West Indies. Cutteridge, James O. 1971. Nelson’s West Indian Readers. Book I. London: Thomas Nelson. Dale, Leigh. 1993. Coverting Captivity: The Teaching of English Literature and the Inculcation of Englishness in Australian Universities. Unpublished PhD. Dissertation, University of Queensland. Dance, Daryl Cumber. 1985. Folklore from Contemporary Jamaicans. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Devonish, Hubert. 1986. Language and Liberation: Creole Language Politics in the Caribbean. London: Karia. Froude, J. Anthony. 1888. The English in the West Indies, or, The Bow of Ulysses. London: Longmans, Green. Gordon, Shirley C. 1963. A Century of West Indian Education. London: Longman. ———. 1968. Reports and Repercussions in West Indian Education 1835–1933. Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire: Ginn. Harris, Wilson. 1960. Palace of the Peacock. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1981. Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, 1966–81. Ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo. Hill, Errol. 1972. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Hodge, Merle. 1970. Crick Crack Monkey. London: André Deutsch. James, C. L. R. 1970. Growing Up with Literature in the Thirties. Savacou. 2: 55–56. Jekyll, Walter, ed. [1907]. 1966. Jamaican Song and Story: Anancy Stories, Digging Songs, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes. New York: Dover. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1985. Annie John. London: Pan Books. ———. 1988. A Small Place. London: Virago. ———. 1990. Lucy. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. King, Ruby and Mike Morrissey. 1988. Images in Print: Bias and Prejudice in Caribbean Textbooks. Jamaica: Institute of Social and Economic Research. Ladoo, Harold Sonny. 1974. Yesterdays. Toronto: Anansi. Lamming, George. 1953. In the Castle of My Skin. London: Michael Joseph. ———. 1960. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. Lovelace, Earl. 1968. The School Master. London: Collins. Marshall, Paule. 1969. The Chosen Place, the Timeless People. London: Longman. McKay, Claude. 1912. Songs of Jamaica. Kingston: Aston W. Gardner. ———. 1933. Banana Bottom. New York: Harper. Mittelholzer, Edgar. 1954. The Adding Machine. Kingston: Pioneer Press. Nettleford, Rex. 1985. Dance Jamaica: Cultural Definition and Artistic Discovery, The National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica 1962–1983. New York: Grove. O’Callaghan, Evelyn. 1985. Thriller! Some Observations on Recent Popular Fiction in the West Indies. West Indian Literature and its Social Context. Ed. by Mark McWatt, 148–62. Cave Hill: University of the West Indies. Owens, Joseph. 1976. Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica. London: Heinemann. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1970. The West Indian Novel and its Background. London: Faber & Faber. Redcam, Tom. 1903. Becka’s Buckra Baby. Kingston: Jamaica Times’ Printery. Rhys, Jean. 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea. London: André Deutsch. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1981. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: the author. ———. 1990. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Port of Spain: the author. Salkey, Andrew. 1974. Anancy’s Score. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture. Seaforth, Sybil. 1988. Growing Up with Miss Milly. Ithaca, N. Y.: Calaloux. Selvon, Samuel. 1965. The Housing Lark. London: MacGibbon & Kee. ———. 1975. Moses Ascending. London: Davis-Poynter. Sistren. 1986. Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women. London: Women’s Press. Swan, Bradford F. 1970. The Spread of Printing (Western Hemisphere): The Caribbean Area. Amsterdam: Vangendt. Tanna, Laura. 1984. Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica. Thomas, J. J. [1889]. 1969. Froudacity: West Indian Fables Explained. London: New Beacon. Turner, Trevor A. 1977. The Socialisation Intent in Colonial Jamaican Education, 1867–1911. Caribbean Journal of Education. 4.1&2. Viswanathan, Gauri. 1989. Masks of Conquest. Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Walcott, Derek. 1965. Leaving School. London Magazine. 5-6 (September): 4–14. ———. 1980. Remembrance and Pantomime: Two Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Walmsey, Ann and Nick Caistor, eds. [1982]. 1989. Facing the Sea: A New Anthology from the Caribbean Region for Secondary Schools. London: Heinemann. Warner, Keith Q. 1982. The Trinidad Calypso: A Study of the Calypso as Oral Literature. London: Heinemann. West India Royal Commission Report. 1940–42. West India Royal Commission Report. 1952.

Islands and Territories

The Literatures of Trinidad and Jamaica SARAH LAWSON WELSH

University College Northhampton

Writing on the differences between Jamaican and Trinidadian literatures in the 1990s is in many respects a thankless task, so outmoded and contentious has the idea of literatures simply bounded by national borders become. Homi Bhabha’s seminal collection of essays, Nation and Narration, first published in 1990, set the tone for a decade in which the relationship between nation and space, national collectives and national narratives, nationalisms and borders and boundaries of various kinds would be debated with increasing intensity and complexity. Such debates were in part fuelled by the growing sense of shifting “boundaries and state entities… changing ethnic and national loyalties” (Curthoys [1993], 23) in the 1980s and early 1990s, such as those producing, and produced by, the fall of Communism in eastern Europe, to take just one example. Despite the very different imperialisms involved in this collapse, it lent such debates a political valency not unlike that produced by the anticolonial and nationalist movements of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, many key commentators of the 1990s, including Edward Said and Bhabha himself, returned to, and acknowledged the influence of some seminal writings and voices of these earlier struggles: Frantz Fanon in Algeria, C. L. R. James in Trinidad, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea. In discussions of cultural difference and national definition, gone was the relatively unproblematized liberal humanist thinking of critics such as Kenneth Ramchand, who, in his preamble to An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature, asked: “Is it possible to write accounts of Jamaican and Trinidadian literatures that would demonstrate differences in character (language, style, technique, themes) between them, and between each of them and what we call ‘West Indian literature’?” (Ramchand [1976], ii). Little sense of the complexities of the nation — what it might constitute, how it might be defined and by whom — or of the relationship between the nation and its narrations, the manifold texts (not just literary) which define what Benedict Anderson calls “nation-ness,” is to be found in Ramchand’s question. Nor does Ramchand seem cognizant, in this passage at least, of the problematics of speaking about a cognate “West Indian literature,” something that arguably was first articulated, but not necessarily realized, only in the 1950s and 1960s — the era of a very short-lived West Indian federation and also that of the so-called West Indian Literary Renaissance, a literature of exile produced largely in Britain rather than in the Caribbean. As later critics have asked, what does “West Indian” mean? and to whom? (see Brathwaite [1974], [1995], and King [1980]). Instead, a more theorized discourse on postcolonial identities and cultural nationalisms took precedence, one that moved away from the territory-specific approach of Commonwealth literature and foregrounded instead certain recurrent features of postcolonialism: movement, migration, cultural hybridity, colonial mimicry and ambivalence, representation, and resistance. In short, the old essentialist attachments to national literatures were replaced by a criticism in which the migrant subject and

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cultural hybridity were seemingly privileged not only as characteristically postcolonial but as characteristically postmodern, too. One of the key texts in enabling this shift in critical thinking and terminology was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, 1983. While the terrain of Anderson’s study is, both historically and geographically, a very broad one indeed, his coining of the term “imagined communities” to describe the ways in which nations and nationalism are created and maintained through a range of cultural practices and are themselves “cultural artefacts of a particular kind” (Anderson [1991], 4), was a particularly enabling one for postcolonial studies. Several recent studies take Anderson’s notion of mapping imagined communities and of the important role of literary production in imagining nations, nationalism, and “nation-ness” and consider them in some interesting contexts. Stuart Murray’s Not On Any Map, 1997, is a collection of essays which explores the complex interface between nations and the cultural nationalisms that both define and elude, or exceed, them. As Murray notes in his introduction: “the desire for a bounded, linear and empirical version of selfhood that is so strong in many postcolonial societies finds in nationalism a set of useful ideological tools, yet the consequences of these ideological moves actually produces multiple and often contradictory images of the national self” (Murray [1997], 8). Murray argues that, despite the fear that “in utilizing the model of the nation, the postcolonial culture will become locked into the European paradigm, capable of only repeating the structures and vocabulary of nationalism founded during the colonial relationship … postcoloniality has offered a powerful re-imagining of the nation. The differing versions of the national produced in postcolonial contexts disrupt the seeming stability and function of the inherited European concept” (8 and 12). Stefano Harney’s more narrowly focused Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora, 1996, looks at the role of Trinidadian culture in defining national identity and the construction of Trinidad as a community imagined by writers from a wider Caribbean diaspora. Harney distinguishes between “the idea of a nation as an independent, unfettered political whole, and the idea of a nation as a people” (Harney [1996], 10), and warns that there are dangers in “confusing terms like ‘nation,’ ‘nation-state’ and ‘peoplehood.’ Theorists speak of interactive ethnicities, of changing boundaries, but the Caribbean diaspora, dispersed around the globe but often looking home in its imagination, presents a formidable task of understanding the limits and meanings of terms like ‘the Caribbean people’ or ‘the Trinidadian nation’
” (Harney [1996], 7). Instead, he demonstrates very persuasively, how “there is no Trinidad, except in the telling” (9): Trinidad as an idea, as a national collective, as an imagined community, is constructed by and through a number of discourses. Rather than simply reflecting cultural specificities and differences, Trinidadian cultural and literary texts play a central role in the discursive construction of “Trinidad” and “Trinidadianness.” There are as many versions of Trinidad as there are tellings. Many readers of Caribbean literature may instinctively agree with Murray’s cautionary note that “Nations are not fictions, though they contain elements which are clearly fictional” (Murray [1997], 14). But I want to suggest that reading the nation, or versions of the nation, as discursively constituted, rather than as essentialist “givens” opens up a range of possibilities. This kind of reading strategy, when applied to the bodies of texts themselves, can be used to reveal the specificity, or sites of difference, not only between literatures but within them as well. This notion of overlapping, sometimes even contesting

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versions of nation and their narrations is thus a productive way of engaging with the complex and plural nature of Caribbean societies, their cultural practices and cultural nationalisms. In the present essay, while eschewing Ramchand’s unashamedly orthodox (one is tempted to say almost Leavisite) methodology, I make use of a reading strategy the end of which may seem, at times, dangerously close to the old essentialist approach of looking at national literatures and their defining characteristics. I try to suggest some reasons for the most salient differences between Trinidadian and Jamaican writing but also engage with some of the ways in which they have been discursively constructed through certain dominant cultural codes. Ultimately, I argue for dominant trends in two bodies of texts rather than for the discrete existence of national literatures (despite having to use the terms “Trinidadian literature” and “Jamaican literature” for reasons of clarity and pragmatism). Like Harney in his introduction to Nationalism and Identity, I am keen to stress that I am not implying, by the use of such terms and by my necessarily selective reference to certain texts, that “Trinidadian [or Jamaican] writers write solely about the Trinidadian [or Jamaican] nation” (Harney [1996], 16–17). In addition, I include a number of diasporic writers, writers no longer based in Jamaica and Trinidad, in full cognizance of the impossibility of pretending “that the idea of the nation stops at the border of legal nation-states” (16–17). My critical approach is, accordingly, intentionally selective and provisional as there are many ways to read these bodies of texts and a wider Caribbean literature. I therefore strongly recommend readers to consult the accompanying bibliography and those essays elsewhere in A History of Literature in the Caribbean which supplement and extend the insights and arguments of this piece. Ramchand suggests “the different responses to landscape by writers from [these] different territories” as a useful “starting-point” for a comparative survey of Trinidadian and Jamaican writing. Certainly, it is possible to interrogate the issue of island identity. However, I am not suggesting that such “identity” is either a cohesive or homogeneous one. In the case of an anglophone Caribbean society as ethnically diverse and culturally complex as Trinidad, it is nonsensical to speak of any single or definitive island identity. As Willi Chen demonstrates in his short story collection King of the Carnival, 1988, there are as many identities, or, in Stefano Harney’s words, “readings of Trinidad,” as there are “way[s] to write that text” (Harney [1990-b], 121). An examination of the ways in which national identity is manifested in each literature must involve a consideration of writers’ responses to the particularity of place in each island territory. However, as becomes immediately obvious from a survey of V. S. Naipaul’s prodigious output, Trinidadian (and also Jamaican) writers are not bound to the actual or imaginative terrain of their island locales. Since the first stirrings of literary nationalism in the anglophone Caribbean, writers from both islands have traveled to, settled in, and written about a much wider range of locations. In particular, the treatment of an urban experience in each literature extends to locales — real or imagined — which are not situated in the Caribbean. One of the most salient similarities of the two territories is the fact that, due to the large-scale emigration of West Indians to metropolitan centers such as London in the 1950s and 1960s, both have major diasporic populations overseas which rival those at home. As David Dabydeen has commented: “England today is the third largest West Indian island — there are over half-amillion of us here, fewer only than Jamaica and Trinidad” (Dabydeen [1989], 133). This social and demographic phenomenon has been substantially reflected in each literature and has, in turn,

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produced an exciting new generation of writers of Caribbean origin in Britain and North America. As far as the literary treatment of rural landscape is concerned, this has been well documented in relation to both territories (see Brown [1984], Breiner [1988], McLeod [1979]; see also Josephine Arnold’s essay in this volume for a comparative context). I will therefore treat differences of island locale, in settlement patterns and between rural and urban experiences in each territory only as an ancillary consideration. As an alternative starting point, Ramchand might have suggested a consideration of those cultural specificities, unique to or dominant in each island, which have been utilized to imagine and reimagine the nation in a postcolonial context. Such cultural formations have been especially influential in determining the content, form, and frequently the techniques of each literature when mobilized in this way. Critical commentators such as Gordon Rohlehr, and more recently Stefano Harney, suggest that the “project of nationhood” has involved not only writers and poets but also “calypsonians, carnival mas-makers” (Harney [1996], 1–2). In terms of musical resources the culturally specific forms of pan and calypso must be considered in Trinidad; mento, ska, and reggae in Jamaica. Other specific cultural formations and / or systems of belief which have had a profound effect on constructions of cultural difference and national identity are carnival in Trinidad and Rastafarianism in Jamaica. Strictly speaking, neither is exclusive to its respective island territory. For example, many smaller Caribbean islands, and indeed other predominantly Catholic nations elsewhere in the world, hold pre-Lenten festivals that show certain similarities to Trinidad carnival. Similarly, Rastafarianism is not exclusive to Jamaica but is now adopted as a way of life by some of Jamaican and, more generally, of West Indian descent, in Britain as well as elsewhere in the Caribbean. However, it is in Trinidad and Jamaica respectively that each is to be found in its most potent and vigorous form: as dominant cultural influences on a range of other artistic forms, utilized in distinctive imaginings of community and explorations of nation. My interest in this essay is in the ways in which such belief systems or cultural practices are mobilized to define national identity and difference; and how they are mediated through a range of discourses, including literary discourse. The role of musical and other cultural formations in the literary imagining of nation is therefore considered in greater detail later in this piece. Another crucial difference between Trinidadian and Jamaican literatures arises, directly or indirectly, from the differing ethnic composition and particular historical and socioeconomic factors that have shaped each territory as an island community. Trinidad’s demography has always been much more ethnically varied than that of Jamaica, and this cosmopolitanism is reflected in much Trinidadian literature. By comparison, Jamaican literature has tended to be more monocultural in that African or Afro-Caribbean cultural forms predominate. This can be partially explained by the importation of massive numbers of African slaves into Jamaica — some 662,000 between 1701 and 1810, compared to only 22,000 to Trinidad in the same period — which led to this fast becoming the dominant ethnic group. That an Indo-Caribbean voice is more overt and more significant in Trinidadian literature is also in part an historically determined difference, for substantially larger numbers of indentured laborers from the Indian subcontinent were introduced into Trinidad in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to meet the labor vacuum in the sugar industry, which had been precipitated by the abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean. For instance, in the period 1838–1917, when Indian immigra-

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tion ended, some 143,939 Indians were brought to Trinidad but only 36,412 to Jamaica, of which 33,294 and 11,880 respectively, returned to India (see Laurence [1971], 57). When the greater size and population of Jamaica is taken into account, this amounted to a significant difference in the number and density of this immigrant group in either island. Beyond such obvious differences, a number of important questions arise: Whose nation(alism) are we talking about and whose community? What are the problems of representing the experience of different ethnic groups in each literature? Are their versions of Trinidad, or Jamaica, necessarily the same? Has the dominant impulse been to ghettoize or to creolize ethnically-determined experience? What kinds of racial tensions exist, and how have they been explored in the literature of each island territory? How is the process of creolization itself both the subject and a major influence on literary form and content? Perhaps most importantly: what kind of aesthetic is appropriate for the Caribbean, and how have Trinidadian and Jamaican artists sought to forge a distinctive aesthetic of their own? How have they imagined and reimagined their nations? One of the most productive means of considering the role of different historical determinants on Jamaican and Trinidadian literatures is to consider not only the literary treatment of specific historical periods or subjects but also each literature’s complex mediation of historical process and its articulation of different concepts of history itself. The approach to history and the writing of history, in whatever form, is immensely problematic. For the West Indian writing about a specifically Caribbean past, this task has been problematized even further by the negation or marginalization of his history and the fact that, traditionally at least, that history has been demarcated and defined by the colonizers’ discourse. V. S. Naipaul, whose position in relation to his own island’s history is particularly idiosyncratic, has articulated this problem well: “How can the history of this West Indian futility be written? What tone shall the historian adopt? Shall he be as academic as Sir Alan Burns, protesting from time to time at some brutality, and setting West Indian brutality in the context of European brutality? Shall he, like Salvador de Madariaga, weigh one set of brutalities against another, and conclude that one has not been described in all its foulness and that this is unfair to Spain? Shall he, like the West Indian historians, who can only now begin to face their history, be icily detached and tell the story of the slave trade as if it were just another aspect of mercantilism?” (Naipaul [1962], 29). Beyond Naipaul’s concluding snub at fellow Trinidadian Eric Williams’s history, Capitalism and Slavery, 1944, there remains the problem of how to approach history. The complexities of this issue have been addressed by many writers and critics, including Derek Walcott (see Coombs [1974], Juneja [1990], Slemon [1988], Tiffin [1988], and Young [1990]). The question of how to approach history seems to have been much more of a problem for Trinidadian writers than for Jamaicans; many more Jamaican writers have produced historical works, and many more have concentrated on their early colonial history, particularly on the experience of slavery, than have their Trinidadian counterparts. Moreover, the confidence with which various Jamaican writers have dealt with large, historically circumscribed, periods — V. S. Reid, Erna Brodber, and, perhaps most ambitiously, Andrew Salkey in his long poem Jamaica, 1973, which explores Jamaican identity from the precolonial period to 1970–is not always as evident in Trinidadian writers. Why should this be so? Although there had been slaves in Trinidad since the earliest colonial era, its slave code was

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both more liberal and its experience of slavery “very different from [that] of the other Caribbean colonies. It was on a smaller scale, it did not last as long, and the black-white divisions were complicated by the [phenomenon of a] ‘free-coloured’ class,” property-owning and often slaveowning as well (Taylor [1986], 21). In contrast Jamaica, as I mentioned above, had a much larger African slave population and a more developed plantation system. It also had a strong tradition of slave resistance and insurrection from the late seventeenth century onwards. Those runaway slaves, or maroons, who took refuge in the mountainous interior of Jamaica and established strongholds from which to wage guerrilla attacks on settlements and raids on plantations, have entered into Jamaican folk memory and inspired a number of literary works. These include H. G. De Lisser’s Revenge, 1919, Namba Roy’s Black Albino, 1961, Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, 1984, and Lorna Goodison’s “Nanny,” in I am Becoming My Mother, 1986. The early Jamaican novelist and long-term editor of the Jamaican Gleaner, H. G. De Lisser is most commonly associated with the development of the so-called historical novel in Jamaica (see also J. Downing Thompson’s essay in this volume). Despite Kenneth Ramchand’s suggestion that De Lisser is now more generally noted as “an illustrator in the novel of the facts and issues in West Indian slave society” (Ramchand [1970], 37) rather than as a major West Indian novelist, there has been a resurgence of interest in his writing and his role as the editor of Planters Punch. Planters Punch was an annual magazine founded in 1920 which De Lisser used as the popular vehicle for the publication of a number of his fictions (see Donnell [1994], Donnell and Lawson Welsh [1996]). Jane’s Career, 1914, is a fascinating early novel centered around a black working-class female protagonist which can be read productively in terms of its class and gender politics. De Lisser’s historical novels, Revenge, 1919, The White Witch of Rosehall, 1929, Psyche, 1952, Morgan’s Daughter, 1953, and The Arawak Girl, 1958, are all most accurately regarded as historical romances in which “historical authenticity is not so much distorted as obscured by the author’s preoccupation with romantic melodrama” (Birbalsingh [1988], 66). Although more complex, Valerie Belgrave’s reconstruction of her island’s history in Ti Marie, 1988, is the best Trinidadian example of this genre, a historical reconstruction which has engendered much critical debate (see, for example, Harney [1990-a] and [1996]). De Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall is set in 1830s Jamaica and explores the emotional and racial tensions of a triangular relationship between a colored woman, a white creole woman, and an Englishman newly arrived in Jamaica. Revenge is set against the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica which is also the subject of V. S. Reid’s Sixty–Five, 1960, and the starting point of his New Day, 1949. The Arawak Girl is perhaps the most interesting of all, despite its not inconsiderable flaws as a novel, because it imaginatively recreates events in sixteenth-(rather than in eighteenth- or nineteenth-) century Jamaica. It is set at the time of Columbus’s fourth voyage and his year-long sojourn on the island between June 1503 and June 1504 and treats the earliest confrontation between indigenous people and European colonizers. As a preliterate and mostly extinct culture, the Arawaks have made no literal imprint on the developing literatures of the Caribbean, yet traces of these indigenous peoples can still be detected in countries such as Guyana, the only country with a significant Amerindian presence in the anglophone Caribbean. Appropriately, it is in Guyana that such “absence” has been perceived as “presence” by writers such as Wilson Harris and, more recently, Pauline Melville, both of whose work involves a literary recuperation and psychic reintegration of lost voices, an

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imaginative exploration of biological and cultural ancestry, and the reconstruction of an atavistic experience that draws on pre-Columbian cultures. In Jamaica and Trinidad, where pre-Columbian traces are much less salient, their absence has generally provided the impetus for a very different construction of indigeneity. Although both literatures are informed by a deep sense of island and regional history, far more Jamaican writers have focused on specific early moments in their history, especially on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, than have Trinidadian writers, who, in the main, have concentrated on the modern period and dealt primarily with public events (Belgrave’s Ti Marie is an exception). Such Trinidadian works include Ralph De Boissiere’s Crown Jewel, 1952, which deals with the industrial unrest of the 1930s; Sam Selvon’s novels recording the impact of the American presence in Trinidad and changes in the sugar industry in the 1940s and 1950s, primarily his first published novel, A Brighter Sun, 1952, and also Turn Again Tiger, 1958; and Mustapha Matura’s dramatic exploration of the emergence of the People’s National Party and “the heady political momentum” it generated in the 1950’s in Play Mas, 1944. The one V. S. Naipaul text that seems to contradict this trend is The Loss of El Dorado, 1970: not only does it deal, in part, with an earlier period in Trinidad’s history (1595–1617), but it utilizes a highly individualized narrative perspective, also a characteristic of his most recent novel, A Way in the World, 1996. But The Loss of El Dorado proves to be more problematic on closer attention. Firstly, it covers more than one historical time span since its later parts deal with events in 1801. Secondly, as Naipaul himself acknowledges in his prologue, the earlier period is demarcated by the dream and the experiences of a European interloper (Raleigh) rather than a Trinidadian. Thirdly, the whole is circumscribed by Naipaul’s highly idiosyncratic concept of Trinidadian history, namely, that it is a “narrative of encounters with the metropolis” (Thieme [1982], 140). What at first seems to be an orthodox historical novel is, in fact, a text that propounds a very particularized view of history. In Naipaul’s words, this is an account of the “two moments when Trinidad was touched by ‘history’
”; at all other times, in his view, it has been “exempt from history” (Naipaul [1970], 14 and 126). Furthermore, it is a text that resists inclusion in the historical novel category by subverting generic boundaries. As so often in Naipaul’s writing, the discourses of historiography, travel writing, and fiction are all employed in a single text. Likewise, Guerrillas, 1975, which is, in part, an imaginative reconstruction of the life and role of Trinidadian Black Power activist, Michael X, becomes problematic on closer inspection. Jimmy Ahmed is, at best, only a fictional surrogate, and it can be argued that Naipaul’s text is only superficially historical; ultimately, it is as uncompromising a reflection of the Naipaulian sensibility and world view as any of his other writings. What, then, of the problems of representing the experience of different ethnic groups in each literature? What kinds of racial tensions exist, and how have they been explored in Trinidadian and Jamaican literatures? Although Trinidadian society lacks the intense polarization along class and color lines characteristic of Jamaican society, it potentially has even more levels of stratification because of the larger number, and different proportions, of individual ethnic groups it encompasses, including East Indians, Chinese, Portuguese and persons of Middle Eastern descent. Consequently, Trinidad has experienced problems and racial tensions different from those of Jamaica, and this has been reflected in its writers and their work. The dominant racial division between those of African and of East Indian origin has been intensified by a

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particular settlement pattern: the latter quickly settled the sugar lands of central and southern Trinidad, dominating the rural areas, whereas Afro-Caribbeans were concentrated mainly in urban areas. Thus, many Indo-Caribbean works deal with a rural experience — V. S. Naipaul’s early novels, especially The Mystic Masseur, 1957, and The Suffrage of Elvira, 1958, Selvon’s A Brighter Sun, 1952, and The Plains of Caroni, 1970, and Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird, 1961, and The Obeah Man, 1964, being just a few examples. A number of novels, such as Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, 1961, and Selvon’s A Brighter Sun, 1952, chart the process of Indian migration to urban areas and the experience of radical disjunction from, or acculturation to, the creole world that ensues. In Jamaica, this Indo-Caribbean voice is much less evident, although research, such as that of Jeremy Poynting, is uncovering more Indo-Caribbean literature throughout the region (see Poynting [1985], [1986], and [1990]). Also, there has not been such a polarized settlement pattern, although, due to the relative sparsity of arable land, a different social phenomenon of a mountain-based rural peasantry developed much more substantially in Jamaica. The latter has become the subject matter and / or setting for many texts, including Claude McKay’s Songs of Jamaica, 1912, and Banana Bottom, 1933, Namba Roy’s Black Albino, and Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, 1980. In most of these works, as in the urban works of Roger Mais and the new generation of dub poets, an Afro-Caribbean voice dominates. Sam Selvon’s essay “Three into One Can’t Go,” in Dabydeen and Samaroo’s India in the Caribbean, 1987, explores the complexities and contradictions of being, as many Trinidadians are, East Indian, Trinidadian, and West Indian simultaneously and suggests the extent to which racial divisions problematize notions of a single national identity and culture. Another essay in the same collection, Ramesh Deosaran’s “The Caribbean Man,” examines the controversy caused by Black Stalin’s 1979 calypso, “Caribbean Man,” widely alleged, particularly amongst the IndoCaribbean population of Trinidad, to be racist in its casual elision of the history and experience of almost half of Trinidad’s population. The lyrics, “Dem is one race — De Caribbean Man / From de same place — De Caribbean Man / That make the same trip — De Caribbean Man / On the same ship — De Caribbean Man,” were targeted as racist, reductive and inaccurate, and the ensuing debate provided an excellent barometer of racial assumptions and racial tensions in Trinidad. Appropriately since then, one notable development in calypso (closely associated with the use of soca) has been the incorporation of musical elements and from participation by members of the Indo-Caribbean population, hitherto underrepresented in this most Trinidadian of cultural forms. However, Jeremy Poynting’s important research suggests that in Trinidadian (and Guyanese) literature at least, the creolization process has not diminished racial stereotypes. Poynting’s analysis of the characters and settings of a range of novels, short stories, and plays by writers of Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean origin “suggest[s] that whereas in general Indo-Caribbean writers have been conscious of being part of a wider society, Afro-Caribbean writing has tended to ignore the Indian presence” (Poynting [1986], 15). Poynting’s findings additionally suggest that “Indian writing tends to deal with the increasing heterogeneity of the group and the tensions arising from such inner differences (religious, political, class, urban-rural and generational) [as in Ismith Khan’s The Jumbie Bird and Selvon’s Turn Again Tiger] whereas Afro-Creole portrayals tend towards a relatively uniform stereotype [often] not only peripheral but negatively stereotyped” (Poynting [1986], 16). Salient examples include a number of calypsos (see Rohlehr [1988]) and the documentation of

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such stereotypes in the title story of Olive Senior’s 1989 collection, Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories. Stereotypes also exist amongst Indo-Caribbean writers, and Poynting goes on to demonstrate how novels such as Shiva Naipaul’s The Chip-Chip Gatherers, 1973, exhibit a stereotyping of the Afro-Creole world similar to that of the “dougla” girl (of mixed African and Indian ancestry) in Michael Anthony’s Green Days by the River, 1967. More complex explorations of the contradictory pull of the creolization process — attenuating while simultaneously acculturating — and the tensions that exist between Trinidadians of African and of Indian origin are found in works such as Ismith Khan’s The Obeah Man, 1964, Selvon’s An Island is a World, 1955, and I Hear Thunder, 1963, and Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, 1979. The dominant impulse to particularize, or to ghettoize, the experience of one ethnic group is perhaps even more pronounced in Jamaica, especially among the dub poets. Writers such as Olive Senior, however, have focused on the nuances and tensions of a much wider range of Jamaican experience, exploring Jamaica’s many ethnic, religious, cultural, gender, and generational divisions. A similar cross-sectional approach is found in Trinidadian writer Willi Chen’s King of the Carnival. This series of short stories represents the multiplicity of racial, religious, and economic groups in Trinidad and their different imaginings of community, thereby subverting the possibility of any unitary reading or the privileging of any single group. Although there has been a certain amount of locally published Chinese Trinidadian writing, including Marion Patrick Jones’ Pan Beat, 1973, and J’Ouvert Morning, 1978, Chen is the first Trinidadian Chinese writer to be published outside of the Caribbean. Divisions of status and of opportunity on the basis of color (and the historically linked index of class) exist in both island territories. But such divisions have been arguably more pronounced in Jamaica than in Trinidad. Various cultural theorists have tried to explain this in terms of a negatively-based cultural polarity, grounded in an historical experience of societal division such as that created by the plantation system. M. G. Smith argues that “Jamaicans moralise incessantly about one another’s actions in order to assert their cultural and social identity by expressing the appropriate sectional morality (black, brown, white). For such selfidentification, negation [what you are not] is far more essential and effective than its opposite [what you share in terms of common values and a common experience]” (Smith [1965], 175). Kamau Brathwaite proposes a creolized model of Jamaican society which initially seems more positive but is potentially just as divisive; his “idea of creolization [is] based on the notion of an historically affected socio-cultural continuum, within which (in the case of Jamaica), there are four inter-related and sometimes overlapping orientations… European, Euro-Creole, Afro-Creole and ‘West Indian’… although there is white / brown / black, there are infinite possibilities within these distinctions and many ways of asserting identity” (Brathwaite [1971], 311). Of the two, it is Smith’s observation that is most clearly borne out by the portrayal of Jamaican society in much of its literature. Similar divisions are depicted in Trinidadian literature but they tend to be much less extreme. For example, Michael Anthony’s The Year in San Fernando, 1965, delineates the radical displacement and constraint experienced by a young boy as he is uprooted from his class background and village environment and sent to live with a middle-class family of strangers in Trinidad’s second largest town. A similar scenario is enacted in both class and color terms in Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey, 1970, when Tee is sent to stay with her fairer-skinned,

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middle-class Aunt Beatrice and effectively marginalized as an inferior “poor relation.” An obvious analogue in Jamaican literature is Olive Senior’s short story “Bright Thursdays” in which the young protagonist is sent to live with the socially superior, lighter-skinned parents of the biological father she never knew. Upon his return, she suffers not only the trauma of his rejection of her but also the humiliation of his dismissive reference to her as that “bloody little bastard” (Senior [1986], 53). In Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, color and class consciousness are revealed as much more central influences on the young protagonist Nellie and as crucial to her emerging sense of personal and ancestral identity. This is dramatized most clearly in the whitening philosophy that Granny Tucker tries to inculcate in her family and which is central to Nellie’s own construction of a mythologized portrait of her grandfather. Also, color and class differences are examined through Nellie’s two aunts: light-skinned Aunt Becca is associated “with the socially mobile section of the community,” while her sister, Aunt Alice, who is rurally-based, unmarried, “resigned, uncomplaining and unambitious… [is] identified… with a mobile, landless, impoverished section of society” (Walker-Johnson [1989], 54). “Brown, educated, religious” Aunt Becca is revealed to have “assumed the face of middle-class respectability only at the terrible price of aborting her illegitimate child” (O’Callaghan [1983], 63), an admission that shows the suppression and self-effacement effected by the tyranny of social mores. Senior has a very similar pattern in her story “The Two Grandmothers” (in Senior [1989]), a classic dichotomy in Caribbean literature which goes back as far as Nicolás Guillén’s famous 1931 poem “Los dos abuelos” (The two grandfathers). Music, especially in its inherited and emerging creole forms, has historically been an important site of cultural resistance in the West Indies. In the slave communities of the earliest plantations, music was one of the most important cultural retentions from Africa which made it possible to sustain an identity alternative to that imposed by the European colonialists. In the colonial and postcolonial period, music increasingly became a medium of indigenous cultural expression, as new forms originated in the West Indies, challenging the old cultural hegemonies of the colonial center. Although the close interrelation of music and word has always been a central feature of oral traditional forms in the Caribbean, it has been this continued development of an indigenous “musical tradition alongside the spoken” (Burnett [1986], xxix), particularly in modern Jamaica and Trinidad, which has created the anglophone Caribbean’s most distinctive musical forms: mento, ska and reggae, calypso and steel pan. These forms, in turn, have encouraged a continued cross-fertilization of music and poetry, giving rise to some of the most exciting and innovative work the region has produced to date. In Trinidad, the calypso is the dominant musical form which has influenced the content, style and form of much of its literature; it is regarded by many as an art form analogous to literature and worthy of the same critical attention that the region’s literary works have received (see Hill [1971], Rohlehr [1970], [1975] and [1990], Warner [1983], and Harney [1996]). However, pan and the more “crossfertilized” rapso poetry have also emerged in Trinidad as a direct result of the synthesis of musical and oratorical influences and techniques. “Songs were the Caribbean’s first poems” (Burnett [1986], xxix), as is amply demonstrated by the early section of Burnett’s 1986 anthology of Caribbean verse, and this sense of a close relationship between music and word has also informed much Jamaican literature. Many of the traditional oral resources that contemporary Caribbean artists employ or adapt appear to have even more ancient origins, predating the

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Middle Passage. The influence of these primarily African-derived oral skills and cultural practices on the literature of the Caribbean has been well documented (see Brathwaite [1979-a]). More recently published archival research has revealed a varied tradition of residually oral practices in nineteenth-century Jamaica (see Hill [1992]). I will limit my discussion here to some of the more recent manifestations of musical and oral influence on these two literatures. Even the titles of Claude McKay’s earliest dialect poetry collections, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, testify to his experimentation, albeit very tentative and conservative by contemporary Jamaican standards, with forms that bring together music and the spoken word. McKay even provided musical notation for some of the poems in the latter collection. This tradition is continued and extended in the use of distinctively Jamaican speech patterns, the ballad form, itself a residually oral, borderline form between music and poetry, and mento rhythms in Louise Bennett’s dialect poetry. In terms of fictional experimentation in this field, Roger Mais has been a central figure, as Brathwaite’s series of seminal critical essays in the 1960s set out to demonstrate (see Brathwaite [1967], [1968], and [1969]). More recently, the work of dub poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, the late Mikey Smith, Oku Onuora, Mutabaruka, and Jean Binta Breeze has dominated Jamaican poetry. Such poets have variously used the rhythmic (and other) resources of reggae music to develop a performative form in which ancient oratorical skills and modern technological resources are combined in an incisive exploration of predominantly sociopolitical issues in contemporary Jamaica or Britain. Some of the territory-specific cultural forms that have influenced Trinidadian and Jamaican literature, respectively, are older than others. For instance, several of the most important terms and rituals of Trinidad Carnival, such as “J’Ouvert” morning (from Jour Ouvert, signalling the start of carnival), derive from the time of French colonial rule. However, many forms traditionally associated with Carnival, including calypso and calinda — the ritual stickfighting accompanied by drumming — seem to have a much more ancient, African pedigree (see Hill [1971] and Warner [1982]). Consequently, some have viewed the African griots as the true “antecedents of the Trinidadian calypsonian”; both the griot and the calypsonian are concerned with the creation of “a social document of the[ir] country’s history, a compendium of the people’s language, an archive of their music” (Hill [1971], 23, 26). A number of Caribbean works deal with the mythologizing of stickfighting, including Seepersad Naipaul’s The Adventures of Gurudeva, 1946, Derek Walcott’s The Joker of Seville, 1979, Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment, 1982, and Willi Chen’s short story “The Stickfighter” (in Chen [1988], 15–30). Significantly, almost all were written by Trinidadians. Indeed, it is a Trinidadian text, Hill’s play Man Better Man, 1985, that dramatizes the connection between African griot and West Indian calypsonian most neatly. In the village community in which Man Better Man is set, Hannibal, the local calypsonian, fulfils a central function as the recorder of existing reputations in the stickfight and as commentator on the challenge presented by the latest contest. In this role, he acts as the mediator between the flux of the villagers’ experiences and the (greater) permanence of his communally sanctioned art; he is both societal commentator and chronicler of local history and — like the griot — the “oral repository” and articulator of a kind of communal memory (Hill [1971], 23). His calypsos function not only to entertain but to record, in memorable, and thus retainable, form, the heroic exploits of those champions, past and present, of the calinda. This is an ongoing process, as is demonstrated by the admission of Briscoe into the halls of fame when a calypso

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is composed to celebrate his symbolic, if not literal, victory in the contest, exposing, through a very different show of strength and integrity, the fraudulence and corruption of the obeah man, Diable Papa, and his cronies. The process of recording history and constructing new mythologies by immortalizing human action through song, is acknowledged by the chorus of villagers themselves as they proclaim: “Excitement for so / More trouble and woe / A day to recall / When you grow old” (Hill [1985], 156). A similar example occurs in Naipaul’s Miguel Street, 1959, a series of related stories abounding in calypso allusions and themes (see Thieme [1987]), when Popo’s imprisonment after a series of adventures in pursuit of his runaway wife is immortalized in a popular calypso. In such distinctly Trinidadian contexts, the traditional griot chant of the West African Mandingo people, “We are word-containers. We are the memory of man” (Hill [1971], 23), takes on a new pertinence. Trinidad carnival has come a long way from its beginnings as the preserve of the French creole upper classes in pre-Emancipation times; it only began to develop as an indigenous and popular phenomenon after Emancipation, with the migration of greater numbers of freed slaves to the city. The street processions, costumes, masking, song and dance of colonial masquerade, as Hill has documented, were appropriated by the freed blacks, and, increasingly, non-European and creolized forms, such as drum music, calinda, and “canboulay” ( from “cannes brûlées,” symbolic of the burning of sugarcane as part of slave insurrections) were incorporated into carnival celebrations. The calypso, like steel pan, and ska and reggae in Jamaica, has historically always been a “lower class creole occupation…the music of the masses” (Rohlehr [1970], 87) and an urban phenomenon. As Pariag, the Indian interloper in the yard environment of Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, observes: “Real Carnival was a city thing, a Creole thing” (Lovelace [1981], 88). Subject to considerable middle-class and white creole disapprobation and opposition, calypso and other popular carnival forms developed as the vehicles of ritualized resistance or rebellion, whereby inversions of the sacred and the profane and other modes of status reversal central to Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque could be symbolically enacted in order to satirize or undermine the traditional bases of authority in church and colonial government (see Bakhtin [1968]). Despite its shift from ex tempore performance to a more scripted and technologically produced form, calypso has retained its role as a vigorous, at times ruthless, form of social commentary, a kind of oral equivalent to popular journalism, exhibiting the same impulse toward probing topical issues or questioning generally held assumptions in a gesture at once inquisitive, at times prurient, witty, satiric, and humorous. As such, it has retained a unique place at the center of Trinidadian society, and is well represented in Trinidadian literature. As V. S. Naipaul has acknowledged: “it is only in the calypso that the Trinidadian touches reality. The calypso is a purely local form. No song composed outside Trinidad is a calypso. The calypso deals with local incidents, local attitudes, and it does so in a local language. The pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider” (Naipaul [1962], 70). The influence of calypso has spread throughout the Eastern Caribbean, and some of its most important practitioners, such as Slinger Francisco, The Mighty Sparrow, are non-Trinidadians; so are some of the most incisive literary treatments of the calypsonian as societal commentator and desecrator, for example, in Derek Walcott’s “The Spoiler’s Return” [Walcott [1980] 53–60]). Yet, the bacchanal culture and cultural codes they represent are specifically Trinidadian. Despite this fact (or perhaps because

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of it), a resilient sense of national and cultural specificity is still evident in many Trinidadian texts, particularly as a means of self-definition in relation to smaller islands in the region: a good example is C. L. R. James’ short story “Triumph” (in Sander [1978], 96, and Donnell and Lawson Welsh [1996], 84–90). This, I will show, is not alien to Jamaican literature but is manifest there in different forms. That such territory-specific cultural forms are perceived to be under threat from various directions is intimated strongly in some Trinidadian texts. Aldrick, in The Dragon Can’t Dance, laments the trend toward commercialization and outside sponsorship of the “mas” (steel) bands as a process that dilutes the local, and indigenous, nature of these art forms, obfuscating their history as modes of resistance and undermining individual and community control by capitulation to the newest insidious manifestations of metropolitan and neocolonial (U. S. American) control: economic power (see Lovelace [1981], 68). Lovelace’s novel provides an interesting intertext to the title story of Willi Chen’s King of the Carnival. Here, another “dragon-maker,” aptly named Santo Lovelace, undergoes humiliating defeat and the effacement of those traditional rituals of preparation — “sacrifice, devotion and long seasons of rehearsal” — which he has undergone for the annual Road March competition, when his carefully-wrought carnival dragon, resonant with suggestions of organicism and primevalism, is passed over in favor of the “ostentatious performance” of a white man’s robotic novelty, reliant on technological gimmickry rather than human ingenuity (Chen [1988], 154). The defeat of the dragon-maker stands as a powerful symbol of the deculturation, and possibly also deracination, of this most central of indigenous traditions, although it is never made clear whether the white man is a foreign visitor or a local inhabitant. Chen’s unobtrusive implication is that the inevitable outcome of such inexorable progress toward the use of modern technology in carnival is dehumanization and effacement of traditional practice. Yet, the alternative reading, that it is a “novel interpretation of mas” (153), is also retained. Chen’s text attests to a larger cultural dilemma that remains unresolved. What is at stake here is the contradictory pull between the desire to enrich or advance a cultural form through the incorporation of new elements (in a sense, a logical extension of the creolization process) and the desire to defend a traditional art form from dilution or attenuation by proscribing such additions or changes. The Trinidad calypso’s adoption of the dance-oriented musical form, soca, is a case in point. Outwardly at least, this form exemplifies Trinidad’s cultural pluralism and the general preference for an aesthetic that favors hybridization. However, it is not the preference of all, as the controversy surrounding David Rudder’s 1986 samba-based calypso “Bahia Girl” testified. The authenticity of Rudder’s prize-winning calypso was hotly disputed precisely because it had treated a non-Trinidadian subject and musical form. Against the alleged diluting influence of this cultural hybridization were ranged those who sought to “purify the culture of the tribe.” The “Bahia Girl” case constitutes an interesting sequel to the “Caribbean Man” controversy, which I discussed earlier. It also reveals another major difference between Trinidadian and Jamaican culture: that the former, as a carnival or bacchanal culture, by its very definition, is more eclectic and generally more receptive to new cultural influences than its Jamaican equivalent. The Dragon Can’t Dance is undoubtedly the most central of Trinidadian texts dealing with carnival and, for this reason, arguably the most quintessentially Trinidadian text. In this novel, Lovelace explores the complex tensions between playing “mas” as an act of faith, a belief in the

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salvation of this cleansing and unifying ritual of carnival, and “mas” as play-acting, taking on an assumed (and ultimately false) persona, which is as transient and unproductive of a sense of selfhood in Aldrick as the carnival itself is of a lasting sense of national unity. Stefano Harney, in his reading of this and Chen’s related text, argues that Aldrick’s dragon “can’t dance” precisely because such a unitary cultural and national identity cannot hold. Instead, the competitive, but not conflicting, readings of Trinidad which Chen’s short stories evidence effect a decentering of any dominant ritual, narrative, setting, ethnic or cultural strand and allow a much more astute sense of multiple identities to emerge. The carnival motto of “All O’ We is One” is thus simultaneously a lie: it is the most elaborately constructed mythology in Trinidadian society. Clearly, divisions exist along gender, political, socioeconomic, and ethnic lines (for a particularly useful analysis of the racial divisions evident in Lovelace’s novel, see Ramchand [1988]). It is also in this novel that Lovelace provides a gloss on an alternative distancing or distortion of calypso away from its popular function, when he has a fictionalized Professor of the University of the West Indies extrapolate wildly on Philo’s “Axe-Man” and “Tarzan” calypsos — the latter of which recalls Sparrow’s famous “Congo Man” calypso — subjecting them, in his cerebralizing way, to the tyranny of necessary meaning and societal significance. Although Philo is seen to compromise his art for a while, capitulating to the populace’s desire for smutty calypsos and appearing unconcerned with anything beyond the material benefits (and sexual favors, in the case of Miss Cleothilda) which he can reap from his position, he does regain a sense of social conscience and a larger vision, resuming his role as societal commentator by the novel’s close. Other calypsonians in Trinidadian literature fare less well: Ian McDonald’s “Jaffo the Calypsonian,” whose calypsos are the means by which he is “released from pain into remembered pain,” is eventually silenced by throat cancer and ends his days in hospital, pathetically stealing “spoons from the harried nurses to beat out rhythm on his iron bedposts” (McDonald [1967], 47–48). Razor Blade in Selvon’s short story “Calypsonian” (in Selvon [1966]), and B. Wordsworth in Naipaul’s Miguel Street both suffer from the seasonal nature of the calypso. But whereas Razor Blade dreams of success as a calypsonian through American commercial backing, B. Wordsworth aspires only to success as a poet. He regards the writing and sale of calypsos, from which he fails miserably to make a living, as an activity ancillary to his chief ambition to write poetry, thereby exposing a telling bias in his preference for the literary norms of the metropole (reflected in his very sobriquet), for the pursuit of high culture, as opposed to what he perceives as the merely remunerative and lesser concerns of indigenous, popular culture. Just as calypso developed from a diverse range of musical influences so it has drawn from a wide range of oral forms and resources including “ole talk,” the antagonistic skills of “‘heckling,’ [giving] ‘fatigue,’ ‘picong’ and ‘mamaguy’
” (Warner [1988], 127), tracings, “telling” and the oratorical forms (secular and liturgical) of “speechifying.” Many of these and other specific oral discourses are usefully categorized by Gordon Rohlehr in his introduction to Voiceprint (see Brown et al [1989]), a much-needed anthology of oral and related poetry which brings together a range of Caribbean oral forms and examples of their literary appropriation. Such mainly grass-roots or street-level improvisatory, verbal forms have been perceived by various critics (see Warner [1982], Fabre [1977 / 78], Ramchand [1985], and Morris [1984]) as major determinants of the narrative strategies of many of Samuel Selvon’s novels and stories,

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especially those such as The Lonely Londoners, 1956, The Housing Lark, 1965, Moses Ascending, 1975 and the stories in the second half of Ways of Sunlight, 1957, which are set in London. This greater indebtedness to specifically Caribbean oral discourses in the London fiction may owe something to the conscious or unconscious need for heightened self-definition against the host culture, as a West Indian living and writing in London. Trinidad’s other culturally specific musical form, steel pan, is a more recent phenomenon with even stronger urban roots. It originated as a slum-centered art created from the opportunistic use of one of the by-products of the island’s oil industry. Significantly, many of the poems which can be located in this area of cultural cross-fertilization combine music and words in ways that defy purely literary or musical definition. However, synthesis of a multiplicity of musical and oral sources in the creation of a new form, such as is evident in the Rapso poetry of Brother Resistance (combining the “talk-songs of Trinidad musician Lancelot Layne, Jamaican Dub, calypso and Afro-American rapping songs” (Brown et al [1989], 21), is still a relatively new occurrence. Despite the radical breakthrough of Brathwaite’s first trilogy, The Arrivants, 1986, which explores the spiritual, rhythmic, and formal possibilities for poetry of a wide range of black, including African-American, musical forms of the late 1960s, most of the poets inclined toward experimentation in this area have concentrated on specific musical forms of Caribbean origin, rather than experimenting with a synthesis of different sources. Ironically, it has been Guyanese John Agard in his “Man to Pan” poems in Mangoes and Bullets, 1985, Guyanese Grace Nichols in the long title poem of her most recent collection, Sunris, 1996, and Grenadianborn Trinidadian resident Abdul Malik in his Pan Run sequences I & II, from The Whirlwind, 1988, who have explored the metaphors, rhythm and experience of pan most fully in poetic form. Several Trinidadian artists have treated pan in dramatic or novelistic form, including Errol Hill in his plays Ping Pong, 1958, and Man Better Man, 1964, and Marion Patrick Jones in her novels Pan Beat, 1973, and J’Ouvert Morning. 1976. Poems such as Victor Questel’s “Pan Drama,” in Near Mourning Ground, 1979, represent only the beginnings of a specifically Trinidadian poetic treatment of pan. The musical base of dub poetry is reggae, a form that developed out of the sound system culture that succeeded the Big Band era in Jamaica. Such systems, disseminating recorded music on a smaller scale, were mostly “located in areas that might otherwise have had only intermittent musical entertainment, [bringing] ska to the people… as an integral part of the Jamaican entertainment scene” (O’Gorman [1972], 51). Such origins “bear an interesting parallel to the growth of the Steel Band Movement in Trinidad.” Furthermore, the psychic release traditionally gained through the symbolic enaction of rebellion through ritual, in Trinidad carnival, is in reggae (as in much Jamaican dub poetry), manifest in a new and more overtly politicized form. In some important respects, calypso in Trinidad and the more recent reggae music / dub form in Jamaica can be seen as different manifestations of the same Caribbean oral matrix. Both are creolized forms grounded in a long tradition of practicing and valuing oratorical skills which is ultimately an African legacy to the Caribbean, although, as Warner documents, kaiso’s origins are disputed, with some analysts arguing for non-African, especially Hispanic, elements contributing to the early formation of the calypso. Both make use of musical resources and exploit the close relationship between music and the sounded word and both utilize popular linguistic forms, primarily a Creole idiom, to signify a popular base, or grass-roots identity,

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subversive of all bastions of authority, linguistic and institutional. In the case of most of the dub poets, the use of Creole has been even more intensely politically motivated, a choice informed by an acute awareness of its history as the language of the oppressed, a much proscribed linguistic form that has yet provided a crucial medium of resistance in allowing the expression of a more authentic and indigenous sense of Caribbean identity. Most interesting of all are those distinct linguistic manipulations enacted within a Rastafarian context which have encoded the language of dub as even more culturally specific (see Pollard [1982], [1983], [1984], and Gorlach and Holm [1986]). One of the most important predecessors of the Jamaican dub poets is Louise Bennett. Bennett, famed for her popular storytelling and poetry renditions and her ebullient, energetic performative style, has long assumed a centrality in Jamaican culture. For a long time, however, her work was not even regarded as literature; for example, it was not included in the first Focus anthology of poets from Jamaica, and in the second it was only included in an appendix. Her non-literary reputation, countered to a significant degree by the critical attention paid to Bennett by Jamaican figures such as Mervyn Morris (see Morris [1967]) was largely due to the fact that she chose to “do dialect,” that is, to use a linguistic form that, although popular and accessible to a large number of Jamaicans, was still, as yet, regarded as an unsuitable medium for literary expression (see Donnell and Lawson Welsh [1996], 10–13). Hill’s most recently published research into the history of the Jamaican stage documents an even earlier tradition of black storytellers / raconteurs performing on stage in Jamaica from about 1870 onwards (see Hill [1992]). Of particular significance and considerable popularity in this period was the self-written material performed and published consecutively by three members of the black Jamaican Murray family. Like Bennett, Charles Garland Murray’s performances made use of Anancy stories and traditional Jamaican proverbs, and he was renowned for his dramatic and humorous rendering of Jamaican Creole. Importantly, he recognized the fundamental orality of this linguistic medium and the conduciveness of the performance mode to its creative use. He was also sensitive to the particular problems that transcribing such an idiom for printed publication of his sketches and stories entailed. It may be most profitable then to see Bennett as an inheritor of this earlier tradition, especially as she, too, started her career on stage, acting, singing, storytelling, and performing pantomime. Despite the efflorescence of interest in and creative use of Creole in mid-nineteenthcentury Jamaica which Hill records, it is only in the present century that figures such as Bennett have popularized and gained wider recognition for the literary use of Creole in Jamaica and throughout the anglophone Caribbean. Together with the first poetry collections of her predecessor Claude McKay, Inez Sibley’s self-published Creole verse, 1931, V. S. Reid’s highly contrived and unsustained adapted Creole idiom in New Day, 1949, and the occasional attempts of another early Jamaican poet, Una Marson, to incorporate Creole and a recognizably West Indian speaking voice into her poetry, Bennett precedes any analogous attempt in Trinidadian literature, despite the publication of a pioneering grammar of Trinidadian Creole as early as 1869 (see Thomas [1969]). When the breakthrough eventually came, with the works of writers such as Samuel Selvon, it was to take a predominantly fictional rather than a poetic form. Rohlehr has demonstrated the Anancy / trickster mentality of Sparrow’s calypso “Queen’s Canary” (in Rohlehr [1970]) and, more generally, the calypso’s rooted sense of connection to a

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wider oral matrix of folk tradition and communal wisdom. Likewise, Bennett’s art is an essentially oral communal one, closely situated to a human life world of “labrish,” rumor and repute. Like many other Jamaican writers and performers, including Roger Mais and Erna Brodber, James Berry and many of the dub poets, Bennett makes use of oral resources such as the proverb, the nursery rhyme, and the children’s ring-game, as well as residually oral techniques characteristic of the Old Testament and the oratorical strategies of the Baptist preacher. Although, like McKay’s, her verse shows strong leanings toward the iambic tetrameter of the ballad form, other musical influences on her work have been more specifically Caribbean. Chief among them is mento, a Jamaican folk song form, out of which other popular Jamaican musical forms such as ska, rock steady, and eventually, reggae developed. The “mento beat” and “shey-shey feet” of dance to this musical form is also celebrated in Part Three of Andrew Salkey’s epic poem Jamaica, 1973, in a specific linkage of an African heritage with earlytwentieth-century Jamaican experience. Bennett’s poetic use of the mento form can be seen as a natural development when we take into account the fact that her earliest performances frequently combined song with storytelling and the poetry for which she has become best known. Interestingly, Bennett has referred to her role as one which again is directly analogous to that of the African griot, the collator and articulator of “culture an tradition an Birthright dat han dung from generation to generation” (Morris [1983]). Like Una Marson, a less well-known figure only now being accorded the critical attention she deserves (see Smilowitz [1984], Donnell [1993], [1994], [1995], and Donnell and Lawson Welsh [1996]), Bennett is concerned with debunking gender mythologies. Although she is renowned for a wide range of poetic subject matter, a notable unifying device in her work is her “Miss Lou” persona and the guise of the resilient “Jamaica ‘Oman” she adopts in order to examine the pretensions, hypocrisies, and absurdities of her society, including those specific societal edicts and pressures, as well as privileges, which appertain to being a woman in this particular island territory. From such beginnings has developed a strong tradition of women’s writing in Jamaica. Despite the fine work of Trinidadian women writers such as Merle Hodge and, latterly, Dionne Brand and Rosa Guy, anthologized in Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson’s collection of short stories, Her True-True Name, 1989, and the new Trinidadian women’s writing made visible by Espinet’s pioneering 1990 anthology of Caribbean women’s poetry, Jamaica stands head and shoulders above Trinidad in terms of the number of women writers of stature it has produced of late and the sheer quality of their work. Moreover, recent research and publications have foregrounded a number of early twentieth century Jamaican women writers, whose work has been, until lately, difficult to access and critically neglected (see CobhamSander in Davies and Fido [1990], 195–222, Donnell [1993], [1994], [1995], Donnell and Lawson Welsh [1996]). A number of these writers, Tropica’ (Mary Adella Wolcott), Albinia Hutton, Eva Nichols, and Clara Maude Garrett, were anthologized in early anthologies such as Voices from Summerland, 1929, Songs of Empire, 1932 and A Treasury of Jamaican Poetry, 1949. Louise Bennett’s influence has been immense, with Jamaican writers such as Valerie Bloom and James Berry continuing in her tradition and others, such as Guyanese Grace Nichols, extending the range of her energetic, largely female personae. The comedy of Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems, 1984, is grounded in the same kind of confident individualism, tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, grass-roots wisdom, and physical presence evident in Bennett’s female personae.

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Bennett is something of a Jamaican literary foremother, a figure who has, directly and indirectly, promoted Jamaican culture in a popular form and encouraged a new generation of writers / performers to explore the creative potentialities of the performative mode. Notable amongst this new generation of poets are the dub poets of contemporary Jamaica. They are as much inheritors of Bennett’s performance-based aesthetic as they are of Brathwaite’s technique in The Arrivants: his experimentation with the language and forms of black music and with the musicality inherent in language, “breaking down the barriers between words and music, restoring the fluidity of motion in performance to the frozen-word-on-the-page” (Rohlehr [1981], 69). Brathwaite is something of a pan-Caribbean figure, a poet, critic, and historian who is Barbadian by birth but Jamaican by adoption. Resident in Kingston for many years, he has fulfilled a crucial role in exploring the roots of Jamaican popular culture, particularly the Caribbean’s African legacy and the experience of slavery on the island, not only in critical and historical studies but also in his poetry. Through his editorship of the Jamaican journal Savacou, he has actively promoted new writing and critical thought in Jamaica, including the significant New Poets from Jamaica anthology of 1979 which launched several of the present generation of dub poets, including Oku Onuora and the late Mikey Smith. Brathwaite’s 1984 essay History of the Voice also deserves note as a seminal critical-polemical text on the use of Creole or “nation language” in Caribbean literature. Not only have the dub poets adapted the rhythms, terminology and techniques of reggae in their own developing poetic technique, as Rohlehr hoped poets might be able to do in relation to Trinidad calypso (see Rohlehr [1970], 99). Many, such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, have also sought to explore reggae as the basis of a wider range of cultural forms and cultural phenomena. Such techniques include the emphasis on a performative dimension in which the powered word interacts with the music, a skill originally grounded in “versioning” and “toasting,” elements of the reggae deejay’s improvisatory art. Other musically-derived techniques include the close tonal and rhythmic control demanded of the poet in a context in which the bass line acts as dominant structural device, the counterpoint of melodic and rhythmic elements in the performance. More technologically derived techniques include the “reverb, or reverberation, originally a deliberate technique of electronic distortion for emphatic purposes in reggae music and appropriated by dub poets such as Oku Onuora in “Echo in Red” as a verbal technique. Historically, then, reggae evolved out of the demise of dancehall style, “venued” live music in Jamaica, grasping fully the opportunities opened up by an ascendant sound system culture with its emphasis on smaller scale dissemination of recorded music and its use of various technological resources. At face value, this shift signalled the “urbanised take-over of the Jamaican cultural lifestyle” (Bones [1986], 54), which depersonalised the traditional patterns of social participation in music characterizing occasions of domestic celebration, ritual or religious thanksgiving. But the development of sound systems also ironically encouraged the adaptation of an equally old verbal tradition of improvisation and other oral skills to this new, essentially urban form in the guise of “toasting” or reggae deejaying. It is this process which gave rise to the terms “to dub” and the concept of “versioning,” the production and use of “B” sides of recorded reggae which omit the vocal track in order to allow the improvisation of a deejay’s voice. Some dub poets, such as Benjamin Zephaniah, actually started out as rappers on the blues dance circuit and many have appropriated such terms to describe their work. Linton Kwesi

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Johnson, however, has been keen to distinguish reggae deejaying and the African-American contemporary art of rap from dub poetry, claiming that the term “dub poet” was something of a misnomer from the start because it suggests “that you get a piece of dub music and put some poetry to it — which is what the deejay’s do” (Johnson [1987], 22), whereas the vast majority of dub poets approach the composition process from exactly the opposite direction. Although the composition process varies among different poets Johnson’s following comment is still instructive: “The nature of the reggae deejay’s art is closer to the African oral poets in so far as it’s spontaneous, and there’s not that element of spontaneity in dub poetry — you sit down and you work it out and you write it and you compose it and you change this word and that word” (25). Like most of the dub poets Johnson is then both “literate and orate and employs the conceptual conventions of both discourses” (Cooper [1989], 17). Johnson’s “Reggae Sounds” from Dread Beat and Blood, 1975, is a good example of the way in which the dub poets have used reggae — in itself a form which “breache[s] the language barrier, widen[s] the horizon of word, sound and, not least, bridge[s] the gap between singing and talking, music and language” as the culturally specific model for a poetry in which “the music and the language [become] one and the same thing” (Bones [1986], 55). The language and music of this poem is characterized by a particular spiritual restlessness, reflecting on a mimetic level, the historical experience of violation, pain, and yearning, the “hurting black story” to which Johnson makes reference. Significantly — and it is from this factor that Johnson’s best poetry derives its strength — it is a language, ever aware of the violence it can barely contain, the kind of violence, actual or imagined, which could erupt at any moment within the Black British urban context of continued frustrations, injustices and deprivations, in which many of the poems are set. In other poems such as “Five Nights of Bleeding” and the tremendously atmospheric “Street 66,” this particular creative use of the interrelationship of reggae rhythm and urban Creole, takes on a further cultural specificity, that of Rastafarianism. The use of lexical items such as the I-prefix is combined with a deliberately created aura of “Dreadness,” the peculiar blend of menace, fascination, and celebration of Rasta cultural identity which locates struggle in “Babylon” firmly within the contemporary world of the Blues Party and Sound System Culture, urban violence and police brutality. The foregrounding of urban violence and the use of Rastafarian linguistic forms is also characteristic of Mikey Smith’s poetry, the poet himself having been an ardent and vocal Rasta. Rastafarians stress an oral ritual called “saying” or “telling” in which language is purified of untruth and the Babylonian biases of the oppressor by a process of systematic dismantling and restructuring. More pertinent or appropriate meanings are thus uncovered in constructions such as “down-press” (instead of “oppress”) and “politricks” (instead of “politics”). Such subversive linguistic strategies are central to the work of many of the dub poets and culturally specific to Jamaica, although they are employed by a widening range of writers. The Jamaican poet Dennis Scott has spoken of his own interest in the ideology and cultural practice of Rastafarians in a particularly useful way: “They seem to me one of the healthiest phenomena that the New World has thrown up: healthy in the sense of choosing a life-enhancing value system which refuses to tolerate the destructiveness of most of the Western civilisation’s beliefs and practices; healthy also… because they are… a creole development — a group, people, who can trace most of their roots to another continent; have had to come to terms with an environment which is essentially

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strange to them — that is we’re not indigenous here — and to forge some kind of world view… every time a New World man has chosen to swallow the value systems, the culture, wholesale of the Old World or — in the Caribbean — to take on the culture of the metropolitan areas of the New World we’ve gone awry, we’ve gone amiss. The Rastas seem to me to have opted — for good and bad reasons — for (logically, and irrationally, and a-rationally — a mixture of these things), for seeing themselves and seeing the world in a certain way which at least says we have to deal with ourselves, there’s a possibility of saving ourselves, no matter what. And this is a very important thing to have happened. In so doing they have manipulated, changed, influenced the culture around them to an amazing extent — particularly, of course, in language” (Scott [1984] 138–39). Scott’s own poem “Squatter’s Rites,” from Uncle Time, 1973, celebrates the revitalizing creative and spiritual possibilities offered by Rastafarianism in a sensitive exploration of a father-son relationship, while his most recent collection, Dreadwalk, 1982, concerns itself even more centrally with this subject: the title poem, for example, deals with the confrontation between a Rasta and a non-Rastafarian artist figure. One of the major contributions to this Jamaican tradition of writing about the Rastafarian has come from Roger Mais and John Hearne, both of whose fictional representations of Rastafarianism are essentially positive. The protagonist of Hearne’s Land of the Living, 1961, is a charismatic black leader of a Rastafarian sect, whose “powerful, elemental, total belief” seems to hold out the potential for a “deep spiritual and messianic bond” (Carteby [1969], 51) and a greater unity amongst the different sects of Hearne’s Cayuna, a fairly obvious fictional surrogate for Jamaica. Heneky’s qualities of charismatic individualism and the novel’s veiled suggestion of social and political potentialities beyond sectarianism are both anticipated in certain respects by Mais’ second novel Brother Man, 1954. Brother Man, the novel’s “individualistic prophet” (Hawthorne [1988], 26), is himself anticipated in certain important respects by an earlier character, Ras, in Mais’s first novel The Hills Were Joyful Together, 1953. Both works are set in the yard communities of a Kingston slum. The Hills Were Joyful Together, somewhat like Sylvia Wynter’s later critique of various Jamaican cults in The Hills of Hebron, 1962, presents a picture of the terrible constraints, contradictions, and hypocrisies of various forms of imported, institutionalized religion in Jamaica. Brother Man continues this exploration, as the protagonist rejects the Baptist Church of his upbringing, turns to the creolized form of Rastafarianism and, on leaving “the Brotherhood because of lacking instruction” (Mais [1954], 112), sets about developing a highly personal religion of his own. It is, however, the second novel that is central to Mais’s consideration of Rastafarianism as religious and cultural value system. Not only are the possibilities of a new “messianic leadership” (Dabydeen and Wilson Tagoe [1988], 56) probed through Brother Man’s influence in the yard; the creative and spiritual possibilities of his new creed are also explored in some detail. The sordid reality of the yard, which Mais’s reiterated motif of stunted vegetative and prison imagery suggests, stifles and imprisons its inhabitants both spiritually and literally; within this setting, Brother Man’s beliefs are seen as a liberating, life-affirming, dignifying and resilient force. Brother Man, to borrow a phrase Mais once used in reference to his first published work, the collection of short stories Face, 1946, is the work “of a hundred per cent Jamaican, writing about hundred per cent Jamaicans,” an attempt to give expression to “certain aspects of local life… [and] national culture” (Williamson [1966], 140). For Mais, at least, the Rastafarian was central to his imagining of a community that

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was distinctively Jamaican. By contrast, Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron, 1962, and Orlando Patterson’s The Children Of Sisyphus, 1964, treat Rastafarianism in a less favorable light. Patterson’s novel, for instance, has been seen to posit “the Rastafarian’s dream of escape [from the yard] especially in its relation to Africa as a sophisticated personal and spiritual escapism which is part of the general absurdity of man’s condition in Jamaica” (Dabydeen and Wilson Tagoe [1988], 56). The novel is also interesting to consider in terms of its representation of gender relations with regard to Rastafarianism, an issue that more recent Jamaican writers and critics have addressed. Among those who have sought to interrogate Rastafarianism in terms of its dominant patriarchal basis are Maureen Rowe’s 1980 essay, “Women in Rastafari,” and Louise Bennett’s satirical treatment of the chauvinist attitudes of the movement in her poem “Pinnacle.” More recently, Binta Breeze has also asked: “’Can a Dub Poet be a Woman?” (Binta Breeze [1990]), thus drawing attention to this similarly male-dominated Jamaican cultural form. The cultural pervasiveness of Rastafarianism as the most Jamaican of systems of belief and cultural practices is shown in the work of a wide range of writers, for instance, Anthony McNeill’s Rasta poems in Reel from “The Life Movie,” 1972. In contrast to the ambivalent treatment of the Rastaman in Brathwaite’s “Wings of a Dove,” there are many more positive representations. One such representation is the aptly named Brother Justice who is marginalized as a Rastafarian and regarded as an eccentric outsider by the inhabitants of a tiny rural settlement in the title story of Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories, 1986. Yet, his friendship with the young boy at the center of the story is shown to be one of equality, respect, and intuitive understanding; he is the only person in this environment with whom the boy really connects. Appropriately, it is Brother Justice who senses the danger to the child in the form of the convalescing Old Man and, as the story reaches its climax, is close by when the child most needs his protection. Such texts construct Trinidad and Jamaica as particular imagined communities, imagined through dominant cultural formations such as carnival or Rastafarianism, constructed through what might be termed bacchanal and reggae discourses. However, this approach to mapping sites of cultural difference and “nation-ness” in Trinidadian and Jamaican writing fails to take account of a range of other differences. These include a consideration of factors such as island size, topography, the differing ethnic composition and settlement patterns of Trinidad and Jamaica, the proportion of women writers in each literature, and important historical variants in the shared experience of slavery under the plantation system. The literary treatment of specific moments or periods in island or regional history is often as indicative of the process of national self-definition as are the various cultural forms and practices examined in this piece. I am, however, not suggesting that historical works are necessarily, or exclusively, concerned with the construction of national identity. As has been demonstrated, both the definition of historical literature and the notion of a singular island identity are problematized by the highly complex and often plural nature of the literatures and the social realities to which they refer. Examples of historical literature abound in both islands but many more Jamaican writers seem to have been concerned with the recuperation and reconstitution of island history as literary subject, especially in its pre-twentieth century form. Trinidadian literature is, in general, much more heterogeneous in terms of the ethnic experiences it explores; its writers seem much more interested in the interactive context of creolization as social process and literary subject. Many

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of its texts deal with the plurality of Trinidadian culture in that they examine the dialectic between the attenuating pull and the enriching possibilities of creolization as a social and a cultural model. In contrast, many Jamaican texts (for example, Brodber [1980], Senior [1986] and [1989]) focus instead on the graduated continuum of color, closely linked to the indices of class and the sociolectal dimensions of the Creole continuum, which exists as the dominant determinant of difference in Jamaican society. Their interest is in the complex web of interpersonal and wider societal tensions such indices generate. In Trinidadian literature, the most salient tensions are generally those that occur between more discrete ethnic groupings, most obviously the relations between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians. Whereas the Indo-Caribbean contribution to Trinidadian (and to Guyanese) writing is crucial, it remains a relatively unmapped territory in Jamaican literature. Brathwaite’s comment from the conclusion of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820 is most instructive in this context; he lists the different “orientations” he perceives in Jamaican society as: “European, Euro-creole, Afro-creole (or folk) and ‘West Indian,’
” adding, significantly in parenthesis: “The East Indian problem, since it introduces new complexities, and does not (yet) significantly relate to Jamaica, will not be unrolled here” (Brathwaite [1971], 310). Twenty-seven years later, it is still a notable silence in Jamaican literature. If recent critical trends and publishing initiatives such as the Faber & Faber Caribbean series, launched in 1997, are anything to go by, the future of Trinidadian and Jamaican writing is an increasingly pan-Caribbean one. Because of the geographical dispersal of its writers, such literature may also become increasingly decentered and culturally hybrid. In both visions of future developments in Caribbean literature, a new kind of regionalism is ushered in, based not on borders but on the imagination: the Caribbean as an imagined and imaginative space. Such a reconfiguration of Caribbean literature may appear alarming to some, but in moving beyond the idea of literatures defined by national or linguistic boundaries, it may allow new critical connections to be made and new literary cross-fertilizations to take place. This may be both profoundly exhilarating and enriching.

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———. 1976. J’Ouvert Morning. Port of Spain: Columbus. Juneja, Renu. 1990. Representing History in The Jumbie Bird. World Literature Written in English. 30.1: 17–28. Khan, Ismith. 1961. The Jumbie Bird. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1964. The Obeah Man. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1985. The Crucifixion. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Laurence, K. O. 1971. Immigration into the West Indies in the Nineteenth Century. Barbados: Caribbean University Press. Lovelace, Earl. 1979. The Dragon Can’t Dance. London: André Deutsch. McFarlane, J. E. C., ed. 1929. Voices from Summerland. London: Fowler Wright. ———, ed. 1949. A Treasury of Jamaican Poetry. London: University of London Press. McKay, Claude. 1912. Constab Ballads. London: Watts. ———. 1912. Songs of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: A. W. Gardner. ———. 1933. Banana Bottom. New York and London: Harper and Brothers. ———. 1953. Selected Poems. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. ———. 1979. My Green Hills of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: Heinemann. McLeod, Alan. 1979. Memory and the Edenic Myth: Claude McKay’s Green Hills of Jamaica: Individual and Community in Commonwealth Literature. Malta: University Press. McNeill, Anthony. 1972. Reel from “The Life Movie.” Kingston, Jamaica: Savacou. Mais, Roger. 1946. Face and Other Stories. Kingston, Jamaica: Universal Printery. ———. 1953. The Hills Were Joyful Together. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1954. Brother Man. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1955. Black Lightning. London: Jonathan Cape. Malik, Abdul (Delano De Coteaux). 1988. The Whirlwind. London: Panrun Collective. Marson, Una. 1930. Tropic Reveries. Kingston, Jamaica: Gleaner. ———. 1931. Heights and Depths: Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: Gleaner. ———. 1937. The Moth and the Star. Kingston, Jamaica: the author. ———. 1945. Towards the Stars. London: University of London Press. Markham, E. A., ed. 1989. Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. Matura, Mustapha. [1944]. 1992. Rprt. Play Mas: Six Plays. London: Methuen. Mordecai, Pamela, ed. 1987. From Our Yard: Jamaican Poetry Since Independence. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica Publications. Mordecai, Pamela and Mervyn Morris, eds. 1980. Jamaica Woman: An Anthology of Poems. Jamaica: Heinemann. Mordecai, Pamela and Betty Wilson, eds. 1989. Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean. London: Heinemann. Morris, Mervyn. 1967. On Reading Louise Bennett Seriously. Jamaica Journal. 1.1: 69–74. ———. 1984. Introduction to Samuel Selvon’s Moses Ascending. London: Heinemann. Mutabaruka. 1973-a. Outcry. Kingston, Jamaica: Swing. ———. 1973-b. Sun and Moon. Kingston, Jamaica: the author. ———. 1980. The First Poems. Kingston, Jamaica: Paul Issa. Naipaul, Vidia S. 1957. The Mystic Masseur. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1958. The Suffrage of Elvira. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1959. Miguel Street. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1961. A House for Mr Biswas. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1962. The Middle Passage. London, André Deutsch. ———. 1967. The Mimic Men. London, André Deutsch. ———. 1970. The Loss of El Dorado. London: André Deutsch. Naipaul, Shiva. 1970. Fireflies. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1973. The Chip-Chip Gatherers. London: André Deutsch. Nichols, Grace. 1983. I is a long memoried woman. London: Karnak Press. ———. 1984. The Fat Black Woman’s Poems. London: Virago.

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———. 1989. Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Woman. London: Virago. ———. 1996. Sunris. London: Virago. O’Callaghan, E. 1983. Rediscovering the Natives of My Person. Jamaica Journal. 16.3: 1–64. O’Gorman, Pamela. 1972. An Approach to the Study of Jamaican Popular Music. Jamaica Journal. 6 / 7: 50–54. Onuora, Oku (Orlando Wong). 1977. Echo. Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s. Patterson, Orlando. 1964. The Children of Sisyphus. London: Hutchinson. Pollard, Velma. 1983. Figurative Language in Jamaican Creole. Carib. 3. ———. 1984. Word Sounds: The Language of Rastafari in Barbados and St. Lucia. Jamaica Journal. 17.1: 57–62. ———. 1989. Considering Woman. London: The Women’s Press. Poynting, Jeremy. 1986. “The African and the Asian will not Mix”: African-Indian Relations in Caribbean Fiction, A Reply. Wasafiri. 5: 15–22. ———. 1990. “You Want to Be a Coolie Woman?: Gender and Ethnic Identity in Indo-Caribbean Women’s Writing. Caribbean Women Writers. Ed. by Selwyn Cudjoe. Wellesley, Massachussetts: Calaloux. Questel, Victor. 1979. Near Mourning Ground. Diego Martin, Trinidad & Tobago: The New Voices. Quevedo, Raymond. 1983. Atilla’s Kaiso: A Short History of Trinidad Calypso. St. Augustine, Trinidad: University of the West Indies Department of Extra-Mural Studies. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1976. An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature. Sunbury-on-Thames, Middlesex: Thomas Nelson & Sons. ———. 1983. The West Indian Novel and Its Background. London: Heinemann. ———. 1985. Introduction to Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. Harlow, Essex: Longman. ———. 1988. Why the Dragon Can’t Dance: An Examination of Indian-African Relations in Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance. Journal of West Indian Literature. 2.2: 1–14. ———. 1985. Introduction to Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. Harlow: Longman. Regis, Humphrey A. 1990. The American Appropriation of Reggae. Caribbean Review. 16.3 / 4: 7 and 74–75. Reid, Victor S. 1949. New Day. New York: Knopf. ———. 1960. Sixty-Five. London: Longman. ———. 1976. The Jamaicans. Kingston, Jamaica: The Institute of Jamaica. Reyes, Angelita. 1984. Carnival: Ritual Dance of the Past and Present in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance. World Literature Written in English. 24.1: 107–20. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1970. Sparrow and the Language of Calypso. Savacou. 87–89. ———. 1975. Sparrow as Poet. David Frost Introduces Trinidad and Tobago. Ed. by Michael Anthony and Andrew Carr. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1981. Pathfinder: Black Awakening in “The Arrivants” of Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Tunapuna, Trinidad: the author. ———. 1990. Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad. Tunapuna, Trinidad: the author. Rowe, Maureen. 1980. The Women in Rastafari. Caribbean Quarterly. 26.4: 13–21. Roy, Namba. 1961. Black Albino. London: New Literature. Salkey, Andrew. 1973. Jamaica: An Epic Poem Exploring the Historical Foundations of Jamaican Society. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture. Sander, Reinhard, ed. 1978. From Trinidad: An Anthology of Early West Indian Writing. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Scott, Dennis. 1973. Uncle Time. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press. ———. 1982. Dreadwalk. London: New Beacon. ———. 1989. Interview with Dennis Scott by Mervyn Morris. Hinterland. Ed. by E. A. Markham. NewcastleUpon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books. Selvon, Samuel. 1952. A Brighter Sun. London: Allan Wingate. ———. 1955. An Island is a World. London: Allan Wingate. ———. 1956. The Lonely Londoners. London: Allan Wingate. ———. 1958. Turn Again Tiger. London: MacGibbon & Kee. ———. 1963. I Hear Thunder. London: MacGibbon & Kee. ———. 1965. The Housing Lark. London: MacGibbon & Kee.

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———. 1966. Calypsonian. Caribbean Narrative. Ed. by Gabriel Coulthard. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1970. The Plains of Caroni. London: MacGibbon & Kee. ———. 1973. Ways of Sunlight. Harlow, Essex: Longman. ———. 1975. Moses Ascending. London: Davis-Poynter. ———. 1983. Moses Migrating. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Senior, Olive. 1985. Talking of Trees. Kingston, Jamaica: Calabash. ———. 1986. Summer Lightning and Other Stories. Harlow, Essex: Longman. ———. 1989. Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Other Stories. Harlow, Essex: Longman. ———. 1994. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Sibley, Inez K. 1939. Quashies Reflections in Jamaican Creole. Jamaica: the author. Sistren Theatre Collective. 1986. Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women. London: The Women’s Press. Slemon, Stephen. 1988. Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 18.1: 156–64. Smith, Michael. 1986. It a Come. London: Race Today. Smith, Michael G. 1965. The Plural Society in the British West Indies. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sutcliffe, David and Ansel Wong, eds. 1986. The Language of the Black Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Jeremy. 1986. Masquerade. London; Basingstoke: Macmillan. Thieme, John. 1982. Authorial Voices in V. S. Naipaul’s The Middle Passage. Prose Studies. 5.1: 139–50. ———. 1987. The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction. Aarhus; Coventry: Dangaroo Press and Hansib. Thomas, J. J. [1869]. 1969, rprt. The Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar. London: Beacon. Tiffin, Helen. 1988. Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial Society. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 18.1: 164–81. Walcott, Derek. 1979. The Joker of Seville and O Babylon. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1981. The Fortunate Traveller. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1986. Collected Poems, 1948–1984. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Walker-Johnson, J. 1989. Autobiography, History, and the Novel: Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. Journal of West Indian Literature. 3.1: 47–49. Warner, Keith. 1983. The Trinidad Calypso: A Study of the Calypso as Oral Literature. London: Heinemann. Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williamson, Karina. 1966. Roger Mais: Novelist. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 2: 138–47. Wynter, Sylvia. 1962. The Hills of Hebron. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1979. Maskarade:West Indian Plays for Schools.Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House. Young, Robert. 1990. Writing History and the West. London; New York: Routledge.

Guyanese Identities JOSEPHINE V. ARNOLD

Staunton, Virginia

The one individual most responsible and best known for the dissemination of Guyanese literature is A. J. Seymour, poet, editor, educator. In the second half of the twentieth century his books, pamphlets, journals (such as Kaie and Kyk-Over-Al) and radio broadcasts have promoted the knowledge of Guyanese literary and artistic achievements within and without his homeland. His Cultural Policy in Guyana, published in 1977 in the series Studies and Documents on Cultural Policies commissioned by UNESCO, is useful as a concise overview of the cultural landscape from the origins to the 1970’s. Seymour has done valuable work in publishing collections of Guyanese poetry. His A Treasure of Guyanese Poetry, published in 1980, is especially useful for bringing together selections from a large number of poets, thereby giving the reader a good grasp of the extent of poetic output in Guyana. For a fuller discussion of Guyanese and other Caribbean poets, the reader is directed to Edward Baugh’s comprehensive article in the genre section of this history. In assessing Seymour’s contribution to literary criticism, we must bear in mind that his mission was to create a literary history for a country without one and that his broadcasts were aimed at school children. He successfully demonstrated that Guyanese writers were capable of producing significant works reflecting their own origins and environment and that the sea, the vast hinterland, and the narrow populated space between these two mighty manifestations of nature defined them as creators and dispensers of the word. The two most important figures in the development of Guyanese literature are, chronologically, Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris. Although Mittelholzer’s writings are very uneven, he should be given his due as a prolific literary ancestor, publishing twenty-five books from 1941 until his death in 1965. In the Kaywana Quartet he set forth, in a highly romanticized, blood and thunder version, the history of Guyanese settlement. These novels follow the Van Groenwegel family throughout three and a half centuries of colonization. By portraying this family’s struggles to implant itself in the new “land of many rivers,” the Amerindian name for Guyana, Mittelholzer attempted to give the disparate inhabitants of this land a sense of history and rootedness. Intermarriages, reversals of fortune, virtually uninterrupted strife, and bloodshed, all described in a numbingly pedestrian style, make these novels difficult to read today. However, a television mini-series would suit them admirably. If Mittelholzer were to be judged only by the Kaywana Quartet, he could probably be relegated to the status of purveyor of waiting-room fiction. His first novel, Corentyne Thunder, was published in 1941. Replete with overwrought passages, it is a novice’s effort to integrate the characters’ inner life with the outward fluctuations of the natural world. But this twinning of emotion with nature disappears at the end of the narrative with the demise of the principal personage. Death stills both the hero and the author’s high-flown prose when we are informed that Ramgollal’s passing makes no difference in the landscape. Mittelholzer’s style becomes more subdued as the dead man’s

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daughters come to grips with the realities of human existence for them as members of a hopeless underclass. They are no longer under the spell of a capricious, often garish setting. Life continues while the world around them remains unmoved. To identfy with nature serves no purpose for anyone. The sobering conclusion of Corentyne Thunder sets the stage for Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office, published in 1950. This work is a radical departure from its predecessor and would appear to be written by a person completely different from the author of the Kaywana Quartet. This narrative, which takes place in Trinidad, is remarkably informative regarding the gradations of skin color among individuals in the Caribbean, along with the values conferred upon such differences. The action takes place in an office in Port-of-Spain between four minutes to seven in the morning and lunchtime. The human relations described are entirely motivated by distinctions of class and color. The office functions as a microcosm for racial preoccupations endemic to the Caribbean. The individuals moving about this confined space never cease to dwell on such considerations as the hair and skin types found among their co-workers, who feels superior to whom and why, who can aspire to date or marry whom, why one will not lower himself or herself to date or marry another. The office workers represent different physical types and therefore different social classes, since class is based on phenotype, with the darkestskinned people being ranked at the bottom. Because of this emphasis on ethnicity and class distinctions, some critics have described A Morning at the Office as a social tract. Michael Gilkes, quoting Frank Birbalsingh, points to this work as the one “‘which first won widespread recognition for British Caribbean writing … and paved the way for the remarkable march of English-speaking Caribbean novelists who followed ’” (Gilkes [1975], 1). Wilson Harris, who published his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, in 1960, is undoubtedly the most widely known writer of Guyanese origin and one of the most significant authors not only of the Caribbean but of the entire English-speaking world. So much has been written on Wilson Harris that criticism devoted to his work has become an industry in itself. One reason for this is that his novels prove difficult to read. They make demands on us that require delving into arcana familiar largely to specialists. Although his literary imagination is fertilized and sustained by the experience of Guyana’s hinterland, it is expressed in the languages of myth, legend, alchemy, creation, and conception. The best-known of Wilson Harris’s works are Palace of the Peacock, The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961, The Whole Armour, 1962, and The Secret Ladder, 1963, which together constitute The Guyana Quartet. Other well-known titles, such as Tumatumari, 1968, Ascent to Omai, 1970, and The Sleepers of Roraima, 1970, testify to the significance of the Guyanese landscape in his oeuvre. A fuller discussion of Wilson Harris’s literary productions may be found in this volume in Hena Maes-Jelinek’s article “The Novel from 1950 to 1970” and the subsequent article by Hena Maes-Jelinek and Bénédicte Ledent, “The novel since 1970.” In the introduction to his Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel Michael Gilkes attempts a summation by explaining that: This new state of consciousness, a new and original growth in sensibility produced, as it were, by a genuine cross-fertilization of cultures and races, is the main theme of Wilson Harris’s work. His novels illustrate what must be considered as perhaps the most remarkable and original

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aspect of West Indian writing — one in which the condition of cultural and racial admixture itself becomes the “complex womb” of a new wholeness of vision. A creative attempt is made to heal the divided psyche of Caribbean Man … (Gilkes [1975], xxvi-xxvii).

Guyana’s own divided psyche is illustrated by ethnic tensions and political rivalries that persist to this day, notably between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese. The former now make up more than fifty percent of the population. Although Guyana is often described as the land of six peoples, whose origins are East Indian, African, Amerindian, Portuguese, British, and Chinese plus a small group designated as mixed, it is the two most numerous groups who struggle for dominance. Yet, officially, Guyana likes to represent itself as multicultural, with no one group being privileged over another. Guyanese novels of the past several decades tell a somewhat different story, while occasionally spotlighting individuals who publicly proclaim their identity as wholly and solely Guyanese. For example, flag-waving, both literal and symbolic, occurs in Roy Heath’s A Man Come Home, 1978, and The Shadow Bride, 1988, and also in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl, 1989. In A Man Come Home, we see Egbert Foster, a Creole of African descent, raising Guyana’s flag over his house. In fact, the entire first page of the novel is devoted to this episode of flagraising. When Foster’s neighbor asks him what he is doing and what that flag is, Foster launches into an explanation, while decrying the man’s ignorance. He then contemplates the flag, pulls it down, hoists it once more. No mention is ever made of this flag again. In The Shadow Bride, a wedding banquet is the setting for a spontaneous affirmation of Guyanese nationality. Sukrum, the groom, suddenly and loudly proclaims that he is Guyanese. When a guest protests that Sukrum is East Indian, the latter retorts that both he and the guest are Guyanese, that they cannot possibly be East Indians because they were born in Guyana. This exchange, as well as Foster’s flag-raising activity, come from nowhere and do not lead to any other nationalistic demonstrations. Heath seems to want his readers to know that his country and his people are affirming a new identity in the land that made them. Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl captures the moment of inquiry and ethnic self-examination in the ruminations of Ghulam, father of the boyprotagonist Josh. When he is out alone at night, Ghulam feels at one with the natural world of plants, animals, and insects. At such times he is profoundly aware that he is a Hindu; yet another awareness stirs within him. Musing on the other people who have come to toil on this land so far from India or Africa (no mention is made of any other country), he sees them living in a “strange harmony” and that “whatever they had been, he sensed they were becoming something else” (Dabydeen [1989-a], 39). Are Heath and Dabydeen espousing the national myth of harmonious co-existence, or is this wishful thinking — an effort to point the myth toward realization? The fact remains that diverse national and cultural strains manifest themselves in the literature of Guyana past and present, and doubtless will continue to do so for some time to come. The future of Guyanese identity is perhaps already recorded in Janice Shinebourne’s novel Timepiece, 1986. The young heroine, Sandra Yansen, leaves her village for Georgetown to find work as a reporter. In her journey of self-discovery she also finds class and ethnic divisions that were unknown to her in village life. She learns that a question frequently asked of another is “What nation are you?” The answer becomes more and more irrelevant as the reply frequently reveals multiple origins. The young

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men she meets are of mixed race. One of them, Son, can cite Dutch, Hindu, Chinese, and Amerindian antecedents. Sandra herself is part East Indian, part Chinese. It is difficult not to conclude that Sandra, through eventual intermarriage, will continue to blend the ethnic strains extant in her country. For Sandra and her friends the answer to “What nation are you?” is not, however, “Guyanese.” The influence of geography is far less significant for the young generation than the influence of culture. It is Son’s opinion that “The only culture that matters nowadays is the American culture” (Shinebourne [1986], 153). Another sign of growing U. S. influence in the shaping of cultural identity is found in Beryl Gilroy’s Boy-Sandwich, published in 1989. In this novel, a boy born in London returns to Guyana with his family just as he stands on the threshold of adulthood. He discovers that he does not belong in his parents’ homeland and announces that he is going back home to London. Though upset by his precipitous departure, his parents are consoled by the knowledge that he will be admitted to Cambridge. At this point the boy, Tyrone, rebels even further by proclaiming that he does not want to go to Cambridge but to Howard University in Washington, D. C.. The family is aghast, unwilling to accept that he would turn down the opportunity of a Cambridge education. We are led to believe that Tyrone will yield to his parents’ wishes. But the desire to break free of England to embrace the U. S. A. has clearly manifested itself in this intergenerational conflict. England has been the country of choice for reverse immigration from the Caribbean since World War II. Because, according to Son in Timepiece, what was important in Georgetown was education, money, and status, it was necessary to go to England for an education that would presumably bring in its wake the other two desirables. For those who did not aspire to education or status but simply wanted better living conditions through more remunerative labor, England was also the place to find those things. In the concluding paragraph of Boy-Sandwich, Tyrone contemplates a group of young men emigrating to London, taking with them hopes of a better life, thinking that they will leave their troubles behind them. What they do not know is that they will be exchanging familiar problems for others as yet unknown and undreamt of. Old conflicts will be traded for new ones that will slowly, but inevitably, transform them, rendering them unfit for a return to the native land. For these reasons, the return seldom, if ever, takes place. Gilroy challenges the notion of impossible return in Boy-Sandwich. Tyrone’s mother and father are forced to put their own aged parents into an institutional home for old people when the elderly couple’s home is about to be torn down by developers. The family cannot afford to provide other housing for the grandparents, nor can they take them in themselves. Tyrone’s father is ashamed that he is unable to give his parents the home they deserve. Later on, we learn that, as luck would have it, grandmother has a valuable painting among her inherited belongings. The sale of this painting makes it possible for the whole family to go back to their unnamed island so that the elders can be cared for and comforted among their own people. The return proves a happy, fulfilling one for parents and grandparents, but not for the London-born Tyrone. A young cousin, Stephy, who is longing to go to the U. S., sums up the needs of the different generations when she remarks that home is for the young and for the old. The in-betweens must go elsewhere to flourish. In the preface and subsequent author’s note, Gilroy informs the reader that her story is based on some events that were true in her own family and on interviews with numbers of elderly West Indians, presumably in England, where

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Gilroy has lived for many years. What, perhaps, Gilroy and the interviewees did not grasp was that the dream of homecoming is just that — a dream; for not only have the emigrants been changed by the land they went to, but the land they left has changed as well. The home to which they dream of returning exists only in their memory. Home is for the people who go on living there; all else is the shadow of what might have been or can never be. As England has long been a land of promise for many Guyanese, so have other places and cultures, notably Africa, Russia, India, and the Amerindian territories. Other Leopards, a novel by Denis Williams published in 1963, features a protagonist who has gone off to work as an archaeological draughtsman in the Sudanic belt of Africa. His name is Lionel, but his family calls him Lobo, as does everyone else. Because of these two names, he has a divided consciousness from birth. To compound matters, he is also a bastard. In his own mind, he typifies the historyless Caribbean man whose African sojourn is therefore a quest for origins. But the quest creates more problems than it can solve when Lionel / Lobo realizes that he is not African. The search for classification is thrust upon him by the values of the Old World, which refuses to accept mongrelism. As his friend Eve brings home to him, he must learn to stop feeling guilty about not being African. She urges him to decide who and what he is and then get on with his life. The fact that Lionel / Lobo’s dilemma cannot be easily resolved is demonstrated by the conclusion, in which the hero finds himself literally up a tree. Bertène Juminer from French Guiana also emphasizes the problem of racial and cultural bastardy in his novel Les bâtards (The bastards), published in 1961, within two years of Other Leopards. Juminer’s narrative has two principal protagonists who go to France for their higher education: one to become a medical doctor, the other a dentist. These young men return to French Guiana to help their fellow countrymen, foregoing the temptation of an easier professional life in France. Once back on their native soil, however, they learn that they are neither fish nor fowl but cultural bastards, begotten upon a repudiated Guianese mother by a French father who will not recognize the offspring of a shameful union. Unable to make a place for himself in the land of his birth, the doctor, Chambord, goes back to France with the hope of returning to French Guiana later on under more welcoming conditions. The dentist, Cambier, resists the lure of France and establishes himself in Cayenne. He comes to terms with his sense of bastardy by rehabilitating his black grandmother, the African ancestor who had been forsaken by her lighter-skinned descendents. Cambier gives his grandmother pride of place and mastery of his household. She thereby embodies the triumphant recognition of Africa as honored and revered mother. In Other Leopards, Africa is a hindrance in the search for identity. In Les bâtards, it helps one character but not the other. Both novels demonstrate that whichever of the Guianas one is born in (or any Caribbean island for that matter), it is up to the individual to find his or her way of belonging. If one cannot identify solely with skin color or geographical location, there is the political alternative, which is closely examined in Jan Carew’s Moscow is not my Mecca, dating from 1964. This novel relates the experiences of Jojo Robertson, a young Guyanese who, after living in London for six years, wins a scholarship to study in Moscow through the efforts of a Communist friend. Jojo accepts in order to receive a free education, as well as out of respect and admiration for his friend’s beliefs. On arriving in Moscow, Jojo fully expects to see a brave new world. He is prepared to like everything. However, disillusionment soon sets in when he

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perceives that the life of a “colored” student in Russia is beset with difficulties not experienced by the whites. Discrimination lives and thrives in this Communist Mecca. His one year in Moscow is enough to show him that he and his kind are not valued there and that he will have to look elsewhere for self-worth and self-definition. In the foreword to this book Carew writes that he pieced the story together over a period of months from exchanges with a young lodger in his house. Carew adds that he himself had studied in Prague for a year and was the first student from British Guiana to be awarded a scholarship behind the Iron Curtain. “As a trespasser in a forbidden world I could see and understand, even in my time, that the influx of large numbers of coloured students with a Western orientation would present their communist hosts with formidable social, psychological and political problems. My stay was troubled, interesting, difficult, and all did not go well with my scholarship” (Carew [1964], 9–10). The novels dealt with thus far conclude with unsuccessful quests and disillusionment with the beckoning tempters. Roy Heath in the Shadow Bride, 1988, describes a love-hate-fear relationship with the culture of India; the Guyanese-born Betta, a doctor trained in Dublin and London, must cope with this simultaneous attraction-repulsion in the person of his Indian mother. The title relates to Mrs. Singh as the shadow bride of her husband, her lover, and her son. It also relates to India itself, whose shadow looms large and heavy over the lives of nearly everyone in the novel. Mrs. Singh, who came to Guyana as a young bride, never adapts herself to the new land. All her thoughts, habits, and actions remain completely under the spell of India, specifically her home state of Kerala. Her adamant, bitter refusal to accept other modes of thinking and functioning dooms her son to constant conflict not only with his mother but with his own countrymen. Mrs. Singh’s open hostility to her son’s projects for helping the poor, disadvantaged Indians on the sugar estates cripples his medical practice as well as his personal relations. Betta barely escapes with his life, after being bodily threatened by thugs hired to help a European estate manager get rid of the troublesome Hindu doctor. Betta’s only crime was to excuse sick Indians from laboring in the cane fields. With no job, no money, no home, Betta turns to his mother for help, which she cruelly withholds. She will never forgive him for leaving his prosperous, highly respected family to go out among the rabble she despises. For Mrs. Singh, the country to which her husband had brought her was to be endured, but never accepted, and certainly never to be helped. Her son has the choice of either yielding completely to her way of thinking or to be cast out, alone and unaided, into the land that gave birth to him physically, but not, Mrs. Singh believes, spiritually. Betta does finally set up practice on his own, but at the great emotional cost of being cut off from his mother and all she represents. Guyana avenges itself for Mrs. Singh’s repudiation in the person of Sukrum, the young man in her employ who proclaims his identity as Guyanese at his wedding banquet. When Mrs. Singh is left alone, by her own choice, in her once teeming household, Sukrum enters her bedroom and rapes her; the Guyanese man overpowers the Indian woman. Guyana takes what India will not give. Mrs. Singh is never the same after this. She can no longer function on her own because she has lost control of everyone and everything. India is now in the past and there is no future for her in Guyana. She puts an end to a life drained of all meaning by stabbing herself. Betta believes that “her death was his doing, but he could not have acted otherwise” (Heath, [1988], 437). This final sentence of the novel shows us a man, guilty at having rejected the motherland but

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knowing full well that he had to go on with his own work as the son of the country that bore him. Whereas, in The Shadow Bride, India represents the darker side of seductive influences on the Guyanese psyche, another novel by Roy Heath, Orealla, published in 1984, introduces the Amerindian presence as symbolic of a rapidly vanishing Eden. Carl, an aboriginal Indian (Macusi) from Orealla is befriended by Ben, the protagonist. The former, as he is described throughout the narrative, is a child of nature; his ways are silent and unpredictable. Carl is unable to comprehend, or be touched by, the customs of the city folk in Georgetown. Ben is fascinated by the seemingly inviolable persona of his aboriginal companion. For example, money has no meaning for Carl, neither does the system of law and punishment. Indians abided by their own codes of justice. In their absence they felt no need to rebel against that which was incomprehensible. As a result, the only Indians who went to prison were those whose territory had been trespassed upon. Ben fears that Orealla, which, for him, comes to embody the blessed haven where the iniquities and injustices of civilization do not prevail, will eventually be destroyed by the encroachments of Georgetown’s language, customs, and laws. Himself a victim of the laws of the land, Ben, on trial for murder, assumes, like Carl, a God-like detachment from the outcome. He behaves as though his life, like all creation, had been compressed into six days; and seeing that the day of rest is at hand, he becomes indifferent to the prospect of annihilation. He retreats into his own personal Orealla; for on beholding the world around him, he knows that, for him, it has not been good. The fascination of the interior, with its Edenic quests and miming of the creation, is well documented in Wilson Harris’s work. A different, more earthy, or perhaps more human, lure of Guyana’s hinterland is found in the lust for riches. Jan Carew’s Black Midas, 1958, tells the tale of a young man called Shark who abandons a career in pharmacy, effectively throwing away the education that was to propel him out of poverty, to live the colorful life of a porkknocker. This is a term used to describe men who go off into the interior to mine gold and diamonds. The attraction of the interior, with its promise of high adventure and fabulous wealth, supercedes the pale inducements of a middle-class career. The cramped life along the narrow strip of coast where most Guyanese dwell, hemmed in by the sea on the one side and the forest on the other, is not for Shark. Carew’s descriptions of the porkknockers’ experiences in the interior excite the reader’s imagination, making it easy to understand that, for these men, the lure of riches and the lure of adventure are inextricably bound together. The call of the vast hinterland sets Guyana apart from the rest of the Caribbean. Guyana sees itself as an island that is not bound solely by water. One boundary, the sea, has been well navigated for centuries; but the other boundary, the forest, remains a source of both promise and danger. Shark, like the other porkknockers, wins and loses fortunes, taking on ever greater risks to make up for his losses. Eventually, one might add inevitably, he is caught in the collapse of a mine. His legs are crushed, necessitating amputation. He will plunder the land no more. The hinterland has exacted its revenge. Roy Heath draws upon the legends of the interior — those linked to the desire for wealth — in his novel A Man Come Home, published in 1974. In a frontispiece Heath recounts a legend that works itself out in the ensuing narrative. According to this legend, there are women known collectively as Water People, or simply Fairmaid, who live in Guyana’s rivers. From time to time one of these creatures will fall in love with a mortal and endow him with riches. His only obligation is to visit her regularly. If the man does not comply, after repeated warning signals,

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Fairmaid will manifest herself to punish him for disobedience. The hero of this novel, Bird, falls prey to Fairmaid after becoming enraged over his brother’s material success. The latter has bought a house in Canada, whereas Bird has nothing. He disappears for a while, then turns up again with a lot of money. No one knows where the money comes from, least of all the readers, if we have forgotten or neglected to read the contents of the frontispiece. As Bird continues to prosper, with no visible means of income, speculation abounds, giving rise to whispered murmurings of posssible dealings with Water People and Fairmaid. Bird disappears every two weeks for several days, providing no news of his whereabouts to Stephanie, his companion and eventual wife. Understandably disturbed by Bird’s mysterious absences, Stephanie consults a seer, who tells her to get rid of the amulet Bird wears around his neck. She manages to get hold of the charm and throws it in the river. Deprived of the protective amulet, Bird is killed in a car crash. The lone survivor, a child, relates that just before the accident a woman suddenly appeared in the front seat. When Bird’s body is found, the necklace is once again around his neck. Candace Slater’s article, “Breaking the Spell: Accounts of Encantados by Descendants of Runaway Slaves,” in Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows gives a detailed version of similar legends in the Brazilian Amazon (Slater [1996], 157–84). Massacouraman, the mythical river monster lurking in the waters of Guyana’s coastland, offers the lure of self-definition and links with a distant past in Cyril Dabydeen’s Dark Swirl. An outside researcher in Ghulam’s village tries to trap the elusive monster, if it really exists. Despite the terror it inspires in the villagers, Ghulam wants the creature to be real because Massacouraman is something that belongs to his people and defines them. Jeremy Poynting’s article, “From Ancestral to Creole: Humans and Animals in a West Indian Scale of Values,” provides an illuminating discussion of the interaction between men and animals, particularly with reference to Guyana, in whose “interior … the savannah and tropical forest survive and support an animal life that is far richer than elsewhere in the Caribbean” (Poynting [1996], 205). Communion with the natural world is superceded by the attractions of urban life for the emerging group of Guyanese women writers. Their numbers are small as yet. In the march toward a sense of national identity, they lag behind their male counterparts, since it has been necessary for them to first forge a place for themselves as autonomous beings. They need to establish themselves within the social structure before coming to grips with other issues. In Janice Shinebourne’s Timepiece, Sandra, the young heroine, has to seek self-definition in an urban setting because village life offers no opportunities. The newspaper office where she is employed is, of course, dominated by men. As she interacts with her co-workers, she learns that for women subservience to males is not something one could leave behind in the village. The men with whom she works and others she meets at social gatherings rarely fail to display their arrogance and sexual tyranny toward women. Through the support of female friends living in both town and country, Sandra discovers that in any setting one can find women of strength and resourcefulness. The opportunities offered in the city, hitherto enjoyed mostly by men, are not the only ways, nor are they necessarily better ways, Sandra concludes, for a Guyanese woman to make use of her own capacities. In The Last English Plantation, 1988, Shinebourne portrays a dying way of life as emblematic of a dying empire. Through the eyes of a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, June Le Hall,

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we see a finely drawn representation of ethnic and class problems experienced by those who live and labor on this plantation. As the existing order breaks down, a girl like June must scramble for survival. The path to survival is education. The key to a successful education is not only academic achievement but, first and foremost, the ability to speak proper English, not Creole. This means more than just correct grammar for June’s mother; it also means speaking at the very least with an acceptably middle-class accent. Although the days of colonization are drawing to a close, the voice of the master lives on as the means of achieving professional respectability. Rooplal Monar’s collection of short stories High House and Radio, published in 1991, makes much of the issues of language and education. He writes in a modified Creolese that enables the reader to comprehend the language (with the aid of a glossary), while getting a good sense of how it differs from standard English. “Town School Girl” is a sensitive portrayal of the problems involved in educating a girl. Radhu, the daughter of humble people from the Lusignan sugar estate, gives evidence of a promising future because she likes to read books and speaks in a manner that frightens boys who “can’t talk good English like she” (Monar [1991], 94). Getting the boys’ attention is really what interests Radhu most, not school. She reads romances, not tomes that will improve her mind. Her poor, uneducated parents have pinned their hopes on her becoming a doctor, so that they will not have to work so hard and will have a higher status in their community. Radhu, who does not share her parents’ aspirations, neglects her studies. She proceeds to fail an important examination, which means that she cannot get into a good school. Refusing to retake the examination, she chooses to go to night school instead. She promptly becomes pregnant, achieving her goal of properly impressing one boy at least. Three years later, Radhu ends up as a cook with a history of three abortions. She regrets not having pursued her education and resolves from time to time to study something worthwhile; but she never gets around to it because she likes men too much. By limiting her sense of self to her sexual function only, she denies both herself and her family a chance for a better life. Is the implication here that education for women is problematical, perhaps even wasted? Or does this tale serve as a warning to young girls to resist the lure of sex, which if yielded to indiscriminately, will deny them their place in the sun? In the story from High House and Radio entitled “Pouch,” the eponymous hero regrets not having an education because he believes he is smart enough to have been a lawyer. Unfortunately for him, his father had sent him to work in the canefields, proclaiming that education was for black people, not for East Indians. Pouch’s interest in law develops after an accident at work involves him in a law suit. He learns that the English employed in the courts enables people who possess this language to lift themselves above those who speak only Creole. Pouch adopts this educated speech, then offers himself as a tout to his lawyer to help bring in business. He succeeds so well, especially among his own people, who are convinced that his mastery of English is a proof of superiority, that he decides to take on the study of law. The day he gets his degree occasions a grand celebration with dancing and drumming such as has not been seen since the old days on the sugar estate. The importance of education is again emphasized in another of Monar’s stories in the same volume, “Quack Dentist.” Uncle Bhim sees to it that his nephew Premdatt trains as a dentist. To convince him to pursue this course Bhim says coolie people should understand that education is the only escape from the canefields. He cites examples of black people who send their children

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to school because they want them to have a profession, which then brings in money and status. Those two things earn respect from white people and put one on an equal footing with them. “Coolman,” the last story in High House and Radio, describes an alternate route to success. Pandit, another East Indian, works on an estate mule gang. His excellence as a cook becomes known to the extent that he is hired by a cricket team to provide meals. Given the importance of cricket in the Caribbean, Pandit has an extremely enviable situation. This new job allows him to mix with his betters. As a result he is offered a job as a hotel chef. He turns down this opportunity because he cannot understand the “backraman’s” (white man’s) English, which is the language of the tourists and big shots with whom he would be obliged to come in contact. He is happy as he is. Unable to read or write, Pandit believes that common sense, as his father had taught him, beats education. His viewing of cowboy films, where common sense always triumphs, confirms him in his conviction. Pandit’s reluctance to learn English causes him to refuse a second job offer. When the captain of the cricket team shows up at Pandit’s door to inform him that he is to go with the team to England, he decides not to accompany them, despite the fact that he would be able to do very well cooking for other West Indians in London. He is completely convinced that he would make a fool of himself in a place where everyone speaks the “backraman’s” language. By not emigrating, Pandit reverses a trend begun in 1962 when many Guyanese, fearing independence, started fleeing to England in order to keep their British citizenship. As one character states, “Who want Guyanese passport” (Monar [1991], 174)? With all the best cricket players gone to England, Pandit’s job as a cookman ends. He abandons cooking altogether and begins to play the drum at weddings. When asked why he is doing that, he states that when one door closes, another opens, adding that if one uses common sense, life will always have a purpose. Through his character Pandit, Monar is telling his readers that it is all right to cut ties with the mother country, to have a Guyanese passport, and, above all, to speak one’s own Creole. By relying on their own resources and their common sense, the Guyanese will succeed as individuals and as a nation. Unlike Rooplall Monar’s Pandit, who is content to remain in Guyana, several other contemporary writers, presently living outside their native land, are giving voice to a Guyanese diaspora that is sometimes ambivalent about its origins and uncertain about its future. In the works of Pauline Melville, Fred D’Aguiar, and David Dabydeen we encounter an awareness of writing for an international audience along with a commitment to present-day standards of political correctness. Melville’s collection of short stories Shape-shifter, 1990, includes tales set in London as well as in Guyana. We find characters moving between the two locales, alternately experiencing either the shock of cultural conflicts in England or amazement at the genetic varieties mirroring the whole history of colonization in Guyana. Finally, there is an acknowledgment and acceptance of ethnic differences as Africans, East Indians, and West Indians meet and interact in an herbalist’s shop in London in the story entitled “A Quarrelsome Man.” Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale, a novel published in 1997, confirms the multicultural ties between England and Guyana by bringing together an English female academic of Jewish background with an Amerindian male from the Wapisiana tribe. The Englishwoman goes into the interior of Guyana for purposes of research on Evelyn Waugh’s journey to British Guiana in the 1930s. Her physical attraction to her Amerindian guide, Chofy, results in an affair that cannot survive the cultural differences between the two. This unlikely couple’s journey into the

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interior serves to demonstrate the resentment of Amerindians toward tourists and to provide a sounding board for a tribal spokesman’s grievances. Tenga, Chofy’s cousin, dwells on the postcolonial fragmentation of identity as evinced by the status of Amerindians, who have been twice colonized, first by Europeans and then by people from the coast. He does not want his tribe to be educated in the ways of the outsiders. He believes that others should learn Amerindian ways instead. In conclusion Tenga proclaims that he is not Guyanese but Wapisiana. In this 1997 narrative the locus of identity shifts away from the national to fall back upon the tribal. David Dabydeen’s novel The Intended, 1991, features a young Guyanese protagonist who repudiates the specificity of ethnic and national origins. He describes his shame at being Asian, or rather, non-white, in an English school. He feels no affinity with his Indian-born classmates. As he sits in the library at Oxford, this bastion of privilege, he reflects on his desire to be white and on his admiration for all things English. Like a Guyanese Rastignac, he vows to succeed. He will use what the great library has to offer in order to conquer the society that looks down upon him. In his veneration for England Dabydeen’s schoolboy connects with the young heroine of Melville’s story “Eat Labba and Drink Creek Water” in Shape-Shifter. She equates the fabled land of El Dorado with the wealth and limitless promise of England, which in her view has everything, whereas Guyana has nothing. Both Dabydeen and Melville are clearly stating that to succeed in life the youth of Guyana must leave their country to seek their fortunes. Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Dear Future, 1996, while stressing the wealth of ethnic diversity in Guyana, focuses on a dispersed family. The young male protagonist is left behind while his mother and three brothers go to live in England. The narrative concludes with a wistful letter addressed to a future time, asking when the boy will be reunited with the absent parent and siblings. When, he wonders, will the divided family be whole again and where? Will they be able to live together in peace and prosperity in the land of their birth, or will it be necessary to give up their identity as Guyanese in order to prosper in some foreign land? Joan Cambridge devotes her novel, Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home, 1987, to the questions posed by D’Aguiar. The heroine, Clarise, leaves Guyana in search of an errant husband who has abandoned his wife and children and run off to New York with another woman. Clarise scrapes up the money to look for him, but she fails to track down the elusive spouse and fails equally to adapt to life in what is for her an extremely alien environment. On learning from a mutual friend that her husband considers his marriage to have been a mistake, Clarise concludes that her trip to New York was a mistake. She now realizes that she will never be able to reunite her family, that she must rely on no one but herself, and that she wants to go home. Since she has no money and no green card, she begs a friend to denounce her to the U. S. Immigration Service so that she can be deported. She knows how to get along in Guyana and does not require help from anyone. She will do what others of her countrymen have done before her. She will go into the bush in search of gold or diamonds. Guyana will take care of all her needs. This is perhaps an overly optimistic view of her future; but one comes away from the novel believing that once on her native soil, Clarise, a strong woman, will be able to make a life for herself and her children. Joan Cambridge’s heroine is young and hearty enough to have confidence in the resources of her country, whereas Harry Narain’s collection of short stories Grass-Root People, 1981, written largely in Creole, deals with the difficulties experienced by individuals who do not leave

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Guyana in order to prosper. The most vulnerable among this group are the aged. This fact is highlighted in the last tale, “Terminal Days,” wherein an elderly father of seven, having despoiled himself to send his children to find work in foreign lands, is left to die alone and destitute after a life of unremitting labor. Nearly all of Narain’s Indo-Guyanese characters are the disinherited of the earth. Their hard work and plans for the future all come to nothing. They never find prosperity in Guyana, the land to which they have been transplanted — only destitution, abandonment, and death. Rooplall Monar’s novel Jahnjat, 1989, presents a more positive portrait of Indo-Guyanese life. The protagonists, young Hindu newlyweds, are caught between old Hindu traditions and the pull of contemporary ideas. After a series of conflicts with the older generation, they realize that in order to have a future together they must cast off traditional ties. They, like Guyana, must rid themselves of the legacy of the past in order to make their own way in the modern world. Both Monar and Narain show us the difficulties of living in a young country that must strive to find a place for itself and for the disparate peoples who live on its soil. Their works are sober, realistic versions of the problems experienced by the Guyanese who have never left their country. Beryl Gilroy, on the other hand, in her novel Gather The Faces, 1996, shows us Guyana through the eyes of an expatriate whose native land has been transformed by memory and desire. Guyanese-born Marvella, who has lived in England since the age of three, recognizes, now that she is a young woman, that every aspect of English culture is alien to her. She can identify with nothing in English history or tradition, yet she has only a partial understanding of her parents’ culture. Therefore, she sees herself as living in a kind of limbo. When she meets an eligible young Guyanese bachelor, she feels drawn to him because, in her view, he knows who he is and where he belongs. She decides to marry this confident, secure individual and return with him to Guyana where she is convinced she will feel totally at home and at peace with herself and her surroundings. Marvella reflects as she walks down the aisle that the motherland will provide all the nurture she will ever need for herself and her posterity. Seven years earlier, in Boy-Sandwich, Gilroy had sent aged parents back to Guyana to end their days in comfort among familiar people and places. Their grandson, however, soon realized that there was no future for him in a return to his roots. In Gather the Faces Gilroy has come to view Guyana as the ideal home for wandering exiles, both young and old. For Gilroy, an expatriate living in England, Guyana has become the mythical native land where the inhabitants have no problem with their identity, and furthermore are perceived as whole rather than fragmented and rudderless like the people of color in Britain. In marrying a black Guyanese like herself, Gilroy’s heroine, Marvella, willingly embraces the traditional life and values of a married woman in a community cognizant of its origins, peopled by members of the same African tribe. This exile’s fantasy of return to a country without ongoing problems of identity, ethnicity, and economic viability is in stark contrast to most of the works we have discussed thus far. Guyanese literature, whether written by expatriates or residents, has demonstrated a willingness to grapple with the issues of conflicting identities among inhabitants of many varied backgrounds and traditions. It serves no useful purpose to single out one group of blacks from the same African village, then proceed to idealize them as examples of unity and tradition in a country that is still in the process of seeking and defining a national identity. A story told to me by George Mentore — a Guyanese-born professor of anthropology now

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living in the Unites States — regarding his recent trip to Guyana pointedly illustrates the continuing ethnic conflicts one encounters there. On arrival at the airport he was approached by two taxi drivers, one black, one East Indian, each clamoring to be chosen. The black cabbie felt his claim was stronger, based on the belief that the visitor should support a black man like himself and not throw any business to the man whose background was different. This type of confrontation demonstrates that there are many miles to go before, or if ever, “all o’we is one.” It is perhaps fitting to end this journey along the multiple paths toward Guyanese identity with the following lines from Martin Carter’s poem “Shape and Motion One:” “I was wondering if I could find myself / All that I am in all I could be. / If all the population of stars / would be less than the things I could utter / And the challenge of space in my soul / be filled by the shape I become” (Carter [1989], 67).

References Birbalsingh, Frank. 1986. Indians in the Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer. Caribbean Quarterly. 32.1–2: 16–23. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1977. Resistance Poems: The Voice of Martin Carter. Caribbean Quarterly. 23.2–3: 7–23. Cambridge, Joan. 1987. Clarisse Cumberbatch Want to Go Home. New York: Ticknor and Fields. Carew, Jan. 1958. Black Midas. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1964. Moscow is Not My Mecca. London: Secker and Warburg. Carter, Martin. 1989. Selected Poems. Georgetown, Guyana: Demerara Publishers Limited. Dabydeen, Cyril. 1989-a. Dark Swirl. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. ———. 1989-b. The Wizard Swami. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Dabydeen, David. 1991. The Intended. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1993. Disappearance. London: Secker and Warburg. ———. 1996. The Counting House. London: Jonathan Cape. D’Aguiar, Fred. 1994. The Longest Memory. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1996. Dear Future. London: Chatto and Windus. Daly, Veret. 1975. A Short History of the Guyanese People. London: MacMillan Education. Dance, Daryl Cumber. 1992. New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Gilkes, Michael. 1975-a. Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel. London: Longman Caribbean. ———. 1975-b. A Reading of Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office. Caribbean Quarterly. 21.4: 1–12. Gilroy, Beryl. 1989. Boy-Sandwich. Oxford: Heinemann. ———. 1994. Sunlight on Sweet Water. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. ———. 1996. Gather the Faces. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Grant, Kevin, ed. 1997. The Art of David Dabydeen. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Harris, Wilson. 1985. The Guyana Quartet. London: Faber and Faber. Heath, Roy. 1974. A Man Come Home. London: Longman Caribbean. ———. 1978. The Murderer. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 1979. From the Heat of the Day. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 1981-a. Genetha. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 1981-b. One Generation. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 1982. Kwaku, or the Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 1984. Orealla. London: Allison and Busby. ———. 1988. The Shadow Bride. London: Collins. ———. 1990. Shadows Round the Moon. London: Collins.

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———. 1997. The Ministry of Hope. London: Marion Boyars. Juminer, Bertène. 1961. Les bâtards. Paris: Présence Africaine. ———. 1989. The Bastards. CARAF Books. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia. Mackey, Nathaniel, ed. 1995. Wilson Harris. A Special Issue of Callaloo. 18.1: 1–215. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. 1982. Wilson Harris. Boston: Twayne. Manley, Robert H. 1982. Guyana Emergent. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company. Melville, Pauline. 1990. Shape-Shifter. London: Women’s Press. ———. 1997. The Ventriloquist’s Tale. London: Bloomsbury. Mittelholzer, Edgar. 1952. Children of Kaywana. New York: John Day. ———. 1963. A Swarthy Boy. London: Putnam. ———. 1970. Corentyne Thunder. London: Heinemann. ———. 1974. A Morning at the Office. London: Heinemann. Monar, Rooplall. 1985. Backdam People. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. ———. 1989. Jahnjat. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press; Demerara Publishers. ———. 1992. High House and Radio. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Mordecai, Pamela and Betty Wilson, eds. 1989. Her True-True Name. Caribbean Writers Series. London: Heinemann. Narain, Harry. 1981. Grass-Root People. Havana: Casa de las Américas. Ogbaa, Kalu. 1983. Exile, Creative Myth, Creative Truth, Thrust and Necessity: An Interview with Wilson Harris. Caribbean Quarterly. 29.2: 54–62. Poynting, Jeremy. 1996. From Ancestral to Creole: Humans and Animals in a West Indian Scale of Values. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 204–29. New World Studies. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia. Selick, Roydon. 1993. Sex and Death in the West Indian Novel of Adolescence. Caribbean Quarterly. 39.2: 1–13. Seymour, A.[rthur] J. 1951. Caribbean Literature: Ten Broadcast Talks. N.p., British Guiana: n.p. ———. 1972. New Writing in the Caribbean. Carifesta ‘72. N.p.: Guyana Lithographic. ———. 1977. Cultural Policy in Guyana. Paris: UNESCO. ———, ed. 1980. A Treasury of Guyanese Poetry. N.p.: Guyana Lithographic. Shinebourne, Janice. [1986]. Timepiece. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. ———. 1988. The Last English Plantation. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press. Slater, Candace. 1996. Breaking the Spell: Accounts of Encantados by Descendants of Runaway Slaves. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 157–84. New World Studies. Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia. Spinner, Thomas J., Jr. 1984. A Political and Social History of Guyana, 1945–1983. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Williams, Denis. 1963. Other Leopards. London: Heinemann.

Genre A Contrastive History

Fiction

The Novel before 1950 J. Downing Thompson, Jr.

Washington University, St. Louis

Writing an essay that surveys anglophone Caribbean novels written before 1950 presents a number of interdependent complexities. A relatively large group of these novels are no longer, and perhaps never were, widely circulated and read, neither in the Caribbean, the United States, nor Britain. With the notable exceptions of the works of Jean Rhys, Claude McKay, Alfred H. Mendes, and C. L. R. James, many of these early texts are now difficult to locate and to obtain. To illustrate my point: I began this project using a bibliography of about sixty entries, taking as starting point Kenneth Ramchand’s comprehensive bibliography in his The West Indian Novel and its Background, 1983. Approximately sixty percent of these items were available at Yale’s libraries, many at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Of the remaining forty percent, many of which were published between 1902 and 1935, about one-third are either noncirculating or lost at the university libraries that hold them in their collections, and those libraries are few. Another twenty percent of that forty percent I was unable to find anywhere. The problem of access is related to the problem of critical neglect. Few contemporary critics have devoted their energies to some of the lesser-known fictions that authors in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and British Guiana produced during the first half of this century. The reason for this is quite possibly that these fictions are not, and have not been, widely available to academics and to larger audiences. One might just as easily argue that these works have not been in circulation because critics have not encouraged publishers and readers to be interested in them. Both arguments need to be taken into account in order to understand the current status of these early anglophone Caribbean narratives. There has been some recent curiosity about certain of these more obscure novels. For example, in 1988, Calaloux Publications reprinted, with an introduction by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, A. R. F. Webber’s Those that be in Bondage, originally published in Georgetown, British Guiana, in 1917. But there still remains a dearth of criticism of works, like Webber’s, that were written in the opening decades of the twentieth century and were first published in the Caribbean. To delve into the period before 1950, then, is to delve into an era that provides many authors and novels yet fully to be investigated, many production and reception histories, biographies, and criticisms yet to be written. Exciting as these prospects may be, the circumstances from which they stem make assessing the period a challenge. Because the institutional literary infrastructure is sketchy at best, one is not certain, and it is not always simple to ascertain, what exactly one should survey. Of course, this is not to suggest that no one has theorized the emergence of the anglophone Caribbean novel. George Lamming, in The Pleasures of Exile, originally printed in 1960, contends, “The West Indian novel, by which I mean the novel written by the West Indian about the West Indian reality is hardly twenty years old” (Lamming [1992], 38). For Lamming, one of

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the valuable characteristics of the West Indian novel is its portrayal of the peasantry. Although, in most cases, the West Indian writer had been educated in “middle-class Western culture, … the West Indian novelist did not look out across the sea to another source. He looked in and down at what had traditionally been ignored. For the first time the West Indian peasant became other than a cheap source of labor. He became, through the novelist’s eye, a living existence, living in silence and joy and fear, involved in riot and carnival. It is the West Indian novel that has restored the West Indian peasant to his true and original status of personality” (Lamming [1992], 39). Kenneth Ramchand, arguing along similar lines, also believes that a distinctive characteristic of West Indian novels is the manner in which they deal with the dynamics of society: “It is not unique for novelists to be regarded as having something special to say to their societies. But the West Indian novelists apply themselves with unusual urgency and unanimity to an analysis and interpretation of their society’s ills, including the social and economic deprivation of the majority; the pervasive consciousness of race and colour; the cynicism and uncertainty of the native bourgeoisie in power after independence; the lack of a history to be proud of; and the absence of traditional settled values” (Ramchand [1970], 4). Lamming and Ramchand instruct us well about the prevalent themes, and many of the topics that they raise in the above passages will reemerge throughout these pages. However, my essay attempts to be rather broad and inclusive, mentioning some texts that may not fit the novel form yet exhibit frequently-evoked motifs, as well as others that may not exhibit those frequently-evoked motifs yet fit the literary form. If there is one common denominator among the lion’s share of the works, it is that their authors are native West Indians. It might be tempting to propose that the common denominator among the earliest anglophone Caribbean novels is that they originated from writers living in and / or writing about Jamaica. Though such a statement would not be entirely accurate, Jamaica, when compared to other Caribbean colonies, had more than its fair share of aspiring authors during the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. Thomas H. MacDermot (writing under the pen-name Tom Redcam), Herbert G. De Lisser, E. A. Dodd (writing under the pen-name E. Snod), W. A. Campbell, Alexander MacGregor James, and Herbert T. Thomas, producing their first, and in some cases only, pieces before 1930, all published their work in Jamaica. With the exception of Thomas and James, these authors chose the novel format. James’s The Cacique’s Treasure (and Other Tales), 1920, is a collection of short stories, many of which had surfaced previously in the Jamaica Times under the editorship of MacDermot. The brief title story is set in Jamaica during the Spanish rule, prior to the earthquake of 1692. A group of Englishmen are on an expedition in the interior of Jamaica when they encounter the hacienda of a late Spanish nobleman. His Arawak wife, Donna Ayola, and his half-Arawak daughter, Aurora, now reside there. One of Donna Ayola’s ancestors had once been a powerful Arawak Cacique who left a treasure that would eventually be found in fulfillment of a prophecy. Harold, the youngest of the Englishmen, falls in love with Aurora and seeks the treasure in order to fulfill the prophecy and to win Aurora’s, and her mother’s, devotion. He finds the Cacique’s treasure but insists that the Cacique’s real treasure is to have a descendant like Aurora. “The Cacique’s Treasure” is more or less an historical romance, yet in compiling the collection, James did not limit himself to that genre. The other tales in the volume

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encompass a wide variety of topics, from the metaphysical and somnambulism to the return of a wounded Great War veteran. Herbert T. Thomas’s The Story of a West Indian Policeman or Forty-Seven Years in the Jamaica Constabulary, 1927, is neither a novel nor a collection of short stories. It might best be described as an autobiography. The text’s unifying concept is the career of its author, a lighterskinned Jamaican who left the island when he was a child in order to be educated in England and Germany. After this extended absence, Thomas returned to his homeland and began a long professional life in the Jamaica Constabulary, ultimately ending his service with a stint as inspector general of the force. This is the focus of the twelve chapters in the book which tell “The Story.” Though lacking a readily-identifiable plot, climax, or denouement, “The Story” is enlivened by Thomas’s writing. He intersperses his own poetry and anecdotes throughout the main narrative, which carries us through the major moments of his career. The Story of a West Indian Policeman deserves attention, for in describing Thomas, who sees himself as an integral component of Jamaican society, it pieces together a mosaic of Jamaica and its history, raising issues, such as race, nationalism, class, and literary production, which predominate in the literary culture of the time period. For example, in the Author’s Preface, Thomas mentions that because of his manuscript’s rejection by British publishers for “being too local in its purview,” he “revised, and practically rewrote, the book, extending it to nearly twice its original size. I decided to do so, as will be seen, in the intimate and familiar style which suits a small community, where everybody knows everybody else, and in which I am probably known, either personally or by reputation, to more persons than any other individual man in it. In fact I have not hesitated to bare my very soul….” (Thomas [1927], vi). Thomas’s apparent egotism aside, this passage illustrates a tendency, in the early decades, to address explicitly the concerns of audience and literary production. While Thomas catered to Jamaican readers by default, Thomas H. MacDermot and Herbert G. De Lisser were concerned with establishing a reading public on the island. Both of them remained in the Caribbean, unlike later figures such as Claude McKay, who emigrated to the United States and to the United Kingdom in order to make a living. In his position as editor of the Jamaica Times, MacDermot sought to provide literature by Jamaicans that would be of interest to Jamaicans. He spearheaded the “All Jamaica Library” designed to do just that. Ultimately, the project failed but not before giving Jamaican readers E. Snod’s Maroon Medicine, 1905, W. A. Campbell’s Marguerite, A Story of the Earthquake, 1907, and MacDermot’s own Becka’s Buckra Baby, 1904, and One Brown Girl and —, 1909, both printed under the name Tom Redcam. Before the main body of One Brown Girl and —, Redcam affixed “The ‘Unusual’ Preface.” Therein, he informs readers of his conscious choice to publish in Jamaica even though doing so will not be as lucrative of a venture as publishing abroad might be. He appeals to readers to buy the book if they enjoy it, for “Only by this minimum of fair play can there ever be the slightest chance of fostering the growth of an Island literature” (Redcam [1909], ii). Also prefixed to the novel is a summary of the sales of the various editions of Becka’s Buckra Baby, to which One Brown Girl and — is a free-standing sequel, the two works together forming “The Story of Noel.” According to Anthony Boxill, both installments of “The Story of Noel” “are rendered

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lifeless by the sentimental didacticism of their author who shows little understanding of the art of the novel” (Boxill [1979], 39). Boxill’s claim is not unfounded. For example, Redcam digresses at length in One Brown Girl and — on topics of no immediate import to the progression of events. And yet, the novel’s structure exhibits a rough sophistication. It is difficult to name a single central character or plot. Rather, many subplots exist in a sometimes messy constellation of occurrences. The story of Noel Bronvola, an Englishwoman, and Liberta Passley, a rich, brown Jamaican, and their attempt to rescue Ada, a poor brown servant, from the immorality of her male friends is probably meant to be the most prominent subplot of them all; it recurs most often. However, Ada and her problems are certainly not ever-present; nor is it the case that the other scenarios provide necessary information about the major players in Ada’s story, though there is usually some intersection of events. Redcam’s technique may not be entirely successful, but it suggests that people’s lives often overlap in complex, yet arbitrary and mundane, ways. Even the title One Brown Girl and — leaves space for readers to fill in the blank, choosing from among the many characters and situations they will encounter on its pages. Redcam’s narrative probes the psychologies of the female characters much more thoroughly than it does those of their male counterparts. The male figures, as individuals, are not particularly significant; collectively, they represent a well of immorality from which the key female protagonists must deliver Ada. Interestingly enough, the few men who may be exceptions to this observation emerge in an early scene that records, in dialect, the conversations of several presumably uneducated men and women. Redcam’s admirable portrayal of the characters shows that intellectual prowess and the ability to manipulate standard English are not one and the same. He also shows that class position has nothing to do with personal pride and integrity. Some of the most socially vulnerable characters display much sophistication, conviction, and eloquence. When Fidelia, a servant of African descent, slaps the son of her white female employer for making sexual advances and is then blamed by her employer for causing his forwardness, we read, “‘I am a woman,’ said the girl [Fidelia] with passion. ‘I am not different to you or your daughter. I am flesh and blood, too. Is not my blood red like yours? Is not my flesh tender too? I am a woman, I tell you, like your daughter. What is shame for you is shame for me. If a man had spoken so to your daughter or to you, my God, would you not strike him?’
” (Redcam [1909], 48). Herbert G. De Lisser shared with Redcam a willingness to put forward fairly intricate representations of Jamaican society’s less powerful groups, such as peoples of African descent, women, and the peasantry. Kenneth Ramchand assigns the following distinctions to De Lisser’s fictions: “Susan Proudleigh is the first West Indian novel of emigration; Jane’s Career is the first in which the central character, the one whose feelings and thoughts are explored in depth, is a Negro” (Ramchand [1971], ix). Originally serialized in the Jamaica Gleaner, Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica, 1914, a bildungsroman, chronicles the early development of fifteen-year-old Jane Burrell, a black country girl whose parents send her to Kingston as a house servant in the employ of a mistress “of yellow complexion and self-confident air, and possessed of a rather shrill voice” (De Lisser [1971], 27). After suffering physical abuse from her mistress and sexual advances from her mistress’s nephew — her predicament resonates with that of Fidelia — Jane decides to flee the household and finds work at a factory that manufactures liquor bottles. While working there, she lives in a tenement yard and meets Vincent Broglie, a composer with whom Jane will have a child and to whom she will be wed near the story’s end. Jane’s Career is

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similar to One Brown Girl and — in that the reader is encouraged to consider the position of working women, as well as the significance of the choices they make between the different types of employment available to them. Of Jane’s fellow workers at the factory, the narrator notes, “had Jane been a judge of character she would have perceived that these young women were either of a more independent disposition or of a somewhat better class than those who remained domestic servants nearly all their lives. They were rebels; they had no humility in them; in their own way they had aspirations; they wanted to be free. Most of them (city born) had never been domestics. One or two others had early emancipated themselves from that form of service” (De Lisser [1971], 102). Broglie’s involvement with a union and his potential participation in a strike further amplifies the focus on labor. By the time we reach the concluding pages, Jane and Broglie’s love affair has caused him to be less of an agitator at the same time that it has elevated Jane to a status that allows her to dominate her very own servant girl who “submissively calls her Miss Jane, and obeys her slightest command” (De Lisser [1971], 196). As this description of the denouement implies, the text’s sometimes valuable insights about workers do not lead to an overarching radicalism that would seek to transform society. In addition to the subjects of labor and the disadvantaged, De Lisser and Redcam also share a concern with Jamaica’s literary market. According to a slip of paper bound into the front of the London edition of De Lisser’s Susan Proudleigh, 1915, the novel “was first published serially in the Jamaica ‘Daily Gleaner,’ under the title of ‘Susan: Mr. Proudleigh’s Daughter,’ having been presented by the Jamaica Tobacco Co. to the reading public of the Island of Jamaica.” De Lisser explicitly addresses the notion of producing literature for a Jamaican reading public. Susan Proudleigh, set in the early 1900s, affords a glimpse into the existence of the title character, a young brown-skinned woman who is high-spirited, attractive, and poor. We follow Susan’s involvement with a number of “intendeds.” Her second relationship, with Samuel Josiah Jones, leads her to Panama, where he has relocated in order to aid in the construction of the Panama Canal. After a falling out with Jones, Susan marries Mackenzie, another canal worker. When Mackenzie perishes in a landslide caused by the excavation of the Culebra Pass, Susan and Jones reunite. The beneficiary of the industrious Mackenzie’s will, Susan returns to Jamaica a prosperous woman. In the end, Susan, Jones, and Mr. Proudleigh depart, having left behind Susan’s aunt and sister in Panama, for they have been able to support themselves there. De Lisser, like Redcam, has a degree of respect for non-standard speech. He writes the Proudleigh’s many family discussions in dialect but does so in a fashion that is neither entirely mocking nor entirely demeaning, though it is certainly not celebratory. One must remember that earlier, in an Author’s Note to Jane’s Career, De Lisser had intoned the attitude that “rude” speech was to be eliminated, not glorified: “Rude dialect, hardly intelligible to the stranger and scarcely to be rendered by the written word, is still spoken in the country districts of the island. But even there the school and the influence of the better-educated classes are doing their work, and so the speech of the Jamaica peasant is changing, even if but slowly” (De Lisser [1971], iv). However, De Lisser is not devoid of sympathy for the peasantry; Susan Proudleigh subtly exposes the plight of the financially fragile Proudleighs. Susan’s brother, who is only mentioned, has gone to Nicaragua in search of work. Most of the remaining family members wind up in Panama at some point. They migrate there because the building of the canal has stimulated the economy. The novel is not only about the trajectory of Susan’s love life but also about the

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trajectory of her and her family’s class status. By the time we reach the conclusion, Susan has shown that she possesses both the ability to be her own capitalist (at one point, she sells goods in her own little shop) and the ability to enjoy Mackenzie’s relative financial stability in Panama. While living with Mackenzie, she does not have to earn money and, for the most part, spends her time keeping house. The portion of the novel set in Panama, which is controlled by raceconscious white Americans, also gives the black Jamaicans an opportunity to comment upon the unusual American system of racial apartheid that refuses to guarantee black people their fundamental rights. A. R. F. Webber’s Those that be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters, 1917, foregrounds socioeconomics even more than does Susan Proudleigh. Set primarily in Demerara (British Guiana), Tobago, and Trinidad, Those that be in Bondage utilizes a number of distinct prose styles in order to tell the story of Harold Walton, a European of English descent, and Marjorie Hamilton, the child of an English overseer (Harold’s uncle) and an East Indian indentured laborer. At times, Webber imitates the King James Version of the Bible. The diction often attempts extreme elevation but awkwardly collapses. Almost as frequently, the language is matter of fact, like that of a sociological tract. At these moments, the text exhibits an impulse to document the social milieu of the sugar plantation and of larger social issues. For example, Webber presents a long exposition on the term “coloured” in American parlance as opposed to that of the West Indies. While De Lisser, in Susan Proudleigh, prefers to interrogate the politics of color through the mouths of his characters, Webber opts to include an extended authorial aside. Race is not the only topic that causes Webber’s sociological tendencies to surface. The initial stages of the book, which are devoted to explaining the circumstances of Marjorie’s birth on the sugar plantation “Never Out,” provide ample opportunities for discourse on the nature of indentured East Indian labor and on the interracial sexual environment of agrarian communities in the Caribbean. The remainder of the novel depicts the struggle between Harold’s vows — while studying at a German seminary, he becomes a priest — and his infatuation with Marjorie. When he decides to step down from the priesthood in the midst of much controversy, he tries to find peace within an unforgiving Roman Catholic Church. As the work concludes, Harold and Marjorie plan to go to England where Marjorie will earn a living as a writer, an endeavor that, the reader only learns during the final pages, she has been pursuing all along, using her late mother’s name as a pseudonym. Selwyn R. Cudjoe argues of Those that be in Bondage, “Although the focus of the text shifts in the course of the narrative, it examines the dual nature of bondage: its physical and spiritual dimensions. The author is concerned with the alienation of the overseer from the rest of society but also with the enslavement of men to man-made systems” (Cudjoe [1988], xix). Cudjoe’s pronouncement is perceptive. Even at the level of diction, Those that be in Bondage emphasizes the themes of individual agency and determinism, asserting that the desires of the will regularly become lost in the context of circumscribing societal structures and providential interventions. The biblical prose of particular passages represents determinism via the divine, while the sociological prose of others represents determinism via human systems. Individual agency amid structural realities, though perhaps not as explicit as in Those that be in Bondage, is a subtext both in Susan Proudleigh and in One Brown Girl and —. Susan Proudleigh assigns more weight to human choices; however, chance dictates many events (like the accidental death of Mackenzie

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and the aftermath of his burial). The careful reader of Susan Proudleigh will notice too how, in the wider scheme of things, economic circumstances push and pull the characters across the waters of the Caribbean Sea. The multiple and intersecting subplots of One Brown Girl and — signify that society is a fluid, living entity, whose motion is propelled by the actions and decisions of individuals. While Those that be in Bondage renders established religion, in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, as one of the “man-made systems” that bind human agency, Under the Sun: A Jamaica Comedy, 1937, De Lisser’s sixth novel, renders the established Anglican church as an instrument for mobilizing one’s class position. After writing about the peasantry in his early works and composing the historical romance, The White Witch of Rosehall, 1929, De Lisser shifted his attention to the more affluent sectors of contemporary Jamaica. Under the Sun is about Christopher Josephus Brown, a financially secure mulatto, who travels to London on a business mission and returns with a status-obsessed English wife, Amy, who, in London, is a member of the working class. Amy uses her fair skin, the hierarchy of the Anglican church, and Chris’s funds in order to make herself popular among the elite. Though Chris has inherited a fine house from his father and can afford servants, his color prevents him from being accepted among his wife’s pretentious associates. As Amy ascends the social ladder, the rift within their marriage expands until they agree to divorce. Both of them remarry — Amy to a rich white man and Chris to a mulatto woman of his own class. Under the Sun craftily examines how race and gender affect class mobility. It can be profitably juxtaposed with Susan Proudleigh. Like the brown, poor Susan, white, poor Amy migrates to another land and improves her standing, in part, through her husband. Yet brown, middle-class Chris and brown, lower-class Susan can never attain the same standing as the European Amy, a standing Amy herself could not have attained in Britain. She surpasses them both, unhindered by the racial glass ceiling upon the house of class. As is the trend with Redcam’s and De Lisser’s fictions, the women are far more complex than the men. However, unlike Susan Proudleigh, who almost comes across as a heroine, Amy is portrayed as a snob. By the mid to late 1920s, some of the patterns epitomized by the novels of Redcam, De Lisser, and Webber were beginning to change. West Indian writers, including De Lisser himself, began to publish more frequently in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The enthusiasm for ventures like “The All Jamaica Library” waned, and the creation of reading publics in the Caribbean was no longer as great a consideration as it had once been. In 1927, The Haunting Hand, the first novel by the Jamaican W. Adolphe Roberts, hit the literary scene, but the novel, printed in Britain, takes place entirely and conspicuously in New York. Nothing about the work hints at its being Caribbean-identified; none of its characters are from the Caribbean, mention the Caribbean in any significant way, speak with a West Indian accent, or any such thing. About Roberts’s next five works of fiction, The Mind Reader, 1929, Mayor Harding of New York, 1931, The Moralist, 1931, The Strange Career of Bishop Sterling, 1932, and The Top Floor Killer, 1935, all of which were printed in either New York or London, one could make the same basic statement. On the dust-jacket of Roberts’s next novel, The Moralist, there is, interestingly enough, a brief blurb that reads, “W. Adolphe Roberts was born in the Caribbean in 1886. ‘Who’s Who in America’ states that the event occurred at sea, but his birth certificate was dated at Kingston, Jamaica.” This is the only reference made to the Caribbean.

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The early works of W. Adolphe Roberts warrant mentioning precisely because they are just that — the early novels in a prolific career. Although they have little to do with the Caribbean, they may offer crucial insights into the intellectual and artistic formation of an author who would go on to write five other novels, including The Pomegranate: A Novel of the Caribbean, 1941, and The Single Star: A Novel of Cuba in the ‘90’s, 1949. These works are in English but are set in Spanish-speaking islands, a fictitious island called Caribbea, and Cuba, respectively. They unabashedly depict the “Latin” regions of the Caribbean in a fiery and exotic light, as places teeming with hot-blooded revolutionaries who, nonetheless, respect beauty and love. Roberts also published a history of the Caribbean and a compilation of biographical sketches entitled Six Great Jamaicans, two of whom are De Lisser and MacDermot. If, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Roberts was not yet turning to the Caribbean as a source of material, others were doing so, even though they themselves may have migrated from the tropics to Europe, the United States, or elsewhere. One such artist was Claude McKay. While his first two novels Home to Harlem, 1928, and Banjo: A Story without a Plot, 1929, are not set in the West Indies, his third, Banana Bottom, 1933, occurs in Jamaica. This is not to say that there is no trace of the Caribbean in McKay’s earlier novels; appearing in both Home to Harlem and Banjo, Ray is a Haitian intellectual who believes his education constrains his behavior, unlike his untutored buddies Jake (in Home to Harlem) and Banjo (in Banjo). Composed while McKay resided in Tangiers, Banana Bottom is the story of the Jamaican Bita (short for Tabitha) Plant, a country girl of African descent who, after being raped, is sent to England by white missionaries to be educated. After returning to her native land, she struggles to reconcile the lifestyle she practiced in England with that of the folk of her village, Banana Bottom. In the single character of Bita Plant, McKay portrays the dilemmas of cultural dualism that he had previously attempted to depict by juxtaposing characters, such as Ray and Jake, who symbolize two distinct philosophies of life. A native of the island of Dominica, Jean Rhys, like McKay, created her version of the West Indies from a distance — in Europe. Before World War II, she had four novels to her credit: Quartet, 1929, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, 1931, Voyage in the Dark, 1934, and Good Morning Midnight, 1939. Her masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, came later in the author’s life and is her only novel that actually takes place in the Caribbean. Although the scene is England, the heroine of Voyage in the Dark, hails from an unspecified locale in the Caribbean. Upon the death of her father, Anna Morgan travels to Britain with Hester, her English stepmother, who desires to have her schooled there. Anna’s decision to become a chorus girl leads to a feud between her uncle and Hester as to who is primarily responsible for her welfare. As is characteristic of Rhys’s fiction, the financial standing of women is shown to be precarious, and the romantic and familial liaisons so closely linked to economics are treated with a dose of delicate cynicism. Rhys’s texts consistently evoke a world undergirded by a market of vulnerable females who find themselves dependent upon men for survival. The effect of such an environment on the psyche is a predominant theme. Alfred H. Mendes, a native of Trinidad and a contemporary of C. L. R. James’s, is also concerned with psychological exploration. Pitch Lake, 1934, Mendes’s outstanding first novel, impressively explores the mental composition of its central character. Joe da Costa is a Portuguese creole whose father, Antonio, owns a rum-shop that caters to the people of color in

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the small town of San Fernando. Joe, who is twenty-two, had been brought, at sixteen, to San Fernando from Port-of-Spain, the home of his mother and siblings. Unfortunately, Joe resents his existence in the remote village, largely because he does not wish to associate with the “Indians and negroes and coloured people” who comprise a significant portion of his father’s clientele (Mendes [1970], 9). The elderly Antonio sells the shop so that he can emigrate to America, where his wife and other children have relocated since Joe’s arrival in San Fernando. Having moved back to Port-of-Spain, Joe resides temporarily with his older brother, a successful businessman. Mendes places his readers inside Joe’s mind as he agonizes over his love-hate relationships with several women of color. He lusts after them, yet because of internalized class and racial ideologies that relegate the women to an inferior status, he often finds himself in a paradoxical state of disgust. After spending some time in Port-of-Spain, he plans to marry a wealthy Portuguese woman named Cora. During their engagement, he discovers that Stella, the young woman of color who is a servant in his brother’s household, is pregnant with his child. Following Stella’s failed abortion, he murders her, leaves her body for someone else to discover and, as the novel concludes, wonders who will be held responsible for her untimely demise. Both Those that be in Bondage and Pitch Lake examine sexual relationships between white men and women of color but from divergent angles. In Those that be in Bondage, Edwin Hamilton, Marjorie’s English father, unflinchingly challenges sugar plantation norms by announcing his decision to marry the East Indian woman whom he loves. Joe da Costa, on the other hand, occupies the opposite end of the spectrum and is consistently in a condition of emotional turmoil due to his interracial tendencies. As for the will of the individual, Joe explicitly questions the degree to which he is accountable for his actions. He would prefer to abdicate his agency to the structures of religion and social circumstance. With a figure like Joe, the issues of agency and determinism, which so strongly inform Susan Proudleigh, One Brown Girl and —, and Those that be in Bondage, are fleshed out within an individual psyche. Pitch Lake also resembles One Brown Girl and — and The White Witch of Rosehall in that it depicts sexual associations, and sometimes sexual violence, between white men and female domestics of color. Such relations are not represented in Mendes’s second novel, Black Fauns, 1935, which takes place within a black, female, and poor world. Like Susan Proudleigh, Black Fauns devotes much time to the lives of barrack-yard residents. Rhonda Cobham notes, “Black Fauns, though it was written and published after Pitch Lake, belongs to this earlier tradition of the barrack-yard story. Like others of the genre it lacks a central dominating consciousness and takes its unity instead from the spatial confines of its yard setting” (Cobham [1984], ix). Just as Mendes proves his talent for psychological writing in Pitch Lake, he proves in Black Fauns that he is more than capable of capturing the vernacular. These barrack-yard tenants speak eloquently, often, and without authorial intrusions. The reader follows events in the yard throughout the course of a week, as Ma Christine’s son briefly visits from the United States, as Ethelrida and Mamitz assault one another and wind up in court, and as Christophine’s man, Seppy, dies. These are not the only, or even most significant, incidents, but in this work, no one event seems to occupy center stage. Rather, Mendes’s aim is to offer a glimpse into the existence of barrack-yard women. Cobham contends, “members of the Beacon group [which includes Mendes, C. L. R. James, and Ralph De Boissiere] present West Indian women as the economic and emotional centre of West Indian lower class life. Consciously or unconsciously their world view is allowed

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to permeate the reader’s responses to all issues, from religious beliefs to sexual preferences” (Cobham [1984], ix). Indeed, in C. L. R. James’s Minty Alley, 1936, the lives of women are prominently displayed, yet James departs from Mendes’s model; the protagonist is a twenty-year-old, middle-class, black Trinidadian named Mr. Haynes. Though told in the third person, the narrative is limited to Haynes’s point of view, for we are aware only of those scenes and of that information to which he is privy. Minty Alley follows Haynes’s life for about a year, from the period ensuing his mother’s death through his relocation in the home of Mrs. Rouse (at Number Two, Minty Alley) to his departure from that address. At the novel’s inception, we find a worried Haynes who appears to be rather dependent upon his faithful servant Ella for advice about surviving the financial difficulties that have threatened to overwhelm him since his mother’s passing. Part of the solution to his woes is to rent a cheaper room at Minty Alley. As his year there progresses, the initially helpless Haynes gradually comes to define himself largely in relationship to the female inhabitants of the home and steps into the role of peacemaker. But even given Haynes’s undeniable centrality to the narrative and his debatable centrality to the female characters’ lives, Haynes himself and Rouse’s long-term lover Benoit are the only two noteworthy male figures among a bevy of vividly painted women, such as the enigmatic Nurse Jackson and the feisty Maisie. Robert N. Donaldson’s Heart’s Triumph: A Moving Story of Love’s Conquest over Race and Colour, 1944, falls outside of the tradition that includes Donaldson’s fellow Trinidadians James and Mendes. Donaldson prefers to deal with race relations among the middle and upper classes and refrains from laying stress upon communities of women. Set around the time of World War I, Heart’s Triumph tells the story of a black piano teacher, Raymond Bichard, who falls in love with one of his students, Helene Danville, a European woman of aristocratic French heritage. This romance, unlike those of Those that be in Bondage and Pitch Lake, is between a black man and a white woman, neither of whom is poor. Much of the novel focuses on the obstacles that the couple must surmount in order to marry. They are wed against Mr. Danville’s wishes, but when their union produces a son, Mr. Danville, who wants his only grandson to carry the Danville name, makes peace with his daughter and son-in-law. Finally, Helene’s and Bichard’s hearts do triumph, and Mr. Danville, a symbol of a passing order in race relations, develops a fondness for his black son-in-law, who has become a rather successful lawyer and popular figure in Trinidad. As its subtitle suggests, Heart’s Triumph unabashedly emphasizes love’s power to destroy prejudicial barriers. Though Donaldson’s predecessors do frequently depict romance and sexuality, they rarely, if ever, so strongly appeal to affection as a catalyst for interracial (or interethnic or interclass) affiliations. If Heart’s Triumph breaks with tradition, Lalaja: A Tale of Retribution, 1947, by the Trinidadian D. W. Rogers, does so in radical fashion. In style and in content, Lalaja is in a category all its own when compared to other novels hailing from Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana in the first half of this century. Modeled after Gothic fiction, it contains elements of the fantastic; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein immediately comes to mind as a parallel. However, Lalaja exhibits anxieties about sociological and educational theories rather than about scientific ones. Lalaja is raised by his grandfather, Old Hyram, who becomes known as “The Sage of Sussurudene” for his misogynistic philosophies of male education. In this sense, Lalaja is a sociological Frankenstein. During Lalaja’s early adult life, he and Old Hyram lead a mysterious

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life in a city on the island of Bubble. They invite women into their home, preying upon their psyches in order to trap them. Eventually, the duo is exposed, and Lalaja transmogrifies into a woman. In Part Two, we follow Lalaja, the woman, who is the darling of her society. She creates the popular and unconventional “Danse a Lalaja,” in which women dance with one another. As the novel concludes, Lalaja dies while experiencing a consuming sexual metamorphosis from woman to man. Without a doubt, Rogers treats issues of gender and sexuality like no other author mentioned thus far. Rather than viewing gender in sociological, economic, or psychological terms, he presents it in a mystical, supernatural mode. Lalaja does not engage issues of race or class in any memorable manner. Most of the characters are middle or upper class and of European descent. Lalaja himself is descended from Italian and Russian immigrants, and allusions to high European culture abound with a notable absence of references to others. One wonders about the factors that influenced Rogers’s artistry. Unfortunately, his life has not been built into the literary infrastructure that consists of criticisms, biographies, histories, and other types of scholarship. There are some authors, such as McKay, Rhys, and C. L. R. James, who are better known and whose creative faculties are more widely acknowledged. Even so, the histories of writers and of writing cultures of the anglophone Caribbean in the early twentieth century deserve to be investigated in greater detail and more frequently. Too many careers stand in need of scholarly illumination; too many accomplishments await deep exploration.

References Boxill, Anthony. 1979. The Beginnings to 1929. West Indian Literature. Ed. by Bruce King, 30–44. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books. Carr, Helen. 1996. Jean Rhys. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Northcote House. Cobham, Rhonda. 1984. Introduction. Black Fauns. By Alfred H. Mendes, i-xvi. London: New Beacon Books. Cooper, Wayne. 1987. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Cudjoe, Selwyn R. 1988. Introduction. Those that be in Bondage: A Tale of Indian Indentures and Sunlit Western Waters. By A. R. F. Webber, vii-xxvi. Wellesley, Massachusetts: Calaloux Publications. De Lisser, Herbert G. [1914]. 1971. Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation. ———. 1915. Susan Proudleigh. London: Methuen. Lamming, George. [1960]. 1992, 2d ed. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mendes, Alfred H. [1934]. 1970, rprt. Pitch Lake: A Story from Trinidad. Nendeln, Germany: Kraus. Ramchand, Kenneth. [1970]. 1983. The West Indian Novel and its Background. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1971. Introduction. Jane’s Career: A Story of Jamaica. By Herbert G. De Lisser, v-xvi. New York: Africana Publishing Corporation. Redcam, Tom. 1909. One Brown Girl and —. Kingston: Jamaica Times Printery. Roberts, W. Adolphe. 1931. The Moralist. New York: Mohawk Press. Thomas, Herbert T. 1927. The Story of a West Indian Policeman or Forty-Seven Years in the Jamaica Constabulary. Kingston: Gleaner.

The Novel from 1950 to 1970 HENA MAES-JELINEK

University of Liège

If the very beginnings of West Indian fiction were predominantly Jamaican, the creative explosion of the 1950s, which preceded political independence in the Caribbean and initiated a period of transition, involved all the islands and Guyana (then still British Guiana). There is a tendency to speak of the West Indian novel as an entity, and, of course, the Caribbean consciousness that it expresses was shaped by the common historical experience of transplantation, slavery, and indentured labor. Nevertheless, the West Indian world, as reflected in the novel, is both complex and diversified. What is now seen as a specifically West Indian sensibility has grown and found expression in subtly varying and multifarious ways. For instance, a proportionately large number of excellent writers are from Guyana and have spent their formative years not in Georgetown, the capital, but in New Amsterdam or in some areas often described as colonial backwaters on the edge of the South American continent. Perhaps their very isolation, the call of the unknown both from the outside world and from the immense territories at their back, were a unique stimulus to their imagination, which, in spite of a common language, marked them off from the island writers. Territorial diversity and variations in the use of language and dialect, which are discussed elsewhere in this volume, should be kept in mind, for the European or North American critic, usually unable to distinguish between them, is too often tempted to lump them together. Since it was in the 1950s that West Indian fiction appeared on the map of world literature, we may ask what its major characteristics were and in what way it differed from English or American novels, which, until then, must have been the staple reading diet of the educated middle class, at that time still a small minority. Unlike fiction in English from other former British colonies, and in spite of V. S. Naipaul’s vision of West Indian mimicry, there was no long period of gestation or imitation of the metropolitan tradition in the anglophone Caribbean. This is not to suggest that fiction suddenly erupted out of a literary void. No literature or literary genre does anywhere, and apart from specifically Caribbean cultural elements, such as the little magazines or the possible influence of an oral tradition — for instance, the Anancy tales — novelists were very much aware of the European tradition of social realism. But they modified it from the start, partly by dealing with inescapable Caribbean issues such as exile, isolation and alienation, fragmentation, race, and the need for self-definition, and partly through their use of Caribbean idioms, which led to the recreation of so many Caribbean voices. Moreover, except for the Oxford-educated Naipaul, these novelists were not university graduates and were therefore less subject to the tyrannies of established forms. Beyond secondary school, at the time still a luxury, the majority of Caribbean novelists were autodidacts who often, though not always, sprang from the people and realized that education was a passport of escape from colonial isolation. Contrary, again, to the usual development of literature elsewhere, Caribbean

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fiction does not begin by concentrating on the socially important man, or the hero. The singledout character is often a man of the people in the literal sense. Caribbean fiction, then, tends to be oriented toward the folk and the community, while the values it explores concern the group, rather than individual, achievement, something that, in the 1950s, is only becoming a possibility. Edgar Mittelholzer, who was highly conscious of sociocultural and racial hierarchies, is an exception. But even V. S. Naipaul, whose early novels record his West Indian experience in a form both influenced by, and ironically distant from, the English traction, portrays West Indian society through ordinary, rather than exceptional, people. The European novel, which developed from an ironic subversion of the epic and the traditional hero, was in turn subverted in the Caribbean to accommodate the European hero’s victims. The portrayal of West Indian society by its first indigenous group of writers since the pioneers of the 1930s tackled the harsh realities of a society kept silent for centuries, the West Indian condition that developed in the aftermath of a particularly inhuman colonization involving the extermination of the native population and a subsequent continuing lack of concern, up to the twentieth century, for the ordinary man’s survival. This is shown, among others, in Ralph De Boissiere’s ironically titled Crown Jewel, 1952, in George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin, 1960, and in Roger Mais’s novels. Yet the fiction of the 1950s is not predominantly one of social protest, even if this is implicit in the portrayal of the people’s condition. The artist confronts the problems with which both he and his society must come to terms if they are to be reconciled with their origins, understand the present, and envisage their own future, that is, the impact of history and of endless economic exploitation, with their corollary of the most racially mixed population in the world, the thirst for literacy, and the individual’s longing for self-realization. Perhaps significantly, the 1950s open with the publication of Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office, 1950, not because it is a great novel, though it is free of the extravagance of much of his later fiction, but because it portrays in a nutshell — a morning’s work in a Trinidad office — the social situation of the time in the Caribbean. Race and color, represented in their extraordinary variety with the white British manager at the top and black messenger boy at the bottom of the office and, symbolically, the social and colonial hierarchy, stand out as determining factors of possible achievement and, consequently, of attitude and behavior. A frequent source of personal frustration and social tension, they bring into focus the characters’ individual and group histories, economically evoked, so that without actually exploring them, they bring to mind the major issues and themes that were to preoccupy most of these novelists throughout the decade. Paramount among these issues and themes is the question of racial identity, more crucial in the West Indies than in any other former British colony since, owing to the region’s history, all possible racial admixtures exist along distinct types: African, East Indian, Chinese, and European. Racial identity obsessively informs the work of Mittelholzer, who is a pioneer in this, as he is in his treatment of other Caribbean themes (but not in the form of the novel). He differs from most of his successors, however, in considering color and miscegenation major causes of disorientation in Caribbean society. Many of his characters share his own dilemma: he was the “swarthy boy” of European-looking parents, and his father was a negrophobe. They see their color as “taint” and associate it with the weaker side of their personality while their white inheritance accounts for their strength, as in the case of the heroine of The Life and Death of Sylvia, 1953. Michael Gilkes has seen in this racial dichotomy the

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reverse of Derek Walcott’s acceptance, the source of the central psychological conflict by which the characters associate their own white-black division with “Intellect / Spirituality (strength) versus Emotion / Sensuality (weakness)” (King [1979], 99). Mittelholzer’s conviction that he owed the strand of strength in himself to his German ancestry may explain his development toward extreme right-wing views, particularly in his last novels which take place in England and deplore the social and political liberalization of English society. From a very different standpoint and with considerably less talent, these novels prefigure Naipaul’s perception of disorder in the once model country. The divided personality and consciousness of Mittelholzer’s characters with their attendant anxiety and, as Michael Gilkes points out, “cultural schizophrenia” (Gilkes [1975], x) was essentially a product of history. In his Kaywana trilogy, 1952–58, Mittelholzer relates the history of his native Guyana which, from the first European expedition to the British takeover in 1796, was tossed from one European power to another — Spanish, Dutch, and French. The novels cover a period from the first Dutch settlement in 1616 to the mid-twentieth century through the fortunes of the Van Groenwegel family. Kaywana is the half-Aboriginal / half-English girl who, in spite of her personal strength and courage (presumably the English in her), marks the Van Groenwegel dynasty with the “taint” of her blood. The settlers’ adventurous struggle against all odds to create and maintain their empire illustrates the courage and will-to-power, the harshness and spirit of violence which presided over the founding of the plantation society and led to the worst aberrations. Though a good storyteller and interpreter of the impact of nature on his characters’ behavior, Mittelholzer often resorts to sensationalism — for example, an old slave is buried alive when useless — and an incapacity to control his material often mars his narratives. The eroticism in these and other novels is seen by some as pornography, by others as a reaction against the prudery of the society he portrayed. But he successfully conveys a sense of Guyana’s terrifying past linked to the fascination the area exerted on the European imagination, a sense of a mysterious environment haunted by the ghosts of the past, as is also obvious in Shadows Move Among Them, 1951, and the ghost-story My Bones and My Flute, 1955. In the same vein as Mittelholzer’s Kaywana trilogy, one should mention Christopher Nicole’s Amyot series, 1964–65, set in the Bahamas. The posthumously published novels of H. G. De Lisser, a fair-skinned Jamaican, are not without resemblance to Mittelholzer’s historical fiction. Psyche, 1952, Morgan’s Daughter, 1953, and The Cup and the Lip, 1956, also evoke the plantation world with a prejudiced interpretation of nonwhites’ behavior, though without the psychological exploration or complexity of Mittelholzer’s fiction. Like The Children of Kaywana, The Arawak Girl, 1958, goes back to the beginning of Caribbean history, in this novel Columbus’s stay in Jamaica in 1503–04. As Kenneth Ramchand suggests, De Lisser sees the Caribs as already degenerate primitives (Ramchand [1970], 164) and is aware of no connection between present-day West Indians and the island’s early inhabitants. A similar interest in the history of Jamaica, in the seventeenth century, informs S. A. G. Taylor’s novel Capture of Jamaica, 1951, and Buccaneer Bay, 1952. They were published by the Kingston Pioneer Press, a venture that was soon to collapse; no publishing house was then viable in the West Indies, one of the reasons that urged potential writers to leave their countries. The first to go, in 1948, was Mittelholzer, who went to England, and Ralph De Boissiere

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who left Trinidad for Australia, where his first two novels Crown Jewel, 1952, and Rum and Coca Cola, 1956, were originally published. De Boissiere has explained that his plots are fashioned by “the opposition of characters to society” (De Boissiere [1982], 5). Crown Jewel, rewritten three times, deals with the 1937 labor unrest in Trinidad and portrays the living conditions of the urban poor while tracing the growing political awareness of a major character, André de Coudray, which may have been inspired by the author’s own left-wing commitment. Though too explanatory, the narrative is interspersed with vivid dialogues in Trinidadian Creole, which Sam Selvon was to use so strikingly as the medium of expression of the West Indian consciousness. Rum and Coca Cola also illustrates the social injustice experienced by the destitute, this time during World War II when the Americans stationed on the island, in spite of their own offhand excesses, gave the Trinidadians a glimpse of a different social order and of the possible collapse of British imperialism. Set in Australia, De Boissiere’s third novel, No Saddles for Kangaroos, 1964, shows the same concern for economic injustice and a similar faith in positive social action. The first two novels by the Jamaican Roger Mais also focus on the life of the dispossessed, however without reflecting the author’s political commitment, though that commitment was an incentive to his choice of subject-matter. Rather, these novels evince the moral outrage, intense sympathies, and spirituality which characterized Mais the man and the artist (he was also a poet, dramatist, short-story writer, and painter). The Hills Were Joyful Together, 1953, a biblical title used ironically, deals with yard life in the Kingston underworld. In the author’s words, it was meant “to give the world a true picture of the real Jamaica and the dreadful conditions of the working class” (Ramchand [1970], 179). Although the characters are individualized, Mais’s purpose is to present a community caught in a deadlock of poverty, hopelessness, and inevitable crime, from which there is no escape. This is symbolically suggested at the very end of the novel when Surjue, who has repeatedly attempted to outwit fate, is shot dead when attempting to escape from prison while his woman, Rema, is burning alive. The last sentence of the novel after Surjue’s fall — “He lay on his back, his arms flung wide, staring up at the silent unequivocal stars” (Mais [1970], 288) — has a Hardy-like resonance, though in both life and work, Mais seems closer to pre-war Orwell. There is a similar gap in their fiction between intention and achievement. But in spite of occasional overwriting and sentimentality, Mais’s writing is vigorous and poetic, and the sense of man’s tragic fate blends with the frustration due to social deprivation. Possibly under the influence of drama, the narrative is fragmented into short scenes intertwining the lives (and deaths!) of the slum-dwellers. The “Chorus of the People in the Lane” in Brother Man, 1954, may also impart an intention to elevate the characters to the level of tragic personae, though this is more successfully achieved in Mais’s third novel, Black Lightning, 1955. Brother Man is also located in a Kingston slum and presents the efforts of a Rastafarian, John Power, to regenerate the squalid and brutal microcosm in which he is isolated by virtue of his moral rigor and spirituality. Full of compassion and integrity, which distinguishes him from fake Rastafarians and Obeahmen, Power is wrongly suspected of a crime he has not committed and, in a scene of Christ-like persecution, he is nearly killed by the very crowd he wanted to save. He survives his trial and is humanized, in a reconciliation of flesh and spirit, by his acceptance of the love of Minette, a young prostitute he had taken in but kept at a distance. As

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an individual distinct from the crowd, Brother Man is explored in greater psychological depth than Mais’s earlier characters. It is not far-fetched to suppose that his trial is also an allegory of the plight of the artist alienated from the Philistine crowd, which prefigures the central drama in Black Lightning. In this novel, however, overweening pride destroys the hero Jake, a blacksmith and a sculptor, who believes in the artist’s social vocation but can live neither with nor without other people’s support. He creates a figure of Samson with which he identifies and is struck blind by lightning. Mais’s use of biblical symbolism is not as simple as it may sound: in Jake’s fate, he conveys at once a sense of the tragedy of life and of the dilemma of the Caribbean artist, whose imagination is nourished by his own community but who feels compelled to leave it. Isolated in rural Jamaica, Jake commits suicide. This takes place undramatically off-stage in a wood, whose beauty and peace are, at this moment, enjoyed by lovers. The novel’s most powerful image remains the moment of illumination and blindness, which eventually destroys Jake. Wilson Harris reads in Jake’s fall a mythical and healing dimension absorbed by Amos, Jake’s crippled friend, who is renewed by it (Sellick [1982], 6–7). The development of Mais’s work and his decision to leave Jamaica — as it turned out, for only two years — exemplifies the predicament of the West Indian writer who is caught between the demands of what he sees as an unenlightened society and his own possibilities of achievement. Yet Mais’s departure seems to have been free of the desperate longing to leave and the near-hysterical fear to return expressed by Mittelholzer and Naipaul. It is not surprising, then, that exile, a heartfelt need for writers and a hopeful economic necessity for many ordinary West Indians, should be a central fictional theme explored at all levels of consciousness and a major factor in the creation of a specifically West Indian novel. To the writers who were to evolve original forms in their recreation of the Caribbean experience, mainly Lamming, Selvon, Naipaul, and Harris, exile gave the required distance to envision the setting and milieu of their youth, which they all portray in their early novels. It was also a complex issue with its closely related facets of identity, the colonizer / colonized relationship, language, and, as Wilson Harris was to show, deeper metaphysical undercurrents. But only George Lamming, in a book of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, 1960, carefully rationalized and examined the ins and outs of the writer’s urge to “get out” and its corollaries while investigating the fruitfulness of exile: “to be an exile is to be alive,” even if metropolitan culture is “a dubious refuge” (Lamming, [1960], 24, 22). Lamming’s work is pervaded by his obsession with the Prospero-Caliban syndrome which he has reenacted and reinterpreted in several novels. Prospero’s major legacy, language, is for him an ambivalent gift, an instrument of education and developing consciousness; yet that very educational process and the use of English are means of imprisoning Caliban’s future. Unlike other postcolonial peoples, West Indians have no other indigenous language, and one must remember that, in the 1950s, the deeper effect of the generalized secondary and university education were not yet felt (the University of the West Indies had been founded only in 1948). Since then, Caliban the writer has, to use Lamming’s words, taken the “extraordinary departure which explodes … Prospero’s premises (Lamming [1960], 109). But in the 1950s, it was envisaged with an urgency that may partly explain the creative drive of the period, and Lamming’s early novels explore the possible ways of assuming “Prospero’s privilege of magic [the Word]” (11) while breaking away from his colonizing vision. In order to do this, the writer’s first task was to understand the nature of the bond between

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Prospero and Caliban, in the past and the present, and of the imposed values Caliban had always taken for granted. Hence, again, the centrality of history is scrutinized through a painful (for Caliban) “backward glance” (Lamming [1960], 32). Lamming’s early fiction is not literally historical since it deals with a very recent past or the present; rather, it is history as it is being lived. In the Castle of my Skin, 1953, takes place against the background of the social upheavals of the 1930s and the beginning of West Indian migration. But the past is in the present, and its all-pervasiveness must be exposed in the feudal system that still prevails in the Barbadian village where G, the hero and main narrator, spends his childhood, in the villagers’ deculturation, in the deficient education system, and in the lack of any responsibility toward the peasants, whose lives are being disrupted in a transitional period while both landlord and rising economic and political leaders (Mr. Slime, the former teacher) wash their hands of them. The novel successfully blends several techniques: a social realism softened by humor which, in the West Indies, often seemed the only available defence against tragedy and is here a major aspect of plot and style; an intuitive and visionary, rather than factual, perception of the past expressed in the Old Man’s poetic and dream-like evocation; changes in point of view; symbolism, which Lamming was to use increasingly, and allegory: an unnamed Old Man and Old Woman are representative of former generations, and the Old Woman is the only villager who still remembers slavery but is also the one most respectful of the landlord’s prerogatives. Though often associated with West Indian novels of childhood, In the Castle of my Skin really concentrates on village life and its disintegration. Lamming records pessimistically the villagers’ general lack of awareness and understanding of their own condition; they include G, a largely autobiographical figure who, alienated from the other boys by education, is on the verge of leaving the island at the end of the novel. But there is all the difference in the world between a villager’s remark early in the narrative, “no man like to know he black,” and Trumper’s pride in the “Negro” race and people upon his return from the United States. Still, the novel ends with a sense of impotence and G’s awareness that, for all its hardships, a way of life has passed. This mingles in his consciousness with expectation. Lamming’s next novels, The Emigrants, 1954, Of Age and Innocence, 1958, and Season of Adventure, 1960, interpret the experience of exile and return which, through actual journeys, take the West Indian on his quest for self-definition and self-realization, more difficult and distressing than expected. As its title indicates, the first novel focuses on a group who meet with disillusionment in an England very different from that of their dreams and from which they feel excluded. This is a recurring theme in West Indian fiction which, in this novel, leads to further alienation. “I have no people,” Collis, a poet, says at the end, a comment on his personal situation and on his estrangement, as an artist, from his West Indian roots. Of Age and Innocence presents the return home of some West Indians accompanied by English friends. They are traveling to San Cristobal, an allegorical composite of islands evoking a Caribbean microcosm with its multiracial population. They become involved in a political movement led, among others, by Shepard who, as Lamming himself has pointed out, remains imprisoned and cannot reject the yoke of history (see Tiffin [1986], 263). Lamming further investigates the possibility of growth and development, as well as of reaching the older generation’s ideal of unity and freedom. Eventually, both old and young fail, and it is an altogether different way of the colonial deadlock that the author examines in Season of Adventure. The novel traces the

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recognition of her African roots by a white-looking mulatto girl, Fola, after attending a “ceremony of souls” in the tonelle of underprivileged Forest Reserve. Voodoo and steel drums are shown to express a genuine Caribbean sensibility, peasant and African, though Lamming does not romanticize Africa nor advocate a return to it. As Powell asserts, identity, personal and political freedom, are one — “freedom is what you is”(Lamming [1960], 18) — even though his own fanaticism leads to violence and murder. Lamming was clearly disillusioned with the failure of independence to bring real freedom. His hopes for a future based on a genuine understanding of, and feeling for, the past are in the peasants, not in the middle-class ambitious politician. But responsibility also lies with the artist, as a compassionate “Author’s Note” on Powell’s failed bid for freedom suggests: “I don’t think I should be far off the mark in describing myself as a peasant by birth, a colonial by education, and a traitor by instinct” (330). In that first hopeful decade, Lamming’s fiction also investigated the artist’s creativity in connection with his origins. As that decade came to an end, Lamming seemed to be poised between a not wholly satisfying achievement and further expectation. But, wisely, he stopped writing before bringing out Water with Berries, 1971, and Natives of My Person, 1972, the book usually considered his masterpiece. Sam Selvon’s novels of this period are less ambitious than Lamming’s, but, in keeping with their clearly self-delimited purpose, they strike the right synthesis between form and content. With the passing of time and the help of serious exegesis, they are seen to be much more than exotic sketches or “diverting superficialities.” These are rash judgments paradoxically based on Selvon’s ability to capture Trinidadian Creole exactly, which, by the common consent of his West Indian critics, he adapts perfectly to his characters’ personalities. So whether in Trinidad or among West Indian immigrants in London, his fictional language is a congenial correlative to his vision, even though his work as a whole is uneven. A Brighter Sun, 1952, was the first novel by an East Indian writer to concentrate on East Indian characters. His young protagonist, Tiger, is cut off from his East Indian roots in a sugarcane district and sent to a multiracial village outside Port-of-Spain after his prearranged marriage to a girl he does not know. The opening of the novel in 1940 and references to world events emphasize the secluded life in Tiger’s village while preparing for his exodus (similar to that of many peasants) toward the outskirts of the city where he starts working for the Americans. They are building a road and, through them, Tiger becomes aware of opportunities in an even larger world. Tiger is barely sixteen when he gets married, and the novel traces his awakening to manhood, to the responsibilities of marriage, fatherhood, and his new, changing environment. His half-completed house — a frequent symbol in Caribbean literature — suggests his own partial achievement for he has experienced and learned much about himself, his society, and the outside world. But in his hardwon maturity, he is also aware of the limitations imposed on his development, educational and social, by milieu and circumstances. A Brighter Sun already shows the mixture of comedy and pathos, the sympathy, humor, and wit typical of Selvon’s later tragi-comedies. Its sequel, Turn Again Tiger, 1958, shows a now creolized and more literate Tiger return to his village of origin for a season, from the planting to the harvesting of sugarcane on a plantation still run on the old, hierarchical model. His experience entails a psychological and social confrontation with the colonial legacy and gives him insight into the rural community’s aspirations to a better life. Struggle with his own relational and emotional difficulties finally enables him to see clearly where he stands with

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regard to his origins and the society to which he returns in the city. Between these two novels Selvon had written An Island is a World, 1955, which deals with the major characters’ emigration from and return to Trinidad and explores the always crucial problem of cultural identity, as well as the political tensions that preceded the discussion and temporary setting up of a West Indian Federation. This less satisfactory work was followed by the excellent short stories collected in Ways of Sunlight, 1957, and Selvon’s matchless evocation of West Indian migrants’ life in The Lonely Londoners, 1956. The Lonely Londoners deals with the London experiences of a group of “boys” from various parts of the Caribbean, their disillusion and bewilderment never quite quenching their excitement at being in the great metropolis, the historical places that used to nourish their dreams on the islands now accessible at any time. Most of them lead a precarious existence in search of jobs, rooms, and women. Apart from the narrator’s own West Indian voice, their experiences are linked and reflected upon by the honest and compassionate Moses Aloetta, their two voices merging at the end, as has been suggested by Kenneth Ramchand in his introduction to the novel (Selvon [1985], 16). The novel is experimental and wholly original in Selvon’s use of a “modified Trinidadian dialect” for both narrative and character speech, often bringing it closer to Standard English, as in the long unpunctuated section — perhaps a parody of Molly’s monologue in Ulysses? — which opens lyrically with the sense of rebirth in London in the summer and turns into a satire of its sexual mores as the narrative slips into Moses’s consciousness. He reflects on the meaning of exile, the ordinary West Indians’ capacity to hide their disorientation and fear behind laughter and bravado, their reluctance to return to the Caribbean because, in spite of all, “real” life is in London. Moses detects a paralyzing aimlessness soon assuaged by the strength of life reasserting itself. Selvon’s rendering of this duality through the perception and sensibility of the common man and its expression in his own language is a major achievement which he was to reiterate in Moses Ascending, 1975. A very different account of West Indian experience in London is to be found in E. R. Braithwaite’s novels, To Sir, with Love, 1959, Paid Servant, 1962, and A Choice of Straws, 1965. The author’s conviction that a good education, total adherence to British culture and his loyal service in the R. A. F. would win him integration when he looked for a job after the war was disappointed. His fictionalized account of his own experience as a teacher in London’s East End and as a social worker nevertheless seem to play up to British prejudice, for he does not tackle racial bias as an issue relevant to all colored people but works out a personal solution by fighting his own hatred, striving to forgive and to achieve moral superiority. While Braithwaite’s answer to race issues is inadequate on both moral and aesthetic grounds because it is narrow and unperceptive, his rendering of black British experience remains similar in content to that of other writers, and he offers a good analysis of difficulties encountered in educating underprivileged children. In a totally different register, John Hearne, one of the few novelists of his generation who stayed in the West Indies, writes mainly about the middle class and, from his second novel on, creates the imaginary island of Cayuna — similar to Lamming’s San Cristobal — strongly reminiscent of his native Jamaica. His light-skinned or white heroes stand at the opposite pole of Lamming’s with their assertive “peasant” sensibility. Whereas Lamming shows the West Indian middle class attempting to step into the shoes of the former colonizers and trying to seize power in all areas, Hearne suggests that the middle class and the landed gentry are being dispossessed

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and are inevitably threatened by the rising majority of the formerly exploited. But even more importantly, his heroes are deeply aware of the vulnerability of their own cultural inheritance and the disintegration of traditional values. Though Hearne sees this as a universal problem, the particular plight of his characters is naturally determined by the issues at the center of Jamaican life: race, color, educational aspiration and the economic structure of a society in transition. His emphasis, however, is on the moral dilemmas of his characters, and he himself has been called a moral idealist. Mark Lattimer, the politician in Voices Under the Window, 1955, tries to reconcile his privileged position with commitment to the poor and is assaulted while rescuing a child from a riotous angry crowd. He recreates his past while lying mortally wounded. In Stranger at the Gate, 1956, the private values of Carl Brandt, who represents the landed gentry, are explored in parallel and opposition to the left-wing political commitment of his friend Roy McKenzie and that of an exiled politician, Henri Etienne. In The Faces of Love, 1957, Brandt’s ideal is reasserted by his cousin Fabricus against the new forces represented by Jojo Rygin, whose dynamism, but also violence, eventually proves self-destructive. In The Autumn Equinox, 1959, political commitment is once more presented as leading to frustration and failure, the result of betrayal or treachery, while the hero of Land of the Living, 1961, is a German Jew whose family died in concentration camps and who becomes involved with Marcus Heneky, the leader of a black rebellion aborted when he is murdered by one of his group, another instance of betrayal. The idealism of Hearne’s major characters and their connection with nature have often been compared to Hemingway’s. A good storyteller and interpreter of individual psychology, Hearne is sometimes taken to task for his treatment of non-middle-class characters, although there are among them morally or spiritually superior people. As a result, and because he privileges commitment to human values, above all love and personal relationships as opposed to political commitment, he has been called an escapist. His early fiction seems to many closer to a literary tradition that other West Indian writers are trying to subvert; this may explain why his novels are underestimated and have not received the critical attention they deserve. Andrew Salkey is another middle-class Jamaican, whose first novel, A Quality of Violence, 1959, is set in rural Jamaica and recreates a devastating period of drought which actually took place in 1900, imposing further hardship on an already dispossessed population. While he avoids dealing with a major historical event, Salkey nevertheless explores the impact on his characters of undigested historical, social, and cultural conditions. The leaders of a Pocomania cult attempt to take advantage of the people’s distress. First, Dada Johnson and his assistant go through a ritual self-flagellation until they unexpectedly die. Mother Johnson later tries to assume her husband’s former power and induces the crowd to stone her to death after a ritual procession up to the hill of a symbolical calvary. There seems to be no end to self-destructiveness, meaningless sacrifice, and violence; even the children have their own rituals and are prepared to use violence to protect them. As a metaphor for the spiritual condition of the people, the drought fitfully blends with Salkey’s exploration of those African survivals which the island’s inheritance of oppression and repeated frustration turn, in times of stress, into the special “quality” of violence of the title. In The Late Emancipation of Jerry Stover, 1968, Salkey explores the cultural means by which his protagonist attempts to give his life meaning while helping a group of Rastafarians. His failure, which here, too, combines with a natural catastrophe — a fatal landslide — pessimistically exposes a void from which there seems to be no rescue either through religion or politics.

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Escape to an Autumn Pavement, 1960, and The Adventures of Catullus Kelly, 1969, deal with exile in London, though Salkey’s protagonists are middle-class and educated rather than working-class migrants as in Selvon’s fiction. From a comfortable, socially respectable position in their own society, they are reduced to taking menial jobs in England and are therefore engulfed in the underworld of black migrants from whom they also feel alienated, as Johnny Sobert does in the first of these two novels. Mainly through his adventures with white women Catullus Kelly moves in a wider social sphere. While in England, however, he fails to understand the nature of the colonizing power with which he had set out to come to terms. Back home, he realizes that the colonizing forces have simply changed faces, but he cannot enlighten his countrymen and, once more, neither culture, religion nor politics are of any help. Catullus is driven to madness, even if to a clear-sighted one. Rastafarianism developed among the urban poor in Jamaica originally as an alternative to the island’s colonial and racial hierarchies when the destitute of African descent saw a potential savior, then a god, in Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. It became increasingly popular after World War II, particularly among slum-dwellers who challenged the Eurocentric social and spiritual values of the middle class. Besides Mais and Salkey, other West Indian writers have examined Rastafarianism’s unique mixture of religious, racial, and political commitment, particularly when it was influenced by the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It may then have helped to give a new direction to Caribbean politics (see Cobham [1979], 25–26]. Nevertheless, the Black Power movement was essentially political and intent on bringing about social change “here and now,” even if it was also the source of a Black Aesthetic, whereas Rastafarianism, inspired by slavery as an historical and existential condition, is predominantly spiritual (see Mutabaruka [1992], 254) and ideologically utopian in its combined illusory identification with Ethiopia. Moreover, the most positive and eloquent expression of Rastafarianism is to be found in poetry, where, with few exceptions such as Mais’s “Brother Man,” it is frequently presented negatively in the period under scrutiny. In Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron, 1962, and J. B. Emtage’s Brown Sugar, 1966, Rastafarianism is only one among other cults, all satirized together with West Indian politics by Emtage, a white conservative who seems to see little hope in African leadership. Though Wynter’s novel is more of an intellectual than an aesthetic achievement, it is through art, in this case African wood carving, rather than through religion, that some kind of spirituality is attained. Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus, 1964, is a more ambitious novel that analyses the close link between the deprived condition of slum-dwellers and their two-fold dream of escape to Africa and spiritual salvation, so that the novel combines a realistic rendering of the horrors of slum life and of the characters’ awareness of them with their unrealistic attempts to transcend them. These are indeed doomed to failure, and for all his sympathetic rendering of Rastafarian aspirations, Patterson presents them as inherent to the hopeless, meaningless plight which the title of his novel so well conveys. The influence of existentialism is equally felt in his later novel An Absence of Ruins, 1967. The early novels of the Trinidadian Earl Lovelace also explore the possibilities of a meaningful existence through religion, though not exclusively so. In While Gods are Falling, 1965, it is indeed from God, not as a transcendental power but as a humanized figure, that the young protagonist seeks support as a personal guide and a source of help for the poor. The Schoolmaster, 1968, is a more complex novel in which the influence of religion cannot be

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dissociated from sociological and political forces. It has, in fact, been called an allegory of Caribbean history with reference to its keen analysis of manipulating and exploiting power. As in novels centering on Rastafarianism, a Christ figure recurs in Lovelace’s fiction, a metaphor both for the sacrificial experience of the dispossessed and for the artist’s search for meaning in a ruthless society. The latter is a major theme in The Obeah Man, 1964, by another Trinidadian, Ismith Khan. Zampi, the title character, is not a mere dabbler in magic and the supernatural but a highly sensitive and perceptive individual whose calling, as he sees it, makes him reflect on and attempt to remedy the sufferings and the isolation men hide under their reveling masks. The novel mostly takes place through carnival celebrations in Port-of-Spain during which Zampi looks for his girl friend Zolda whom he eventually takes away to a higher life of dedication, though sexual attraction is a major motivation for her. Whereas Lovelace reproduces in his fiction a wide variety of Trinidadian speech, Khan makes use here of the calypsonian mask and thus prefigures Lovelace’s own blend of the oral and the written in The Dragon Can’t Dance, 1979, while Khan’s exploration of the dual meaning of carnival masks and of the reality they hide foreshadows Wilson Harris’s Carnival, 1985. In Khan’s first novel, The Jumbie Bird, 1961, also coalesce major themes explored in the Caribbean in the 1960s: the continuing impact of the confrontation of cultures, the ensuing crisis of identity particularly for the individual alienated from his original milieu by education, and the experience of childhood. The milieu recreated here (Khan’s own) is that of East Indian Muslims, though major celebrations, like the festival of Hussay, have been creolized or assimilated to festivals in other religions (Hindu and Christian), a syncretism with which V. S. Naipaul also deals in The Suffrage of Elvira, 1958. The three generations represented in The Jumbie Bird illustrate three stages in the West Indian experience: a deep sense of exile, at once nourished and resisted by the hope of returning to the country of origin; the disorientation of a second generation caught between two worlds; and the difficulties of the growing boy in the third generation, torn between a cherished childhood world he must leave behind and the need to adjust to a different, more sophisticated world itself in the making. The jumbie bird of the title, repeatedly calling its “message of death,” is a symbol of isolation and death-in-life; it implicitly evokes new directions as yet undefined, but intrinsic to change. Khan’s novel is only one of a group generally called Novels of Childhood, a particularly fruitful genre in West Indian fiction. The experience of children in the Caribbean has often been viewed as a convenient metaphor for the growing and developing stage of the community at large. It does not express a patronizing outlook of the kind that sees colonials as the “children” of more sophisticated metropolitan “parents.” Rather, the child’s opening consciousness, his sense of insecurity when torn from the secluded world of childhood and forced to make choices and move on, above all his fresh and future-oriented approach to life in spite of nostalgia and the need to understand the past, all are elements whose significance can be extended to a community choosing for the first time its own destiny and direction. In Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, the young boys’ gradual understanding of the villagers’ social and political situation parallels that of the adults, as does the political maturity of one or two among them. It can also be argued that some novels concentrating on childhood and growth fictionalize a specific mode of writing. V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, 1961, and Wilson Harris’s The Eye of the Scarecrow, 1965, are cases in point. The former creates a West Indian social realism derived

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from the British tradition, while the latter deconstructs that tradition and presents the narrator’s development from childhood to maturity as a vision and a new mode of writing in the making. Michael Anthony is best known for his childhood novels and for his capacity to present from the inside and with great sensitiveness a child’s developing consciousness, his emotions and sense of self-discovery. Already in The Games Were Coming, 1963, which deals mainly with a young man’s attempt at self-realization by becoming a cyclist champion in Trinidad, Anthony creates through the imaginative musings of the champion’s brother, Dolphus, the response of a young adolescent to the outer world, his confused efforts to sort out his sensations and feelings, his response to environment and people, and his gradual understanding of major social choices and ways of life. The Year in San Fernando, 1965, circumscribes with great precision the experience of a twelve-year-old boy who leaves his village to spend a year in San Fernando, going to school and serving the old lady with whom he stays. The boy faithfully records what he sees and feels, as he is suddenly cut off from his warm home atmosphere and finds himself among indifferent strangers in an alien environment, so that the pain of growing up merges with the difficulty of adjusting to a new life while finding his bearings in a new place and taking on new responsibilities. The novel was inspired by Anthony’s own experience, and it is no small achievement that the child’s perception of events is never distorted by the adult’s memory or changed reaction to them nor by sentimentality or idealization and that the reader should be able to grasp more of naively recorded incidents than the child. As has also been pointed out, the changing canefields become “an image of the progression of the boy’s year in San Fernando” (Ramchand [1970], 215), while his growing familiarity with the city and some of its inhabitants are an initiation into life, including a delicately conveyed, pleasant, yet worrying, sensuality. In Green Days by the River, 1967, the boy protagonist, Shellie, is three years older and shown growing into adulthood when he is forced to choose between the two girls to whom he is attracted and, as a result, feels life closing in upon him. Here, too, Anthony is at his best in his accurate rendering of the boy’s emotions and exceptional relationship of mutual trust with his father. Geoffrey Drayton’s Christopher, 1959, evokes the lonely childhood of a white boy in Barbados as the old plantocracy his father represents is being superseded by the new merchant class into which his mother was born. The boy is, therefore, troubled by underlying tensions between his parents and occasionally between the white and black communities. His refuge from isolation is a close observation of nature and, above all, his warm relationship with his devoted black nurse Gip through whom he comes to a better understanding of the villagers. His despair when she dies is also despair at the passing of an era and the death of childhood and innocence. The growing white boy in Ian McDonald’s The Humming-Bird Tree, 1969, who leaves behind and even rejects his former intimate relations with colored children (an Indian boy and his sister, the protagonist’s first love), becomes much more articulate in his eventual deliberate choice of white supremacy, though for some time he is attracted by an “emerging, different, mutual love” (McDonald [1974], 162). The beauty and colorfulness of the tropical world and the boy’s perception of them are sensitively rendered, but by adhering to his parents’ conservative outlook, he puts a stop to his growth toward a broader view of human and social relations, in contrast to the changing political and social scene in Trinidad. As in other novels by white West Indians, childhood in the Caribbean is remembered as a season in paradise from which fall is inevitable. A similar nostalgia for a lost or perverted Eden-like past is expressed in novels by white

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Dominican female writers, Phyllis Shand Allfrey’s The Orchid House, 1953, and Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966, both of which convey the beauty and latent sickness of a landscape sensuously recreated and responded to. In the first of these, the narrative, told by the dying old black nurse, Lally, shows the decline of the white creole family to whom she has devoted her life; the master himself is dying from consumption and a refusal to live after his return from World War I, while his wife and a life-long spinster admirer look on passively. The three married daughters who return to the island try, each in her own way, to save the family from total disintegration and death. Only John sees salvation in cooperating with the deprived black masses, now exploited by the merchant class in connivance with the Church representatives. Jean Rhys’s masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, also deals with impoverished creoles but in the nineteenth century, just after the abolition of slavery when ruined, suddenly insecure whites faced with terror their new poverty and the menacing vengeance of hostile blacks. It is a rewriting of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, recreating from each character’s point of view Rochester’s experience in the West Indies and his first wife’s childhood and youth, her growing alienation, brief period of happiness, then rejection by Rochester, despair leading to madness, and imprisonment in an England in no way corresponding to that of her imagination. This contrast is already emphasized in Rhys’s pre-war novel, Voyage in the Dark, 1934, which also idealizes the heroine’s West Indian childhood. With this exception, Rhys’s pre-war work does not deal with the West Indies, though all of her heroines are, like Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, victimized, passive, vulnerable women. Antoinette’s husband identifies her with her island, which substantiates the interpretation of his treatment of her as “double colonization” (of both land and woman) since he married her for the dowry she received from her rich stepfather. Though short and deceptively simple, Rhys’s novel is a remarkable allegory of a major period in Caribbean history, its social climate, surface and subterranean tensions and, above all, of undigested psychological conflicts that were to erupt again violently in the twentieth century. Garth St. Omer’s first published work is a childhood novella, “Syrop,” 1964, about a young boy whose sense of responsibility for his family makes him dive for coins thrown by a sailor when he is sucked down by a ship’s propeller. This tragedy foreshadows the pessimism and fatalism of A Room on the Hill, 1968, Shades of Grey, 1968, which contains The Lights on the Hill and Another Place Another Time, and Nor Any Country, 1969. St. Omer recreates with great perceptiveness and accuracy, the social and cultural environment in his small native island of St. Lucia, where, as in Dominica, the pervading influence of the Catholic Church is the major force uniting a deprived population living on the island’s meager resources. The typical St. Omer protagonist belongs to the educated minority who managed to escape abroad to be educated. When he returns, intending to take up a responsible position in his society, he is forced on a quest to define himself and seek an outlet for his personal angst. His isolation and sense of being trapped in the midst of poverty, religious conformity, and moral paralysis (shades of Joyce, as has been pointed out), together with the need for personal choice and responsibility, often deviated from by sexual adventure and guilt, convey a sense of absurdity and impotence frequently described as existentialist, or even nihilist. Yet the protagonists’ attempts to come to terms with the past, historical and personal, the blend of “terror and pity” which determines their behavior (compassion rather than absurdity), are generally seen by West Indian critics as

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expressing a search for a new kind of humanism. St. Omer’s use of language has been compared to Lindsay Barrett’s experimentation in his single promising novel Song for Mumu, 1967, often considered as the most interesting from this point of view. Although Barrett’s vision of Caribbean society is one of frustration, poverty, and spiritual loss, there is a pervading passion, intensity, and energy in scenes of West Indian life recreated in a language largely inspired by the oral tradition. Another novel of “return” to one’s native land is Neville Dawes’s The Last Enchantment, 1960. As the hero, Ramsay Tull, approaches Jamaica, the island is viewed from different perspectives; the narrative is told from varying points of view, and his progression, both actual and imaginative, toward his native village at the top of the mountain can be seen to represent the “labyrinths of tentative selves” through which he is attempting to define himself. This novel is also a political satire, as is Peter Abrahams’s This Island Now, 1966. Abrahams, an exiled South African, had written several novels about his own country before his dystopia set on a Caribbean island. From his very first novel, he spoke in favor of a then impossible multiracial society in South Africa, but he also faced crucial racial problems when he settled permanently in Jamaica. In This Island Now, racial problems are linked with the island’s power structure and economy. As in many so-called ThirdWorld countries, the black leader’s choice of policy is inevitably dictated by racial considerations which corrupt his ideals and mar the efficiency of his plans. Eventually, the revolution which he started for his countrymen turns against them as the means he uses corrupt his ends. In Austin Clarke’s The Survivors of the Crossing, 1964, the purpose of the revolution is also political and economic but focuses on a powerless peasant, Rufus, who rebels against the white plantocracy in Barbados. Unlike Abrahams’s protagonist, who can discourse abstractedly on the dialectics of power, Rufus belongs to the laboring poor, and his revolutionary ideal has grown from reading a friend’s letters about prosperity and freedom in Canada. In Clarke’s second novel, Among Thistles and Thorns, 1965, it is a young adolescent’s pride in his race which has been fired by his father’s reminiscences about Black America. In both cases, however, the hero’s dream of emancipation or fulfillment is destroyed or cut short by an apathetic and treacherous community or by selfish unimaginative adults. Rufus is turned into an outlaw and imprisoned; Milton, the young boy, is taken away from high school. In their isolation Clarke’s heroes cannot envisage the emancipation of their racial and social group because the group itself is not prepared to act. Racial consciousness, which runs as a powerful theme through Clarke’s work, grew out of his own experience in Canada, where he has been living for the past thirty years or so; it also has been strongly influenced by African-American political movements. In his next novels, which form his Toronto trilogy, The Meeting Point, 1967, Storm of Fortune, 1973, and The Bigger Light, 1975, he explores the cultural encounter between West Indian and Canadian cultures through the experience of ordinary Barbadian immigrants, the “meeting point” of the first title suggesting conflict followed by frustration and alienation rather than multiracial solidarity. There has always been a strong element of protest in Clarke’s fiction, which blends here with a satire of the cold, inhospitable WASP community but also of the self-deceptive weakness of West Indians torn between nostalgia for their island and a desire to fit into Canadian society, although their own relaxed and exuberant behavior clashes with the more subdued and conformist Canadian life-style. Increasingly, Clarke internalizes these conflicts and

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explores their psychological effects in women as much as in men, one of the very few writers of his generation to do so. Other West Indian novelists who belong to the North American West Indian community are Frank Hercules, Rosa Guy, and Paule Marshall. Hercules’s first novel, Where the Hummingbird Flies, 1961, concentrates on inter-war Trinidad, its social and political mores, while I Want a Black Doll, 1967, deals with an interracial marriage and its tensions in New York. Paule Marshall, an artist of an altogether higher order, was born in the United States of Barbadian parents. Her first novel, Brown Girl Brownstones, 1959, may suggest a comparison with Clarke’s fiction of cultural and spiritual conflict among Barbadians in Canada, for it dramatizes the life of Barbadian immigrants in New York as they attempt to reconcile their West Indian way of being with the exigencies of success in a materialistic society. But Marshall is also a pioneer among West Indian women writers. While tracing a young girl’s growth to self-understanding through the tensions inherent in her adolescence and the Barbadian community’s life, the narrative blends major themes: feminism subtly actualized in the female characters’ behavior and development, understanding of the past, self-acceptance and, above all, a sense of belonging to a black community. A sense of community is also central to Marshall’s second novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, 1969, particularly among the peasants of Bournehills on the imaginary Bourne Island, who each year reenact, through carnival, the rebellion of an eighteenth-century slave, Cuffee Ned (also fictionalized in Wilson Harris’s Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 1977). Marshall’s novel is an exploration in depth of the significance of slavery and its lingering implications, as well as of the values of white civilization and black culture: the former are represented by white liberals who come to the island intending to improve it, but their instruments and behavior prove destructive and self-destructive; the latter offers a possibility of redemption to both individual and community. As the title indicates, both setting and people are important in themselves and for their mythical significance. The heroine’s decision at the end of the novel to go to Africa in search of her African husband and her child reenacts the union, actual and psychological, between the New World and Africa separated by millions of slaves drowned in the Atlantic on the Middle Passage. Actual return to Africa in search of one’s racial roots rather than the largely spiritual, even mythical, ideal of the Rastafarians is the major theme of two novels by Guyanese writers who have themselves lived in Africa, O. R. Dathorne’s The Scholar-Man, 1964, and Denis Williams’s Other Leopards, 1963. In the first of these Adam Questus, a Guyanese university lecturer, finds an Africa still indirectly controlled by Europeans for the benefit of a minority but does make contact with the real Africa through its destitute, suppressed people, particularly a woman who embodies their suffering yet also the hope of a genuinely new Africa. However, the element of parody and caricature in the narrative does not blend easily with its serious ideological intention, and the whole is an uneven achievement. Not so Williams’s remarkable novel, in which Lionel / Lobo Froad, another Guyanese intellectual on an archeological expedition in the Sudan wavers between two selves, the sophisticated European-trained scholar and the instinctive African. He finds no easy solution to his self-division in Africa, nor does the author try to give final answers. After attempting to exorcize Europe by striking his white boss with a screwdriver, Froad covers his naked body with clay, climbs a tree to be “free of the earth,” and thus appears to have

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moved from uncertainty to nothingness. Yet this need not be read as negatively as it often is, even if Froad’s quest for identity has failed. His last words are about the uncertain light, possibly that of a new beginning. For Williams, as for Wilson Harris, a mixed ancestry is a potential source of strength rather than the reverse. In much West Indian fiction, however, the “mulatto” condition is a source of self-hate and bitterness, as shown in Vic Reid’s The Leopard, 1958. This novel is set in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion and concentrates on the behavior of a physically and psychologically crippled boy who, with his putative white father, hunts down his actual father, an African involved in the struggle for liberation, who takes him up but fails to save him. The novel offers a deeper exploration of human relations and their tensions than the obviously symbolical triangle and their journey in the forest might suggest. Through the evocation of colonial rule and its predatory effects in Africa (and implicitly the West Indies), the narrative, in spite of improbabilities, conveys, powerfully and without complacency, the destructive forces in both man and nature, for which the leopard of the title is an apt metaphor. Race is also an all-pervasive preoccupation in the fiction of exiled Guyanese writers, particularly in their early largely autobiographical fiction. In Jan Carew’s first novel The Wild Coast, 1958, the young hero, Hector Bradshaw, has “the blood of both master and slave” in his veins. In the village of Tarlogie where he is sent to recover from illness, he not only becomes familiar with the “wild coast” of the Corentyne, but his initiation into manhood occurs through the discovery of slave history and his own slave ancestry as well as other family secrets, like his father’s living with an Amerindian woman. Carew’s treatment of race is often superficial and sometimes unconsciously prejudiced, but he renders with sensitivity the atmosphere and the moods of Guyanese landscapes, particularly in Black Midas, 1958, in which the hero’s search for El Dorado, his making a fortune and quick squandering of it, and his maiming in a second expedition serve to free him from illusory pursuits and give him a better understanding of the Guyanese poor. Life on a big sugar estate is approached from two different angles in Peter Kempadoo’s Guiana Boy, 1960, and Christopher Nicole’s White Boy, 1966. In the recreation of country (as opposed to city) life, the voiceless poor are usually presented in Guyanese fiction as getting on well together, whatever their race, linked by their difference from the white estate owner. The subject of Kempadoo’s novel is the laborer’s struggle for survival and the efforts of the hero’s father to help his son escape their deprived condition through education, whereas Nicole’s protagonist, Rupert, lives in the “big house” and later, with no higher education, gets a good job because he is white. He befriends the son of their Indian butler who hopes that they will cooperate to build a better country. But when trouble is imminent, Rupert simply leaves the country that his ancestors have ruled and helped exploit for many generations, a departure in keeping with the white man’s lack of responsibility also shown in Lamming’s fiction. By their magnitude, scope, and continuous development, V. S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris’s fictions stand out as major achievements in Caribbean literature, supported in each case by a considerable activity as essayist that has further emphasized the extreme disparity of their response to West Indian society and their conception of the novel. Naipaul began by insisting on the absence of a West Indian tradition; he has claimed that there is “no people in the true sense of the word” in the Caribbean, no achievement, and therefore no history. Yet he has made these absences into the subject of his writing which explores traumas of loss, displacement, alienation

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and failure, first as specifically West Indian, then as a generalized human condition in this century. While other writers of his generation have been at pains consciously to contribute to the growth of a West Indian sensibility through the portrayal of their society, Naipaul has used the same material with ironic detachment and non-commitment, though not without compassion, in his early novels. Frequently criticized in his native Trinidad for his unflattering image of it, one above all that is strongly skeptical of potential achievement, he is often considered elsewhere the finest living writer in English both for the quality of his prose and for what is seen as a “true,” if deeply pessimistic, view of the Third World. His vision of it certainly grew out of his Caribbean experience, and it is not the least paradox of his work in the 1950s and 1960s that the never wholly controlled insecurity, fear, and hysteria one detects in it make him perhaps more subtly West Indian than his fellow writers. The Mystic Masseur, 1957, The Suffrage of Elvira, 1958, and Miguel Street, 1959, (the latter is actually his first written work) all recreate the Trinidad of Naipaul’s boyhood and youth up to the early 1950s when the island was on the verge of change and opportunists were quick to seize their chance of climbing to wealth and fame by exploiting the ignorance and superstition of their compatriots. When the narrator in The Mystic Masseur writes that the history of Ganesh Ramsumair (later G. Ramsay Muir, M. B. E.) is “the history of our times,” he means that his protagonist’s success and climb from failed teacher to “mystic” masseur to politician is in keeping with the anarchic, second-rate, “mimic” world he (Ganesh) comes to represent, just as in the second novel Harbans, the lucky candidate in a farcical election campaign, exemplifies the gap between genuine democratic practice and the corruption Naipaul dramatizes. The effect of his satire here as in the more gentle, tragi-comic sketches of Miguel Street arises from the discrepancy between the ideal to which his characters aspire (like “B. Wordsworth”) and the utter futility of their dreams and results (particularly in the sketches,) in a rare blend of humor and pathos, often reminiscent of Selvon. The island world in this early fiction is uniquely West Indian, not least through the narrator’s ear for local speech and wit (see Ramchand [1970] and Thieme [1987]) and his eye for the eccentric detail, though the confusion and absence of values, the rootlessness and namelessness of both people and “thing,” foreshadow the gloom of the later fiction. A House for Mr Biswas, 1961, is usually seen as Naipaul’s masterpiece, a New World epic that traces its memorable hero’s life-journey as sign-painter, shopkeeper, and journalist toward a precarious achievement while recording the process of assimilation of the closed East Indian community into which the author was born and the awakening of Trinidad from colonial apathy partly through education and ambition. The novel’s panoramic multi-generational scope, the title’s emphasis on the protagonist’s individuality and the house (actually a series of bleak houses) as a metaphor for personal achievement link it with the nineteenth-century English novels of the “great tradition.” But though it can hardly be doubted that Naipaul had the English model in mind, he subverts it by once more showing the gap between inaccessible dream and partial failure, which account for the perhaps unintentional irony at the heart of this novel. Mr. Biswas, however, is the first of Naipaul’s characters to reach a clear understanding of his own predicament and of the void that the author saw as inherent in West Indian society. Biswas has been described as everyman, clown, rebel, artist, and he is indeed all these, full of contradictions and presented with a mixture of impatience with his inadequacies and affectionate admiration for his courage and resilience (he is a fictionalization of Naipaul’s father Seepersad), his never

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faltering determination to be free and self-sufficient, symbolical of the colonial struggle for independence. With its share of satirical and comic episodes, its large set of acutely grasped secondary characters, its mythical and allegorical overtones (see Thieme [1984]), its analysis of a society in the making, though at the cost of receding Indian values, A House for Mr Biswas is also a masterpiece of psychological realism, whose uncertainties give it the humane dimension that Naipaul’s later fiction often lacks. After Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, 1963, which extends to a British protagonist in London, Naipaul’s vision of alienation and disillusionment, The Mimic Men, 1967, initiated a new narrative method while confirming his perception of West Indian society as nihilistic, uncreative and, as the title indicates, purely imitative. Together with the pervasive use of metaphors such as houses, trees, shipwreck, its narrative technique and point of view make it a more complex novel than anything Naipaul had written before. Ralph Singh, the first-person narrator, travels in memory from his student days and marriage in England back to his childhood and early education in Isabella, a barely disguised Trinidad, through his political career on his native island, then final dismissal and exile in London, a circular journey marked at all points in time and space by a deep sense of displacement both physical and psychological. In essence, the subject has much in common with The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira, though it is treated here in a serious mode and shows West Indian politicians falling back on mimicry, corruption, and racial prejudice to palliate their total powerlessness. Although Singh initially sees himself as a twentieth-century Gibbon writing about the dissolution of empires and their aftereffects (actually Naipaul’s subject), his vision is too narrow to encompass more than his personal history, which is nevertheless representative of the island’s predicament. The reader’s difficulty lies in correctly assessing the nature of Singh’s self-reflexiveness which has even been read as an allegory of the writing process itself. Whether he is self-deceived throughout (see Thieme [1985]) or whether Singh, the narrator, must be distinguished from his former self (see Ramraj [1971]) remains a point of controversy. In light of Naipaul’s later work and of the hollowness and despair underlying the comedy in A Flag on the Island, short stories published in the same year as The Mimic Men, one is tempted to believe in Singh’s total self-deception and unredeemable selfishness. It would imply, then, that Naipaul’s satire of both individual and society is totally unrelieved, while the human, if not the moral, values in the name of which such satire is wielded are not clear. Unlike Naipaul, who sees Western myths as alien and irrelevant to the Caribbean because incompatible with its unheroic past, Wilson Harris sees them as the legacy of a common human ancestry and, from his earliest to his latest fiction, has recreated many of them through local personae in a Caribbean setting. His first novel Palace of the Peacock, 1960, significantly fictionalizes the myth of El Dorado, both West Indian and European, using it as a metaphor for the conquest of the New World and the meeting between Europeans and dispossessed Amerindians. Its plot is at once simple and terrifying in its reconstruction of Guyana’s past. The time is not specified since it is clearly a symbolic reenactment of all conquering expeditions into the heartland of Guyana. Through the main character, Donne, Harris evokes at once Renaissance ambition and the poet’s imagination — what Derek Walcott, in his poem “Ruins of a Great House” refers to as “ancestral murderers and poets” (Walcott [1962], 45) — which could have produced a new conception of man and society. Donne leads a multiracial crew into the interior

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in order to get cheap labor for his plantation and pursues Amerindians on a dangerous river through the jungle. Most of the crew die, and only Donne, with two of his companions, reaches the waterfall above which his mistress and her folk are thought to have taken refuge. In the rest of the narrative, the realistic and historical sources of the plot are transformed into a visionary sequence in which Donne becomes at last fully aware of the hell he has built. The crew and the folk are momentarily united in the “palace of the peacock,” and an alternative is offered to historical disaster and enmity through the agency of consciousness and the imagination. The regeneration of the imagination is indeed a major theme in this as in all of Harris’s novels. By breaking the mould of ingrained prejudice and stasis and in spite of, or rather through, the resulting void, Harris suggests that the Caribbean catastrophic past offers a largely neglected potential for reconciliation and development and that the emergence of multiracial societies could have led, and may still lead, to cross-culturalism. Understandably, then, he rejects the notion of a pure, or distinct, West Indian identity as the expression of a partial, and limited, perception of both individual and community. It has sometimes been wrongly suggested that Harris’s visionary writing seeks to transcend history, to escape or reject it. Actually, all his novels are steeped in history, past and present, though he does indeed show that it need not be deterministic. The novels he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s indirectly recreate the history of Guyana: its origins and the nature of its various communities in his first four novels The Guyana Quartet; the economic depression of the 1920s and the 1948 Guyana strike in The Eye of the Scarecrow, 1965; a psychological reenactment of the “void” that resulted from the Middle Passage in The Waiting Room, 1967; and the traumas of history in individuals and peoples in Tumatumari, 1968, a reinterpretation that covers the history of one family, and of Guyana, from the end of World War I to the late 1960s and is presented as an “epic of ancestors” (Harris [1968], 133). Harris does not present historical events as such but their consequences or effects as they are played out in the individual soul and affect it, providing what he calls a “drama of consciousness” (Harris [1967], 34). His fiction differs from much Caribbean writing through his rejection of realism which, in his view, attempts to “persuade” the reader that the selected elements it presents — historical and social situations, manners, fashionable conventions, and even moral attitudes — belong to an inevitable order and condition. His own early fiction seeks to retrieve the lost, or eclipsed, elements of community, for the land is alive with the spirit of all its former inhabitants and, by an act of memory, the narrator resurrects their elusive presence in order to initiate a dialogue between the broken parts of the country’s heritage and, at a deeper level, between the divided selves that people his unconscious. Because Harris’s narratives develop on several levels and linear time is often disrupted, they create disorientation and uncertainty. But these are positive prerequisites to the transformation of the characters’ apprehension of events. Most of Harris’s fictions follow a pattern of dislocation and reconstruction though, again, not in a linear process but in a canvas of partial “crumblings” interwoven with partial revisions. His in-depth exploration of the characters’ psyche, the fact that he privileges the frail clues that occasionally erupt from their unconscious over what he sees as the illusory objectivity of appearances, and the importance he gives to intuition and the “subjective imagination,” as opposed to reason, also alter traditional characterization and modify plot. Thus in The Far Journey of Oudin, 1961, Beti, an illiterate East Indian

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woman, twice defeats the powerful money-lender Ram, with a thirteen years’ interval between the two occasions, through her intuitive grasp of his intentions and the way he makes use of Oudin, her husband. After the latter’s death, she swallows the piece of paper, or “covenant,” by which Oudin has sold his as yet unborn son to the impotent Ram. In The Whole Armour, 1962, Christo’s visionary, “shamanic” encounter in the forest with a group of flying Amerindians makes him see his coming execution for a crime he has not committed as a reenactment of their dismemberment and enables him to visualize a potential reassembly of genuine community. In The Secret Ladder, 1963, Fenwick, a surveyor, meets Poseidon, the frail leader of descendants of runaway slaves, in the forest, and this meeting enables him to envision a new kind of community through the retrieval of lost antecedents. In each case, the self-sufficient character of traditional fiction allows the rigid limits of the self to dissolve to make way for a dialogue with others, dead and living. It is through imaginative sympathy with the “unwritten lives” of the defeated and dispossessed and exploration of their “ground of loss” that the consequences of history can be altered. Such alteration and “revision” are conveyed through language that Harris frees from its conventional usage, or fixed meaning, and, above all, through “convertible” images and metaphors. In Palace of the Peacock, for example, the sun is at first a symbol of destructive willpower but splinters into fragments when Donne’s hard personality breaks to make way for a new consciousness. The “waiting room” is another protean metaphor, at first “the convertible void of the waiting room,” that is, the heroine’s consciousness in which she indicts her lover, but at the end of the novel it is a cavern and a womb, still her consciousness, in which her lover achieves vision. In Tumatumari a Gorgon’s head, the “Gorgon of history,” becomes “unprejudiced flesh and blood” (Harris [1968], 156). Harris’s language constantly revises itself, just as, to use his own words, his fiction “seeks to consume its own biases” (Harris [1985-b], 127) so that his narratives are revisionary process, or what he would later call “infinite rehearsal” (Harris [1987], 1), a process already present in Palace of the Peacock in the different reenactments of Donne’s death. In The Eye of the Scarecrow, his first consciously self-reflexive novel, the I-narrator describes as follows the creative process in which he is involved: “It was to prove the re-living of all my life again and again as if I were a ghost returning to the same place (which was always different), shoring up different ruins (which were always the same)” (Harris [1965], 25). This statement actually describes Harris’s own approach to experience, his repetitive return from different perspectives to past experience, whether individual, social, or historical, in order to detect in the past unsuspected avenues to fulfillment, or neglected opportunities of reconciliation between adversarial characters or groups. As suggested above, no human situation, no state of mind, is final, just as, however absolute or fixed ideals may seem, they are but partial apprehensions of an ever-receding, unattainable wholeness. To participate in the process of “rehearsal” and try to understand the characters’ real motivations, to discover hidden possibilities of transforming evil into saving deeds, is also to take part in what Harris has more recently called “the unfinished genesis of this imagination” (Harris [1992]). As he was to imply in his Carnival Trilogy, 1985, 1987, and 1990, such a concept of the imagination as both seat and source of creativity, or “womb of space” (Harris [1983]), requires a philosophical and intellectual revolution akin to the scientific revolution that modified our perception of the universe in the twentieth century (see Maes-Jelinek [1991], 236). But this dynamic conception of the imagination

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was already perceptible in the novels of the early period, which are all open-ended instalments of an unfinished imaginative journey and conclude either with an evanescent vision, as Palace of the Peacock does, with a continued exploration, as in Heartland, 1964, or with a process of transformation, like the “translation of the Gorgon of history” at the end of Tumatumari (Harris [1968], 155). This emphasis on the need for constant revision is the most original and fruitful response, at once aesthetic, philosophical, and political, to have originated in the West Indies. It influenced many younger writers, such as Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips, as is obvious in the prominence they both give in their writing to memory and cross-culturalism.

References Birbalsingh, Frank. 1988. Passion and Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature. London: Hansib Publications. Cobham, Rhonda. 1979. The Background. West Indian Literature. Ed. by Bruce King, 9–29. London: Macmillan. De Boissiere, Ralph. 1982. On Writing a Novel. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. XVII.1: 5–12. Gilkes, Michael. 1975. Wilson Harris and the Caribbean Novel. London: Longman. ———. 1981. The West Indian Novel. Boston: Twayne. Harris, Wilson. 1964. Heartland. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1965. The Eye of the Scarecrow. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1967. Tradition, the Writer and Society. London: New Beacon. ———. 1968. Tumatumari. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1982. Metaphor and Myth. Myth and Metaphor. Ed. by Robert Sellick, 1–14. Adelaide: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English. ———. 1983. The Womb of Space. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press. ———. 1985-a. Adversarial Contexts and Creativity. New Left Review. 154: 124–28. ———. 1985-b. Carnival. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1987. The Infinite Rehearsal. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1990. The Four Banks of the River of Space. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1992. The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. XXVII.1: 13–25. James, Louis, ed. 1968. The Islands in Between. London: Oxford University Press. King, Bruce, ed. [1979]. 1995; rev. ed. West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan. ———. 1989. The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World. London: Macmillan. Lamming, George. 1960-a. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. ———. 1960-b. Season of Adventure. London: Michael Joseph. Maes-Jelinek, Hena. 1982. Wilson Harris. Boston: Twayne. ———. 1992. “Unfinished Genesis”: The Four Banks of the River of Space. The Uncompromising Imagination. Ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek. Aarhus: Dangaroo Press. Mais, Roger. 1970. The Hills Were Joyful Together. London: Jonathan Cape. Mutabaruka. 1992. Interview by Gerhard Dilger: Only a Revolution Can Bring about a Solution. US / THEM. Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures. Ed. by Gordon Collier, 249–55. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi. Ramchand, Kenneth. 1970. The West Indian Novel and its Background. London: Heinemann. Ramraj, Victor. 1971. V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. Common Wealth. Ed. by Anna Rutherford, 125–34. Aarhus: Akademisk Boghandel. Selvon, Sam. 1985. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman. Thieme, John. 1984. An Introduction to A House for Mr. Biswas. A Sense of Place: Essays in Post-Colonial Literature. Ed. by Britta Olinder, 151–61. Göteborg: The English Department, Göteborg University. ———. 1985. The Mimic Men: A Critical View. London: Collins and the British Council.

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———. 1987. The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction. Aarhus and London: Dangaroo Press and Hansib. Tiffin, Helen, ed. n.d. New Literature Review 7. Literature in the English-Speaking Caribbean. Wollogolong, Australia: Department of English, University of Wollogolong. ———. 1986. The Novels of George Lamming: Finding a Language for Post-Colonial Fiction. Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction. Ed. by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim. 253–74. München: Max Hueber Verlag. Walcott, Derek. 1962. In a Green Night. London: Jonathan Cape.

The Novel since 1970 HENA MAES-JELINEK AND BÉNÉDICTE LEDENT

University of Liège

Since 1970, Caribbean fiction in English has continued to evolve by producing more original talents and imposing itself on the international scene as one of the most innovative and diversified achievements to have emerged from the postcolonial world. Its originality lies partly in its impressively wide range of language forms from classical traditional prose to the highly metaphorical through a remarkable diversity of regional dialects and idiosyncratic blendings of voices and oral rhythms into literary prose. It lies also in the writers’ vision of the West Indian experience in the Caribbean itself or in exile which, either in its regional multiracial and multicultural makeup or in a widespread displacement to North America and Britain, is representative of a largely universal condition. It must be noted, however, that whatever society they have chosen to live in, West Indian novelists have generally resisted the temptation of international postmodernism, no doubt stimulated by the need to envision a promising future for their people rather than adhere to the non-referential world view of “First” and “Second” World Western writers. In addition, the social and political unrest of the early seventies in the Caribbean was an incentive to many to investigate the sources of conflict and the possibilities of harmonious living in the islands and in Guyana: while exile remained a pervasive theme, much fiction from the seventies onward deals with the advisability of returning to the Caribbean in order to contribute to the building of a new society. Many contemporary West Indian writers, however, have been preoccupied with the creation, or the expression, of a Caribbean consciousness and of a specifically Caribbean aesthetics, even while they sometimes denied such a possibility, as is the case with the Naipaul brothers and their nephew Neil Bissoondath. Other writers, namely Earl Lovelace and Michael Anthony, have sought the essence of a genuine Caribbean culture in the folk tradition, especially carnival,. Apart from Jean Rhys, all novelists in the first period of Caribbean fiction were male writers, whose female characters were generally of secondary importance, a help or hindrance to the men’s self-fulfilment but very seldom the center of consciousness. Exceptions are Wilson Harris’s The Waiting Room, 1967, and Tumatumari, 1968, or, in a more limited way, the earlier Far Journey of Oudin, 1961, and The Whole Armour, 1962. It was only in the late 1980s and early 1990s that Caryl Phillips began to portray female characters in depth. In the meantime, however, female novelists had appeared on the literary scene who, for the first time, recreated the Caribbean woman’s experience from the inside. It even seemed, for a while, that they were altogether taking over from male novelists among whom no new major figure appeared for some time until a much younger generation emerged with Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, and David Dabydeen, together with the slightly older Bissoondath and Lawrence Scott. As one looks back over the period, then, one discerns three major groups of writers — the older and the younger generations of male writers and the women writers — dispersed over the anglophone Caribbean,

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Britain, Canada, and the United States, where they have been making a major contribution to the novel in English especially through language and form. Wilson Harris, the senior writer of the older generation, has also been the most prolific, a novelist of genius in his endlessly renewed exploration of the psychical resources of deprived people(s) in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the postcolonial world and his investigation of a possible conciliation between so-called “primitive” mythical thought and Western rationalism, as well as between art and science. In his efforts to free the contemporary mind from one-track thinking and limited perceptions, he has given his narratives the fluidity of musical movements, revised some of their canvases as a literary “painter” would and brought to light parallels between Amerindian world perceptions and quantum physics. Significantly, Anselm, the protagonist of The Four Banks of the River of Space, 1990, is a Guyanese “engineer, sculptor, painter, architect, composer” (Harris [1990], x), the representative of a new humanism on the margins of civilization. In addition, although self-reflexiveness was present in various forms in Harris’s early fiction, notably in The Eye of the Scarecrow, 1965, The Waiting Room, and Tumatumari, he uses it increasingly as a stimulus to imaginative revival in both fiction and life. Ascent to Omai, 1970, can be considered as the last instalment of Harris’s second cycle of novels but is also a landmark in his work-in-progress and announces a new cycle of fictions bringing together in quintessential form aspects of narrative and imaginative concepts which he was to develop subsequently. Victor, the protagonist, explores the heartland (Omai is a chasm and a mountain) in search of his father, Adam, who disappeared after serving a sentence for setting fire to the factory in which he was working, one more example of the lost father in Harris’s work and, until recently, in Caribbean society. Superimposed on Victor’s ascent to Omai is the reconstruction of his father’s trial which also becomes the “trial” and “gestation” of Victor’s soul (Harris [1970], 43) and thus adumbrates what the narrator in Jonestown, 1996, calls “self-confessional, self-judgmental art” (Harris [1996], 161). The trial Victor reenacts in his writing (novel and play) is also that of a technological civilization in which, despite “centuries of depression, the decimation of Aboriginal and conquered peoples,” he discovers “a significant buried awareness of community” (Harris [1970], 43, 124). One of the narrative’s most stunning features is the conciseness with which it, as “novel-history” (52), combines the geological and historical past of the land, still branded with the “stigmata of the void” and the obsessive search for El Dorado, its social history and also the individual experience of Adam and Victor. Through a series of metaphors, at first apparently unconnected, then gradually relating different layers and areas of meaning, Harris shows experience to be rooted in sensations whose retrieval by memory opens the way to an understanding formulated in abstract terms. At the same time, by making Victor a vessel, or “vicar,” for the “other silent voices” and “mute sensations” ignored before, Harris reasserts his faith, already expressed in The Eye of the Scarecrow, in language as both “vision of consciousness” (78) and an equation of experience, itself later called “text of reality” (Harris [1990-c], 176), thus positing the referentiality of language. Before his next novel, Black Marsden, 1972, Harris published two volumes of stories or novellas, The Sleepers of Roraima, 1970, and The Age of the Rainmakers, 1971, all reinterpretations of Amerindian myths, vestiges of legend, and historical incidents in postconquest Guyana. They bring to light the distinction Harris makes between historiography as largely descriptive and static and myth as carrier of a seed of renewal or transformation. These stories / novellas are

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also an essential link between the early and the later fiction as illustrations of Harris’s concept of cross-culturalism, rooted in the unconscious depths of the psyche. The best example is to be found in “Yurokon” which fictionalizes the effect on the last surviving Carib child of his ancestors’ bone-flute, the instrument they carved from the bones of the Spanish enemies they cannibalized in order to enter their mind and intuit the kind of attack they might be subjected to. The Caribs also saw in the bone-flute the very origin of music. It was, therefore, “the seed of an intimate revelation … of mutual spaces they shared with the enemy,” long ignored because of the stigma of cannibalism. The bone-flute metaphor, in which destruction (cannibalism) and creation (music) come together, expresses Harris’s conviction that “adversarial contexts,” such as the encounter of inimical cultures can generate creativity. This does not mean that Harris envisages an actual rebirth of the Caribs, but, rather, the rebirth of an eclipsed native consciousness, itself part of a collective or universal unconscious. Though Harris’s fiction is always informed by a movement towards otherness, he is also careful to show that the deprived other can become tyrannical in turn. This is a major theme in Black Marsden which takes place largely in Edinburgh but, like all subsequent novels, bridges continents. The bridge metaphor symbolizes the cross-culturalism that informs these novels as the characters travel, actually or imaginatively, from the U. K. to the Americas or India, as in The Angel at the Gate, 1982. It is also a gateway to and from the unconscious, as well as to and from the underworld of the dead or of eclipsed people(s). In Black Marsden, Clive Goodrich comes upon the “half-frozen spectre” of Doctor Black Marsden in the ruined Dunfermline Abbey and invites him to stay in his house. Marsden, a clown, a conjurer and a hypnotist, yet also a guide, brings along the beautiful Jennifer Gordon and introduces Goodrich to his other “agents” who all exist in their own right as well as being part of Goodrich’s personality and the “tabula rasa” theater with himself. From Black Marsden onward, Harris called his novels “comedies,” either in subtitles or in the narrative: “tabula rasa comedy”; “comedy of light”; “comedy of divinity”; or “divine comedy of existence.” All differ in character and tone, Carnival, 1985, coming closest to Dante’s concept of comedy as a journey of initiation while actually revising it, whereas Black Marsden features comic elements such as incongruity, metamorphosis, and black humor. It uses the comic as “an instrument of subversion and interrogation” but is also directed “towards the writing itself … as if Harris [wanted to prevent his style from] becoming an ‘inevitable pattern’
” (McWatt [1991], 152–54). Black Marsden combines elements of (self-)mockery with a serious analysis of the social mechanisms that endanger the very existence of civilization. Harris’s writing in this phase offers a superb rendering of the spirit of specific places, whether Edinburgh, Mexico in Companions of the Day and Night, 1975, or London in DaSilva DaSilva’s Cultivated Wilderness, 1977, and The Tree of the Sun, 1978. In Genesis of the Clowns, published second in one volume with DaSilva though written before it, the symbolically named Frank Wellington travels back in memory to Guyana but encompasses the empire as he enters into a dialogue with those he had exploited in the past: “I began to be plagued by an interior sun … looking back now from the Thames to the Abary I feel myself riveted into a breathless tapestry of revolving continents, landscapes and rivers I once possessed that may have started then…. As though the wheel of empire began to turn anew when for many it had already stopped, began to return to me as a moving threshold of consciousness” (Harris [1977-b], 86). In DaSilva DaSilva, the “Commonwealth paintings” of the eponymous protagonist dissolve the

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uniform of empire, making possible the displacement and mutation of the “fixed boundaries” of a central culture and tradition. In all these novels, Harris substantialized his concept of “the novel as painting” ([1981], 86). In Companions, a sequel to Black Marsden, Goodrich edits the diaries, paintings, and sculptures of Nameless who has “fallen” through many layers of vestiges in Mexico and discovered “unsuspected corridors, underseas, underskies of creation” (Harris [1975], 32) spanning centuries and civilizations. In DaSilva DaSilva, the central character, reborn from Palace of the Peacock, 1960, and Heartland, 1964, prepares his canvases for an exhibition and is spurred on to a profound “revision” of these paintings and the experiences they evoke. The increased sensuousness in these narratives in no way impairs the double vision that Harris’s highly poetic prose creates, the real world through which hidden depths are perceived, “transparent densities of blues and greens, white fire, edges of orchestrated delicacy touched by unfathomable peace … as if to alert him to the reality of the radiant city within every city, the reality of the genie’s gift, the genie’s potential reconstruction” (Harris [1977], 63). In The Tree of the Sun, the DaSilvas come across an unfinished book and letters, which the former tenants of their flat secretly wrote to each other but never sent. DaSilva’s editing of this material is the subject both of the novel and of his paintings. Not only does he bring the dead to life; they bring him to life in the new dialogue he initiates between them. In this dialogue through art across time and space, between the living and the dead, lies the way to “the resurrection of the self,” a theme further developed in the following novels. In The Angel at the Gate, art also “create[s] a subtle, therapeutic noman’s land or accent upon cross-cultural humanspace” (Harris [1982], 23). One must note, however, that the role of art is never romanticized as it first confronts the protagonists with the “furies” that keep ravaging the world. Harris’s Carnival Trilogy, Carnival, 1985, The Infinite Rehearsal, 1987, and The Four Banks of the River of Space, 1990, foregrounds the dialogue between author / “editor” and creative protagonist initiated in the previous novels. Carnival is Harris’s “rewriting” of Dante’s Divine Comedy, his exploration through the I-narrator, Jonathan Weyl, of the “Inferno and Purgatory of the twentieth-century world” (Harris [1985], 15). Weyl’s Virgil is Everyman Masters who has developed from Marsden, the spiritual but sometimes demonic guide in the earlier cycle of novels. Masters’s name encompasses both the average man and the ruler and suggests that each contains the other potentially. A plantation overseer in his first life in New Forest (probably Guyana), Masters becomes an exploited everyman in what may be called his second life, working with other West Indians in a London factory. “Carnival,” another Harrisian protean metaphor, involves a penetration of masks towards a deeper reality, not Truth but many partial truths. It is also a dynamic, multivalent concept evoking the “carnival of history” and a metaphysical “divine comedy of existence,” which shows the absolute categories of Dante’s time — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — to have become inadequate and transformed into fluid, overlapping states. The Carnival Trilogy also revises the traditional forms of allegory, comedy, tragedy, and epic as each novel revises a masterpiece of Western literature, freeing it from the historical / social / psychological frame and ideology of a given period. That ideals of greatness and an incorrigible desire for the infinite led to the conquest of the world and its division into higher and lower cultures is further shown in The Infinite Rehearsal (a phrase that epitomizes Harris’s writing process and view of existence), “a spiritual biography” that sifts “unreliable fact

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from true play” as the narrator, Robin Redbreast Glass, “rewrites” Goethe’s Faust, now associated with the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl, the fabled plumed serpent, and conceives a creative process that enables Glass to envisage the liberation of the world from its tyrannies. In The Four Banks of the River of Space and his next two novels, Harris’s attempt to reconcile art and science takes the form of a symbiosis between quantum physics (which supposes a multiple, relational conception of reality) and a pre-Columbian perception of the universe, particularly the Mayan conception of time with its blending of past, present, and future. Four Banks “rewrites” The Odyssey with English and Guyanese characters. It disrupts and reverses the finality of Ulysses’s deeds, especially his implacable vengefulness which, when imitated in modern technological societies, is a threat to the very existence of humanity. In the protagonist Anselm’s “book of dreams,” his personality is fragmented into a number of actors who share the burden of his strong personality and become partial selves subject to conversion. Resurrection at Sorrow Hill, 1993, is also an all-embracing epic in Harris’s sense of the word. Most characters are inmates in the Sorrow Hill “Asylum for the Greats”; in their schizophrenic dividedness, they claim to be famous historical figures, such as Montezuma, Leonardo, and Socrates. Their psychological and spiritual breakdown reflects major contemporary crises, while historical disasters reverberate in the present-day conflicts fired by intense individual emotions and are therefore major sources of violence. Shifts between past and present show the need to face the legacies of the past that still weigh on the characters’ psyche but also point to their capacity to transfigure their experience into the creative potential inherent in the disruptive wounds of history. The variations on metaphors of breaking and reconstituting — the very process of life — are so many manifestations of the resurrection as transformation from one mode of sensibility to another. Harris’s faith in the power of the imagination to bring about a renaissance of meaning and value is again actualized in his latest novel, Jonestown, 1996, which evokes an actual tragedy in the Guyanese interior where the Reverend Jim Jones, the American leader of the People’s Temple sect, forced hundreds of his followers, including 276 children, either to drink cyanide soup or be shot on the spot. This massacre is presented as part of a large-scale historical and moral context, a manifestation of an irrational will to destroy, epitomizing other twentiethcentury ideological holocausts and genocides, all of them effects of moral disease, whether unbridled ambition, the false spirituality of charismatic leaders, or the perversion of originally idealistic ends. The destruction of the settlement also suscitates questions about the enigmatic disappearance of cities, settlements, and peoples in Central and South America before and after the conquest. The focus on the Maya, their culture, knowledge of mathematics and astronomy as well as their myths, evokes a powerful elusive presence reminiscent of the folk in Palace of the Peacock, while the imagery partly inspired by Mayan art sustains the narrative movement towards a synthesis between mythic and discursive thought. In Harris’s ever deeper exploration of the unconscious, archetypal characters, the deepest embodiment of an ontology he has developed since Palace of the Peacock, illustrate the contradictory forces that humanity should face and learn to balance. Harris also denounces the devastatingly repetitive motivations by which societies keep operating. But only the individual consciousness of the protagonist, here Francisco Bone, an imagined former acolyte of Jones’s, can contemplate repentance, a healing compassion and love. In Harris’s latest fiction philosophical and self-reflexive dialogues on the

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relation between morality and creativity are woven into the fabric of “convertible imageries” and rich intertextuality through which he presents a vision inspired by the colonial and postcolonial experience but nevertheless stubbornly hopeful. In contradistinction to Harris, V. S. Naipaul, the other major figure in West Indian fiction, has repeatedly expressed his skepticism about the form of the novel even while continuing to write fiction after 1970. In an early essay on “Conrad’s Darkness,” Naipaul stated that “the novel as a form no longer carries conviction … there is a great confusion in the minds of readers and writers about the purpose of the novel” ([1980], 217–18), while twenty years and four novels later he wrote that “the novel has done its work” ([1994-b], 3). A 1985 remark, “I … began to feel that those of us who had come after [the great nineteenth century work] were simply borrowing the form and pouring our own experiences into it” (Naipaul [1985], 5), seems curiously similar, at first, to Wilson Harris’s objection to the Caribbean writers’ use of the nineteenth-century model of the novel (see Harris [1967]). But whereas Harris, from his first published work of fiction on, discards the realistic mode of the English tradition, Naipaul’s narratives have, if anything, become more realistic. He avowedly presents actual events or facts which he then analyzes, an analysis that turns into a meditation on life and the human condition in his last two novels. Naipaul’s own comments evince an obsession with “delivering the truth” ([1994-b], 3). This phrase recurs insistently in all his interviews, he means by it both factual accuracy and the more imaginative truth that facts reveal. Significantly, both Guerillas, 1975, and A Bend in the River, 1979, were preceded by essays on the same subject, respectively by “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” and by “A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa” (both reprinted in The Return of Eva Peron, 1980). Unlike the narratives in his two later novels, The Enigma of Arrival, 1987, and A Way in the World, 1994, historical events in both Trinidad and Zaïre are woven into an imaginary plot in Guerillas and A Bend in the River. Guerillas describes the involvement of two white liberals, a man called Roche and his mistress Jane, with Jimmie Ahmed, a character based on the real Michael de Freitas, alias Abdul Malik or Michael X, a Black Power militant who had founded an agricultural commune upon returning to Trinidad from England, took part in the 1970 uprising on the island, and was later hanged for murder. All the characters in Guerillas turn out to be powerless shams, the Third World idealists just as much as the self-deceived white liberals; real power lies in the hands of American Bauxite companies and other financial powers rooted in the slave past. Naipaul commented that, in this period of writing, he was no longer content to represent the world but had begun to analyze it (see Naipaul [1971], 62). What his critical analysis brings to light is the utter futility of enterprise in what he sees as second-rate societies. One character seems to sum up Naipaul’s view when he states that “The setting may change, but no one will make a fresh start or do anything new” ([1980], 149). In this, as in most of Naipaul’s fiction, one sees “a community without rules” and gets a “feeling of a dissolving world” (Naipaul [1975], 103, 74). An incapacity to think or act rationally, to establish some kind of order, and the underlying fear of inevitable failure that feeds a sense of frustration and resentment against the very white liberals who have sympathized without understanding the real situation, all combine to provoke incredible violence. Jane is sodomized by Jimmie, hacked to pieces by one of his acolytes and buried in a pit; all evidence of her presence in Trinidad is erased by a cowardly Roche who destroys her

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papers and runs away, his last words to Jimmie being “We are leaving you alone” (253). Apart from its symbolic political meaning, the fate meted out to Jane reveals a disturbing recurring feature in Naipaul’s treatment of women, white women in particular, as when Salim, the protagonist of A Bend in the River, breaks with his mistress, another white liberal; he beats her black and blue, then spits between her legs. Such a scene arouses the reader’s revulsion both from the scene and from the protagonist; it is not a mere side issue, for the characters involved are all equally contemptible and show in personal relationships the same self-interest and disregard for the other human person as they do in their public roles. Admittedly, Salim, who has traveled from East Africa and settled in Zaïre as a shopkeeper, is more observer than participant, in spite of some painful experiences. He finally escapes to London, among the last to leave just before a civil war and the accumulated rage of the Africans further devastate a country already ravaged by anarchy since the end of the colonial rule, bled by the dictator and the foreign powers that keep him in place. Naipaul’s clear-sighted and unfortunately prophetic critique of Mobutu’s Zaïre may well make this his best novel. But as Salman Rushdie was to point out in a review of The Enigma of Arrival, 1987, Naipaul describes “life without love” ([1987], 13), a striking feature in Naipaul’s fiction of the last twenty-five years apart from the affection for his family indirectly expressed in the last part of Enigma. It may well be that the representation of an utterly inefficient, disorderly, and violent Third World in the aftermath of colonization is inspired by compassion (see Thorpe [1976], 39), though some readers and critics have appreciated this differently. The values that clearly underlie Naipaul’s satire of those incapable of putting them into practice are order and the form of the civilization and culture of a European tradition sustained by the self-assured authority of its antiquity. Naipaul’s attachment to these values is illustrated in his intertextual use in his fiction of the “great tradition” of the English novel (see Thieme [1987]). He was clearly hoping to enjoy the way of life that he thought coterminous with this European culture when he sought refuge in a Wiltshire cottage where “he was given a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller” (Naipaul [1987], 96). The Enigma of Arrival recreates the ten years he spent in this originally idyllic setting. It is indeed hard not to identify Naipaul with the unnamed narrator, a writer from Trinidad with exactly his experience of displacement and quest for a center, now seeking appeasement and solitude and given to self-analysis both as a writer and a man indelibly marked by his origins in a chaotic and “historyless” society. Although Naipaul still writes a classic prose with the same descriptive precision, this plotless novel shows a significant change in both subject and method. Apart from his retrospective meditation on his purpose and achievement as a writer, he concentrates on the lives of a few select individuals whom he first sees as deeply and securely rooted in a traditional way of life in the symbolical vicinity of Stonehenge, but then he comes to the conclusion that even there all is change, flux, and decay. The center itself has become void, while the writer performs what he now considers as the novelist’s major task, that is, to meditate on facts observed and faithfully recorded. The ultimate development is that of a fiction largely inspired by non-fictional events, rather than predominantly imagined or “invented.” For the role of the imagination in Enigma lies in its fusion of a metaphysical reflection on death (see Crivelli [1993]) with self-reflexive comments on the purpose of writing. It has been suggested that the text’s function is to unmask “the literary and cultural authority represented by England to the end of reconciliation of the self” (Tiffin [1989], 38).

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Naipaul’s latest novel, A Way in the World, 1994, is another autobiographical book mixing personal and collective history with meditation. He goes over his beginnings as a writer both in Trinidad and in London, introducing characters he later meets in different parts of the world and partly fictionalizes people who, whatever their temporary rise to importance, are failures at the core. He also returns to the material of The Loss of El Dorado, 1969, by presenting differently, but with equal stress on defeat, deception, and self-deception, the “unwritten stories” of Raleigh and General Miranda who, in the early nineteenth century, tried to free Venezuela from Spanish rule. Again, there is emphasis on the absence of order and values, on irresponsibility and on “memories of a cruelty present in all aspects of life” in the Trinidad of his youth (Naipaul [1987], 29, 79). Yet there is also nostalgia for the colonial landscape, now transformed, as he knew it in his childhood. The narrative comes full circle with the assassination in Africa of Blair, a clerk and temporary colleague in Naipaul’s Trinidad youth, who became a United Nations counselor and was sent on a mission to Uganda. The wholly unheroic return of Blair’s body to Trinidad appears to be symbolic of the lasting futility of the postcolonial endeavor to change the world for the better. Like V. S. Naipaul, his younger brother, Shiva, won a scholarship to Oxford and after graduation began a literary career in the same realistic tradition of fiction and travel writing. If anything, Shiva Naipaul is even more pessimistic and scathingly critical of the Third World than is his brother. In “The Writer without a Society,” the former repeats several times that Trinidad, “dull, empty and devoid of inspiration,” could in no way feed the imagination and that even the attempt to forge a culture could not escape absurdity (S. Naipaul [1970-b], 116). Nevertheless, however critical he is of the society he came from, including his own East Indian community, his first two novels, Fireflies, 1971, and the Chip-Chip Gatherers, 1973, are set in Trinidad. In Fireflies, the rich Khojas and the Luchtmans (who replicate the family hierarchy of the Tulsis and the Biswases in V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas) evince the cultural confusion resulting from their efforts to maintain Hindu customs while, at the same time, being unable to resist the appeal of Christian beliefs. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Luchtman, the obstinate and resilient heroine of the novel, struggles to bring up her children, hoping that education will be their passport to a fuller life. But her sons fail and are ironically closer to the fireflies caught in a jam bottle by a boy so he can study by their light (his parents are too poor to afford an oillamp) than they are to the boy himself, who ends up as a successful doctor. The Chip-Chip Gatherers is also a story of failure in a community dominated by cruelty and greed, except for the selfless dedication of women, while A Hot Country, 1983, later published as Love and Death in a Hot Country, is set in imaginary Cuyuma and blends the author’s perceptions of Africa and Guyana. Shiva Naipaul’s fiction is informed by his conviction that the society he wrote about was “fragmented and incoherent” ([1970-b], 122). He did not break away from the literary models — Jane Austen and Dickens — who, in his youth, conveyed to him what a novel ought to be. Rather, he implicitly suggested that the West Indian writer could not evoke, nor could a West Indian audience respond to, the sense of order underlying the English tradition. His career was cut short by his untimely death at the age of forty. Although one cannot say how he might have developed, his last books of essays point to an increasing interest in journalistic writing similar to his brother’s work. Death also interrupted the career of three writers of the older generation: John Hearne,

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Andrew Salkey, and Sam Selvon. John Hearne left an unfinished novel after he published The Sure Salvation, 1981, after twenty years of silence. This late novel differs markedly from his early fiction and no longer concentrates on the middle class in contemporary West Indian society. It takes place entirely on the slave ship Sure Salvation which illegally perpetuates the international slave trade into the 1860s. It has rightly been pointed out that the novel is polyphonic (see King [1982], 657), its narrative progressing through dialogue and a sweeping movement which throws light, by turns, on the inner self of the characters involved: the captain and his crew, but also the captive slaves. The novel’s beginning evokes both “The Ancient Mariner” and Melville’s Benito Cereno, but, except for the slaves’ liberation at the end of the middle passage, those ultimately responsible for the horrors that have taken place remain imprisoned either in their own dreams of power or in their prejudices. Formally more ambitious and of a richer narrative texture than Hearne’s early work, this novel also conveys a more pessimistic view of humanity. Andrew Salkey, the author of more than thirty books, including poetry, essays and children’s stories, published only one other novel after The Adventures of Catallus Kelly, 1969. Come Home, Malcolm Heartland, 1976, combines several themes explored by writers of the first generation: exile, a longing for home — at once a physical place, a familiar social context, and a psychological answer to alienation — and an idealistic (genuine or counterfeit) involvement in Third-World politics. Salkey’s radical intellectual protagonist, who sincerely wants to help the oppressed of his country, becomes involved with black revolutionaries who are secretly working for racist governments, whether in prerevolution Portugal, White Rhodesia, or South Africa. He sees them as imprisoned in a “spurious, melodramatic self-dramatizing fantasy” (Salkey [1976], 145). Yet, though aware of their play-acting, Malcolm Heartland does not realize how dangerous they are and disregards their attempts to prevent him from going home to Jamaica. On the day he is due to leave, they have him killed by one of the “oppressed” for whose sake he was going back. This victorious nihilism is another pessimistic comment on the failure of the Black Power movement to contribute to genuine revolutionary change. In retrospect, it is possible to see Sam Selvon’s whole fictional opus as an attempt to put on the literary map the experience of Caribbean people as they struggled to fit into the economic, social, and cultural scene of the modern world and, in the process, to present in his own original language an inside view of the Caribbean common man in all his complexity, resilience, and sustaining humor. Selvon’s fiction in the second half of his career still concentrates either on Trinidad or on London, and on the difficulty, for most of his characters, to feel completely at home in one or the other. The implicit ideal informing his novels, though never fully actualized by his characters is, as he himself said in several interviews, the creation of a “third” race and an identity free of the divisive racial and regional / national allegiances within the Caribbean. This “third” race would also match Selvon’s conception of universal man. “I am a citizen of the world,” he declared, and of Moses Aloetta, the protagonist of his London trilogy, “I think of Moses as a Caribbean composite of every man” (Selvon [1996], 97, 111). At the same time, he considered himself to the end as deeply Trinidadian, hoping to create a Caribbean consciousness and “mind” (see Selvon [1995], 123, 125) in his inimitable “modified” English which, as Wilson Harris said, was “part of the consciousness of the narrator” in his novels (quoted in Selvon [1995], 116), and he pioneered the “meeting of orality and literacy” (Ram-

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chand [1988], 108) later so well rendered by Earl Lovelace. However different in their writing Selvon and Harris may be, they both believe in a specific Caribbean sensibility and share the conviction that a composite Caribbean identity can represent universal humanity. But if Selvon himself proved that “he could easily fit into any culture” (Selvon [1996], 97) by moving happily to Canada after nearly thirty years of residence in Britain, Moses, perhaps because he is an ordinary man incapable of clearly conceiving and formulating his own potentialities, remains an exile in both London and Trinidad. Most of Selvon’s protagonists are working-class men, urban or agricultural in the Caribbean, immigrant workers in London. Selvon himself often returned to Trinidad and continued to represent the various conflicting constraints that his aspiring heroes attempt to overcome. The Plains of Caroni, 1970, the fruit of a period of research on sugar production sponsored by Tate and Lyle, focuses on the effect of these pressures on the lives of East Indian workers. The intense love of Balgobin and Seeta is thwarted by her prearranged marriage to his brother. While the latter rises to the position of overseer and makes good financially, the disillusioned Balgobin concentrates all his energies on traditional cane-cutting. Toward the end of his life he desperately resists mechanization, armed with his cutlass, in a memorable battle against the mechanical harvester introduced by the company. As Balgobin is dying, he is saved from arrest by the revelation to Romesh, his university-educated nephew and plantation manager, that he is Balgobin’s son. Pursued by the resentment of the East Indian workers, Romesh escapes to London with his white girl-friend, while Balgobin, the one who overcame the “metal Trojan Horse” (Selvon [1970], 68), is venerated like an epic hero. His heroism, both in his daily existence and for the preservation of an outdated way of life, recalls Poseidon in Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder, 1963, and can be compared to both Harris’s and Walcott’s mythologizing of the experience of ordinary peasants and fishermen. In Those Who Eat the Cascadura, 1972, Selvon recreates life on a cocoa estate owned by an Englishman before independence, illustrating in individual lives and in the relations between the white man’s “great house” and the estate village “Sans Souci”(!), the colonial system and its attendant hierarchies never questioned by the totally dependent villagers. The love affair between Sarojini, the estate owner’s unacknowledged daughter who is promised to the overseer Prekash, and a visiting Englishman interested in folk traditions and obeah is given a metaphorical dimension and enables Selvon to explore, and implicitly comment on, the social and political aspects of the colonial situation (Dance [1986], 444). Selvon’s last two novels, Moses Ascending, 1975, and Moses Migrating, 1983, are sequels to The Lonely Londoners though not originally intended as parts of a trilogy. Twenty years after their early difficult years in London, the group of “boys” is dislocated, none of them having succeeded in making a satisfactory living, except comparatively, for Moses who has bought a dilapidated house in Shepherd’s Bush. He is now a “landlord” in his “castle,” refusing to let rooms to black men and former friends and resisting involvement either with the Black Power movement or the new wave of Pakistani migrants (many illegal) in London’s migrant areas, though he gets mixed up with both against his will. He has chosen to live in the attic to view the world from above, employs an illiterate white Man Friday, Bob, to whom he teaches reading, and he has decided to become a writer and “compose” his memoirs. But he fails in all his efforts to achieve even his misguided notion of true Englishness; at the end of Moses Ascending, Moses finds himself again in the basement,

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symbolically punished by his former “slave,” Bob, for his sexual relations with the white Jeannie, while Bob keeps harassing the black Brenda without the slightest compunction. Since Moses is the first-person narrator in both the second and third novels of the trilogy, he condemns himself in his own words through Selvon’s masterly use of a dramatic irony which blends humor, wit, and a merciless satire to expose his protagonist’s self-deceptive adherence to misunderstood English values, ridiculing both white prejudices and Moses’s inability to break free from the colonial relationship and the colonialist stereotypes in which he is proudly indoctrinated. The subversion of these stereotypes is further carried out in Moses Migrating, 1983, where Moses decides to return home to Trinidad at the time of Carnival. He is accompanied by Bob and Jeannie and, like them, stays at the Hilton, ignoring his “Tanty Flora,” who brought him up, until he comes upon her by chance. In the carnival procession, he impersonates Britannia as she is represented on preindependence coins, with Jeannie as his hand-maiden and Bob as his slave. While he is convinced that their group represents England’s greatness as an imperial power and serves its cause, the onlookers and the jury interpret it as a satirical subversion of colonialism, and Moses wins the competition. As has been suggested (see Fabre [1995], 161), Moses does not see that his impersonation of Britannia is only an empty mask, and he misses the opportunity to graft himself back on his cultural roots, which he briefly rediscovered during the carnival celebrations. He leaves Trinidad feeling a traitor to his country, to Tanty Flora and to Doris with whom he had fallen in love and intended to marry. At the end of Moses Ascending, Moses, confined to his basement room, had wondered “if [he] should start from scratch all over again” (Selvon [1975], 13). At the end of Moses Migrating, this seems exactly what he must do as he stands in the immigration line at Heathrow Airport. The officer makes him wait while Moses clutches his carnival silver cup like the Holy Grail, the ironical reward of his failed quest to come to terms with his authentic self. Selvon, who acknowledged in interviews that parts of himself went into the making of Moses, certainly succeeded in creating a distinct Caribbean consciousness expressed in his unique blend of Creole and standard English and, as Fabre comments, in molding “the folk-tradition of the Caribbean into a recognized literary form” (Fabre [1995], 162). The disorientation and persistent destructive effects of the colonial experience on individuals and communities who have neither fully understood its real nature nor “digested” it remains an all-pervasive theme in the writing of the older generation and is shown to thwart the potential creativity inherent in a truly liberated postcolonial consciousness. As opposed to Selvon’s trilogy, George Lamming’s last two novels, Water with Berries, 1971, and Natives of My Person, 1972, explore this theme in a tragic, allegorical mode through the experience of white colonizers in the seventeenth-century (Natives of My Person) and contemporary West Indians in London (Water With Berries), thus linking the two periods and the devastating effects of imperialism on both conquerors and their victims. Significantly, the major characters in Water with Berries are three expatriate artists going through a period of creative sterility largely due to their failure in personal relationships and their incapacity to come to terms with their historical past and connection with England. Teeton, a painter, escapes San Cristobal (Lamming’s symbolic West Indian Island throughout his fiction, like Hearne’s Cayuna and Naipaul’s Isabella) thanks to his wife’s relation with the American ambassador. But he cannot forgive her infidelity, and she commits suicide. So does Nicole, the American wife of Roger, a musician of East

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Indian descent, who repudiates her because she is pregnant and he cannot face their child’s racial impurity. Derek, the actor, successfully plays Othello for one season, then is imprisoned in the role of a corpse until he “resurrects” himself from it and rapes his white co-actress onstage, thus enacting the Caliban stereotype assigned to the black man in the colonizer’s imagination. Water with Berries borrows its title from Shakespeare’s The Tempest which Lamming had closely scrutinized as an allegory of colonialism in The Pleasures of Exile and used as a referential frame in earlier novels. The major roles — Prospero, Caliban, and Miranda — are all shared here by at least two, sometimes three characters as a way of showing in each relationship the destructive influence of colonialism on colonizers and colonized alike. The most significant indissoluble bond is the one between Teeton and his landlady, Mrs. Gore-Brittain, or “The Old Dowager,” for whom he feels deep affection until he realizes the extent of her power over him and a subconscious hatred unacknowledged by either. He kills her and burns her body, “burn[s] the Old Dowager out of his future” (Lamming [1971], 247). At the end of the novel, the three artists are awaiting trial for rape, arson, and murder, though there is a clear suggestion that the spiraling violence in which they have been involved is the unavoidable backfire of the violence suffered by the colonized and the only conceivable means of freeing themselves from their ambiguous relation with Britain. Lamming himself and some of his critics (see Tiffin [1979], 92, and [1986], 268) explain Teeton’s murder of the Old Dowager as a necessary therapeutic step “to kill that whole area within himself that has been her creation” and “the drama of cleansing for a commitment towards the future” (Lamming [1988], 22, and [1973], 7). But apart from running counter to Lamming’s assertions that the West Indian artist cannot help being a descendant of both Prospero and Caliban and that reconciliation is possible through a redeeming collective “ceremony of souls” or dialogue between the living and the dead, the three artists’ radical “purgation” places them on a par with the destructive imperialists in Natives of my Person, who are pursued by their past and cannot envisage a better future. In spite of a similar interest in history and an insistence on the need for a new Caribbean consciousness and vision, Lamming’s position is here poles apart from the satirical Sam Selvon and the metaphysical Wilson Harris. Nevertheless, Natives of My Person does evoke Palace of the Peacock in its recreation of the colonizers’ journey and the treatment meted out to women who are considered, like slaves, either “senseless creature[s]” or “cargo” (Lamming [1972], 16). If Lamming, like Harris, insists on the necessity to face the legacy of the past, however painful, as a prerequisite to a modified consciousness, he is much more pessimistic about the possibility of such a change in the individual psyche and even more so about the effect of history on the community. Natives of My Person, his most complex and many-leveled allegorical novel, recreates the unauthorized voyage undertaken in the seventeenth century (and carefully documented by historical voyages) on the Reconnaissance by white colonizers with the purpose of founding a utopian settlement on the Caribbean island of San Cristobal. While the commandant’s motives seem at first laudable in his bid for freedom and his escape from the absolutism of his country’s leadership with its all-powerful House of Trade and Justice (two obviously linked, if incompatible functions), it soon becomes clear that neither officers nor crew are prepared to revise the motives (greed and lust for power), prejudices, and unscrupulousness which lie at the root of both Caribbean and European history, Lime Stone, the metropolis,

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representing all imperial powers. One exception is the commandant who, on rereading (and, in a sense, revising) his diaries, realizes that if the territories where he intends to settle are virgin, it is because he is morally responsible for the extermination of the native tribes (see McDonald [1987], 81). Another exception is Priest who confesses in his journal his responsibility for the collapse of order within the officer’s “orbit of power” which he chose rather than perform what he knew, half-deceptively, to be his duty “within the orbit of [the Lord’s] mercy” (329). Together with his and the officers’ ambiguous reluctance to be reunited with their wives, who have traveled separately on the Penalty and are waiting for them on San Cristobal, the commandant’s awareness that his destructive past is before and not behind him makes him decide not to continue the voyage. This leads to the crew’s mutiny; the commandant is murdered by Surgeon and Stewart, who are ignorant of his decision and are, in turn, shot by the commandant’s cabin boy. The novel is nevertheless open-ended in the ordinary crew’s escape from the power conflicts and the officers’ unredeemable mad impulses, as well as in the Lady of the House’s assertion to the waiting women that they “are a future [men] must learn” (Lamming [1972-a], 351), although they, too, have encouraged the men in their barbarous ways by their submission. Natives of my Person remains Lamming’s most impressive achievement, a polyphonic, self-reflexive narrative blending various modes of writing and bringing to light the many blind spots in the characters’ consciousnesses, which prevent them from perceiving that freedom is not escape but requires a responsible moral choice. It also shows that, ultimately, such shortcomings partake of human nature and shape with equal forcefulness personal relations and public / collective / political behavior, the postcolonial present as much as colonial history, and that the only way towards a better society lies indeed in self-knowledge and in a morally creative vision. In their different ways, Naipaul (in Guerillas), Salkey (in Come Home, Malcolm Heartland), Lamming (in Water with Berries), and even Selvon, humorously (in Moses Ascending) all explored the impact of the Black Power Movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in both London and the West Indies, whether on the individual (both the intellectual and the ordinary man) or on society. Most Caribbean artists were sensitive to the crisis in which the future of West Indians seemed to be at stake and felt compelled to examine the potentialities and the pitfalls of a commitment to race and revolutionary politics in order to achieve a genuine Caribbean consciousness. Michael Anthony’s largely autobiographical early novels had given voice to the awakening sensibility of young West Indians of peasant, mostly illiterate background, an emerging awareness representative of their communities, showing from the inside and with a natural simplicity the ordinary person’s consciousness of self and environment, a process other novelists postulated in more intellectual or abstract terms. Anthony again used a firstperson narrator in a “mystery novel” (Carter [1987], 42), All That Glitters, 1981, in which twelve-year old Horace Lumpres learns to discriminate between truth and falsity, “all that glitters.” In Bright Road to El Dorado, 1982, Anthony offered a revised version of Trinidadian history through the eyes of a young Arawak, who succeeds in sending Antonio de Berrio and Walter Raleigh on a wild goose chase after gold. But in the late 1960s, after fourteen years in Britain, Anthony felt that he had lost touch with a changing Trinidad and he was trying to resist pressures on him to write novels of protest. He decided that his only option, if he were to go on writing, was to leave England and accepted a teaching position in Brazil where he stayed for two

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years before returning to Trinidad in 1970 (see Walmsley [1992], 104). Streets of Conflict, 1976, inspired by Anthony’s Brazilian experience, tends to confirm his conviction that he could not write about racial tensions and ideological causes without betraying his conception of fiction and his vision of reality. His attempt, in this novel, to integrate a rather complicated love story with the social upheaval and violence of the 1968 students riots in Rio de Janeiro is unconvincing, to say the least; it is an example of his confessed inability to deal with social and political issues as opposed to “the realities and nuances of West Indian social relationships” (Baugh [1995], 64) perceived through his portrayal of aspiring individuals. In King of the Masquerade, 1976, a children’s novel, Anthony, like other West Indian novelists, particularly Earl Lovelace, presents the Trinidadian carnival as a metaphor for West Indian creativity and a potential instrument of social harmony. Unknown to his middle-class parents, who despise the folk culture of Trinidad as violent and vulgar, Alan Broomley, longing for selffulfilment and recognition in the community, dons the mask of the Fool in Twelfth Night in the carnival parade and wins the first prize in the competition. As Fool turned calypsonian, he not only succeeds in harmonizing two cultural traditions but acknowledges his own roots in contradistinction to his father who is guilty of the very violence he denounces when he knocks down his disguised son as the latter is trying to embrace his mother. Through Alan’s experience, however, Anthony reaffirms the strength of the folk tradition and imagination as the true expression of Trinidadian culture. From a completely different perspective and in a much more ambitious form Michael Thelwell’s The Harder They Come, 1980, deals, like Anthony’s earlier fiction, with the experience of a poor country boy brought up by his grandmother, who leaves the magic world of his youth and emigrates to “Babylon,” Jamaica’s Kingston with its contrasting social spheres and surroundings: the exclusive areas where the wealthy hide protected by guard dogs and the squalid slums where deprivation and suffering inevitably lead to violence and crime. The novel turned into fiction a Jamaican film by the same title, inspired by the life of a reggae songwriter. Ivan Rhygin becomes a famous musician but is repeatedly frustrated by injustice and corruption, whether in church, business, or civil service. Losing faith in the values his grandmother instilled in him, he becomes a rebel who drifts into the ganja trade and a life of crime. He is killed in a confrontation with the police but immortalized as a hero by the young who carry on as rebels against an iniquitous system. The Harder They Come is a long, substantial novel that offers a composite picture of all aspects of Jamaican life, its landscapes and culture, in contrasting language registers, juxtaposing the third-person narrator’s standard English with dialogues in Rastafarian language described as a “brilliant reproduction of the folk speech” in Jamaica (Dance [1986], 459). Thelwell’s novel is a significant example of the social realism he advocates as a critic, arguing that modernism “has had a corrupting influence on … Caribbean fiction” and has been an excuse for avoiding “engagement with social and moral questions” (quoted in Gikandi [1992], 3). It fits in with a body of fiction shaped by the conviction that literary realism is the most suitable form to render the Caribbean people’s culture, identity, and sociopolitical aspirations. A similar search for authenticity runs through Earl Lovelace’s writing, whose far more considerable achievement stands in this respect between Thelwell’s novel and the fiction of Michael Anthony with whom he has often been coupled (see Barratt [1986] and Harney [1991]), though his recent novels show that he has moved with great assurance toward a more complex

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vision and rendering of Trinidadian society. But the emphasis in Lovelace’s, as in Anthony’s, fiction is on what has been called “selfhood,” “personhood,” and “peoplehood.” Except for limited periods of teaching in America, Lovelace never emigrated and is said to live in a remote village in Trinidad. This may explain his attachment to Trinidad’s landscapes as well as its strong peasant tradition and sensibility which, in Lovelace’s fiction, are eroded by a colonial education or by neocolonial American capitalism. The Wine of Astonishment, 1982, published after The Dragon Can’t Dance, 1979, was written first. It takes place in the village of Bonasse where a community of spiritual Baptists see their traditions disrupted when their religious practices are forbidden by law. They are also betrayed by the village schoolteacher, formerly of their group, who tells them “We can’t be white, but we can act white” (Lovelace [1982], 13). Bolo, the village stickfighter (a “warrior” figure in Lovelace’s fiction) resists the authorities and is killed by the police when he refuses to free the two girls he has taken as hostages. When the congregation (who had not supported Bolo) is allowed to resume its practices, they realize that they have lost touch with the “Spirit.” On their way home, however, the religious leader and his wife Eva come upon a steelband and discover the same “Spirit” in the boys’ music, a spirit not imposed from the outside but born of the people itself. The novel is told by a female narrator, Eva, whose vernacular is another expression of the “Spirit” and of literary authenticity. It has been suggested that, as a speaker, she sustains a patriarchal “authoritative masculinity” (the “drums and songs and warriors” emblematized by Bolo) represented before by white colonial power (Shetty [1994], 76). There are admittedly strong mothers but few women who share the burden of the quest for selfhood in West Indian fiction by male writers. The Dragon Can’t Dance brings together on Calvary Hill, a slum area in Port-of-Spain, characters who have mostly left a more secure and solidary, if poor rural community. Many are jobless in keeping with a tradition of “Idleness, Laziness and Waste” (Lovelace [1979], 11), their only means of resisting colonial exploitation in the post-emancipation era. This is Aldrick Prospect’s “philosophy” of life; year after year, he awakens from his lethargy to make the dragon costume into which he weaves his own and his people’s history and sufferings, celebrating the people’s culture and resistance to oppression through costume and dance in carnival. Fisheye, the “warrior,” similarly asserts himself in the Hill’s steelband, but Philo, the calypsonian, eventually escapes to a wealthy suburb when he becomes King. When carnival is taken over and regulated by rich sponsors, Fisheye, Aldrick and a few others rebel and capture a police jeep, proclaiming themselves the “People’s Liberation Army” without any preconceived plan or ideology. While arousing sympathy for the rebels, uprooted workers who are victims of the economic situation, Lovelace nevertheless draws attention to the pitfalls both of a directionless rebellion and of a cultural event recuperated by those in power who encourage the poor to concentrate their expectations and energies on a brief manifestation rather than on steady, selffulfilling endeavor. Already in the meaningless rounds in the police jeep, Aldrick “had a feeling of being imprisoned in a dragon costume on Carnival Tuesday” (77). In the years spent in prison, he understands the nihilism and omnipotence of his former passivity and avoidance of responsibility. It makes him take his life in his own hands in a spirit of hope (see 205) as he had once encouraged Sylvia, the girl he loves, to do. They eventually come together when she renounces marriage with wealthy Mr. Guy, the rent collector and city councillor. Though Lovelace clearly upholds the indigenous popular tradition and gives substantial form to its

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impact on the people’s everyday life, he does not romanticize the subversiveness of its major expressions (carnival, steelband, calypso) but is careful to show that its potential dynamism (the dance of the title) depends on the individual’s awareness of who he is and what the tradition really means to him. What Aldrick tells Sylvia applies to himself first: “You want to be a self that is free … to grow … to be yourself” (202). To find one’s own way and arrive “at a self” (Lovelace [1996], 254) is also central to Salt, 1996, which received the tenth overall Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1997. In a remarkably smooth but vivid and witty narrative, it blends together the tragic and the comic, all aspects of Trinidadian society in village and city, represents all classes and races (and their history) now inextricably mixed, and shifts unobtrusively between standpoints, including that of the white plantocracy. The repository of myth and history is Uncle Bango, a laborer on a creole estate who, in order to build the New World originally misnamed by the conquerors, has made it his life’s mission to free his fellow villagers from the mental imprisonment, born of historical servitude, that continues to plague the island’s inhabitants indiscriminately. The other man with a mission is Alford George, an enthusiastic, obstinate teacher turned politician, who comes to understand first that he must educate the young to live in the island rather than prepare a few for higher education abroad, then that he must serve his village community rather than support demagogic, profit-making post-independence politicians. At the end of the novel, the young narrator of the beginning meditates that “the tragedy of our time is to have lost the ability to feel loss, the inability of power to rise to its responsibility for human decency.” But he has learned “not to despair because of our errors or to be afraid to try again” (259). There is also in this novel a new recognition of the contribution of women to men’s achievement. Another striking feature is the de-dramatization of tragic historical events, especially as told by Bango with a kind of innocent irony, not to minimize his people’s sufferings but to stress their resilience and make them share his stubborn faith in their future. One of his best stories (which gives the novel its title) is of a slave ancestor, Guinea John, wanted for rebellion, who was wise and light enough to fly back to Africa to his pre-middle-passage family but could not be followed by the other slaves because they had eaten too much salt and were too heavy to fly. A widespread legend among slaves had it that Africans could fly before they started eating salt to compensate for their dehydration in the canefields (see also Cliff [1984], 63–64). Since slaves were also, like salt, currency and precious cargo, the novel’s title may suggest that as long as Trinidadians do not liberate themselves from the psychological burden of this past, they will not be able to take imaginative flight toward a new life. Similarly concerned with his countrymen’s need for psychical liberation, Roy A. K. Heath belongs in age with the older generation of Caribbean writers. But his first novel was only published in 1974, and he therefore appears as a continuator, rather than a pioneer, of Caribbean fiction. Though he has worked in Britain as a teacher, and temporarily as a lawyer, for more than forty years, all his novels take place in his native Guyana where he returns regularly not to lose touch with his roots. Like Wilson Harris in The Whole Armour, he is sensitive to the topography of the country’s settled areas, a narrow strip of land between the sea and the vast South American forests, the physical counterpart of the people’s spiritual imprisonment. His fiction blends Amerindian myths, obeah, Hinduism, and Islamic beliefs (more than half of the Guyanese population is of East Indian origin) with the Protestant and Catholic legacies of the

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colonizers. But the cultural fusion that Guyanese society is in the process of achieving (see Heath [1992], 125) emerges in his last two novels only. Heath’s treatment of the supernatural and some extravagant features in his narratives have elicited comparison with Mittelholzer (see Munro [1984], 383), while Heath himself acknowledges influences as diverse as Amerindian storytelling and the nineteenth-century Russian novel. However, his fiction is extremely realistic, verging on naturalism even in the bleakness and determinism of the characters’ daily life. This is particularly obvious in The Murderer, 1978, in which Galton Flood is so confined within a life of cruel repression, fear, and emotional sterility by his domineering and destructive mother that his relationship with his wife is doomed; he kills her when he hears that she has been unfaithful and ends up as a harmless lunatic walking the streets and repeatedly shouting “Don’t cork the bottle.” Confinement to an inescapable glass sphere is also the condition of the Armstrongs, a middle-class family whose decline over two generations Heath follows in his Georgetown Trilogy, From the Heat of the Day, 1979, One Generation, 1981, and Genetha, 1981, named after the Armstrong daughter who is driven to prostitution in the brothel of the family’s former servant. Heath’s fiction centers on family life and relationships and seems to ignore the broader issues of race, politics, class, and gender that other Caribbean writers consciously explored. But these are part of the unconscious legacy of the Guyanese psyche, whose “hinterland” (Heath [1981-b], 58) or “unexplored countries of the heart” (Heath [1993], 168) Heath scrutinizes as his characters struggle, mostly in vain, to break through their “state of unfreedom” (Harris [1978], 656). While his novels express little concern for history, Heath still describes them as “historical” and considers that he shares a “social, cultural consciousness” with Wilson Harris (Heath [1992], 121, 136). This can be seen in The Shadow Bride, 1996, which returns to the theme of a difficult relation between a tyrannical mother and her son, a doctor aware of his East Indian inheritance but also conscious of the need to serve and mingle with the other races. Heath’s 1996 novel, The Ministry of Hope (a title that echoes Orwell’s sinister ministries in 1984) is a sequel to Kwaku, or the Man Who Could Not Keep His Mouth Shut, 1982, named for its trickster protagonist. This is a more ambitious novel with new political overtones and a salutary meeting with Amerindians in the hinterland, a theme already tackled in Orealla, 1984. Unlike most characters in Heath’s earlier fiction but like Dr. Singh in The Shadow Bride, Kwaku reaches selfknowledge and is spiritually redeemed, giving the novel’s title an ambivalent meaning. Since all West Indians descend from forced or voluntary migrations, throughout their history, first to the Caribbean and, after World War II, to Britain and North America, in some cases completing a triangular journey back to the Caribbean, the theme of exile remains central to Caribbean fiction wherever it is written. West Indian writers in Canada, though less numerous than permanent or temporary expatriates in Britain, form a growing and significant body on the country’s multicultural scene. Canada must be one of the very few countries in the world, if not the only one, whose multicultural policy was inscribed in the law by the 1988 Multiculturalism Act. Nevertheless, while recognizing the opportunities afforded by official policy, some West Indian writers denounce in essays or fictionalize what they see as insidious manifestations of racism or discrimination and also criticize their countrymen’s attempts to fit into the prosperous, respectable white community at the cost of their cultural roots. It has recently been demonstrated not only that African slaves were imported and held in bondage in Canada but that from the eighteenth century onward, there were writings by black

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Loyalists, slave narratives by African American fugitives and the occasional writings on black religious communities. At the present time, African-Caribbean writers in Canada are sometimes considered as part of a larger group who emigrated from various African countries, though some descended from families long settled in Canada. George Elliott Clarke, for instance is a seventhgeneration Canadian, whereas Austin Clarke is a first-generation immigrant from Barbados. Austin Clarke’s Toronto Trilogy is still thought to have first validated the African-Canadian experience in fiction. He has continued to explore the dilemma of the black West Indian who tries to fit into and to contribute to the Canadian cultural mosaic while retaining his racial integrity. His characters, however, are still affected by that now universal plight, alienation. It can take the form of deadness as in When He was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, 1971, an ironical description of the protagonist who cuts himself off from the West Indian community for the sake of an illusory assimilation into white society. Alienation is also the condition of John Moore in The Prime Minister, 1977, who returns to Barbados to take up a high government position only to realize that he is a stranger in his birthplace, which is now overrun with tourists and plagued with prostitution and corruption. Clarke attributes the source of Caribbean alienation to a colonial education analyzed with comic but sharp insight in the autobiographical Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack : A Memoir, 1980. His next novel, Proud Empires, 1986, partly covers the same ground, dealing with education and the corruption of island politics in Barbados during an election, though it ends on a more optimistic note than The Prime Minister. After a long period of silence, Clarke published a new novel, The Origin of Waves, 1997, which centers on two boyhood friends from the Caribbean who meet in Toronto after half a century and catch up with their respective life story, gradually revealing truths hidden from each other and from themselves. Clarke’s realistic narratives are sometimes uneven but are interspersed with highly comic scenes and lively dialogues, especially when they are set in the Caribbean. His 1996 novel has been hailed as the expression of a “vibrant literary renaissance” (Nurse [1997], C1). Understandably enough, since they are most familiar with their own background and experience, anglophone Caribbean writers have tended to write about their own race groups. There are notable exceptions such as Sam Selvon, whose fiction indirectly advocates racial integration, Wilson Harris with his characters of mixed ancestry, and Earl Lovelace who, in The Dragon Can’t Dance, describes the repeated unsuccessful attempts of an East Indian character, Pariag, to become part of the Afro-Caribbean community on Calvary Hill. Writers of East Indian descent have drawn attention to the difficult choice their people faced between the preservation of a major old culture, static and sometimes empty of meaning because it has been cut off from its roots, and the possibility of an uneasy sociocultural integration. Moreover, just as AfroCaribbean novelists have felt the need to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, so East Indians have analyzed the wounds and psychological traces of indentureship. A case in point is Harold Sonny Ladoo, a Trinidadian East Indian who had settled in Canada. No Pain Like This Body, 1972, is set in a rural backward East Indian community in Trinidad at the beginning of the century. It is a compassionate recreation of the trials of one family that barely subsists on a small allotment, poverty, uncontrolled passion, and bereavement driving them to degradation and even madness. Ladoo’s posthumously published and unrevised second novel, Yesterdays, 1974, is far less successful in its somewhat farcical and repetitive account of a boy caught between the

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equally violent impositions of Canadian Christian educators and his Hindu father. He becomes so unsettled that he wants to travel to Canada with a “Hindu Bible” and start a mission school equipped with whips and torture chambers. One critic praised the novel as a “bittersweet comedy” (see Salick [1991]), attributing its ribaldry and scatology to the specific Indo-Caribbean peasant background in which, he argues, the book originated. Again, the intention behind the plot seems to be to portray the deprived condition of an acculturated community seeking selfexpression in revenge and violence. Also of East Indian origin but of a younger generation and of middle-class background, Neil Bissoondath, V. S. Naipaul’s nephew, was acclaimed as a significant writer from the publication of his first book of short stories, Digging Up the Mountains, 1985, and, like his uncle, has since been a controversial figure among West Indian writers and critics both in the Caribbean and in Canada. His first novel, A Casual Brutality, 1988, was criticized for its negative picture of “Casaquemada” (“house burnt” in Spanish), a fictionalized Trinidad, and accused of playing up to white prejudice by accepting uncritically both colonial values and neocolonial power relations. The novel opens at the island’s airport where Dr. Raj Ramsingh is on the point of embarking alone for Canada, significantly without luggage. The novel’s end picks up this scene as Raj flies back to Canada where he had taken his medical degree. Framed by these two scenes, the narrative alternates between his reconstruction of his first journey and his life in Canada as a medical student, then a doctor, and the evocation of his youth and recent stay on his native island with his wife and son after his return at the time of a short-lived oil boom. The ensuing slump and political unrest give rise to a spell of terrible violence during which his wife and son are murdered. While Bissoondath’s technical achievement and precise realism are generally admired, his portrayal of Trinidad is said to ignore and even negate the historical diversity, the pluralism and the creative culture of the Caribbean, presenting only a racially divided and class-ridden society. Ramsingh (and clearly Bissoondath himself) sees his native island as a place “of limited scope, of brutal past, hesitant present and uncertain future,” where the individual faces “the impossibility of possibility” (Bissoondath [1988], 142, 268). Ramsingh is an unattached individual who confesses to never getting to know the grandparents who brought him up; he is not interested in their past (see 127), and his total lack of imaginative sympathy for, or even interest in, his own cultural roots undermines what he presents as the objectivity of his perception. Similarly, he has little interest in his wife to whom he has spoken only once with intimacy (see 295). At the end, however, Ramsingh achieves some self-knowledge, recognizes that he returned to Casaquemada out of self-interest at the time of the boom but asserts, in contradiction to his first statement about his leaving, that he now emigrates not to escape but to expiate, to turn “nothing into something, far from the casual brutality of collapse, far from the ruins of failure” (15, 378). Nevertheless, his return to Canada — he had made sure that he could go back to by taking Canadian citizenship just before leaving — does look like an escape. The reader is left to wonder whether Bissoondath condones his narrator’s vision and sees him as the inevitable product of his colonial and postcolonial condition whose complexities are not sufficiently substantiated in the narrative to elicit a clear answer. It also seems that no doubt is cast on the narrator’s conclusion about the island’s future: “So it has been. So it is. So it will remain” (378). However, as Ramsingh’s earlier experience in Canada shows, the challenge of meeting his

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future there is not unproblematic either. He shrinks from association with fellow expatriates (Bissoondath [1988], 162) and, like the author, in Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, 1994, clearly objects to Canada’s policy of multiculturalism and ethnicity. Bissoondath’s objection is that to perpetuate ethnic customs and a sense of belonging to one’s country of origin can only make for division and prevent integration. He himself simply wants to be a Canadian, not an Indo-Trinidadian Canadian, just as he wants his novels to be “universal” and present universal situations and emotions. The trouble is that, however defensible such a position may be, literary universality even as a specifically Western conception is seldom the fruit of a deliberate intention or ambition. In spite of cultural globalization, few writers are genuinely “international,” and universal masterpieces are usually rooted in particularized cultures explored with understanding and compassion, qualities that can hardly be compensated for by what one critic called Bissoondath’s “bleak honesty” (Thorpe [1991], 9). His second novel, The Innocence of Age, 1992, concentrates on a white Canadian protagonist and his estranged son, whose wanderings through Toronto make them aware that the city is rapidly and constantly changing, the ups and downs of some areas suggesting similar movements in the life of individuals and social groups. The novelist’s intention seems to be to universalize the migrant’s plight — one can be a migrant in one’s own country — seen as an aspect of the mutability of existence and, as has been pointed out, to “deconstruct” such categories as “ethnic fiction” or “migrant writing” (Van Toorn [1994], 89). Of the same generation as Bissoondath and, like him, at first a short story writer, Lawrence Scott is a European creole from Trinidad who now lives in Britain; he has published a highly original novel, Witchbroom, 1992. The author’s acknowledgments of his indebtedness to older West Indian artists and his recreation of Caribbean history and myth clearly place him in a specifically Caribbean tradition. But in spirit, this novel of epic dimension belongs with the work of a new generation who, while aware that the terrible legacies of the past still influence the social and political complexities of the present, envisages a Caribbean future in terms of reconciliation and possibility. The narrative consists of an overture — music and later painting alternately animate the novel’s texture — and of two groups of “Carnival Tales” recreating the pre- and post-independence eras, separated by the first narrator’s self-analytical diary. As he is on the point of closing down the old family house, he evokes fairly similar events as the tales, though in a more matter-of-fact way and “in a plainer style” (Scott [1992], 95). The “Carnival Tales” recreate the history of a Spanish family since the conquest of the New World, the Monagas de los Macajuelos, and are told by Lavren, their last descendant and the first narrator’s “alter ego” (2). The tales are inspired both by Marie Elena, his mother and muse, and by the stories his second mother and Black Nanny, Josephine, used to tell him. Lavren is something of a mythical character, “archetypal” in Wilson Harris’s sense of the word, a hermaphrodite who “levitated between worlds. S/he hung between genders. S/he trembled between loves and desires. S/he was pigmented between races. S/he stretched her young body between continents and hung about her neck this archipelago of islands” (12). As a kind of vessel voicing the dreams, ambitions, and sufferings of all strata, genders and races of West Indian society while overlooking the Gulf of Sadness and occasionally swimming in its undercurrents, Lavren seems to have emerged from the depths of Caribbean experience, conscious that the one task he must never relinquish is “remembering.” His brothers and his sister have dispersed, “fleeing and

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fragmenting the family in their fear and guilt, their obsession with pigmentation” (224), and he alone remains to remember the guilt and pain of the past, as well as love and dedication. If the story of the white plantocracy largely dominates the narrative, it is by way of a confession, while Josephine’s role in the lives of her masters shows how inextricably interdependent blacks and whites are: on the day of her mistress’s delivery, Josephine gives birth to a son also conceived by Lavren’s father when he seduced her on his own marital bed. The novel ends on J’ouvert morning (from “jour ouvert”), suggesting the openness and the promise of the future, when the first narrator realizes that he has been Lavren all along, the composite consciousness and conscience of the Caribbean. At the novel’s very end, “the memory of treachery and cruelty” endures, and the vestiges of a long history of exploitation and torment are still seen. Finally, the old plantation house, derelict and eaten up by a parasite worse than the witchbroom that entailed the family’s ruin (slavery and indentureship), disappears, and there remains only an absence full of “remembered selves” (272). This beautifully written novel blends the tragic with the comic, eccentric behavior with silent suffering, and sacrifice with love, while the fluidity and empathy of the exploring, sensitive consciousness points to a new course in the Caribbean imagination. Scott’s second novel Aelred’s Sin, 1998, further develops a theme adumbrated in Witchbroom, the overwhelming ambivalent influence of the Creole Catholicism on Jean Marc de la Borde (the Aelred of the title), also a white planter’s son. He joins an English monastery (formerly an estate built on the proceeds of the slave trade) at the age of nineteen after the tragic death of Ted, his mixed-race youthful love who was challenged by hostile schoolboys to jackknife from a high rock. In the monastery Aelred falls in love with an older monk, his mentor, then with a young novice, and strives to sublimate his sexual passion into spiritual love and conciliate it with the monastic discipline and vow of chastity. Gradually his idealization of both homoeroticism and love of God combine with his apprehension of the cruelties of racism. Cleaning the painting of the eighteenth-century owner of the estate — which represents an African boy kneeling by his master — he recalls his black nanny’s story of Mungo, a young slave hanged for trying to escape. Aelred calls the boy in the painting Jordan and fictionalizes his life from his capture in Africa, his enslavement in Antigua, and his death. Hunted by his master’s hounds, Jordan plunges into a river and, like Ted, dies when his head strikes a rock. Aelred’s own thwarted emotions and suffering enhance his compassion for the torments imposed on Ted, Mungo, and Jordan by a similar inhuman intolerance. When he dies, presumably of AIDS, some years after leaving the monastery, his younger brother Robert, who runs the family plantation, comes to England. As both third-person and I-narrator, he reconstructs Aelred’s life from his journals and letters while on a moral journey of his own. For Aelred, and years later Robert, the experience of Ted, Mungo, and Jordan urges them to come to terms with the racism and guilt in their own, and the West Indian, past. Writing about it is also an initiation into art and, as in other recent West Indian novels (see Dabydeen’s A Harlot’s Progress), it brings out the close links between Caribbean and English social history. Also of Trinidadian origin, but based in the United States and Spain, Robert Antoni has much in common with Lawrence Scott, not least a faith in a rememberment of formerly antagonized racial groups. Antoni’s impressive first novel, Divina Trace, 1991, deals, like Witchbroom, but on a more playful and daring mode, with the complex genealogy and history

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of the Caribbean and celebrates its multiculturalism, an aspect of West Indian identity hardly ever pictured by white creole writers, not even by Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey. Seven voices, speaking from different social, racial, and sexual perspectives, help the ninety-year-old central narrator, John Domingo Jr, to chart the mysterious story of Magdalena, a nun cum whore who has been canonized by the folk. These voices also trace the short life of her frog-like son, perceived as both a fantastic being (a “diab-crapochild” [Antoni (1991), 69] in the words of Evelina, the obeah woman) and a congenital monster suffering from anencephaly, a tension between “superstition and science” (Rollins [1993], 72) typical of the novel’s hybrid spirit. What follows is a visionary journey into a violent past, made up of rapes and incest, yet ending in forgiveness, through which the narrator discovers his “other I. Not the imagined I but the I of my imagination: the imagining I” (Antoni [1991], 170) and explores the collective memory of Corpus Christi, the fictional island reminiscent of Trinidad where the novel is set. The text’s stylistic and formal exuberance, inviting comparisons with novels by James Joyce and Gabriel García Márquez, gives Divina Trace a surreal touch. Yet some critics believe that Antoni’s overblown prose is more likely to alienate readers, as in the abstruse central section, narrated by Hanuman, the monkey god, and appropriately written in a simian gibberish full of well-hidden ironic allusions. One might argue, however, as the narrator does in relation to the testimony of Mother Superior Maurina (a Molly-like monologue without punctuation, mixing Latin, Spanish and onomatopoeia) that, “through [its] sensory overload,” this incantatory novel can manage “to tap some source deeper than [one’s] conscious mind, deeper than reasoning and touching and actually tasting” (157). While addressing by now common postmodern issues such as the meaning of language and the relativity of historical truth, Divina Trace’s originality lies mainly in its vivid representation of a cross-cultural Caribbean as “one big callaloo with all of we boiling up swimming together inside, and nobody could know any longer who was who and what was what, much less care to make a difference” (365). One finds a similar interest in syncretism in Antoni’s more recently published novel Blessed is the Fruit, 1997. Its lush and lyrical narrative centers on two thirty-three-year-old women living on the island of Corpus Christi in the late 1950s: white Lilla, an impoverished estate owner, and black Vel, Lilla’s servant, at once her “opposite” and her “own twin sister” (31). As Vel is recovering from a failed abortion in her mistress’s bed, the two women evoke their often difficult past and try to make sense of their “collective Caribbean fate” (51) beyond the constraints of race and class. This deep-running complicity, testifying to a conciliatory mood that also characterizes the writing of younger Caribbean writers in Britain, is embodied by Bolom, Vel’s yet unborn child, to whom the two women tell their complex life stories. If the arrival in Britain of writers such as Wilson Harris, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Sam Selvon led to a new West Indian consciousness and an unprecedented creative boom, it also paved the way for a new generation of writers of Caribbean origin who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Either born or brought up in England, these younger artists are still caught between a Caribbean ancestry to which they remain attached and the British culture in which they grew up. In a sense, then, their attempts to build bridges between these two poles resemble the reaction of their predecessors to the cultural “schizophrenia” inherited from colonialism, although what was for them a source of conflict, albeit creative, has now become the carrier of a richer, pluricultural consciousness. For the two groups of writers, fiction is part of a process

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of self-discovery manifest, for example, in their common predilection for the Bildungsroman. Yet, the endeavors of the younger writers to find a genuine identity seem to rest on a more confident sense of belonging to British culture, however tempered this feeling may be by the racism they still face and the supranational ethos to which many of them tend to subscribe as citizens of a global world. Their border writing can thus be said to contribute to the definition of a displaced and increasingly universal Caribbean identity, while simultaneously taking part in the construction of a new, heterogeneous Britishness. In spite of the discrimination rampant in the Thatcherite Britain of the 1980s, the fiction by the descendants of Caribbean immigrants has rarely been one of social protest, unlike much of the poetry written during the same period. Only a handful of minor novels, mostly written by novelists of Jamaican descent, have taken as their direct subject the anger and frustration of the new generation who, in the wake of the 1981 Brixton riots, came to the realization that their parents had been lured to Britain by false promises. Two examples of this trend are Norman Smith’s Bad Friday, 1982, and David Simon’s Railton Blues, 1983, written in adapted forms of Jamaican English. Whereas their protagonists see exile in Britain very much as a new form of slavery, they never express nostalgia for the Caribbean. In the same vein, Amon Saba Saakana’s Blues Dance, 1985, draws upon dub and reggae to depict a violent and racist London. That social realism is a marginal genre in recent Caribbean fiction in Britain should not be taken to mean that this body of novels is impervious to its social and political surroundings. On the contrary, in spite of their frequent temporal and spatial distantiation from contemporary Britain, these narratives can be read as allegories of life in a modern, multicultural society. By and large, the major novelists of the post-Empire Windrush generation write in a revised realistic vein, integrating deliberate intertextuality, polyphony, structural disruption or even, as in Fred D’Aguiar’s Dear Future, 1996, tinges of magical realism. As Mario Relich put it in relation to David Dabydeen’s prose, “beneath the limpid surface lurk endlessly explosive undercurrents of literary, cultural and historical debate” (Relich [1993], 56). While such subversions of the traditional realistic narrative might be ascribed to the familiarity of writers, who are also academics, with current literary theories and postmodernist techniques, they are more likely to emanate from a double authorial intention: the wish to decolonize their writing by questioning the epistemological and ontological premises of Western thought, while also expressing a desire to continue, and simultaneously depart from, the Caribbean literary tradition represented by the former generation and thereby to give voice to a new displaced, yet idiosyncratic Caribbean sensibility. Perhaps another explanation for this departure from conventional realism also is that, unlike their predecessors, the second generation of writers are no longer affected by a “burden of revelation” (Dabydeen and Wilson-Tagoe [1987], 83), that is, they do not have to explain themselves to an audience but can rely on the readership created by their precursors (D’Aguiar [1993], 141) Caryl Phillips, who was born in St Kitts and arrived in England when still a baby, stands out as the most original and versatile among the new Caribbean voices. He is also a prolific playwright, television and radio scriptwriter, essayist and editor, which is not without relevance to his fiction. His collection of essays The European Tribe, 1987, is a case in point for its indictment of European racism gives a more political edge to his often restrained narratives. Moreover, as it probes the identity quandaries of a Caribbean migrant living in the West though

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not fully of it, this volume sheds light on the predicament of a whole generation of writers, very much as George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile had done for the novelists of the 1960s. Although there are major differences between Phillips’s early and later novels testifying to an impressive capacity to develop, his fiction could well be read as a single book starting from the concrete Caribbean exilic condition and developing into a complex diasporic vision or, in the novelist’s own words, “a sort of late twentieth-century aesthetic which reaches out beyond the Caribbean” (Phillips [1991-c], 605). In addition to a pervasive concern with displacement, which he has explored from many angles, Phillips is also obsessed with the misrepresentations of history which he feels his moral responsibility as a writer to address. Therefore his novels often focus on marginalized individuals silenced by hegemonic systems, whether colonialism, patriarchy, or Christianity. His sympathetic recreation of female voices bespeaks an exceptional capacity to render a character’s inner thoughts as well as a great sensitivity to sexual oppression. Phillips’s first two novels deal with the tense relation between the Caribbean and Britain that has crucially shaped his art. The Final Passage, 1985, tells the story of Leila, a young West Indian woman who journeys, in the 1950s, from her prison-like Caribbean island to an unwelcoming London. The novel’s open ending does not completely alleviate the despair of Leila who is shattered by England’s coldness and by her husband’s selfishness. In keeping with Phillips’s double allegiance, The Final Passage is as much about British as about Caribbean history, for if it explores the reasons that drove Caribbean people to undertake the quasi-mythical journey to the colonial Motherland, it equally chronicles the changing face of Britain in the postwar years. Though a modest novel written in a deceptively plain, yet lyrical prose, it nonetheless prefigures features of Phillips’s more mature writing: a tendency toward ambivalence as well as a preference for form over plot. One can also see in Leila, who bears a striking resemblance to Jean Rhys’s victimized heroines, a prototype of the alienated and enigmatic Phillips character who finds it difficult to communicate with others but whose often vain efforts to survive finally command respect. In spite of a predictable narrative, A State of Independence, 1986, offers a critique of neocolonialism in St Kitts, the more perceptive for being the fruit of the author’s “stereoscopic vision” as both insider and outsider of the society he depicts. Its main protagonist, Bertram Francis, decides to go back to his native Caribbean after two decades in Britain. Confronted with the corruption of local politicians and his own incapacity to act, he intuits that nothing can ever be achieved if the past is ignored. His return, fraught with cultural and emotional difficulties easy to imagine, conveys the tragic fate of the immigrant who can “never go back home and be happy” (Phillips [1982], 47), an understandably favorite theme with exiled writers of the first but also the second generation as is obvious in Joan Riley’s A Kindness to the Children, 1992, and Vernella Fuller’s Going Back Home, 1992. With Higher Ground, 1989, Phillips’s fiction takes a departure toward greater formal sophistication, though some reviewers interpreted this as artistic failure. Its vaster historical and topological scope encompasses Africa, the Americas, and Europe, the three key components of cosmopolitan Caribbeanness. Higher Ground consists of three apparently unrelated stories, each giving voice to a suffering and isolated individual “trying to survive a journey” (Phillips [1989], 218) whose plight can be read as an allegory of the alienated and exiled West Indian moving from enslavement and bondage to life in a Western metropolis. A nameless African working as

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an agent for white slave-traders on the West African coast is the narrator of “Heartland,” the first section set in the eighteenth century. “The Cargo Rap” is made up of the letters sent by Rudi, a black American prisoner in the 1960s. The focus of “Higher Ground,” the third part, is Irina, a Polish Jew exiled in post-war Britain. By bringing these three stories together, Phillips invites his reader to see them, from a kind of moral higher ground, as the complementary facets of a human condition he views in terms of captivity and oppression, made perhaps more bearable for being shared and resisted by men and women from different continents and times. Cambridge, 1991, mostly takes place on a nineteenth-century Caribbean plantation. Written in a pastiche of confessional literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely travel writing and slave narratives (see O’Callaghan [1993-b]), it centers on two characters: Emily, a thirty-year-old Englishwoman who has just arrived to survey her absentee father’s sugar estate, and Cambridge, a slave born in Africa whose education and conversion to Christianity marks him as a threat to white plantocracy. Although both are finally crushed by slavery and the violence of the colonial society, Emily’s vision eventually begins “to pulsate with a new and magical life” (Phillips [1991-a], 182), which indicates, as Wilson Harris’s fiction has repeatedly shown, that human imagination can survive and even benefit from the worst adversity. The masterly mixture of good faith and self-deception inscribed in the discourses of the two protagonists provides a powerful anatomy of the paradoxes and psychological processes underlying Caribbean history. Cambridge is often regarded as Phillips’s masterpiece because of its subtle yet powerful irony which constantly questions the notion of truth and, according to Paul Sharrad, “works to turn monologue into dialogue” (Sharrad [1994], 213). Like Higher Ground and Cambridge, Crossing the River, 1993, rests on a recreation, without sentimentality or moralism, of unheard voices from the past, a strategy that conveys Phillips’s belief in the novel as “an incredibly democratic medium” (Phillips [1991-b], 98) but also as a revisionary tool. This fragmented novel spans two hundred and fifty years of black Atlantic history and opens with a guilty African father who sold his children to an English slave-trader in the eighteenth century. The body of the book is made up of the “many-tongued chorus” (Phillips [1993], 1) of his children dispersed in time and space: Nash, a nineteenth-century liberated slave sent as a missionary to Liberia; Martha, a pioneer in the American Wild West; and Travis, a black GI posted in Europe during WWII, but also Joyce, the working-class Englishwoman who becomes Travis’s wife. While the jubilant epilogue brings the voices of the African Diaspora together and points to the possibility of cross-culturality, of crossing the river of man-made prejudices, the rest of the novel suggests that this remains a complex and nevercompleted process, constantly threatened as it is by tribalism and obsession with racial difference. This is even more fully demonstrated in The Nature of Blood, 1997, which is mostly set in a Europe hostile to what it regards as the outsiders in its midst. The novel combines, in another puzzle-like narrative, a haunting evocation of the Holocaust as seen through the eyes of Eva Stern, one of its victims, with the Israelis’ discrimination against Ethiopian Jews, a connection that Phillips uses to show that “man learns little from history” (Phillips [1998], 7). The novel also interweaves a lyrical reworking of Othello (with the African general as central consciousness) into dry and biased accounts of Jewish persecution in fifteenth-century Venice. Here again, as in Higher Ground, Phillips approaches the Jewish experience with sympathy and obliquely suggests a parallel with the black history of homelessness and exclusion, a traditional

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comparison in Caribbean thought that informs Rastafarian ideology but is also tackled in novels such as Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, the Timeless People, 1969, and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng, 1984. Nevertheless, despite Eva’s suicide and Othello’s bitter thoughts, the vision of the world offered in The Nature of Blood is not wholly negative for it points again and again to man’s universal need for love and irrepressible capacity to maintain hope in the face of adversity. The need, and the difficulty, to unearth the repressed traumas of history, which runs as a leitmotiv in Phillips’s later fiction and may be part of a quest for a postmigratory self-definition, is also central to The Longest Memory, 1994, the first novel by Guyanese-born Fred D’Aguiar, also an acclaimed poet and playwright. Set on a Virginian plantation at the turn of the nineteenth century, The Longest Memory is built around the figure of Whitechapel, an old, obedient slave (the “master of his own slavery” [D’Aguiar [1994], 27]), who reports the escape of his rebellious son to the plantation owner and thereby causes him to be whipped to death, an act of betrayal illustrating the issues of responsibility and loyalty conflicts in an oppressive system. In spare, though vibrant prose, the novel then branches out from this central event into the testimonies of its many protagonists: the master, his daughter, the overseer, the runaway son and his mother, whose intertwined voices evoke the “prodigious carpet” (33) that the complex history of the Americas has helped to weave. Like Phillips, D’Aguiar chooses to dwell on the unchronicled aspects of slavery, viewing it from a human rather than an institutional perspective, thus examining the many ambiguities hidden behind its monolithic facade. Although he refutes any autobiographical dimension at the beginning of Dear Future, 1996, D’Aguiar may have drawn upon his own Guyanese childhood to create in this novel the village of Ariel and its colorful inhabitants, among them Red Head, a nine-year-old boy who longs to be reunited with his mother, an immigrant in England. After receiving a head injury, he alternates between reality and a dream-like dimension, a limbo from which he writes letters to “Dear Future,” his only hope of change. The episodic narrative, full of macabre humor, addresses the corrupting effects of power, the destruction of nature and traditional culture by progress symbolized here by a black tarmac road “running through the heart of the land” (D’Aguiar [1996], 25), and the disruption of family life caused by migration, all problems that affect present-day Caribbean societies and ironically threaten the “Dear Future” the boy puts so much faith in. But the immense creative resources of ordinary people, their genuine racial pluralism in a racially polarized country as well as the warmth of their extended families are presented as possible if endangered alternatives to the scourges of modernity. In his next novel, Feeding the Ghosts, 1997, D’Aguiar reverts to the slave experience and recreates from the victim’s point of view the conditions of the Middle Passage and the poorly documented practice whereby ships’ captains would throw presumably sick slaves overboard, then claim compensation from insurance companies, rather than risk financial loss if their “stock” did not fetch a good price at market. D’Aguiar’s narrative is based on an actual event, the jettisoning of 132 live slaves by the captain of the Zong (also mentioned in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng), who later faces the insurers at a trial presided by Lord Mansfield, himself a slave owner. The prologue, a prose poem evoking human bodies gradually melting into the rolling waves (see also David Dabydeen’s poem Turner), their voice speaking through the wind, transmutes and amplifies Derek Walcott’s “the sea is history” into “the sea is slavery.” The principal narrative strand contrasts the captain’s treatment of the slaves as cargo with their suffering and terror as perceived through the consciousness of Mintah,

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a mission-educated young woman, who was also thrown overboard but managed to climb back on board. From her hiding place she writes a journal that is produced at the trial by the sailor who helped her. The judge quite predictably ignores the journal as ghost-written; but for Mintah writing her slave narrative is a duty and a tribute to the dead that keeps their memory alive. The powerful reconstruction of the Middle Passage is interwoven with a striking sea, wind, and, above all, wood imagery. Mintah, who has learned carving from her father, later carves 131 statues of the nameless ghosts buried in the oceanic vault as another act of memory: “The ghosts feed on the story of themselves. The past is laid to rest when it is told” (D’Aguiar [1997], 230). Like Fred D’Aguiar, David Dabydeen is a prize-winning poet of Guyanese origin. However, he diverges from his fellow-countryman in that his fiction is written from a recognizably IndoCaribbean perspective, which is not to suggest that it is narrowly ethnocentric. On the contrary, its many allusions to the racial tensions in his native country show that Dabydeen, like Grace Nichols or Janice Shinebourne, other Guyanese novelists of his generation, is aware of the destructiveness of racial essentialism. His novels are therefore imbued with a sense of the cultural plurality of West Indian identity, encapsulated in the parting words “you is we” (Dabydeen [1991], 40) uttered by an African character to the nameless narrator of The Intended, 1991, as he leaves his Berbice village for England. This commonality is also illustrated in his third novel, The Counting House, 1996, where the exploitation of the African slave Miriam by the white plantation owner foreshadows the lot of the freshly arrived indentured East Indians. As is often the case with first novels, The Intended is largely autobiographical. The London experience of its teenage narrator is interspersed with long flashbacks evoking his childhood in a violent, yet warm Guyana, which reveals Dabydeen’s talent for bringing minor characters to life, in a way reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul’s early fiction. The novel captures the narrator’s inner division between his ambition to belong to the center symbolized by the University of Oxford which he finally reaches, and his attachment to his “dark self” (Dabydeen [1991], 196) embodied by his Rastafarian friend Joseph Countryman. Joseph’s intuitive imagination works as a foil to the apparent calm and order of Western academia and, in a subtle twist of irony, informs the whole novel, not only its broken structure and imaginative prose but also its use of Creole in which the absence of grammatical distinction between past, present, and future is, for Dabydeen, evocative of the migrant experience (Dabydeen [1990], 179). While The Intended has been read as a metaphor for the dilemma of the exiled post colonial intellectual caught between “resistance and complicity” (see Fee [1993]), it can also be interpreted as a subversion of the traditional apprenticeship novel (see Relich [1993]) or as an example of literary decolonization through its “creation of a new literary aesthetic independent from the cultural hegemony” (McIntyre [1996]) which transpires, for example, in its complex reworking of Heart of Darkness, evoked by the title. In Disappearance, 1993, the central character is an Afro-Guyanese engineer who has been sent to Dunsmere, a village near Hastings, to help consolidate its crumbling foundations, an obvious reference to a decaying empire. In spite of its obtrusive symbolism and self-conscious writing that refer back to Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, the novel is a sensitive rendering of a colonial journey from illusion to disillusion. While the narrator used to view Englishness as essentially rational and restrained, he is initiated into its darker sides by two fellow outsiders in the village, the eccentric Mrs. Rutherford and the

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Irishman Christie, an experience that leads him to greater awareness through a reappraisal of the “sorrow of ancestral memory” (Dabydeen [1993], 17). Dabydeen himself achieves a similar repossession of the past in his third novel, The Counting House, 1996. If Phillips and D’Aguiar retrieve the slave past in their fiction, Dabydeen returns to indentureship, a subject rarely tackled by West Indian novelists of the previous generation. The Counting House focuses on Rohini and Vidia, two poor Indian peasants who migrate to British Guiana in the nineteenth century at the time of the Indian Mutiny, lured by promises of wealth and romance. But, as Rohini’s childlessness conveys, the new land proves a mirage. The couple gradually drifts apart, their relation strained by their differently channeled ambitions which are symbolized by the title’s counting house. Thanks to a kaleidoscopic perspective including the points of view of parents and friends of the young couple, Dabydeen portrays Indian and Guianese societies without idealizing them: while his India is plagued by endemic starvation and a rigid caste system, the Guiana he describes is riddled with destructive greed and violence. Hardly disguised authorial explanations about Indian customs occasionally mar the novel, yet it provides a cogent if bleak account of “coolie” experience as well as an enlightening analysis of the tense relationships between Afro- and Indo-Guyanese that still affect contemporary Guyana. In Hogarth’s Blacks, 1985, a book on eighteenth-century English art, Dabydeen presented an exhaustive analysis of Hogarth’s serial paintings entitled A Harlot’s Progress. His eponymous novel, 1999, is, in his own words, a “reconfiguration” of the paintings (Wasafiri [1999], 29). Indeed, the central character and narrator is a black slave who usually figures on the margins or in the background of Hogarth’s paintings. As he lies on his deathbed, Mungo (an imposed name later changed to Noah, then Perseus) is pestered by a Mr. Pringle, an abolitionist in whose eyes he is only a “ruined archive” (Dabydeen [1999], 3, 36). Pringle himself wants to write an “epic” of the slave’s adventures to promote his cause. Pringle’s insistence kindles Mungo’s consciousness but he gives Pringle scant or false information (“I can change memory,” 2). Mungo refuses to have his story and the suffering of his people appropriated and turned into a sensationalized account. He creates instead a narrative of his own including alternative versions of experiences ranging from his early childhood in Africa to his capture, sodomization, and conversion to Christianity by Captain Thistlewood, his sale to Lord Montague, then to the Jew Gideon who appoints him servant to the prostitute Moll Hackabout. The novel’s message is clearly that in the corrupt, mercantile society of the time, when human beings were commodities, everyone was enslaved by other humans, by cupidity or ideology, or by all three. The novel’s most remarkable feature is the complete symbiosis between form and content. The multiplicity of viewpoints adopted by Mungo is matched by an equal multiplicity of language registers, pidgin alternating with highly sophisticated English, poetic evocations with violence. Violence is expressed in deed and expression both in Africa and London and in Mungo’s inner dialogues with the dead. Mungo is out to show that he has mastered all the forms and subtleties of the language as well as much of the knowledge available at the time. His true personality, however, remains a mystery to Mr. Pringle and, to some extent, to the reader. Since the fluctuations in language and narrative perspective make it impossible to pin Mungo down, Dabydeen’s style suggests perhaps that the dehumanizing effect of slavery destroys any possibility of a stable self. Only in the last chapter, when Moll finally appears in the narrative, does Mungo sound authentic in his expression of tenderness for the harlot who has only “progressed” to her death. Yet, surpisingly,

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and in contradiction to Dabydeen’s analysis of the paintings in Hogarth’s Blacks, Mungo asserts that the artist, too, misrepresented them both. The final irony is that he turned them into a commodity for thousands when the paintings were popularized and repeatedly reproduced. If the emergence of a new generation of novelists may be viewed as one of the main developments of Caribbean literature since the seventies, the long-awaited recognition of writing by women was an even more striking phenomenon. Their fiction had, till then, not so much been absent as marginalized by publishers and critics alike. Significantly, one of the first publications of the 1970s is Crick Crack, Monkey, 1970, by the Trinidadian Merle Hodge. Remarkable for its vigor and humor, it has become a symbol for a rising tradition of women’s writing. Not only is it the first major novel published by a black Caribbean woman (with the exception of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, 1959), but it also encapsulates the preoccupations that were to figure prominently, though with a great diversity of approach and tone, in female fiction: the place of family relationships in the coming to maturity of a child protagonist, often metaphorical of the wider political scene; the incongruities and destructive effects of colonial education; and the complex intersections of race, class, and gender in cultural identification. The male novelists of the 1950s and 1960s had already explored these themes; but it is important to underline that women writers were often more introspective and formally more innovative than their male predecessors. What further seems to distinguish female writers, apart from their focus on heroines rather than heroes and their greater sensitivity to their “double colonization” first as colonials then as women (see Petersen and Rutherford [1986]), is an interest in retrieving voices and knowledge from the past, a movement also involving male authors like Caryl Phillips. In other words, women writers are intent on challenging their age-long, actual and literary, voicelessness, or, rather, unheardness (Davies and Fido [1990], 3), which no doubt explains why so many of their works are autobiographies, either real or fictive. This new “woman consciousness,” involving “righting history and redefining identities” (25), is often combined with a “reliance on oraliture,” which, for Rhonda Cobham, provides women writers with powerful metaphors as well as with “organizing principles within their narratives” (Cobham [1993], 47). Hence the insertion of songs, nursery rhymes, or storytelling and the crucial role ascribed to grandmother figures as repositories of ancestral wisdom, lore, and indigenous practices such as obeah. These two aspects significantly coalesce in the title of Hodge’s seminal novel, an echo of the ritual “Crick crack?” with which the heroine’s grandmother Ma used to conclude her Anancy-stories and to which the children would chorus back: “Monkey break ‘e back / On a rotten pommerac!” (Hodge [1970], 25), but also a reminder of the “hiatus between fantasy and reality” (Cobham [1993], 47) that brands the life of many protagonists in Caribbean female fiction. Crick Crack, Monkey is narrated through the eyes of Cynthia Davis, also known as Tee, a young girl whose mother has died and whose father has emigrated to England. First brought up by the boisterous and generous Tantie in a caring, multicultural rural community, she then goes to live in a gentrifying neighborhood of Port-of-Spain with her self-righteous Aunt Beatrice whose firm intention is to “haul” her niece out of “ordinaryness” or “niggeryness” (Hodge [1970], 137). The heroine’s dual allegiances to and growing ambivalence toward indigenous values and those imported from the metropolis are reflected in shifts from broad dialect to standard English but also in changing rhythms of narration. If Tee can thus be seen as torn

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between clashing cultural systems, some critics have insisted on a more complex reading, one also including the world of Ma and that of the colonial school which generates Helen, Tee’s imaginary “Proper Me” (90; see Gikandi [1992] and O’Callaghan [1993-a], 70). Crick Crack, Monkey closes with the heroine looking forward to her imminent departure for England, to her “‘Land of Hope and Glory’
” (Hodge [1970], 46), ironically unaware that more alienation awaits her there and that it will be difficult for her to ever find her “true-true name” (32), painfully caught as she is between Tee and Cynthia, between her peasant past and her middle-class aspirations. Although Merle Hodge views creative writing as “a guerilla activity” that can empower peoples and help them fight attempts to negate the reality of their world (Cudjoe [1990], 206), she paradoxically stopped writing fiction after her promising first novel, apparently taken up by political activism. Recently, however, she published For the Life of Laetitia, 1995, this time aimed at a younger Caribbean readership who, she believes, should also be exposed to children’s fiction from their area. It is about twelve-year-old Lacey who has to leave her small village to get an education in town. In Beka Lamb, 1982, Zee Edgell from Belize portrays another case of divided consciousness as her eponymous protagonist is, like Tee, forced to choose between her black creole community (embodied in her militant Granny Ivy) and the colonial values which entail that “almost everything locally reared or made is suspect” (Edgell [1982], 88). This impossible choice encapsulates the difficulties of the quest for postcolonial individuality while also illustrating the pitfalls facing the construction of a national identity in a society struggling for decolonization (see Gikandi [1992]). But Beka Lamb emphasizes more strongly than Hodge’s novel the role of religion, represented here by a moralistic and hypocritical Catholic Church, in the cultural dilemma of the colonial subject. In addition, it directly addresses the issue of female sexuality through Beka’s close friend Toycie who cannot bear the stigma of an illegitimate pregnancy and eventually dies mad. Much of the novel consists in a long flashback meant as a wake for Toycie, “a remembrance in the privacy of Beka’s own heart” (Edgell [1982], 5), ending with her reaching a mental “clearing” that imbues her story with a sense of beginning. Taking place in a Belize on the verge of independence, Edgell’s second novel, In Times Like These, 1991, brings again the private and the public together. It focuses on Pavana Leslie, a young woman back in her homeland with her twin children after years working in Somalia for a development agency. However, this new novel does not match the originality of Beka Lamb which, though not experimental, had a vividness sustained by a pervasive vegetation imagery. Edgell’s second work of fiction, described as a “romance” by at least two reviewers, fails mostly at the level of characterization, with a heroine almost too respectable to be true. It has also been labeled a “middle-class novel,” not that this is a flaw in itself, but the book does not really call into question the values of that social group, such as careerism, though these obviously clash with the preoccupations of the nation at large (see Savory [1993], 87). Jamaican Erna Brodber, like Hodge and Edgell, belongs to a small group of women writers who, though widely traveled, have opted for residence in the Caribbean, possibly a way of asserting their commitment to their society and the place of women in it. If, as one critic put it, “Caribbean women writers are more amenable to formal experimentation than their male counterparts” (Gikandi [1992], 32), Erna Brodber certainly exemplifies this statement in a style

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that in Wilson Harris’s words, “penetrates surfaces to convert boundaries” (Harris [1990-b], 89, 92). Like Harris’s own fiction, her narratives attempt to retrieve a “community of being” from the unconscious and to reintegrate in oneself and one’s social environment all the disparate elements, above all mixed ancestry, previously ignored. Brodber’s is one of the most original talents among Caribbean women writers, whose work blends in totally new language and forms the expression of womanhood (so long confined to stereotypes in both life and fiction) and of a specifically feminine sensibility, history (particularly oral history transmitted by ordinary people in Jamaica), social analysis, myth-making, and the folk tradition. Like Harris, who makes little distinction between fiction and essay, Brodber, an historian and sociologist, remarks that “her sociology and her fiction are inextricably linked,” and, like Harris again, she believes that individual and community must confront their past “no matter how distressing” (O’Callaghan [1986], 73, 75) before any harmonious development can take place at either level. This is the experience of Nellie, the I-narrator of Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, 1980, a title borrowed from a Caribbean song game (see Humphrey [1989], 30). Nellie suffers from a breakdown and can only begin to heal when she accepts her sexuality and understands the conditioning process to which she has been subjected by her aunt Becca, herself sterile and obsessed with respectability. The circular narrative takes Nellie from past to present, then back to the past until she can say goodbye to her mixed ancestry and declare “we are getting ready,” obviously planning the future: “No paths lay before us. We would have to make them” (Brodber [1980], 147, 146). The reader must piece together her broken recollections of her protected and idealized childhood, her fearful and guilty discovery of sexuality, her first frustrating sexual experience, her recognition of her identity as black and Jamaican in the United States, her disappointing commitment to political activism and her growing awareness of her true cultural roots. The central ambivalent symbol of the novel is Anancy’s “kumbla,” a Jamaican word for calabash, at once a protective envelope and a source of light which either blind and paralyze or “show you the way” (77). For, as Nellie realizes, “the trouble with the kumbla is the getting out of the kumbla” (130), an expression which has come to express the liberation of the female voice in Caribbean literature (see Davies and Fido [1990]). Myal, 1988, also presents the psychological breakdown of the central character, Ella O’Grady, a young mulatto girl adopted by a near white Methodist parson and his English wife who give her a schoolish education that gradually cuts her off from her peasant background. She accompanies a rich American woman to Baltimore and there marries a white American who appropriates both her body and her past which he uses to produce a profitable entertainment, “the biggest coon show ever,” called Caribbean Nights and Days (Brodber [1988], 79, 80). But he would not give her the child she longs for, and when she becomes psychologically ill, developing an imaginary pregnancy, she is brought home and cured by Mass Cyrus, a religious folk leader who practices Myalism, a kind of healing by which the slaves attempted to counter evil forces and the sometimes negative effects of obeah. Similarly, young Anita threatened by Mass Levi who uses obeah to “zombify” her and restore his declining sexual powers, is exorcized by Miss Gatha, of the Kumina Church, whose liberating influence as she marches like “a coconut tree in a private hurricane … Birnamwood come to Dunsiname” (70) is rooted in her African cultural past.

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One senses through the narrative the strength of the oral tradition in the many voices and rhythmical cadences through which the life of the Grove Town community can literally be heard and sensed. The conversion of boundaries Harris alludes to relates to the self-awareness the two girls, and the community with them, achieve as they are freed from the “spirit thieves” who victimized them, Ella’s husband who drains her dry, spirit thieves at Whitehall but also Jamaican sexual plunderers (Brodber [1988], 108, 82, 109). The conversion also applies to the fractured realities — religious mosaic, historical and cultural legacies — in the community, eventually moving toward an accepted syncretism. As has been pointed out, there is “an analogy between the role of the healer who diagnoses the heroine’s illness and that of the artist who examines the sources of cultural malaise” (Walker-Johnson [1992], 49). The end of the novel wittily implies that the remedy must come from within, an expulsion of the hidden text, “The half that has never been told” (Brodber [1988], 34). Like her first two novels, Brodber’s Louisiana, 1994, rests on a retrieval of voices from the past to set in motion a process of collective and individual healing. In the 1930s, Ella Townsend, a young African-American of Caribbean origin, is sent to Louisiana by the University of Columbia to piece together local black history with the help of a prototypical tape recorder. Her major informant is Mrs. Sue Ann Grant-King, at once storyteller, matriarch, and, as Ella later learns, a Marcus Garvey supporter and a psychic. Although she dies well before Ella’s mission is over, the old lady, also known as Anna and Mammy, keeps sending messages first through the recording device then through Ella’s own mouth, a “thought transplant” that at first makes Ella question her sanity but which she later comes to accept as a “journey into knowing” (Brodber [1994], 31, 38). Through Ella’s academic project, Brodber points to the sterility of a science wary of psychic forces and therefore ignorant of the “affective interaction between the researcher and the researched” (Cudjoe [1990], 165) while also touching upon the appropriative impulses that can underlie an investigation into the past. What might have turned into “spirit thievery” then results in Ella’s rediscovery of her roots, a rebirth and ongoing metamorphosis. For Ella’s husband too, a colored Jew from the Congo brought up by a white priest in Belgium, Louisiana means becoming a new man (Brodber [1994], 53) and, although his relationship to his wife is at first not devoid of self-interest on both sides, he supports and shares her involvement with the supernatural. But Ella’s experience is above all a “community tale” (161) that explores the deep and complex links between the Afro-Caribbean and African-American histories, a theme already touched upon in Myal but also running through Phillips’s Crossing the River. According to Brodber, attempts to build connections between the New World blacks have so far come mostly from the grass roots, and it is high time that intellectuals tackled these connections, “thus making dialogue easier and more fruitful and black solidarity and therefore black action more possible” (Cudjoe [1990], 168). As Louisiana unfolds, the voice of American Anna is joined by that of Louise, alias Lowly, her close friend from Jamaica; both become spiritual mothers to Ella who celebrates their sisterly “oneness” (Brodber [1994], 62) by calling herself Louisiana (Louise plus Anna), a spiritual version of female bonding. This very rich novel is again reminiscent of Harris’s fiction, not simply because of its metaphorical style or its interest in non-rational approaches, but also for its accretive form. Opening with an epilogue in which the editor of a small black woman’s press explains how Ella’s manuscript reached them, the novel then goes on with a rough transcript of Anna’s first recording whose sibylline words, but

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also silences, are then echoed, expanded, and entered into to confirm that indeed “language is the key” (117) to human becoming. Most of Erna Brodber’s contemporaries are writing from an expanding diasporic web spanning Western Europe, mostly Britain, but also Canada and the United States. Both a lived experience and a source of inspiration for creative writing, migration can therefore be regarded as a catalyst in the development of a Caribbean female literary consciousness, very much as it contributed to the literary explosion in male writing in the 1950s. Yet, in the 1990s, the most original female talents among exiled writers are not to be found in Britain, as was the case with the first generation of male writers, and still is to a certain extent with Phillips and D’Aguiar, but in North America where, as Jamaica Kincaid pointed out, she could find her own voice more easily because there she “could rebel against … the patriarchal nineteenth-century English view.” In England, by contrast, she felt she would have been unable to “express anger at [her] historical situation” (Kincaid [1996], 142, 139). This may be one of the reasons why writing by AngloCaribbean women has been said to be fueled by a so-called “creative rather than ‘high academic’
” passion (Davies [1994], 33), their craft being basically meant to “write about life as [they] live it” (Ngcobo [1988], 1), to assert a selfhood that is threatened in the here and now, an immediacy perhaps more germane to poetry than fiction. While to some such an engagement with realism is a strength (Davies [1994], 33), it may also explain why fiction by Caribbean women in Britain tends to be published by smaller publishing houses and therefore have a poor international circulation. With six novels to her name, Beryl Gilroy is the most prolific among the Caribbean woman novelists writing in Britain. She is also their senior, although her fiction has only been released in the last decade, which may be indicative of changing policies in the world of publishing. With the exception of two romantic narratives retelling legendary love stories of the New World, Stedman and Joanna, 1991, and Inkle and Yarico, 1996, her novels are informed by her encounter with racism and prejudice as a Guyanese immigrant in the 1950s, an experience even more directly recorded in her autobiography Black Teacher, 1976. On her own admission, Gilroy writes “fact-fiction” (Cudjoe [1990], 200), deriving her inspiration from the reality met in her work as headmistress and psychologist. Moreover, she is something of an exception in Caribbean writing by women for while the vast majority of first novels deal with childhood, hers, Frangipani House, 1985, focuses on old age, also the subject of Snowflakes in the Sun, 1995, the second novel of Grenadian Jean Buffong. “Frangipani House” is the Guyanese rest home where sixty-nine-year-old Mama King has been sent by her two daughters based in New York. The book opens with Mama King’s feelings of uselessness and her rebellion at her “incarceration” and her having to “see the world through window” (Gilroy [1985], 1, 5) but it closes on a positive note, for after an ordeal including depression, madness, and a stint on the streets with a group of Indo-Caribbean beggars, Mama King eventually goes to stay with her granddaughter Cindy, a decision that Gilroy seems to consider more in keeping with the caring traditions of the African family even when dispersed by exile. Intergenerational relationships also inform BoySandwich, 1989, the story of Tyrone, a young Jamaican living in Britain, whose grandparents have, like Mama King, just made “the journey to the limbo of a sheltered home” (Gilroy [1989], 1). This shakes the fragile sense of identity of the boy who used to feel “sandwiched-in and safe” (36) between his parents and grandparents. It is only after a journey back to what he

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believes is his Jamaican home that he can come to terms with Britishness. Gilroy’s next two novels, published simultaneously, are simple stories focusing on Caribbean women in Britain. Marvella, the heroine of Gather the Faces, 1996, falls in love with her Guyanese pen-friend and returns to her native land to get married, while Melda in In Praise of Love and Children, 1996, finds solace in fostering children of immigrant families. As has been pointed out, it is important to understand Gilroy’s work and career to “put into some historical context the creative achievements of younger writers” (Davies [1994], 100), in particular that of Joan Riley who came from Jamaica in her late teens and writes, like her elder, about the black British experience, although in a much darker mood. Riley’s first novel, The Unbelonging, 1985, is a pioneering work: the first novel published by a Caribbean novelist in Britain since Jean Rhys in the 1930s, it is one of the few, along with Phillips’s The Final Passage, to offer a woman’s perspective on Caribbean migration to the U. K. As its title indicates, it dramatizes the dilemma of a generation who feels at home neither in England nor in the Caribbean. Hyacinth, its teen-age heroine, arrives in England in the 1970s. Faced with an abusive father and hostile schoolmates, she retreats into her dreams of an idealized Jamaica that turns into a nightmare when, after taking a degree, she journeys back to the Caribbean. There, she is brutally confronted with her ultimate homelessness when the “Go back whe yu come fram” of destitute Jamaicans echoes the “Go back where you belong” of racist Britons (Riley [1985], 142). Although The Unbelonging does not innovate formally nor stylistically, it contains an interesting reworking of the traditional accounts of childhood found in so many novels by women, which seems to point to an aggravated sense of dispossession of the postmigratory generation. In Riley’s novel the new environment is no longer seen in terms of bewilderment but of aggression. Besides, the child is not looked after by a surrogate parent but ends up in a children’s home, which symbolizes the fundamental inhospitality of England, as in David Dabydeen’s The Intended. Because of a hard-line realism that the author justifies as a token of loyalty towards “the community of women who give unstintingly of their lives to flesh out my creative world” (Riley [1992-b], 217), Riley’s next two novels fail to energize their thematic potential. In Waiting in the Twilight, 1987, Adella, a Jamaican crippled by a stroke (a clear metaphor for the paralyzing effect of British society on the alien) takes an embittered look back at a life made of hardship. Riley’s presentation of man / woman conflicts is particularly dark and entrenches, rather than challenges, sexual prejudices, insofar as her male characters remain one-dimensional figures chronically negative and unaccountable, although immigration makes them victims as much as it does the women. If Riley’s stark realism tends to transform context into text (Suarez [1991], 291), it is also intended as an absolute rejection of the romantic fiction in which her heroines find an escape from the harsh realities of immigrant life. This is the case in Romance, 1988, an altogether less depressing novel which traces the lives of two dissatisfied Guyanese sisters, Verona and Desiree, and concludes with their decision to change after the stimulating visit of two aged grandparents from Jamaica, the symbolic bearers of their lost roots. These limitations notwithstanding, there is one aspect in which these two novels are unreservedly successful: in retrieving Caribbean women from decades of absence in fiction and presenting them with a faithful mirror of their own suffering. In that sense, Riley’s writing can indeed be seen as “an effort to heal through representation” (291).

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Riley’s fourth novel, A Kindness to the Children, 1992, is her best work to date. It presents three women who can be viewed as “metaphors for national states and attitudes” in the Caribbean (Riley [1993], 18). The first two, Sylvia and her sister-in-law Jean, have just arrived in Jamaica from England. Undertaking the journey to come to terms with her husband’s recent death, Sylvia is faced with the “destruction of her Utopian vision of Jamaica,” thereby getting rid of her “righteous indignation” (Riley [1992-a], 278, 260) and the sense of superiority attached to her English ways. For Jean, return to her native land means remembering her unhappy childhood and the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of a pastor. But the confrontation with her secret past arouses feelings of persecution mixed with guilt and transforms her long-lasting depression into religious fervor then madness. Sylvia and Jean’s arrival also triggers the coming to consciousness of their relative, Pearl; she realizes how trapped her daily life has been (218) and decides to take advantage of her newly-found freedom. The novel stands out for its vivid evocation of today’s rural Jamaica and its presentation of the clash of mentalities between the locals and those “from foreign” (209), often educated people. More importantly, it also marks a change from Riley’s rather rigid third-person narratives to a more varied text including some stream-of-consciousness passages that give access to Jean’s deranged mind, to “the whole army of people inside her head” (27). The madwoman is a recurring image in texts by Caribbean female novelists, often conveying an incapacity to cope with the stereotypes imposed from the outside. But while in many of them fragmentation of the self marks the beginning of a new wholeness as in Brodber’s Jane and Louisa, for example (O’Callaghan [1993-a], 38), in A Kindness to the Children, it only leads to self-destruction as Jean eventually dies after a drunken escapade during which she is raped again. For Riley, she represents the “schizophrenic nature of Caribbean society” (Riley [1993], 18) and her bleak end may therefore symbolize the impossibility of getting over the rifts caused by colonialism and patriarchy if these cannot be voiced by the victim (see O’Callaghan in Davies and Fido [1990]). Next to Gilroy’s and Riley’s naturalistic narratives of Anglo-Caribbeanness, one finds a group of novels again emphasizing the personal and the domestic but more directly geared at the West Indian experience. Written by three novelists who spent their formative years in the Caribbean but later settled in Britain, they all depict societies in transition, with the passing of an old order suggesting the emergence of a new awareness. If these novels do not, like Riley’s, focus on the “‘realities’ of black women in Britain” it may be, in the words of Grace Nichols, a poet from Guyana, because their authors cannot “subscribe to the ‘victim mentality,’
” which would imply yielding to the stereotype of the “‘long-suffering black women’
” (Cudjoe [1990], 284). Nichols’s Whole of a Morning Sky, 1986, takes place in Guyana in the early 1960s and gives yet another version of the novel of childhood, one whose form is particularly innovative since the straightforward third-person narration is coupled with poetic and sensuous impressions written in the second person. Young Gem Walcott and her family have just arrived in Georgetown from their rural village, and the child’s emotional disquiet at moving is paralleled by the explosion of violence attendant on the country’s imminent independence. Evelyn O’Callaghan has commented upon the transformative qualities of this apparently simple book: not only does its irony subvert the nationalist feelings present in its epigraph (an extract from a Martin Carter poem) by demonstrating the ultimate inanity of political upheaval, but its gently comic vision also dismantles the paternalistic order by exposing the human frailty of men who nonetheless

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occupy the leading positions in society (see O’Callaghan [1993-a]). In this first novel Nichols captures the cultural plurality of Guyana, with its unique “mélange of people of different races and different shades and mixtures of races,” even as she emphasizes the racial divisions that tear apart a country where “everything is race” (Nichols [1986], 52, 80). A similar paradox informs Timepiece, 1986, the first novel by Janice Shinebourne, who left Guyana in the 1970s. It opens as Sandra Yansen, its heroine, returns to Pheasant, her native Berbice village now deserted and dead except for the “unperturbed presence” (Shinebourne [1986], 10) of the slave past. The narrative looks back on her childhood there in a predominantly matriarchal world where solidarity prevailed over racial divisions and her career as a journalist in a male-centered urban society is threatened by personal ambition and the political unrest of the mid-1960s. Timepiece is written out of a need “to come to grips with Guyana’s political culture” (Cudjoe [1990], 143), but it does so by celebrating those who, like Sandra’s father, “lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (epigraph from George Eliot’s Middlemarch). The strength of Shinebourne’s second novel, The Last English Plantation, 1988, lies again in a vivid depiction of the social and historical circumstances of individual characters. Set in the mid-1950s, at a time of political crisis, it is told from the point of view of June, a passionate young girl of Indo-Chinese descent who experiences alienation when she wins a scholarship to attend high school. As the Martin Carter epigraph makes clear, this is a novel about the difficulties of becoming and finding one’s self for both a young girl and the disintegrating plantation society in which she was born. Angel, 1987, by Grenadian Merle Collins, deals, like Nichols’s and Shinebourne’s novels, with a period of turbulent change in the history of her native country. Starting in the 1950s with the burning of white landowners’ houses up to the 1983 American invasion of Grenada, it focuses on three generations of women, the youngest represented by Angel McAllister, whose strength, sense of solidarity, and emotional intelligence bode well for the future of the island. A highly diversified form (including traditional realistic narrative, letters and pieces of folk wisdom), linguistic variety ranging from standard English to broad Creole (for which a short glossary is provided), and polyphonic qualities, all contribute to an open-minded and wideranging rendering of a complex history. As Renu Juneja points out, Angel epitomizes the major features of Caribbean women’s fiction: it is a story of childhood with communal dimensions, but its humor and radical political message (a literary “call to arms,” according to Lima [1993], 52) give it a flavor of its own (Juneja [1995], 95). Collins’s second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, 1995, is set again in the Caribbean but this time on fictional islands called Paz and Eden. It presents Carib, a woman whose voice is a “monument to [the] bravery” (Collins [1995], 4) of her forgotten Carib ancestors. Regarded as mad by the islanders, she stimulates the remembering of their intricate history thereby helping their understanding of the spirits living inside them. Pauline Melville, the author of a widely acclaimed collection of short-stories entitled Shapeshifter, 1990, published in 1997 a first novel that seems to initiate a more original trend in Anglo-Caribbean female writing. Distrustful of the label “magic realism,” Melville prefers to describe her writing as a rendering of “the marvels of reality” (Clee [1997], 38). The Ventriloquist’s Tale, 1997, is a complex book full of inventiveness whose title suggests, like Shapeshifter, the idea of otherness and role-swapping. It is framed by a prologue and an epilogue told in a conversational tone by a trickster figure, the ventriloquist of the title, who can be identified

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as Macunaima, the mythical Amerindian folk hero. Inside this frame are two stories which might be those of Pauline Melville’s Guyanese ancestors: the incestuous relationship between Danny and Beatrice in the 1920s, which is thwarted by Father Napier, a homosexual Jesuit; and the present-day affair between Chofy, a relative of the incestuous couple, and an Englishwoman researching Evelyn Waugh’s links with Guyana as expressed in A Handful of Dust. In a sense, The Ventriloquist’s Tale can be read as writing back to Waugh’s scorn of “natives.” But in addition to its revisionary intent, it also registers, often humorously, the many clashes between European and Amerindian world views without, however, deciding in favor of either. In 1994, Merle Collins left Britain for the United States, a move that is perhaps indicative of the migratory lives of many Caribbean writers but is also symbolical of the displacement of the publishing opportunities for Caribbean women writers towards North America. Canada, for example, has only recently been experiencing a flourishing of female talents. Tobagonian Marlene Nourbese Philip, better known as a poet and political activist, long remained the only West Indian woman novelist in Canada with Harriet’s Daughter, 1988, a book that gives but a slight indication of the radical engagement with hybrid female identities expressed in her collection of poems, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, 1989, and her more recent prose poem, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, 1991. Harriet’s Daughter is a young adult novel about the emotional maturation of Margaret, a teenage West Indian living in Toronto, who, on her way to adulthood, identifies with two women named Harriet: on the one hand, Harriet Tubman, who facilitated the passage of hundreds of slaves to the free North; on the other, Harriet Blewchamp, the Jewish employer of Margaret’s mother who bequeaths the young girl not only money but also “a shared sense of persecution of blacks and Jews” (Ramraj [1995], 109). In the mid-1990s, two remarkable novelists emerged. Trinidadian Dionne Brand published In Another Place, Not Here, 1996, a lyrical novel set both in Trinidad and Toronto and written in a language that reminds us that poetry is Brand’s first vocation. It is the story of two women: Elizete, prisoner of an abusive relationship, and Verlia, a political activist who becomes Elizete’s lover. The subject may be reminiscent of Alice Walker’s Color Purple, although the temporal and spatial contexts of Brand’s novel are completely different. After a well-received collection of stories, Out on Main Street, 1993, Shani Mootoo, of Indo-Trinidadian descent, wrote Cereus Blooms at Night, 1997. At the center of this powerful first novel is Mala, an old reclusive eccentric on a fictional island, whose eventful life story is told with humor and suspense by her sexually ambiguous nurse, Tyler. With the exception of Brodber, the most original fiction by Caribbean women in the last decade has been produced in the United States. While the vitality of Caribbean-American writing by women can be ascribed to their intellectual independence from the former colonizing power, which does not prevent an anti-hegemonic engagement with the United States (see Davies in Davies and Fido [1990], 60), one should not forget the role played by the well-established African-American literary tradition in facilitating the Caribbean writers’ integration into the multicultural American canvas; hence their confident treatment of plural identities. This was surely the case for some writers of the former generation, such as Rosa Guy and Paule Marshall, who have kept writing after 1970 but are more often listed as African-American than as Caribbean writers. If the difficulty of placing them significantly questions the relevance of national and geographical criteria in drawing up a Caribbean literary tradition, it concretely problematizes the articulation of complex identities which has become

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“central to our understandings of the ways in which these writers express notions of home in their works” (Davies [1994], 116). Rosa Guy tackles specifically African-American issues, as in A Measure of Time, 1983, which explores the history of the Harlem Renaissance. But Paule Marshall, born in New York of Barbadian parents, can be helpfully considered here as a foremother to the new generation of Caribbean writers, both female and male. Not only did she pioneer black women writing, but she also initiated what Edward Brathwaite has called a “literature of reconnection” (Davies [1994], 119; see Keulen [1996], 85), that is, one bringing together the different cultural strands of the African Diaspora, a theme also dear to Erna Brodber and Caryl Phillips. Marshall does not see her own double cultural allegiance in terms of division or duality but as a unique experience enabling her to “act as a kind of bridge” (Marshall [1988], 15). Such is the thrust behind Praisesong for the Widow, 1983, Marshall’s first novel in fourteen years, which renders the moulding of an identity through a confrontation with the past. While cruising the Caribbean, Avey Johnson, a widow in her sixties, recovers the African roots with which she had lost touch during her married life in New York and at the same time reconnects with her female self. As in Marshall’s first two novels journeys and dance rituals provide metaphors for the heroine’s psychological transformation. But while the protagonists of Brown Girl, Brownstones and The Chosen Place, the Timeless People were left on the brink of new discoveries, the more mature Avey performs her own metamorphosis, eventually able to feel “part of what seemed a farreaching, wide-ranging confraternity,” her individual wholeness indissociable from the “collective heart” (Marshall [1983], 249, 245). A similar interest in the linkages between AfroCaribbean and African-American cultures informs Marshall’s latest novel, Daughters, 1991, which features Primus Mackenzie, a politician from the fictional Caribbean island of Triunion, Estelle, his black American wife, and Ursa, their daughter born in the Caribbean but living in the States. As usual with Marshall’s fiction, the cultural is coupled with a focus on gender issues. Even if the multi-voiced narrative (in which the female perspective prevails) highlights the selfishness of men, the younger generation of women, the daughters of the title, are shown to achieve emancipation thanks to their sense of self and their cultural heritage. Though praised as a dense and complex novel, Daughters may not be Marshall’s best work for it occasionally lapses into melodrama. Jamaica Kincaid, born Elaine Potter Richardson in Antigua, is one of the most inventive Caribbean novelists of the last decades, which might account for her tremendous critical success though this is more likely due to her articulation of issues in vogue among feminist critics, such as mother-daughter bonding, female sexuality, and the recovery of the female body (see Cudjoe [1990], 221). However, Kincaid’s foremost originality does not lie in her choice of subjectmatters. The topic of her first novel, Annie John, 1985, is familiar enough to readers of Caribbean literature: it is the growing-up story of Annie, a school girl who eventually leaves her native Antigua to study in England. Organized in eight chapters first published as separate stories in The New Yorker, it is a subtle exploration of the child’s upsetting confrontation with death and sexuality, both classic focuses of tales of initiation everywhere, and of her coming to terms with history and migration, more specific features of stories of colonial childhood in the West Indies. What distinguishes Kincaid’s novel is a rather deceptively simple, at times even

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childish, prose style that is actually replete with Biblical echoes and sensuous overtones. The very language Kincaid uses in fact exemplifies one of her major messages, that the world is not what it seems and that beyond surface reality lies “another reality over which we, in our modernity, have no control — and certainly of which we know very little because we’re too scientific” (229). It is no wonder, therefore, if Annie John is woven with dream sequences and Annie’s deranged thoughts during a physical and mental collapse that symbolizes the break between childhood and womanhood and from which she is significantly cured by Ma-Chess, her obeah-wielding grandmother. Yet the novel remains largely realistic and can be read as a concrete translation of Kincaid’s earlier book, At the Bottom of the River, 1984, a collection of bafflingly impressionistic stories whose central consciousness, like Annie “no longer a child but … not yet a woman,” has visions of an essentially ambivalent world “in which the sun and the moon shone at the same time” (Kincaid [1984], 56, 77). In spite of Kincaid’s claim to the contrary (Kincaid [1991], 22), her second novel, Lucy, 1990, might well be read as a continuation of Annie John since it opens with a nineteen-year-old Caribbean heroine arriving in the United States as an au-pair to a well-off white family with four daughters. Leaving behind a mother she used to love intensely but now hates in her wish to become independent, Lucy uncharts her new cultural and affective environment with a blend of lucidity and naivety and eventually achieves a complex identity, “inventing” (Kincaid [1990], 134) herself away from the ethnocentric feminist and psychoanalytical discourses that her employers would willingly impose upon her (see Donnell [1992]). Apart from the continuity in the plot, Lucy also pursues similar motifs, chief among them the theme of the fall and the challenging of binary thought. But whereas Annie John chronicles the girl’s passage from the “paradise” (Kincaid [1985], 25) of the mother-child symbiosis to the hellish separation from the parent (significantly also called Annie John), the later work is clearly grounded in a postlapsarian phase in which Lucy, named after Lucifer, is “doomed to build wrong upon wrong” (Kincaid [1990], 139) as a rebellion against family and conventions. Also, if Annie John questions traditional categories, as in the much quoted episode in which Annie meditates upon a picture of Christopher Columbus “fettered in chains attached to the bottom of a ship” (Kincaid [1985], 77) like a slave, Kincaid operates a similar blurring of roles in her depiction of Lucy who is at once agent and subject of discovery in her dealings with her lovers and her middleclass employer, Mariah. But as Giovanna Covi rightly insists, there is no simple reversal of the master-slave dichotomy (Covi [1994], 82). Like other novelists of her generation, Kincaid indeed upturns and decenters power, rather than directly opposes it, in a refusal to adopt the dualistic rhetoric of empire, and aware, like Lucy, that it impinges on your freedom because it makes you see “hundreds of years in every gesture, every word spoken, every face” (Kincaid [1990], 31). Both Annie John and Lucy are semi-autobiographical first-person narratives exploring a female subjectivity underpinned by a love / hate relationship with the mother metonymic of the bond between the colonized and the colonial mother country, of the relationship between the powerless and the powerful (see Kincaid [1991], 12; Kincaid [1992], 23). In a sense, Kincaid offers a fresh version of the coming-of-age story for if the use of autobiography and other confessional writing has been isolated as a favorite mode for expressing an individual female consciousness in the making (see O’Callaghan [1993-a], 7), her almost obsessive focus on

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biological mothering, for all its ambivalence, sets her apart from her fellow writers whose mother figures are often relegated to surrogate parents, such as aunts, grandmothers, or nannies (see Cobham [1993], 56). As its title suggests, Kincaid’s The Autobiography of my Mother, 1996, does not dramatically differ from her first two novels, an apparent lack of originality partaking of her aesthetic of repetition whereby events only gain significance if they are told again and again. Yet, as ever with Kincaid, similarity also hides difference. While this third novel takes up once more the autobiographical mode, its concern with motherhood is not what it seems. Its narrator, Xuela Claudette Richardson does not tell the story of her Carib mother, who died when giving birth to her, but paradoxically retraces her own bleak life in Dominica: her early years as a foster child in a world where “brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given” (Kincaid [1996], 5); her childhood with an uncaring and calculating father who is half African half Scottish; her departure for Roseau at fifteen and her first unwanted pregnancy; her love affair with Roland and, eventually, her loveless marriage to Philip, an English doctor. As the novel unfolds, however, one realizes that Xuela’s account is as much her mother’s as it is her own, for “In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from” (227), a strange mixture of absence and presence which raises the question of the nature of reality in a world where the coexistence of opposites such as life and death is unproblematical. But however much Xuela’s narrative allows her to know herself better, it nonetheless points to the limits of self-knowledge, for “who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you” (202), and as the now seventy-year-old narrator dismally concludes, “Death is the only reality, for it is the only certainty, inevitable to all things” (228). Kincaid has always depicted headstrong female characters, but Xuela surpasses them all in self-reliance and willpower, possibly her way of keeping at bay the defeat and despair that brand her colonial society. Lonely and narcissistic, Xuela rejects all forms of attachment and refuses to bear children, even practising her own abortions. Her self-centeredness is unequivocal: “I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my mind” (100), but this outspoken self-love is perhaps her only means to relate to the mother she never knew and to compensate for her sad loss. The novel contains hardly any dialogue, yet its short, rhythmic sentences and iterative vocabulary endow it with an unmistakable oral sonority that account for its compelling stylistic beauty. The temptation is strong to interpret Kincaid’s fiction independently of its unobtrusive social and cultural context, although one gets a clearer idea of her political commitment if one reads her fiction in the light of A Small Place, 1988, an angry essay in which she forcefully denounces the colonial past and neo colonial present of her native Antigua. But by concentrating on what some critics believe to be the universal dimension of her fiction, that is, the strictly domestic mother-daughter relationship, psychoanalytical readings often overlook its wider implications (see Donnell [1993]). For example, Xuela’s story has an unquestionable collective meaning, and her motherlessness is also the historical exile of enslaved Africans taken from their motherland. In contrast to Kincaid’s spare fiction, the novels of Michelle Cliff, a Jamaican also based in the United States, rely on a rich historical and cultural context that confers a unique multi-layeredness on her narratives but also makes them more overtly political. Another difference between the two novelists is that while Kincaid deals with the peasant or working class experience, “Cliff’s world is that of the bourgeois vacillating between the metaphoric yard

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and the big house” (Davies and Fido [1990], 60). Cliff’s first novel Abeng, 1984, focuses on Clare Savage, a twelve-year-old Jamaican girl, a “crossroads character” whose name bespeaks her plural heritage: “Clare” refers to her light skin and the privilege and gentility it entails while Savage evokes the “wildness that has been bleached from her skin” (Cudjoe [1990], 265). Like many other characters in Caribbean literature, Clare is thus a divided figure: divided between her father, the impoverished descendant of a family of planters, and her mother, a colored woman from the country, divided between their conflicting visions of the world which she is not able to understand, let alone analyze. But if the novel describes the girl’s fragmentation and thereby provides a reexamination of the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, it also chronicles “her movement toward … wholeness” (265), which culminates in Cliff’s second novel No Telephone to Heaven, 1987, when Clare is killed while taking part in a guerilla attack. Her tragic death may sound like defeat, but, for Cliff, this ending “completes the circle, or rather triangle, of the character’s life. In her death Clare has complete identification with her homeland; soon enough she will be indistinguishable from the ground. Her bones will turn to potash, as did her ancestors’ bones” (Cudjoe [1990], 265). One of the clues to understanding Abeng is its title, an African word for conch shell, an object both used to call slaves to the canefields and employed by the maroons to communicate among themselves. With this double reference to bondage and resistance, the text undertakes to reconstruct the intricate Jamaican past of which the island is tragically ignorant. While history looms in the background of Kincaid’s novels, influencing her characters’ subconscious, it is foregrounded in Cliff’s writing in such a deliberate way that it might be taken for didacticism, were it not so effectively woven into the narrative. Etymological information, the evocation of little-known but meaningful events of Jamaican history, and a wide-ranging intertextuality all mix in Abeng to “[expand] the Caribbean social and semantic space” (Gikandi [1992], 239). But Abeng does not only retrieve lost meanings, it also seeks the “imaginary collapse of the given” (246) by, for example, refiguring the island’s phallocentric genealogy through a focus on Nanny, the female Maroon leader. Unsurprisingly, the gaps in the collective memory also affect Clare’s family whose “carefully contrived mythology” (Cliff [1984], 29) the novel dismantles by revealing some of its secrets, such as Clare’s ancestor’s native mistress, his burning of his slaves on the eve of Emancipation, and the homosexuality of one of her uncles. Ironically, Clare remains unaware of all this, and the novel closes with her inability to understand a dream in which she stones her black friend Zoe (a clear reference to Wide Sargasso Sea). “She had no ideas,” the narrator adds, “that everyone we dream about we are” (166). No Telephone to Heaven presents an older Clare Savage, still trying to come to terms with her split self. After a motherless adolescence in a racist New York, studies in London and wanderings on mainland Europe with a black Vietnam veteran, thirty-six-year-old Clare returns for good to her native Jamaica, now under Michael Manley’s rule, determined to follow her mother’s advice to help her people, which she does by joining a group of revolutionaries and giving them the farm she has inherited from her grandmother. But “there is no telephone to heaven,” as the title indicates, that is “no way of reaching out or up” (Cliff [1987], 16), no magical solution to endemic poverty and violence; the only way out for Jamaicans is to rely on themselves, as Christopher, a boy from the Dungle, tragically does by becoming a murderer.

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Nonetheless, Clare’s return journey is one of remembrance of woman-centered myths (like that of Nanny, the Maroon leader, or Pocahontas), of reunion with the spirit of her female ancestors who are identified with the motherland — “here is her” — and of efforts toward “restoration,” a personal quest mirrored in her best friend, Harry / Harriet, a transsexual who is like Clare “neither one thing nor the other” (174, 87, 131). Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven follow roughly the contours of Cliff’s own fragmented self which is also the subject of two collections of remarkable prose poems, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, 1980, and The Land of Look Behind, 1985. Free Enterprise, 1993, her third novel, testifies to an extended agenda going well beyond the identity dilemmas of colonial Clare Savage to cover a wider diasporic domain, an evolution also perceptible in the later fiction of Brodber and Phillips. Its multivoiced narrative deals with resistance to slavery and centers on two women activists, Annie Christmas and Mary Ellen Pleasant. The first is a light-skinned Jamaican who joins American abolitionists in the 1850s and ends up, some sixty years later, leading a “secluded” life in Louisiana (Cliff [1993-a], 4). The second is a successful black entrepreneur, very much “her own woman” (96), who owns high-class hotels staffed by runaway slaves she has helped to escape. By recovering the two women’s participation in an aborted slave insurrection funded by Mary Ellen herself but recorded in history as “John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry,” the novel enacts the revision of this “official version” (16), while simultaneously emphasizing the unavoidable subjectivity and fantasy of memory, thus of historical records as well, since “we carry more within us than we can ever imagine” (202). Such is at least the message conveyed in the stories told, “like a poor man’s Decameron” (58), by Annie’s neighbours, the members of a leper colony whose leprosy is in fact metaphorical and who have been incarcerated for their political activism (see Cliff [1993-b], 598). Among them is Rachel DeSouza, a Jew from Suriname, who recalls the Inquisition and the persecution of her people in fifteenth-century Europe. As was the case with Abeng, the complexity of Free Enterprise is reflected in its richly allusive text but also in its polysemous title. The name of a restaurant run by a Negro fisherman where Annie and Mary Ellen have meals together, “Free Enterprise” echoes at once the capitalism that gave rise to the Institution, the entrepreneurship blacks have to engage in if they want access to power, but also, more positively, the enterprises undertaken to liberate slaves. There are many points of convergence between the novels by women writers such as Brodber, Kincaid, and Cliff and the fiction of Lawrence Scott and Caryl Phillips, namely their overlapping interests in otherness (whether Jewishness or sexual ambiguity), their conflation of sexual and colonial victimization, and their crossing of the borders of race, class, gender, or nation, both in theme and form. While this commonality challenges once more the validity of the controversial concept of a specifically feminine writing, it clearly indicates the emergence of a new creolized sensibility, one rejecting oppositional stances and one whose fluid boundaries have rendered obsolete issues of purity and legitimacy. To the editors of an anthology of Caribbean women’s writing who speak of Michelle Cliff’s “compromised authenticity” (Mordecai and Wilson [1989], xvii), young Caribbean writers themselves, whether male or female, seem to suggest the following answer: that, even without a “true-true name,” “We are New World People, and we built this blasted country from the ground up. We are part of its future, its fortunes” (Cliff [1993-a], 151).

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Ramchand, Kenneth. 1988. West Indian Literary History: Literariness, Orality and Periodization. Callaloo. 11.1: 95–110. Ramraj, Victor J. 1995. West Indian Writing in Canada. West Indian Literature. Ed. by Bruce King, 102–14. London; Macmillan. Relich, Mario. 1993. Literary Subversion in David Dabydeen’s The Intended. Journal of West Indian Literature. 6.1: 45–57. Reyes, Angelita. 1984. Carnival: Ritual Dance of the Past and Present in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance. World Literature Written in English. 24.1: 107–20. Riley, Joan. 1985. The Unbelonging. London: The Women’s Press. ———. 1987. Waiting in the Twilight. London: The Women’s Press. ———. 1988. Romance. London: The Women’s Press. ———. 1992-a. A Kindness to the Children. London: The Women’s Press. ———. 1992-b. Writing Reality in a Hostile Environment. Us / Them. Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures. Ed. by Gordon Collier. 213–18. Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi. Also published in Kunapipi. 16.1 (1994): 547–52. ———. 1993. Joan Riley Talks with Aamer Hussein. Wasafiri. 17: 17–19. Rollins, Annette. 1993. Review of Divina Trace by Robert Antoni. Journal of West Indian Literature. 6.1: 71–74. Ross, Robert L. 1991. International Literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers. New York: Garland. ———. 1996-a. Remembering India in Guyana. Review of The Shadow Bride. The World & I. 11. 7: 279–83. ———. 1996-b. Review of The Ministry of Hope. The World & I. 12: 8. ———. 1997. Guyana and Roy Heath. The World & I. 12: 8. Rushdie, Salman. 1987. A Sad Pastoral. Review of The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul. The Guardian. (13 March): 13. Saba Saakana, Amon. 1985. Blues Dance. London: Karnak House. Salick, Roydon. 1991. The Bittersweet Comedy of Sonny Ladoo: A Reading of Yesterdays. Ariel. 22.3: 75–85. Salick, Roydon. 1992. “Rampant with Memory”: Themes and Technique in The Stone Angel and Frangipani House. Commonwealth. 14.2: 98–105. ———. 1995. Selvon and the Limits of Heroism: A Reading of The Plains of Caroni. Kunapipi. 17.1: 102–13. Salkey, Andrew. 1976. Come Home, Malcolm Heartland. London: Hutchinson. Sarvan, Charles P. and Hasan Marhama. 1991. “The Fictional Works of Caryl Phillips: An Introduction.” World Literature Today. 65.1: 35–40. Savory, Elaine. 1993. Breaking New Ground, Remapping the World: Recent Writing by Caribbean Women. Review of In Times Like These by Zee Edgell and Daughters by Paule Marshall. Journal of West Indian Literature. 6.1: 77–92. Scott, Lawrence. 1992. Witchbroom. London: Heinemann. ———. 1998. Aelred’s Sin. London: Allison and Busby. Selvon, Samuel. 1970. The Plains of Caroni. London: MacGibbon and Kee. ———. 1972. Those Who Eat the Cascadura. London: Davis-Poynter. ———. [1975.] 1984, rprt. Moses Ascending. London: Davis-Poynter. ———. 1983. Moses Migrating. London: Longman. ———. 1988. Jean-Pierre Durix Talking of Moses Ascending with Sam Selvon. Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Inter-Views. 10.2: 11–13. ———. 1990. “Oldtalk”: Samuel Selvon interviewed by Alessandra Dotti. Caribana. 1: 77–84. ———. 1995. Interview with Reed Dasenbrock and Feroza Jussawalla. Kunapipi. 17.1: 114–25. ———. 1996. Christened with Snow: A Conversation with Sam Selvon. By Kevin Roberts and Andra Thakur. Ariel. 27.2: 89–115. Sharrad, Paul. 1994. Speaking the Unspeakable: London, Cambridge and the Caribbean. De-scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality. Ed. by Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, 201–17. London: Routledge. Shetty, Sandhya. 1994. Masculinity, National Identity and the Feminine Voice in The Wine of Astonishment. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 29.1: 65–79. Shinebourne, Janice. 1986. Timepiece. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.

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Short Fiction VICTOR J. RAMRAJ

University of Calgary

Anglophone Caribbean short fiction has, until recently, ceded center stage to the other genres, particularly to its extended counterpart, the novel. The reason for this is to be found largely in the Caribbean writers’ close relationship with British literary tradition, which privileged the novel over the short story. With no significant publishing house in the Caribbean, Englishspeaking Caribbean writers resorted to British publishers, who dissuaded them from making their debuts with collections of short stories. V. S. Naipaul, for instance, was advised not to publish Miguel Street, 1959, his series of linked short stories, until he had established himself with the novels The Mystic Masseur, 1957, and The Suffrage of Elvira, 1958. Hutchinson’s New Authors cautioned Michael Anthony that short stories are “very difficult to manage,” and invited him to submit a novel instead (Anthony [1970], 65). This genre privileging of British publishing houses stood in contrast to North American publishers’ receptiveness to the short story. The first publication of Eric Walrond, the Guyanese writer, who immigrated to New York in the 1920s, was a collection of short stories, Tropic Death, 1926. It would appear that, in more recent Caribbean writing, this undervalued genre is now being given its due. A number of careers of fiction writers have been launched with short story volumes: Trinidad-Canadian Neil Bissoondath’s with Digging Up the Mountains, 1986; the Jamaican Olive Senior’s with Summer Lightning and Other Stories, 1986; the Trinidadian Willi Chen’s with King of the Carnival and Other Stories, 1989; and the Guyanese Pauline Melville’s with Shape-Shifter, 1990. Had British publishing and literary response to the short story been more favorable, the short story in anglophone Caribbean literature would very likely have flourished and perhaps achieved earlier as prominent a position as the other genres had. While there was no significant publishing house in the anglophone Caribbean other than Tom Redcam’s All Jamaica Library (which during its five years of activity — 1905 to 1909 — published just four works of fiction), there were many little magazines and literary sections of newspapers published in the region that provided outlets for story writers. Numerous stories, folktales, and yarns appeared regularly. Many of the writers who went on to achieve international distinction in the preferred form of the novel began as short story writers in the readily accessible local literary journals, little magazines, and literary sections of newspapers and newspaper annuals. The most prominent of these were the literary magazines Trinidad, and its successor The Beacon, Bim, Kyk-Over-Al, Focus, and Public Opinion. A good number of the novelists who came to prominence in the 1950s published short stories in Bim, the distinguished Barbadian little magazine edited by Frank Collymore which first appeared in December 1942. It was initially Barbadian in scope, but eventually became a Caribbean journal publishing stories by such novelists as Michael Anthony, Austin Clarke, Edgar Mittelholzer, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and Garth St. Omer. Numerous other writers appeared in its pages,

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including Therold W. Barnes, Edward Brathwaite, Timothy Callender, Frank Collymore, E. L. Cozier, Geoffrey Drayton, John Figueroa, A. N. Forde, Bernard Graham, Cecil Gray, E. A. Markham, Harold Marshall, Mervyn Morris, Millicent Payne, Harold Partheesingh, Barnabas Ramon-Fortune, Eula Redhead, Daniel Samaroo, Karl Sealy, Monica Skeete, John Wickham, and Jan Williams. In Jamaica, Focus was launched by Edna Manley in 1943, and it appeared off and on until 1960. Primarily concerned with Jamaican issues, it published several stories by such writers as John Hearne, Roger Mais, Vic Reid, and Philip Sherlock. The Guyanese Kyk-Over-Al began publication in 1945, with A. J. Seymour as editor. Wilson Harris was one of the prominent and regular contributors in the 1940s and 1950s. J. A. V. Bourne (who, in 1940, published Dreams, Devils, Vampires, a collection of six supernatural tales), Edgar Mittelholzer, Martin Carter, A. J. Seymour, and Sheik Sadeek, who, in 1980, published Windswept and Other Stories, a collection of twelve stories of Indo-Guyanese life, had stories published here as well. As important as these little magazines in the establishment and development of Caribbean short fiction was the BBC weekly radio feature, “Caribbean Voices” (which had its origin in “Calling the Caribbean,” a program that enabled West Indian servicemen in Britain during World War II to keep in contact with their homelands). Until it ended in 1958, “Caribbean Voices” was the main outlet for anglophone Caribbean short stories, particularly in the 1950s, when, in a given year, it featured as many as eighty short stories. It often collaborated with the Caribbean little magazines, particularly Bim, broadcasting to a wider audience stories that the magazines had originally published. Almost every Caribbean novelist of this period had short stories aired for the first time on this program. Often, more short stories were featured than poems; for the last six months of 1949, for instance, the program carried forty stories and just eight groups of poems. As one would expect, the quality of the stories varied considerably. In fact, the first program carried an embarrassingly sentimental short story, but, on the whole, “Caribbean Voices” maintained a high standard under such producers and editors as Henry Swanzy and V. S. Naipaul. Outside and preceding this Caribbean-London literary connection of the 1940s and 1950s, Eric Walrond had published in New York Tropic Death, an impressive collection of ten short stories — his only published book — with which he can claim the distinction of being the author of the first substantial Caribbean volume of stories in English. Born in Guyana and educated in Barbados and Panama, Walrond established himself as an important member of the Harlem Renaissance soon after he immigrated to the United States in 1920. He published several short stories in various American journals. Most of them dealt with the theme of racial discrimination in New York City (including his first short story published in America, “On Being Black,” 1922, in The New Republic). But it is his stories in Tropic Death, all set in the Caribbean, that earned him justifiably higher acclaim. Themes that are to recur in Caribbean literature — immigration and exile, poverty and suffering, racial prejudice and alienation — first appear in these stories, set mainly in Barbados, Guyana, and Panama. But seldom in subsequent Caribbean literature is there such relentlessly dismal and horrifying portrayal of these experiences. In Walrond’s unaccommodating and harsh world, humans suffer at the hands of their fellow humans and are victims of social mores, technology, the natural and supernatural world, and their own elemental passions and emotions. In “The Yellow One” (Walrond [1974], 50–66), two sailors savagely attack each other in a sweltering galley and inadvertently cause the death of a young mother. The jealous protagonist of “The Wharf Rats” (67–84) employs obeah to bring

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about the horrible death of her lover, who has abandoned her for another woman. In “Subjection” (99–112), a white American marine kills a black man who berated him for striking another black man. Though Walrond is conscious of the imperial / colonial relationship in this incident, he is more concerned with showing how man — black or white — is at the mercy of his primitive passions and impulses. His stories are peopled by individuals and groups of individuals isolated from each other by color, shade, ethnicity, and hegemony. In “The Yellow One,” an American black loathes a fellow worker, a Cuban of mixed blood. In “The Palm Porch” (85–98), a mulatto woman despairs because her daughters are not marrying fair-skinned men. Walrond censures the biases and prejudices of his characters; at the same time, he depicts them as victims of a naturalistic world, whose harshness he starkly evokes. His occasional irony against individuals is muted by his awareness of the grim ironies of life in their unaccommodating environment. In “The Wharf Rats,” a jealous woman kills her lover, unaware that he is actually not in love with her rival. In “The Vampire Bat” (144–60), a white soldier ridicules the superstitious West Indians; returning home late one night, he notices a black baby who, he assumes, has been abandoned; the baby, actually a vampire, kills him. Walrond employs the Modernist style of the 1920s. He experiments with multiple narrators, parallel structures, and fragmentary forms, and he uses dreams, fragments of songs, and stream-of-consciousness. He captures the feel and flow of Caribbean English, not hesitating to authenticate it by fracturing spelling and disrupting syntax. Writing in the 1920s, Walrond had no strong tradition of Caribbean short fiction to draw on. There were such isolated pieces by expatriates as West Indian Yarns, 1884, by X. Beke, and Maroon Medicine, 1905, by E. Snod, the pseudonym of E. A. Dodd (Jamaica). The narrative voice in these would have been alien to Walrond. Beke’s is an assortment of fifty-three short anecdotes, reports, and character sketches on locals and expatriates, characterized by such titles as “Faithful Negroes” and by supercilious observations of ethnic traits. Almost all were published originally in the Argosy (Demerara) and written for an expatriate readership. Maroon Medicine is a collection of four stories of the Maroon mountain people of Jamaica. The narrator uses Standard English and focuses on the comic aspects of his protagonists, whose Jamaican English he tries to authenticate through phonetic spelling. At times, he, like Beke, observes them like a cultural anthropologist; he notes, for instance, in the closing section of “The Courting of the Dudes,” a story of two rivals in love, that “the day of the Picnic broke cloudless and exceedingly fair, and for its appointed time kept bright and warm with the bright warmness that the black man loves” (Snod [1905], 80). It is hardly likely that Walrond would have known much less cared for these narratives. He would have been familiar, however, with the rich oral tradition of folktales, on which he draws in “The White Snake” (Walrond [1974], 128–43) and “The Vampire Bat.” As in other literatures, the indigenous progenitor of the Caribbean short story is the oral tradition of storytelling. Caribbean folktales derive from the three main cultural constituencies: the native Arawak and Carib Indians, the African slaves, and the East Indian indentured laborers. Philip M. Sherlock, in West Indian Folk-Tales, 1966, retells six Arawak and Carib creation myths and aetiological tales. “The Coomacka Tree” (Sherlock [1966], 7–12) relates how the first humans — the Caribs — arrived on earth from the moon. They visit earth in their cloud chariots where they are stranded when their chariots disintegrate. In “Irreweka, Mischief Maker” (21–26), a mischievous monkey causes a flood that covers the world for ten

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days; when the flood subsides, humans and animals become enemies as they struggle to survive, and they cut themselves off from each other by cultivating separate languages. Another consequence of the flood is given in the story “The Dog’s Nose Is Cold” (34–38): with no animal companions, man prays to the god Irawidi for a companion and the god makes the dog out of the bodies of several fish, which accounts for the dog’s cold nose and his allegiance to man. Sherlock retells several Anancy stories, brought to the Caribbean by West Africans, in West Indian Folk-Tales and in an earlier volume, Anansi the Spider Man, 1954. The protagonist of these folktales is the spider. (“Ananse,” in the Twi language of West Africa, means “spider.”) Anancy assumes human form when life runs smoothly for him; when conditions are desperate or difficult, as occurs in most of the stories, he becomes a spider, often a trickster living by his wits. His position as underdog elicits tolerance of his trickery and deceit. Many of these Anancy tales are aetiological in intent, explaining, for instance, why the crab has a hard shell, why the monkey imitates others, and why the spider spins webs. Like Anancy, his fellow animals have human characteristics: Mouse and Goat are timid, Tiger is strong and aggressive, and Cat is smart. The setting of the stories in tropical forests and villages is realistically portrayed, and the dialogue among the spider and other creatures, often witty, is convincingly dramatized, if disbelief in their ability to speak is suspended. There are several other collections with additional Anancy stories and variations of those retold by Sherlock. Among them are Pamela Colman Smith’s Annancy Stories, 1899, Walter Jekyll’s Jamaican Song and Story, 1907 (the source of some of Sherlock’s Anancy stories), Martha W. Beckwith’s Jamaica Anansi Stories, 1924, Louise Bennett’s Anancy Stories and Dialect Verse, 1957, and Anancy and Miss Lou, 1979, and Andrew Salkey’s Anancy’s Score, 1973. All these versions, in which Anancy retains his human traits, can be compared with Laurice Bird’s Maxie Mongoose and Other Animal Stories, 1950, a collection of stories for children that portray animals simply as animals. Kenneth Parmasad’s Salt and Roti: Indian Folk Tales of the Caribbean, 1984, retells some of the East Indian folktales brought by indentured workers from India. These stories, rooted in Indian culture, share certain characteristics of the tales of the trickster spider. In “The Cat and the Rat,” the cunning Rat has Anancy’s role. One of the more popular tales deals with Sakchulee, a mischievous character, who always finds himself doing wrong while trying to do right. Stories like “The Golden Hair” (Parmasad [1984], 19–30), in which a princess picks a flower that turns into a prince, and “The Voice of the Flute” (43–49), a tale of a murdered girl haunting her brothers through the sound of a flute, recall the traditional European fairy tales. Other stories have a strong ethnic component: “Rites of the Dead” (89–99), for instance, warns of how easy it is for children of immigrants to lose their cultural and religious heritage. Another Caribbean precusor to Walrond’s Tropic Death is the corpus of short stories by expatriate British writers in the Caribbean published in local newspapers and magazines toward the end of the nineteenth century. A rich source of these stories are the annual numbers of Christmas Tide, which began as a supplement of the Berbice Gazette of Guyana. The first issue, published in 1893, was read throughout the Caribbean, and the editors found it necessary to bring out special editions for the other colonies, such as the Trinidad and the Barbados issues of 1897. These stories so far have been ignored by Caribbean scholars perhaps because they are not perceived as truly Caribbean writing. Many are set in Britain, like Mabel Collins’s “The Ghost of Red Farm,” 1897; and those with Caribbean settings feature British expatriates or visitors to

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the colonies, such as Sydney Watson’s “The Sea Chums,” 1897. Blacks, East Indians, and other residents, if at all present in these stories, constitute back-drop, as in Milton Hastings’ “Just in the Nick of Time,” 1898, set on the Essequibo Coast of Guyana. “The huts of the East Indians … standing out in bold relief against a back-ground of rich green vegetation, such as only a tropical climate can produce” (Hastings [1898], 13) are there simply to provide local color for a romantic story involving the wealthy British planters. These stories are essentially light and sentimental, as is demonstrated by such titles as Mabel Collins’s “The Black Lady of Doriscourt, A Christmas Ghost Story,” 1895, and R. B. Tydd Stephenson’s “An Unforeseen Danger,” 1896; their worth is largely as documents of one strand of the colonial cultural history of the Caribbean. Six years after Walrond’s Tropic Death, another immigrant to the United States, Claude McKay (Jamaica), known in Caribbean and American literature more for his poetry, novels, and controversial social commentary, published Gingertown, 1932, a collection of twelve stories. Most of these are set in Harlem and depict characters threatened by white racism. Four of the stories are accounts of Jamaican village life. One of these, “Crazy Mary” (McKay [1932], 192–202], is about a young woman’s emotional torment when her suitor, the village schoolmaster, is accused of impregnating a student. Betrayed by her lover and humiliated by the villagers, who condemn the student as a seductress and exonerate the schoolmaster, Mary eventually loses her mind and commits suicide. McKay’s narrator knows the villagers well, but though he once belonged to the village he now stands apart from it. His phrasing in his account of the student’s sexual experience demonstrates his distance from the villagers: she had three children with three different “black bucks” before she was nineteen (17). All the stories set in Jamaica have narrators caught between the local and the metropolitan perceptions of rural life — an ambivalence not uncommon in later Caribbean stories. Several writers resident in the Caribbean who did much to nurture Caribbean short fiction were those associated with Trinidad and The Beacon, the two literary journals that flourished during the early 1930s in Trinidad. The main short story practitioners of these publications were C. L. R. James and Alfred Mendes, but there were other proficient contributors: Ralph De Boissiere, Earnest Carr, Kathleen and Charles Archibald, Percival Maynard, and C. A. Thomasos. These writers introduced a sub-genre, which came to be known as the barrack-yard story. The stories depict graphically the bitter-sweet life of slum dwellers. The writers insisted on social realism, criticizing those who portrayed Trinidad romantically and exotically and peopled their stories with Anglo-American characters perceiving their fellow countrymen as “inferiors, an uninteresting people who are not worth [their] while” (Anonymous [1932], 1), and who made their characters speak like Anglo-Americans with no trace of the local vernacular, idiom, and speech pattern. Advocating social realism, the barrack-yard school of writers did not shy away from the sexual and violent in the lives of the slum dwellers, for which they incurred the censure of the middle-class reader, whose moral narrowness and philistinism they criticized in several articles and editorials. James’s “Triumph,” 1929, and Mendes’s “Afternoon in Trinidad,” 1936, are the earliest barrack-yard stories. Both tell of the relationships of kept women with their lovers (or keepers) and neighbors: in “Triumph,” the heroine fends off the attempts of jealous neighbors to make her keeper doubt her fidelity; in “Afternoon in Trinidad,” the heroine frustrates the efforts of a rival to steal her keeper. Such characters and situations are common in the barrack-yard stories, and so are lively exchanges among characters in Trinidad English,

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characterized by clever retorts, rhythmic swearing, biblical quotations, and folk sayings. Though James and Mendes portray the barrack-yards as squalid and impoverished, they emphasize the inhabitants’ resilience, vitality, and zest for life rather than their misery and poverty. Their narratorial voices are comic rather than tragic, and are in stark contrast to Walrond’s bleak perception in Tropic Death. In playing down the harsher socioeconomic aspects of these barrackyard dwellers and in portraying them as not crushed in life and spirit, these writers evidently are not militant reformers and their stories are not essentially social protest pieces. In “Triumph,” as in Minty Alley, 1936, James is not yet the committed Marxist that he becomes some years after leaving Trinidad for England in 1932. James and Mendes, like McKay, respond ambivalently to their characters. They know well, and sympathize with, the impoverished barrack-yard dwellers, but they also recurringly distance themselves from them. In “Her Chinaman’s Way,” 1929, Mendes, for instance, observes patronizingly of the protagonist’s superstitious behavior: “No woman of her class is entirely free from it in the island” (Mendes [1929], 21). In “Triumph,” James begins by describing the barrack-yard for the individual unfamiliar with it: “Where people in England and America say slum, Trinidadians say barrack-yards” (James [1992], 29), and he proceeds to make ironic contrasts between aspects of the barrack-yard and places like the Lido and Greek temples. Such instances of irony are set against James’s pervasive sympathetic tone, an antithesis that points up the extent to which these colonial authors, caught between two worlds and two audiences, are writing from both within and without their society. This ambivalent attitude is perhaps best shown in James’s “La Divina Pastora,” 1927, a story about the miraculous intervention of a saint in a young woman’s love affair. The narrator draws attention to himself with the opening sentence: “Of my own belief in this story I shall say nothing” (25). He prides himself on being a sophisticated individual, conscious of his European education, capable of portraying his Trinidad heroine in terms of European literature: she has no thought of “Ibsenic theories of morality” (25). With such comments, he distances himself from her; yet, as the story proceeds, it becomes evident that he knows intimately her experiences and values and sympathizes with her lot. Many of the barrack-yard stories play down narrative, emphasizing character and situation. Mendes’s “Her Chinaman’s Way” is one of a few exceptions that employ suspenseful narration and surprise endings. Maria is kept by a well-to-do Chinese businessman, a secretive man whom she fears. When the story opens, she wants to leave him but knows that if she did, he would not let her have their child. She discovers that he is involved in opium smuggling and reports this to the police, who set a trap for him. He manages to evade their trap and, realizing that Maria has betrayed him, returns home to punish her. Unaware of what has happened, Maria prepares a cup of tea for him, and while she is in the kitchen, he vengefully strangles their child — an act that takes Maria (and the reader) by surprise and stands out as perhaps the most violent and horrifying incident in the barrack-yard sub-genre. A decade after Mendes and James wrote their stories and advised aspiring writers to write of what they knew and saw around them, since “it is difficult to write well of persons and things beyond one’s ken” (Anonymous [1932], 1), Seepersad Naipaul published a collection of six stories, Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales, 1943, in a foreword to which he states: “I wrote what I saw — what, in fact, I see every day, and what I know” (S. Naipaul [1976], 6). The world he writes about is the rural pocket of Trinidad East Indians, and, like Mendes and James

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in their barrack-yard stories, he draws from life not from literature. As V. S. Naipaul observes, these writers were establishing, not borrowing from, a tradition; they showed that it was possible to create literature from what they saw around them; and he himself is indebted to them for providing with their steady, direct vision, “a starting point,” as he calls it in “Jasmine” (V. S. Naipaul [1972], 26). Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales was reissued as The Adventures of Gurudeva and Other Stories in 1976, with a foreword by Seepersad Naipaul’s son Vidia, who included a few of his father’s later stories that were broadcast on the BBC’s “Caribbean Voices.” The 1943 collection is the first book of anglophone Caribbean stories to be published by a writer of East Indian extraction. Many V. S. Naipaul scholars have found these stories significant as a source of and influence on his early stories and novels; one of the instances of intertextuality is the son’s reworking — in the opening chapter of A House for Mr Biswas, 1961–of the short story “They Named him Mohun” (S. Naipaul [1976], 124–33). But the stories have much merit and can stand on their own. The best of them, which include “The Engagement” and “The Gratuity” (176–200), reflect the traditional attributes of the short story: economy, aesthetic distance, narrative pace, and structural control. Even the less successful stories acquire an appeal through their novel and fresh settings, situations, and characters. Seepersad Naipaul provides particulars of East Indian day-to-day life with documentary exactness. And he displays an expert knowledge of the workings of the village tribunal, or panchayat, of the rituals of engagement and marriage ceremonies, and of the techniques of stickfighting and the arcane skills of obeah. Though he is capable of sharp ironic observations, his tone is comic, tolerant, and warm. He has a weakness for romantic situations, happy endings, and sudden twists by which his protagonists avert disaster. In “Sonya’s Luck” (S. Naipaul [1943], 37–43), to avoid an arranged marriage to someone she has never met, the unhappy protagonist plans to elope with her secret lover the night before her wedding. When she meets him at their trysting place, she discovers that he himself is fleeing an arranged marriage — to her. The title story, “Gurudeva,” long enough to be a novella, follows — in a series of episodes or “chapters” loosely held together — the life of Gurudeva from his mission school days and his forced early marriage at the age of fourteen, through his efforts to prove himself to his community by becoming a stick fighter, to his eventual initiation into adulthood when he finds himself in gaol for injuring a policeman in a stick fight. In the later edition of the collection, the story is retitled “The Adventures of Gurudeva” (S. Naipaul [1976], 25–123) and is expanded to include episodes after Gurudeva’s release from prison. Now burdened with adult responsibilities, he becomes involved with his community and religion as a pundit and teacher. Often, he finds himself caught between Indian and Western values — a motif in these later stories — as in the episode where he falls in love with one of his students, a Westernized, liberated young woman, and has to choose between her and his tradition-minded wife of an arranged marriage. A strength of these stories is Naipaul’s deft presentation of dramatic scenes. Like The Beacon short story writers, he effortlessly recreates Trinidad speech patterns. In his early stories, he renders the dialogue of his Hindispeaking characters in a quaint, biblical style; but in later stories, he employs, like V. S. Naipaul in A House for Mr Biswas, conversational, standard English. Though Seepersad Naipaul is familiar with English and classical authors, there are few allusions to them. Unlike James and Mendes, whose stories were published both locally and abroad — James’s “La Divina Pastora”

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first appeared in the British Saturday Review of Literature, 15 October 1927–and who were conscious of both the local and the Anglo-American reader, Seepersad Naipaul’s stories, particularly those of the early volume, are meant for the local reader and are free of the bifocality evident in “La Divina Pastora” or in “Triumph.” In Jamaica, Roger Mais, a contemporary of Seepersad Naipaul’s, was writing much different stories. Mais has over fifty short stories to his credit: the first of his two 1942 collections, Faces and Other Stories, has seventeen stories, the other, And Most of All Man, sixteen. More stories were published in Public Opinion, Focus, and broadcast on “Caribbean Voices.” But this prolific output has not displaced his reputation as a novelist, established in particular by The Hills Were Joyful Together, 1953, and Brother Man, 1954, novels that depict the brutal lives of slum dwellers. These novels focus on the characters’ impoverished lives and have a much stronger social protest function than the barrack-yard stories; and they are relentlessly pessimistic, unrelieved by the comic that is characteristic of James’s and Mendes’s stories. Mais’s stories, almost all of which pre-date the novels, are similarly pessimistic, but they are not exclusively protest pieces, complaining about the lot of the urban poor. In fact, only a handful, such as “Gravel in Your Shoe” from Listen, The Wind and Other Stories, 1986, belong to this category. Most, underplaying political and socioeconomic issues, are sensitive, somber explorations of individuals, both urban and rural, working and middle class, troubled by feelings of inadequacy, thoughts of mortality, and fears of being unloved and unfulfilled. Mais’s characters, for a while, rise to the challenges of their society but, ultimately, are denied success and have to resign themselves to their lot. Mais portrays, with deep psychological insight, the psyches of his destitute protagonists. There is always a suggestion that the narrative has larger implication: the yard story “Gravel in Your Shoe” (Mais [1986], 73–79) focuses not on the circumstances of the protagonist’s destitute state but on her inner emotional turmoil; she is bothered by her neighbor’s gossip about her husband’s infidelity, with which she tries to cope by denying it to herself. “Blackout” (41–44) uses the simple incident of a poor Jamaican requesting of a white American tourist a light for his cigarette to examine the estrangement between rich and poor, man and woman, black and white, native and foreigner. Mais recreates the Jamaican setting with a sharp eye for sociocultural particulars. But his themes are never exclusively Jamaican; and his characters are Jamaican and human individuals. In “The Crooked Branch” (16–27), for instance, he explores a child’s alienation as he becomes aware of the differences between himself and his adopted siblings. When he falls in love with his adopted sister, his father sends him away but cannot explain to him that this is because he is the girl’s half-brother. Mais evokes the Jamaican social context distinctly but it is the psychological, not the sociological, that attracts him to this story. The “Jungle” (7–9) relates an individual’s apprehension as he walks through an unsafe section of Kingston late at night. The particulars of the circumambient setting serve to render graphically a Kingston street at night as well as to generate the frame of mind of the philosophical young protagonist who somberly contemplates the inevitability of death and the relative merits of living life cautiously or daringly. In “Glory Road” (131–35), Mais employs a Jamaican country road symbolically to convey the narrator’s perception that death is a blessing for which he should be grateful. And in “Flood Water” (121–25), a young man swims across a treacherous river to return home to his wife. Mais establishes how closely the fate of this Jamaican farming community is tied to the river. But this

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socioeconomic theme is secondary to Mais’s interest in the psychological: the young man’s efforts to cross the river symbolically parallel his struggle with suspicions of his wife’s infidelity. Mais is the first Caribbean writer to employ symbolism so pervasively in his short stories. A sociorealist, he is careful, however, not to let the symbolic intrude or detract from the literal and concrete. There are two creative phases in Roger Mais’s career as a writer of fiction: the late 1930s and early 1940s when he published short fiction locally, and the 1950s when with access to British publishers he turned to the novel and virtually ignored short fiction. In this regard, he is an exception. Many of the subsequent writers who became established novelists continued to write the occasional stories even though the novel was their preference. A few, such as V. S. Naipaul, Samuel Selvon, and Michael Anthony, published collections of short stories. However, their stories do not constitute as large a proportion of their oeuvre as in Mais’s case. The most prolific Caribbean novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer (Guyana), has twenty-three published novels; his published short stories number fewer than that. But the ones he has written prove him to be an accomplished short story writer. He is particularly skilled at evoking feelings of isolation and is fascinated by the psychological states of his characters especially those given to solitary life. Though he employs dialogue skilfully, his preferred form of narration is the narrative-descriptive rather than the dramatic, a preference dictated perhaps by the laconic nature of his often solitary protagonists. In “Sorrow Dam and Mr. Millbank: An Idyl” (Gray [1973], 134–40), Mr. Millbank, a Prufrockian character, dissatisfied with his drab life as an urban boarder, abandons his job as an accountant for life as a farmer among the poor residents of Sorrow Dam, whose resilience and vitality he admires. In “We Know Not Whom To Mourn,” 1949, a son visits his dying father, whose paternal affection he yearns for all his life. While the rest of the family gathers around the ailing father (who ironically recuperates), the son commits suicide. His unhappy relationship with his father and his suicide — a solution to the torment of several Mittelholzer protagonists — are more poignant when considered in relation to Mittelholzer’s own experience. The son, who recurringly feels that his father is disappointed in him, is very much like Mittelholzer, whose own father, a negrophobe, though himself of mixed blood, could not accept his son’s swarthy complexion. Mittelholzer himself committed suicide, though at a later age and for more complex reasons than the son in this story. Mittelholzer sets many of his stories in Guyana, the coastal and interior landscapes of which fascinated him. In “Tacama,” 1948, he catches exactly the seductive yet treacherous beauty of the Guyana hinterland. “Sorrow Dam and Mr. Millbank” and “We Know Not Whom To Mourn” evoke both the dreary and the idyllic of the Guyanese coastal towns and villages. In his Guyana stories, Mittelholzer explores, as he does in his early novels, the world of both the creoles and the East Indians and the point at which their worlds intersect, though he dramatizes better the social, rather than the psychological, lives of the East Indians. None of the torrid sexuality of the novels, particularly evident in the Kaywana series, 1952–58, appears in the short stories. As in his novels, Mittelholzer in his stories does not restrict himself to the Guyana landscape; some are set in Trinidad (where he resided for six years before immigrating to Britain) and in Barbados (where he spent the years 1952 to 1956 before returning to Britain). “Hurricane Season,” 1954, is a particularly faithful dramatic account of the atmospheric changes in Barbados during a hurricane watch. Mittelholzer’s earliest publication is Creole Chips, 1937, a

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collection of twenty-seven short (each less than a page long), amusing anecdotes and sketches — a form of short narrative that frequently appeared as regular features in newspapers throughout the Caribbean during this period. Mittelholzer’s “chips” are similar in tone to the 228 slightly longer pieces, or “storyettes,” by Pugagee Pungcuss (aka G. H. H. McLellan), published in The Daily Chronicle (Guyana), 1937–38, and collected in Old Time Story: Some Old Guianese Yarns Re-Spun, 1943–a title that looks back to X. Beke’s 1884 collection West Indian Yarns. Most of the stories by Wilson Harris (Guyana) were published (mainly in Kyk-Over-Al) before the appearance of his first novel, Palace of the Peacock, 1960. These early stories are clearly apprenticeship pieces and are important precursors of the novels. They capture brilliantly the Guyana landscape, particularly the interior, imbuing it with mythical and philosophical significance and effectively paralleling the literal with the allegorical, the realistic with the surrealistic, the concrete with the abstract. Harris’s characters are both human individuals and philosophical representations; they are at ease with both standard, even formal, English and Guyanese versions of English. One of his earliest stories, “Tomorrow,” 1945, tells of a young man invited in out of the rain by an artist. The artist shows him an unfinished statue and introduces him to a woman who earlier, in a moment of anger, has murdered her husband and is now contemplating the consequences of her action. As in Harris’s novels, the symbolic or allegorical significance is not readily evident: quite possibly, Harris is examining the inability of individuals to comprehend even imaginatively the consequences of their actions. “Spirit of the Sea Wall,” 1961, surrealistically has as its narrator a scarecrow, who faces the sea with his back to a city that could be Georgetown (Guyana), Troy, or a toy city. An old woman approaches him and takes his hat, claiming that it is her husband’s. She is transformed into a beautiful woman and is swept out to sea, evading the outstretched hands of a man in the crowd that has gathered around the scarecrow. The man thinks that the woman is dead, and perhaps his perception provides a way into the story: Is Harris suggesting that the man is unable to view imaginatively the past and the world around him? The theme of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, conqueror and conquered, evident in Harris’s novels, appears in “Fences Upon the Earth,” 1947, one of his stories set in the Guyanese hinterland. It is a slight narrative about a Guyanese resident who stops to drink at a creek owned by an overseas mining company. An expatriate representative of the company reprimands him for trespassing. A more impressive hinterland story is Harris’s “Kanaima” (Ramchand [1966], 196–205), a later work that has the density of style and metaphorical richness of the novels. It explores, among other themes, the paradoxical and antinomian relationships of life and death in the Guyana hinterland, employing the symbol of Kanaima, the Amerindian spirit of evil and death. In “Banim Creek,” 1954, three men, isolated in a hinterland camp, compete with each other for the favors of a woman whose husband physically abuses her. Harris defines effectively their personalities, tendencies, and motives. But the story goes beyond this depiction of human behavior: a fourth character, the narrator, a contemplative man, speculates on the philosophical implications of their actions, particularly their bearing on the nature of heaven and hell. The incidents are too thin to sustain these speculations and the narrator often appears to be straining to imbue them with deeper significance. The story, originally published in Kyk-Over-Al, is an extract from an unpublished novel that was lost in a fire. Harris later incorporated elements of it in The Secret Ladder, 1963, where the narrator’s philosophical observations are organically

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part of the novel and not undigested as in the extract. “Banim Creek” invites comparison with “At the Stelling” (Ramchand [1982], 67–83), a story by the Jamaican writer John Hearne, set in the Guyanese interior (which is given a fictional name). The narrative focuses on an Amerindian scout, who, perpetually abused and humiliated by an arrogant, insensitive young government officer and several of his associates, kills them with cold deliberation. Like “Banim Creek,” Hearne’s story probes the psychological motivation of the principal players, but while Harris looks at the philosophical implications of his narrative, Hearne emphasizes the hatred and violence of individuals set apart by ethnic and hegemonic divisions. Harris’s portrayal of the Guyanese hinterland is impressionistic; Hearne’s is representational. Harris employs both standard English and versions of Guyanese English; Hearne fabricates a dialect that is a literary rendition of Guyanese and Jamaican English, a hybridity that, at times, rings false. Hearne, as a rule, is not as comfortable with dialect as he is with British or Jamaican Standard English. Several of his stories were published in The Atlantic Monthly and appear to have been written for an Anglo-American as much as for a Caribbean readership. Hearne’s prose, clean and pared, recalls Hemingway’s. His world, as presented in the handful of stories he has published, is primarily that of the middle class, particularly the intellectuals and professionals, mainly of Jamaica (which is rendered fictionally in his stories and novels as Cayuna). In “The Wind in this Corner” (Howes [1971], 40–56), Hearne provides an uncommon perspective of Caribbean politics. Young politicians, drawn from intellectuals and professionals, who speak perfect conversational English and were evidently educated abroad, are persuading their aged party leader to step down before the conclusion of the current election campaign. They appear to be far removed from the actualities of Jamaican life, but there is little irony here as Hearne presents them as men of purpose and commitment. Hearne is conscious of social distinctions and of class and racial divisions. In “Village Tragedy” (Salkey [1970], 15–26), which tells of the accidental death of a prosperous farmer, Hearne portrays figures from different segments of society: the village idiot, the drunken doctor, the deceased’s sons, who are concerned more with their inheritance than with the loss of their father, and the materialistic minister of the church, who wonders what benefits the death will bring his church. In “The Lost Country” (27–39), Hearne draws a parallel between an impoverished black prospector’s and a Scottish-Carib professional surveyor’s obsession with life in the Guyanese interior. In their later years, both ignore well-intentioned advice that returning there could be fatal because of their frail condition. Here, as in other stories, Hearne captures authentically local settings and characters, but, characteristically, he tries to extend their significance beyond the racial and regional. The men’s obsession is not just a lust for gold or diamond but a natural, human yearning for ancestral connections, which Hearne says, in words that recall Fitzgerald’s at the end of The Great Gatsby, are “half-remembered fragments of some enormous receding and impossible dream” (39). The Barbadian writer George Lamming’s contribution to the Caribbean short story is slight when compared with his role in the Caribbean novel. He published just a handful of stories. Up to 1972, he had published in Bim seven pieces of short fiction, four of which are extracts from his novels. He did not publish much short fiction during his later life. In these stories, as in his novels, Lamming focuses on the working-class and peasant experience, writing with deep awareness and understanding. He knows the middle class but, unlike Hearne, observes it from

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the outside and invariably with irony. In “Birds of a Feather,” 1948, the young Caribbean protagonist-narrator has a closer relationship with his American co-workers than with the affected local middle class, whose sterility he seeks to escape. In “Of Thorns and Thistles,” 1949, he writes sympathetically but comically as well — which helps him keep his distance — of a peasant woman who fakes blindness to keep her daughter with her and prevent her from migrating to the United States. A similar warm, comic tone informs Lamming’s account of the efforts of a protective sister in the Caribbean working-class immigrant community in London to prevent her brother from marrying a white girl. She cancels his limousine, but, dressed in hat and tails, he appears at the church on the handle-bar of his friend’s bicycle, an unconventional entrance that the anxious wedding party applauds. The story ends ironically with an English bystander commenting to himself on how extraordinary it all is. “Birthday Weather,” 1951, is a poetic evocation of the feelings and thoughts of George, a peasant lad, as the rain falls all day on his ninth birthday. The story is a preliminary version of the opening chapter of Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, 1953. For Lamming, the short story clearly is incidental in his oeuvre. However, his contemporaries like Michael Anthony, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, and Sam Selvon, though they preferred the novel, each nevertheless published a number of short stories, enough to constitute individual volumes. Michael Anthony (Trinidad) published Cricket in the Road, 1973, a collection of twenty stories. His is a unique talent among Caribbean short story practitioners. He writes — without any overt political or social axe to grind — of common experiences of ordinary individuals in everyday situations. His protagonists, often children, are untainted by partisan political, social, cultural, and racial biases. He is intuitively alert to the feelings of the young and to their subtle, seemingly trivial but real shifts in moods, perceptions, responses, and aspirations. In “Enchanted Alley” (Anthony [1973], 19–25), the young black narrator, who recently moved from a small village to the town, observes some East Indian vendors in an alley on the way to school. At first he keeps his distance from these strange people but eventually is drawn into a warm relationship with them. “The Valley of Cocoa” (26–33) is a sensitive account of a youth’s awakening to the beauty of his surroundings. Yearning for the imagined attractions of the city, he considers his home to be dreary until a visitor from the city opens his eyes to the attractions of his rural home. As in his other stories, Anthony presents an experience like this as that of any — not just a Trinidadian — rural youth. Nevertheless, it is possible on one level to see a historical specificity here: the boy’s awakening to particulars of his home suggests the colonial writers’ to their own ethos. The title story, “Cricket in the Road” (40–43), is a poetic evocation of a growing child’s complex and changing relationship with friends. This is one of a few Anthony stories that verge on the sentimental and nostalgic. Anthony writes affectionately of his society and its inhabitants, but he manages to keep his distance with an even-tempered, unintrusive voice. The world he recreates is not as violent as that of the barrack-yard stories. Yet there are occasions when his protagonists turn to violence when natural justice warrants it. In “Drunkard of the River” (54–59), a young boy, abused and humiliated by his drunken father, causes his death by drowning. Anthony chooses not to reprimand the boy but to point up the sad irony of his life. He portrays similarly the “badjohn” in “The Day of the Fearless” (60–65), who would like to mend his ways after a stint in prison, but is forced to defend himself in a street fight and finds himself back in gaol. Anthony’s style correlates with his refreshing, unpretentious portrayal

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of the common and the ordinary. His diction is simple, the conversational Standard English of his narrative description complementing the Trinidad English of his dialogue. A dominant characteristic of his style is the simple syntax: there are few compound sentences; most are simple and coordinating. The conjunction “and” is found often in his fiction. His narratives are uncomplicated though he structures them well to point up climactic incidents and achieve effective closures. This is evident in his historical narrative about the Governor of Trinidad in 1796, Chacon, whose wife elopes with a rival at the end of “The Captain and the Fleet” (104–14) and in his fantasy piece about a fish, in “Peeta of the Deep” (72–79), whose waywardness leads him into a fisherman’s net at the end of the story. Jean Rhys provides a perspective on the Caribbean different from that of the writers considered so far. Born in Dominica of white parents, she grew up in the small white Dominican upper class, where she lived until the age of sixteen, when she left the island to attend school in Britain. She was never to live in Dominica again, though, some thirty years later, she returned for a short visit. Most of her stories — in collections entitled The Left Bank and Other Stories, 1927, and Tigers Are Better Looking, 1968 – are set in Europe, but in many of these, the protagonists have spent their childhood and youth in the Caribbean and often recall and contemplate these Caribbean experiences. These stories are about alienated, placeless individuals striving for a sense of identity. Those with Caribbean setting (collected in Kenneth Ramchand’s Best West Indian Stories, 1982) are frequently narrated from a white child’s point of view. The children are lonely individuals estranged from parents preoccupied with proper social conduct and maintaining racial and class distinctions. As they awaken to their parents’ prejudices, they experience intense inner and outer conflicts. In “The Day They Burned the Books” (Rhys [1927], 40–46), the young white narrator is dismayed to learn that her friend’s late father, a white man, detested his wife, a “coloured” woman. She is further disturbed by her friend’s nihilistic sense of not belonging to either his father’s or his mother’s world. Rhys’s stories are characterized by a melancholic tone that is noticeable even in her accounts of beautiful scenes or pleasant incidents. Her response to life is perhaps best conveyed in the title of one of her stories, “Temps Perdi” (Burley [1968], 69–88), a mood piece in which a woman from the Caribbean living in Britain nostalgically recalls her Caribbean experiences. “Temps Perdi,” the name of an estate in Dominica which the narrator knew, is Creole, the narrator says, not for forgotten time but for wasted time or lost labor. The story and the title convey well the narrator’s, and Rhys’s, sense of the futility of it all. Rhys’s stories are not intricately plotted; some in fact are sketches rather than stories and suggest the lyric rather than the narrative. They depend for their effect not so much on narrative as on brilliant imagery and imagery patterns that function literally and figuratively. Rhys also pays particular attention to form and structure. In “Fishy Waters” (Rhys [1976], 43–62), an apparently respectable member of the white middle class accuses a migrant British carpenter of abusing a child, when actually it is the accuser who is the perpetrator, as his wife comes to realize at the end of the story. Rhys relates the incident and its effect on the community through a variety of devices, including newspaper letters to the editor, editorials, personal correspondences, and courtroom cross-examinations and summations. In “Let Them Call It Jazz” (Ramchand [1982], 97–112), she employs the interior monologue and an impressively authentic rendition of Dominican English to evoke, with intensity and immediacy, the feelings of placelessness and

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alienation of a Caribbean mulatto woman in London. In “I Used to Live Here Once” (178), which, at just about five hundred words long, can claim to be one of the shortest Caribbean stories, Rhys employs a form that allows this account of a woman returning home to be read, ambiguously, as both a Gothic tale and an epiphanous realization that she no longer belongs there. “Heat” (Rhys [1976], 37–41), juxtaposes responses of souvenir hunters, gossipers, and sensational newspapers reporters to recreate with immediacy the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelé in Martinique. Rhys’s fellow Dominican Phyllis Shand Allfrey wrote several stories set in the Caribbean, London, and New York. Like Rhys’s stories, they relate the white West Indian’s experiences of disaffection in the Caribbean and of exile when abroad. The creole woman in “Miss Garthside’s Greenhouse,” 1990, set in London, experiences nostalgic feelings for her tropical home in Venezuela, which the narrator, a London librarian, chooses to interpret as impractical and romantic. Many of the stories with Caribbean settings, such as “The Man Who Pitched Bottles,” 1968, were published or reprinted in The Dominica Herald and The Star, the newspaper Allfrey edited in Dominica. Samuel Selvon of Trinidad is one of the most prolific anglophone Caribbean short story writers. He has a natural talent for the form and is very comfortable with it. The episodic nature of his novels — The Lonely Londoners, 1956, for instance — attests to this. Prior to his immigration to London in 1950 and the publication of his first novel, A Brighter Sun, in 1952, he had published over twenty pieces in The Trinidad Guardian, under such pen-names as Michael Wentworth and Ack-Ack, and in Bim. Several of his stories were broadcast on the BBC’s “Caribbean Voices.” In 1957, he published a selection of nineteen of his stories in Ways of Sunlight, dividing the volume into two parts: stories set in Trinidad and stories set in London. Some of his early works omitted from this volume and some later stories were published in Foreday Morning, 1989, a title that conveys the author’s perception of the early stories as primarily apprenticeship pieces and as measures of his development as a writer. A few are early versions of later pieces, such as “Calypsonian,” which was later published as “Calypso in London” (Selvon [1973], 125–31), with the Trinidad setting changed to London; in an early version of “Johnson and the Cascadura” (11–37), the narrator is not involved in the love affair of the two main players as he is in the later version, and the story thus has little of the energizing tension of the revised version. Like Seepersad Naipaul, Selvon writes in some of his early stories of East Indians in rural Trinidad, particularly of those caught between East Indian and Western worlds. “Cane is Bitter” (Selvon [1973], 59–73] is an impressive study of an East Indian youth’s realization of how his Western education in the city has alienated him from his rural family steeped in traditional East Indian peasant culture. He comes to see his education as a betrayal of his culture and heritage. In “A Drink of Water” (112–21), published previously in a shortened form as “The Great Drought,” a young farming couple suffers during a drought in Trinidad and is exploited by a villager who has the only well. Their crops are destroyed and the wife is dying, but the story ends on a happy note as rain begins to fall and the wife miraculously recovers. The happy ending notwithstanding, this story, like “Cane is Bitter,” has a melancholic mood, which stands in sharp contrast to the comic tone of many of Selvon’s urban and immigrant stories. Unlike Seepersad Naipaul’s stories, however, Selvon’s are not restricted to the East Indian experience. Many more are about the experiences of Afro-West Indians and of West Indian immigrants in

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London and Canada whose racial or ethnic identity remains unspecified. Several of Selvon’s stories set in London are light-hearted, zany, humorous sketches of the pranks, follies, and foibles of Caribbean immigrants. “Basement Lullaby” (175–80), for instance, tells of a tired West Indian in a Paddington basement room, kept awake by his chattering roommate; he retaliates by pounding away at the piano as soon as his talkative companion drifts off to sleep. Often, however, beneath Selvon’s and his narrators’ laughter is an awareness of the harsh life of the working-class immigrants, who themselves resort to laughter to cope with their lot. Both author and narrators appear to be laughing philosophers conscious of the pervasive sadness of life. Selvon portrays characters who do not allow their harsh environment to crush their resilience and ability to survive. In “Obeah in the Grove” (167–74), four Caribbean tenants resourcefully resort to the supernatural to frustrate their manipulative landlord; and in “If Winter Comes” (156–60), the wily protagonist uses his wits to survive London’s harsh winters. Selvon is most proficient in employing various forms of Standard and Caribbean English in narrativedescriptive and dramatic scenes. In his skilled hands, language is made to convey within a short space subtle shifts in function, mood, and tone, from the farcical and comical to the pathetic and the poetic. And it vitalizes and authenticates his portraits of many distinct and memorable West Indian protagonists. In “My Girl and the City” (181–88), an often anthologized mood piece, with echoes of T. S. Eliot’s vision of London in The Waste Land, Selvon skilfully combines Standard English with the feel and flow of Caribbean English to achieve an inspired poetic prose. In “Cane is Bitter,” he has a sharp ear for the speech patterns of modified standard English and of urban and rural versions of English. V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad) has three collections of short fiction: Miguel Street, 1959, A Flag on the Island, 1967, and In a Free State, 1971. Some critics and Naipaul himself, however, perceive Miguel Street and In a Free State not as volumes of short stories proper but as novels. Miguel Street is a collection of seventeen sketches of middle- and working-class residents of a fictional Port-of-Spain street of the 1930s and 1940s, held together by a common setting, by a shared tone that wavers between the farcical and the comical, and by an adolescent narrator, whose development is noticeable if the sketches are read in the order given — the principal reason why the work can be considered a novel. The inhabitants are portrayed as a likeable group of highly individualistic, eccentric characters, who quarrel with each other but have a strong communal sense, and who, though constantly buffeted by life, have a capacity to bounce back. The barrack-yard stories are the progenitors of this work, but Naipaul’s use of the adolescent point of view and the voice of innocence awakening to the realities of Trinidad street life set it apart from these stories. In fact, in the much anthologized “B. Wordsworth” (V. S. Naipaul [1959], 56–65), a story of an aspiring poet, one of the many sad inhabitants of the street, the tone verges on the sentimental. In a Free State comprises three stories, with a prologue and an epilogue that constitute the narrator’s observations in his journal about his travels in Egypt. What holds these self-contained stories and diverse forms together are the somber, pessimistic tone, unrelieved by recurring comic moments, and the motifs of rootlessness, placelessness, and nomadism of many on both sides of the hegemonic divide. In “One Out of Many” (V. S. Naipaul [1971], 25–61), a servant from Bombay working for an Indian diplomat in Washington is helpless when he deserts his employer and finds himself an illegal immigrant in America; in “Tell Me Who to Kill” (65–108), a Caribbean immigrant fares even worse in London: unable to

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cope with social and economic pressures, he is remanded by the courts to a mental asylum; and in the title story, which is long enough to be a novella, two English expatriates no longer feel welcome in a newly independent East African country. A Flag on the Island lacks the homogeneity of the other volumes. It is a collection of nine stories and a novella, the title piece, all of which were written between 1950 and 1965. Read in chronological order, this collection, set in the Caribbean and England and peopled by Caribbean, English, and American characters, provides an indication of Naipaul’s development as a fiction writer and of his versatility in the use of tone, form, and characterization. “The Mourners,” 1950 (V. S. Naipaul [1967], 62–73), the earliest piece in the book, has a young East Indian narrator responding to the grief of parents who have lost a child. The story illustrates the young Naipaul’s deft control of voice and his skill in achieving distance that is just right to suppress sentimentality on the one hand and aloofness on the other. Another early story, “The Enemy,” 1955 (62–73), exhibits Naipaul’s facility with Trinidad English. This piece was originally intended as the opening episode of Miguel Street, but Naipaul evidently felt that the dark theme — a boy’s adolescent hatred of his mother — would be out of place in a work that is predominantly comic. He does work it into a later incident in A House for Mr Biswas that reflects the relationships between Anand, his mother, and Mr. Biswas. Naipaul’s sharp ear for Trinidad non-standard English is best seen in “The Baker’s Story,” 1962 (111–20), and “The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book,” 1962 (52–61), which takes the form of a semi-literate watchman’s written reports on the activities of certain residents of a Caribbean hotel, an experiment with form that Naipaul brings off remarkably well. “The Night Watchman’s Occurrence Book,” “A Christmas Story,” 1962 (V. S. Naipaul [1967], 24–46), and “A Flag on the Island,” 1965 (124–214), are among Naipaul’s finest short fiction and share qualities that have distinguished his novels. In “A Christmas Story,” an East Indian schoolmaster who converted to Presbyterianism from Hinduism when he was young, now cannot choose between his two religions and cultures. His inner conflict is heightened by his anxiety on Christmas Eve about a pending audit that would lead to his indictment for embezzling church funds. This tormented, self-important schoolmaster narrates the incident but his voice recurringly is undercut by the subtle irony of the narrating voice, which is both sympathizing and censuring — an ambivalence that imparts a fine tension to the work. “A Flag on the Island” examines a newly independent, formerly British, Caribbean island’s mimicry of North American way of life while ignoring its own indigenous culture. A local novelist, Mr. Blackwhite, for instance, catering to American readers, writes about interracial sex and protest politics. The story, one of Naipaul’s bleakest, offers no hope for the society other than a possible chance of a rebirth after total annihilation; but even an apocalyptic solution is denied it when a hurricane that strikes the island does not bring about the desired cataclysmic destruction. Naipaul is not hesitant to risk using in his stories, as he does in such novels as Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, 1963, non-West Indian voices. “The Perfect Tenants” (85–100) captures the voices of eccentric English tenants in an English boarding house, and “A Flag on the Island” is narrated by an American tourist. Frank Collymore (Barbados), a founding editor of Bim, the Barbadian little magazine that provided many Caribbean short story writers with their start, was himself a short story writer with at least seventeen stories in Bim. Though many of the writers he published went on to

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establish more solid reputations for themselves as short story writers, his is a significant talent. His stories, posthumously collected in The Man Who Loved Attending Funerals and Other Stories, 1993, are controlled, well-crafted, and technically accomplished. Though his settings and protagonists are West Indian and are rendered with a sharp eye for particulars, Collymore’s themes are not restrictively Caribbean. Many of his stories are concerned with the dark recesses of the subconscious and have resonances of Poe. One of his better stories is “Rewards and Chrysanthemums,” 1961, a psychological study of two Barbadian sisters who come together after a long separation. In “The Diaries,” 1966, the dark secrets of a deceased woman are revealed by the narrator, a lawyer, whose astute comments as he peruses her diaries serve to paint his as well as her portrait. Among Caribbean short fiction writers, Austin Clarke (Barbados-Canada) occupies a unique position. Immigrating to Canada in 1955, he became the first recounter of the black West Indian experience in Canada. Of his generation of Caribbean writers, he is perhaps the most critical of the establishment, whether it is the white majority in Canada or the colonial expatriate and the postcolonial ruling black middle class of Barbados. His angry voice stands in stark contrast to, for example, Selvon’s genial, contemplative tone in his London stories about the West Indian immigrant’s life. However, like Selvon’s, Clarke’s talent is more suited to the short rather than to the extended narrative, as the episodic structure of his novels affirms. Clarke has published five volumes of short stories: When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, 1971, When Women Rule, 1985, Nine Men Who Laughed, 1986, In This City, 1992, and There Are No Elders, 1993. The first volume has as many stories set in Barbados as in Toronto, with four of them (in the expanded version published in 1973) portraying the experience of AfricanAmericans in the United States. The stories of the other volumes are primarily about immigrant life in Toronto, with just a few set in Barbados. Clarke has an unerringly sharp ear for Barbadian speech patterns and idioms, which contribute much to his vibrant characterization. He is adept at creating hilariously comic scenes. However, his strident anger, his overt manipulation of plot to serve his political ends, and his lack of sufficient authorial distancing from protagonists not always deserving of sympathy often work against these stories being unqualified successes. “Four Stations in his Circle” (Clarke [1971], 51–56) is among the best stories of the first volume. The protagonist, a black Barbadian immigrant striving for acceptance as a social equal in Canada, abandons his Caribbean friends and culture and buys a big house in a white neighborhood, but ironically his neighbors assume that he is simply the caretaker. Of the eight stories in When Women Rule, five are about Barbadian male immigrants in Toronto, rendered impotent as much by their inhospitable environment as by wives, friends, and their own self-hatred. The other three are about working-class white Canadians, who, like the protagonist of “The Collector” (Clarke [1985], 11–26), resent the incursion of immigrants, yearning for a time when Canada was “pure.” In his introduction to Nine Men Who Laughed, Clarke rails against the Canadian system, but he also censures those Caribbean immigrants who, on achieving a measure of material success, respond to abuses with feeble, amnesiac laughter. The stories show the dire consequences of such temporizing laughter. The protagonists all meet dismal ends: they either lock themselves away, go mad, commit suicide, or are raped and murdered. One of the nine stories, “A Funeral” (Clarke [1986], 9–28), set in contemporary Barbados, ridicules corrupt local politicians. In the 1980s, several new writers broke on the literary scene with significant volumes of

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short stories. Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua-U. S. A.) collected, in At the Bottom of the River, 1983, ten stories, many of which were published in The New Yorker, where she was employed as a staff writer. She is one of the more innovative writers whose stories have little narrative line, achieving structural cohesion through a collage of moods and images that are astonishingly original and encourage fresh perceptions of the common and commonplace. She uses stream-ofconsciousness, conveying the characters’ thoughts and feelings in a simple, exquisite prose that is at once both poetic and conversational. There are often symbolic or allegorical layers to her stories, as in the title story, which allegorically contrasts the life of the man who lies in bed hoping to escape pain and death with that of the man who gets out of bed perceiving life to be blissful though not free of suffering. The many stories of Caribbean girlhood in this collection make it the first significant volume of stories about women in the anglophone Caribbean, and the stories evocatively portray family ties and conflicts particularly between mother and daughter. King of the Carnival and Other Stories, 1989, a collection of sixteen short stories by Willi Chen has the distinction of being the first volume of anglophone Caribbean stories by a writer of Chinese extraction. Most of his stories are about the lives of rural East Indians in Trinidad during the 1940s and 1950s. What engages Chen’s imagination are the primary passions and elemental emotions that lead to violence and death. The first story, “The Stickfighter” (Chen [1989], 15–30), which relates the tragic consequences of a triangular love affair, begins with a corpse hanging from a tree, with crows circling overhead. It proceeds to tell of equally gruesome incidents involving stickfighting, wife beating, and murder. This perspective on Trinidadian rural life — similar to Harold Sonny Ladoo’s in Yesterdays, 1974–is seldom found in the fiction of other recorders of the East Indian experience in Trinidad, such as Ismith Khan, in his novels and in his short stories “The Red Ball” (Seymour [1972], 226–33) and “A Day in the Country” (Howes [1971], 48–62), Seepersad Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul, and Selvon. In a few of his stories, Chen emphasizes the multiracial nature of Trinidad, evoking the meeting of cultures, often sadly, occasionally comically. What is surprising is that he does not portray in an extended way any major characters of Chinese extraction. There is the occasional Chinese shopkeeper, but nothing of the Chinese community. Chen’s stories depend for their effect on faithfully recreated settings and situations and externally observed characters, rather than on psychological development. Most have prominent narrators who appear simply to record the characters’ actions, seldom entering their minds or exploring their feelings. These narrators observe the lot of their fellow Trinidadians with warmth and understanding while keeping a sensible distance. Chen is unabashedly traditional, indulging in little technical or formal experimentation though he employs skilfully the oral storytelling art and counterbalances effectively lyrical cadences and pared prose. His dialogue rings with authenticity, to which end he has used certain rural expressions that required an appended glossary. Novelist Neil Bissoondath (Trinidad), V. S. Naipaul’s nephew who immigrated to Toronto where he now resides, has published two collections of stories: Digging Up the Mountains, 1985, and On the Eve of Uncertain Tomorrows, 1990. These stories are almost exclusively concerned with the experiences of immigrants, refugees, nomads, and wanderers. He would appear to agree with his protagonist in “Veins Visible” (Bissoondath [1985], 210–23) that “everybody’s a refugee, everybody’s running from one thing or another” (222). In Digging Up the Mountains, half of the stories are set in the Toronto Caribbean community, particularly its East Indian

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pocket; the others range in setting from Trinidad to Latin America, Japan, and Spain. Bissoondath is recurringly concerned in these stories with the psychology of exile and dispossession, themes that he explores from a variety of perspectives: a Trinidadian businessman forced by political violence to flee his island home in “Digging Up the Mountains” (1–20); a Canadian teacher self-exiled in Trinidad in “An Arrangement of Shadows” (108–42); a Japanese girl in Toronto breaking away from her restrictive culture in “The Cage” (39–67); a Canadian lost and alone in Spain in “Continental Drift” (143–62). The lives of these individuals are characterized by frustration, emptiness, anxiety, and terror. Bissoondath is alert to the plight of his uprooted protagonists, but he stands apart, often too far apart, from them. His writing is disciplined and steady with none of Austin Clarke’s uncontrolled anger, but it lacks Clarke’s affectionate portrayal — indiscriminate though it is — of the Caribbean immigrant and exile. The stories of Olive Senior’s (Jamaica) collections, Summer Lightning and Other Stories, 1986, and Arrival of the Snake Woman, 1989, are scintillating evocations of life in rural Jamaica. Much of the appeal of these stories has to do with the telling of them. Senior employs various forms of Jamaican English to individualize and animate her characters. The stories, like Anthony’s, are written mainly from the point of view of children. Unlike Bissoondath’s stories, Senior’s have an unobtrusive authorial presence characterized not by irony but by affection. Her narrators, with independent voices, reveal deep recesses of themselves and their community, with which they are intuitively and intimately familiar. The narrator of the longest story, “Ballad” (Senior [1986], 100–34), self-reflexively comments on her telling of the tragic story of a lively woman of whom the community disapproves. She reprimands herself for starting the story with the woman’s death. Senior evokes, rather than describes, atmosphere and feelings. “Summer Lightning” (1–10) creates an ominous mood as a child is confronted by a child molester. “The Country of the One Eye God” (16–25) captures a grandmother’s shifts of feelings when she realizes that her grandson, a murderer on the run, is about to kill her. “Love Orange” (11–15), which tells of a child’s attempts to give her dying grandmother a red ball that she equates with love, and “The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream” (85–99), which relates a boy’s unfulfilled anticipation of his first taste of ice cream at a harvest fair, are both brilliant studies of children experiencing bewildering emotional conflicts and gradually losing their innocence in an adult world indifferent to their feelings. Pauline Melville’s (Guyana-Britain) Shape-Shifter, 1990, is a collection of twelve stories linked by the metaphor of the shape-shifter, an entity described in the epigraphs as capable of conjuring up “as many figures and manifestations as the sea has waves”; it is similar to the “shaman or medicine-man of the Indians of Guyana” who “can effect transformation of himself or others.” Four of the stories are set in Guyana and the others in London. The protagonists include Scottish and English individuals but are primarily Guyanese and residents of London with West Indian ties. In a world that is constantly changing and deceiving them, these protagonists have no firm sense of identity. They try to turn their amorphous psyches to their advantage, coping with their chameleon-like societies by themselves, constantly modifying and shifting their identities. The “shape of things” and the “shape of people” (Melville [1990], 54) are subject to constant mutations, transformations, and impersonations. In “Tuxedo,” the Jamaican thief feels that God plays tricks on him, shifting His color from black to white, from ally to persecutor. An English visitor to Guyana, who comes imperiously expecting to find many

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economically deprived residents in this former colony, is traumatized when she discovers an English youth among those begging in the streets of Georgetown. “You Left the Door Open” (113–34), perhaps the most mysterious and psychologically complex story of the collection, tells of a female cabaret artist who specializes in impersonations. One of her impersonations — a male — she names Charlie. Later, she is sexually assaulted by an intruder whose name she discovers is Charlie Pearce. This intruder may have escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane in the north of England. Pearce apparently is also the name of a murderer who lived in nineteenth-century Sheffield. The police find no evidence of any intruder’s presence in her home. In this and several other stories in the collection, there are many apparently supernatural occurrences. On one level, they are fascinating accounts of the supernatural but Melville intends them to be taken also as psychological studies, an approach she announces in the opening story “I Do Not Take Messages from Dead People” (1–14), which shows how the protagonist cloaks the natural in the apparently supernatural to exploit his superstitious tormentor. In “The Truth is in the Clothes” (99–112), Melville cryptically refers to Heraclitus, the Ancient Greek proponent of the theory that the world is in a constant state of change, moving between opposites — winter and summer, life and death, pain and joy — in a perpetual cycle. In Melville’s fictional world, there are constant shifts not so much between such antithetical extremes but among various versions of unhappiness in an essentially joyless world. To the list of writers with individual volumes of anglophone Caribbean short stories in the 1970s and 1980s should be added John Stewart’s (Trinidad-U. S.) Curving Road, 1975, a collection of stories about the African-American experience set in the U. S., specifically in Iowa, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and in Trinidad. Clyde Hosein’s (Trinidad-Canada) The Killing of Nelson John and Other Stories, 1980, offers stories of the rivalries and conflicts of residents of Trinidad, whose ambitions and hopes are seldom realized in their colonial and postcolonial society. Beryl Gilroy’s (Guyana-U. K.) In for a Penny, 1980, five stories for young adults that explore the psychology of failure in the lives of members of black families in London. Harry Narain’s Grass-Root People, 1981, are thirteen stories about rural Guyanese struggling to survive in the country’s harsh economic and political climate of the 1970s, while Rooplal Monar’s Backdam People, 1985, eleven stories written in Guyanese-East Indian English, depict sugarestate characters outwitting each other. From Jamaica hail Hazel Campbell, with Woman’s Tongue, 1985, and Opal Palmer Adisa, with Bake-Face and Other Guava Stories, 1986, a group of four stories set in Jamaica that examines women’s search for their selfhood in their relationships with lovers. Worthy of notice are also E. A. Markham’s Something Unusual, 1986, Dionne Brand’s (Grenada-Canada) Sans Souci and Other Stories, 1988, and Cyril Dabydeen’s (GuyanaCanada) To Monkey Jungle, 1988, all three collections with many stories that recount the experiences of West Indian immigrants to North America. The short story continues to flourish in the 1990s with such publications as Merle Collins’s (Grenada) Rain Darling, 1990, seven stories of the growth and transformation of female protagonists. The Jamaicans Michelle Cliff and Alecia McKenzie, with Bodies of Water, 1990, and Satellite City and Other Stories, 1992, respectively, write stories of the desolate lives of characters struggling to survive race, class, and color conflicts, stories that, in McKenzie’s case, relate with documentary immediacy experiences of economic deprivation in postcolonial Jamaica. Earl McKenzie’s (Jamaica) A Boy Named Ossie: A Jamaican Childhood, 1991, stories

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of a Jamaican youth’s growing awareness of social and political issues in rural Jamaica, whose warm humor recalls Michael Anthony’s, might be paired off with Alecia McKenzie’s, while Shani Mootoo’s Out on Main Street, 1993, stories of Trinidadian-Canadian women struggling to come to terms with their ethnic, national, and sexual identities are closer in theme to Michelle Cliff’s concerns. Further, there are Sandra Riley’s (Bahamas) The Lucayans, 1991, and N. D. Williams’s (Guyana-U. S.) The Crying of Rainbirds, 1992, the latter stories of ambivalent protagonists drawn to, yet repelled by, their Caribbean home. Many of these writers of the 1980s and 1990s began their careers as fiction writers with collections of short stories; their numerous publications confirm that the short story is a burgeoning genre in contemporary anglophone Caribbean literature. Even Derek Walcott recently turned to this genre in “Café Martinique,” 1985, to explore the jaded outlook of an older French Caribbean poet of European and black ancestry, Maurice, who, like many of Walcott’s speakers in his poems, experiences “turmoil in [his] mulatto veins as tangled as a rain forest” (Walcott [1985], 140). The narrator, a kindred spirit, himself a poet divided to the vein, functions as an alter ego to Maurice. He lives on an unnamed British island across a channel from the protagonist’s island of Martinique, a place much more imbued with European influence, which the narrator initially envies. He admires Maurice and shares many of his ideas, including his perception of the contemporary Caribbean Sea as a classical Aegean Sea and his belief in the complementary relationship of European and local cultures (ideas that recur in Walcott’s poetry). However, though the narrator sees much of Maurice in himself, he rejects his bitterness about the postcolonial world, opting for a life in which “the rest of us will have things to do” (228). This contribution by Walcott to anglophone Caribbean short story is yet another demonstration of the growing recognition in contemporary anglophone Caribbean literature of the value placed on the genre. A number of anthologies have collected new and previously published stories and have made available to a wider readership some pieces recovered from little and ephemeral magazines not easily accessed. Andrew Salkey has two anthologies: West Indian Stories, 1960, and Stories From the Caribbean, 1965–republished as Island Voices, 1970, with only a slight change in the order of the stories. Kenneth Ramchand’s Best West Indian Stories, 1982, offers his choice of twenty stories by primarily established short story practitioners. Mervyn Morris’s The Faber Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories, 1990, and Stewart Brown’s Caribbean New Wave Contemporary Short Stories, 1991, feature works published in the 1980s. Carmen C. Esteves and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert’s Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women, 1991, includes several stories by anglophone writers. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh’s 1996 Reader in Caribbean Literature surprisingly does not reprint as much short fiction as one might have hoped. There are earlier selections of Caribbean stories, such as Sir Algernon Edward Aspinall’s West Indian Tales of Old, 1912, T. R. St. Johnson’s A West Indian Pepper-Pot or Thirteen “Quashie” Stories, 1928, each set in a different Caribbean Island and in Guyana, and Ernest A. Carr’s Caribbean Anthology of Short Stories, 1953. These could be juxtaposed with such anthologies of stories from individual islands and regions as Vic Reid’s 14 Jamaican Short Stories, 1950, Clinton Black’s Tales of Old Jamaica, 1952, John Brown’s Poems and Stories of St. Christopher, Nevis and Anguilla, 1959, C. R. Ottley’s Legends, True Stories and Old Sayings from Trinidad and Tobago, 1962, Leo H. Bradley, John A. Watler, and Lawrence Vernon’s Among My Souvenirs: An Anthology of Ten Local [Belize] Short Stories, 1961, and Edward

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Brathwaite’s Iounaloa: Recent Writing from St. Lucia, 1963. To approach short fiction as a separate genre in anglophone Caribbean literature is to recognize its prominent role in the germination of that literature. The origins of Caribbean narrative could be traced back to the oral folktales of the native Caribs and Arawaks and of the immigrants from Africa and India, and later on to the yarns, tales, anecdotes, and “creole chips” published in regular newspaper columns and newspaper annuals, and in little magazines and chapbooks. As a glance at the list of works cited at the end of this essay affirms, there are actually more writers of short fiction than of novels. The large body of Caribbean short fiction demonstrates a range of talent more varied, more multiple than that found in Caribbean longer fiction. Though unquestionably a distinct and valid genre, anglophone Caribbean short fiction does not have an autonomous, isolated life. In its hundred-year history, it has provided a record of Caribbean consciousness that complements that of anglophone Caribbean literature at large. The early stories are mostly records of planters’ and expatriates’ experiences; in these works, indigenous Caribs and Arawaks, and immigrant Africans, East Indians, Chinese, and others are simply exotic backdrops. When they are favored as the focus of such works as E. Snod’s Maroon Medicine or X. Beke’s West Indian Yarns, they are viewed with sociological or anthropological interest. In subsequent short stories, hegemonic considerations complicate — consciously or unconsciously — artistic perception and practice. Some writers embed themselves in the local, resisting impositions of imperial culture that, despite their best efforts, seep, however slightly, into their works. Others pursue compromises. Striving to regard local and imposed cultures as complementary, they nevertheless register in their writing an ambivalence that induces various authorial anxieties, tensions, and contradictions. In the postcolonial world, the new short story writers are more conscious of the complex consequences of the colonialimperial divide. Those that are not writing back to the empire are at least interrogating its past and present relationship with West Indians both in the Caribbean and in Caribbean immigrant communities outside. Colonial-imperial issues, however, have not rendered these writers oblivious to local political abuses and exploitations in the post-Independence Caribbean. Pauline Melville’s Shape-Shifter recurringly calls attention to the ugly legacy of imperialism, but the very first story of her collection is also one of many contemporary stories that indict the tyranny of certain native politicians who supplanted imperial administrators. But it would be to falsify the achievement of Caribbean short story writers to see them simply in terms of their political interest in matters of nation, state, and government, even though these loom large in the Caribbean psyche. From the beginning, Caribbean short story writers have alerted readers to the elusive aspects of experience of the ordinary individual which could not be accounted for simply or immediately by political determinants. The stories demonstrate the role of the immediately personal or familial, amorous or sexual, or religious in daily life. Edgar Mittelholzer’s disturbing father-son relationship in “We Know Not Whom to Mourn,” Sam Selvon’s narrator’s amorous devotion in “My Girl and the City,” Jamaica Kincaid’s mother-daughter symbiosis in At the Bottom of the River, Harry Narain’s malicious neighbors in Grass-Root People, and the incorporation in many stories since the 1980s of the radical changes in relationships brought about by the discourses of feminism — all attest to the range of emotional and intellectual responses beyond the scope of politics and government that the anglophone Caribbean short story spans. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the injection of new artistic genes from

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within the Caribbean itself, and from diasporic Caribbean societies in Europe and North America, assures the unflagging vitality of the anglophone Caribbean short story as it defines and redefines individual and communal identities of the Caribbean peoples.

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Narain, Harry. 1981. Grass-Root People. Havana: Casa de las Américas. Ottley, C. R. 1962. Legends, True Stories and Old Sayings from Trinidad and Tobago. Port-of-Spain, Trinidad: The College Press. Parmasad, Kenneth V., ed. 1984. Salt and Roti: Indian Folk Tales of the Caribbean. Chaguanas, Trinidad: Sankh. Pungcuss, Pugagee. 1943. Old Time Story: Some Old Guianese Yarns Re-Spun. Ed. byVincent Roth. Georgetown, Guyana: Daily Chronicle. Ramchand, Kenneth, ed. 1966. West Indian Narrative. London: Thomas Nelson. ———. 1982. Best West Indian Stories. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson. ———. 1985. Tales of the Wide Caribbean. London: Heinemann. Reid, Vic, et al. 1950. 14 Jamaican Short Stories. Kingston, Jamaica: Pioneer Press. Rhys, Jean. 1927. The Left Bank and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1968. Tigers Are Better Looking. London, André Deutsch. ———. 1976. Sleep It Off, Lady. London: André Deutsch. Riley, Sandra. 1991. The Lucayans. London: Macmillan. St. Johnson, T. R. 1928. A West Indian Pepper-Pot or Thirteen “Quashie” Stories. London: Philip Alan. Salkey, Andrew. [1960]. 1965, rprt. West Indian Stories. London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1970. Island Voices: Stories from the West Indies. New York: Liveright. ———. 1973. Anancy’s Score. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture. Sadeek, Sheik. 1980. Windswept and Other Stories. Georgetown, Guyana: Author. Selvon, Samuel. 1952. A Brighter Sun. London: Wingate. ———. 1956. The Lonely Londoners. London: Wingate. ———. [1957]. 1973, rprt. Ways of Sunlight. London: Longman. ———. 1989. Foreday Morning. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Senior, Olive. 1986. Summer Lightning and Other Stories. Harlow, Essex: Longman. ———. 1989. Arrival of the Snake Woman. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Seymour, A. J. 1972. New Writings in the Caribbean: Carifesta 1972. Georgetown, Guyana: n.p. Sherlock, Philip M. 1954. Anansi the Spider Man. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. ———. 1966. West Indian Folk-Tales. London: Oxford University Press. Smith, Pamela Colman. 1899. Annancy Stories. New York: R. H. Russell. Snod, E. [E. A. Dodd]. 1905. Maroon Medicine. Kingston: Times’ Printery. Stewart, John. 1975. Curving Road. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Walcott, Derek. 1985. Café Martinique. House & Garden (March): 140: 222–26. Walrond, Eric. [1926]. 1974. Tropic Death. New York: Collier Books. Williams, N. D. 1992. The Crying of Rainbirds. Leeds: Peepal Tree.

Poetry

A History of Poetry EDWARD BAUGH

University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

Two different kinds of composition characterize the earliest stages of poetry’s evolution in the anglophone Caribbean, otherwise called the West Indies. They are different in respect of the kinds of persons who write them, as well as in respect of subject matter, form, style, the audience at which they are aimed, and the ideological interests that they served. On the one hand, there are poems in the high scribal tradition of English verse, as it had developed by the eighteenth century. These poems were written by members of the white master class, primarily with a view to glorifying to the British at home the imperial adventure in the Caribbean. They praised an idealized and generalized natural beauty of the Caribbean archipelago: “Where first his drooping sails / Columbus furl’d / And sweetly rested in another world, / Amidst the heavenreflecting ocean, smiles / A constellation of elysian isles; / Fair as Orion when he mounts on high, / Sparkling with midnight splendour from the sky: / … / Earth from her lap perennial verdure pours, / Ambrosial fruits, and amaranthine flowers; / Nature in all the pomp of beauty reigns….” (Montgomery [1810] 11). On the other hand, there were the anonymous, “simple” expressions of the dispossessed black slaves — folk song, ballad, chant, and work song — which articulated their observations and feelings about slavery’s day-to-day experience. For instance, there is poignantly terse, direct, reality-accepting lament: “If me want for go in a Ebo, / Me can’t go there! / Since dem tief me from a Guinea, / Me can’t go there! / / If me want for go in a Congo, / Me can’t go there! / Since dem tief me from my tatta, / Me can’t go there!” (Burnett [1986], 3). The slaves hardly had the leisure in which to indulge the luxury of apostrophizing landscape. It would not have occurred to them that they inhabited “elysian isles.” Ironically, the few examples of these early products of the oral tradition that have survived did so only because members of the master class — travel writers and historians — found them quaint or historically important enough to record. The poems of the high literary kinds were erudite and grandiloquent, typified by “poetic diction,” personification, and classical allusion. The preferred verse forms were blank verse, the heroic couplet, and the Spenserian stanza. In choosing the latter form for his The Cruise: or a Prospect of the West Indian Archipelago, 1835, Robert Nugent Dunbar explained, with arch modesty, “With regard to the metre adopted, I conceived that none but blank verse, or the stanza of Spenser, could adequately sustain the grandeur of the tropics; and I chose the latter, as being the easier….” (Dunbar [1835], xi). The interest of the essentially British verse that celebrated the West Indies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is today merely historical, but it is nevertheless considerably so. These poems are still to be adequately researched as important examples of West Indian travel literature; they present a variety of information, albeit often idealized, about the islands’ history, geography, and early social life. This information, however, is often very generalized. The poems’ celebration of the “the grandeur of the tropics” is really

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a celebration of the supposed grandeur of British colonialism in the Caribbean. In most cases, the poems work to uphold the slave-based sociopolitical system of the West Indian plantation society. Small wonder, then, that sugarcane, which provided the bulk of wealth in the West Indian economy, proved such an inspiration to poets. The major example of such verse is James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books, 1764. A Scotsman and an M. D., Grainger spent the last eight years of his life on St. Kitts. In the blank verse of his “West India Georgic,” as he correctly labels the poem, he labors, true to neoclassical convention, not only to delight but also to teach and announces his “noble” intent in the opening lines: “What soil the Cane affects; what care demands; / Beneath what signs to plant; what ills to await; / How the hot nectar best to crystallise; / And Afric’s sable progeny to treat: / A Muse, that long hath wander’d in the groves / Of myrtle indolence, attempts to sing” (Grainger [1767], 3). Many other poets also had their setpiece panegyric on sugarcane: for instance, Nathaniel Weekes in Barbadoes, 1754, and John Singleton, in his General Description of the West Indies, 1776. In the headnote to his short lyrical effusion “The Sugar-Cane,” which is perhaps more arresting than the poem itself, Robert Dunbar makes it plain enough why versifiers like himself found sugarcane so irresistible a subject. He does not disguise the link between poetry and money: “This prolific parent of the great staple production of the Antilles is a fine exuberant plant, which clothes the fields with the richest verdure. There is, I believe, scarcely any cultivation which yields so lucrative a return per acre as under favourable circumstances, that of the sugarcane. So bountiful a gift of Providence seems not only calculated to call forth the activity and enterprise of the agriculturist and merchant, but to awaken also feelings of a higher and more refined enthusiasm” (Dunbar [1863], 98). A quatrain from Dunbar’s poem illustrates the dominant impulses and some characteristic deficiencies of this kind of poetic production: “Thy tall blades, whispering to the sun-bright air, / With fancy’s visions seem to fill the scene: / And hither Ceres and her nymphs repair, / And bind their tresses with your chaplets green” (99). The slaves only too happily would have abandoned the canefields to Ceres and her nymphs. Clearly, the poet had no notion of the razor-edge texture of a cane frond, and the idea that cane fronds might be nymphs’ chaplets is part of the European dream of the tropical island paradise. In his instructions on sugarcane cultivation, Grainger included advice concerning the costeffective management of the labor force. He advised on the temperament of different tribes of Africans and on the work to which each was best suited; on the physical ailments to which Negroes were most prone and on how to treat them; and on what to look for when buying slaves: “Let health and youth their every sinew firm; / Clear roll their ample eye; their tongue be red; / Broad swell their chest; their shoulders wide expand; / Not prominent their belly; clean and strong / Their thighs and legs, in just proportion rise. / Such soon will brave the fervours of the clime; / And, free from ails, that kill thy negroe-train, / A useful servitude will long support” (Grainger [1766], 122). Grainger exhorts the slave not to “repine” at this destiny,” because his “rural task” is “far more pleasant” than that of white men who labor in mines. At the same time, he appeals to the planter to treat his slaves leniently and “let mercy soften the decrees / Of rigid justice” (Grainger [1776], 129). If his Muse had the power that, predictably, she does not, she would surely put an end to slavery, but only so that the blacks might happily continue in a state of voluntary servitude: “Servants, not slaves; of choice, and not compell’d: / The blacks should cultivate the Cane-land isles” (129).

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Other poets such as Singleton and Chapman represent this kind of superficial humane concern for the slaves, coupled with an acceptance of slavery as the Negro’s natural lot. Chapman’s Barbadoes, 1833, a sort of social history as idyll in the mode of Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, is one of the livelier, more varied, and more particularized examples of its kind. It includes vignettes that describe a cane-piece fire, a hurricane, and the fall of volcanic dust on Barbados from the 1812 eruption of La Soufrière. This poem is also the most polemically tendentious of its kind in its defense of the slave-plantation status quo, even while it shouts abhorrence of slavery: “Accursed slavery! dire thirst for gold, / that makes the tender heart obdure and cold, / At whose chill touch ethereal Mercy flies, / And shrieks, and groans, and curses fret the skies” (Chapman [1833], 26). At the same time, the poem is replete with pictures of happy, well-treated, willing slaves: “Lo! where the gang assembled wields the hoe, / And each begins his own appointed row; / Song and jocund laugh are heard around — / Quirk upon quirk, and ready jokes abound. / The task allotted they with ease can do; / No shapes of dread affright their steps pursue: / They fear no lash, nor worse! the dungeon’s gloom, / Nor nurse the sorrows of a hopeless doom. / The gay troop laughs and revels in the sun, / With mirth unwearied — till their work is done” (13). Presumably, slavery in Barbados did not warrant condemnation. Chapman’s “island-slaves once loved their father-friend,” the slave-master, and were “content with his their happiness to blend” (41). It is meddling, ignorant Englishmen who incite the slaves to rebelliousness by concocting “A moving narrative of negro-woes; / Of brands and tortures, only known by name — / Of lawless power slavery’s damning shame” (41). The Negro is thus foolishly persuaded to “Leave all the peaceful joys he knows behind, / Baptise himself in fire, and through a sea / Of blood and battle wade to liberty!” (42). Beneath the surface of his idyllic picture lurks the master’s fear of the slave and of a replication of the Haitian revolution throughout “our Eden isles” (Chapman [1833], 42). How easily Chapman’s jocund slaves become “frantic savages,” “rushing through the trees” (42)! In a footnote, he refers the reader to Bryan Edwards’s History of St Domingo [sic], 1801, “for an account of the horrors of a servile war” (107). Chapman believes that any “attempt to force an immediate emancipation on the colonies must lead to their separation from the mother country” (107). The threat he imagines the freed slaves to pose is made all the more terrifying by being invested with a mythical sexual factor: “violation with every possible aggravation awaits the women who may fall into the hands of the new freedman; and murder, with the utmost refinement of torture, the unhappy men” (107). The anonymous author of Jamaica, a Poem in Three Parts, 1777, raised the specter of black revolt nearly sixty years before Chapman. Unlike Chapman, however, this author envisaged such revolt as inevitable and as just reprisal for the cruelty of enslavement. Years before the Haitian revolution, he issues a warning to the slaveowners: “Some Afric chief will rise, who, scorning chains, / Racks, tortures, flames — excruciating pains, / Will lead his injur’d friends to bloody fight, / And in the flooded carnage take delight; / Then dear repay us in some vengeful war, / And give us blood for blood, and scar for scar” (Anon [1777], 43). The established poetic rhetoric could also accommodate the abolitionist cause of the “senseless zealot” (Chapman [1833], 41). Chapman’s own poem was in part a response to James Montgomery’s The West Indies, 1810, which, as Chapman rightly notes in his Preface, would have been more accurately titled “The Slave-Trade.” The publisher R. Bowyer had commissioned Montgomery’s poem for his edition

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of Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1809. The English poetic tradition allowed for the didactically moralizing and the polemical to exist side by side with the romanticized fiction of Edenic isles. But liberal or Christian sentiment was no guarantee of superior verse: “Among the bowers of paradise, that graced / Those islands of the world-dividing waste, / Where towering cocoas waved their graceful locks, / And vines luxuriant clustered round the rocks; / … / — An eastern plant, engrafted on the soil, / Was till’d for ages with consuming toil; / … / While with vain wealth it gorged the master’s hoard, / And spread with manna his luxurious board, / Its culture was perdition to the slave, — / It sapp’d his life, and flourished on his grave” (Montgomery [1810], 17–18). While lauding sugarcane as “this all-wondrous plant,” Singleton similarly inveighs against the abuse of “its nutritious quality” by “intemp’rate man,” who distills from it “a fiend” with which “he dims the light / of reason, prime prerogative of man: / Th’ intoxicated brain by vapours fill’d, / Hurls wisdom headlong from her rightful throne, / And scenes of hapless riot oft ensue” (Singleton [1777], 6). Here is the coarse, sensual planter as seen (and perhaps at times envied) by the British visitor to the West Indies. This motif is repeated in the prose of James A. Froude’s The English in the West Indies, 1888, and Maria Nugent’s Lady Nugent’s Journal, 1907. Here is the other side of the antagonism between the colonist and the home-based Englishman, whose self-righteous “interference” Chapman had resented. But whether apologist for slavery or abolitionist, whether in georgic, pastoral, polemic, or quasi-epic mode, all these poets shared in the brotherhood of the one rhetoric that appropriated the experience and naturalized the existence of the Caribbean colonies. Chapman writes of “his” Barbados that “a new England bloomed in beauty here” (Chapman [1833], 48), and Singleton begs that his Muse not be deemed presumptuous for having “dar’d to moralize in song” — “Pardon her freedom, for she’s British born” (Singleton [1777], 73). The poets knew themselves, however innocently, to be part of a discourse of power that they shared with historians and travel-writers. Just as Singleton acknowledges the precedent of “tuneful Grainger” (22), Chapman’s footnotes, like William Hosack’s in The Isle of Streams, 1876, rely heavily on Bryan Edwards’s histories. Anticipating “those who may think [his] picture overcharged,” Dunbar refers them to Hartley Coleridge’s “very clever volume, ‘Six Months in the West Indies’
” (Dunbar [1835], ix). Except for The Isle of Streams, all the British-based poems of privilege I have mentioned so far — the poems of “grand design” — were written before slavery ended in the West Indies. As the dream of a sugarcane El Dorado faded, the genre became virtually extinct. The lyric — variously moralizing, didactic, sentimental, and descriptive — practiced by earlier poets such as Chapman and Hosack, became the preferred form. We now enter the period of the black, or “coloured,” West Indian poet who sings his homeland’s worth and beauty in the context of a filial relationship to England. This filial relationship had been voiced much earlier, and in a prophetically ambivalent way, in Francis Williams’s curious “Ode to General George Haldane.” This poem about a Governor of Jamaica is slightingly preserved in Edward Long’s History of Jamaica, 1774. The fact that Williams wrote it in Latin indicates the degree to which he sought to assimilate the English neoclassical tradition. But his suspicion that it was a tradition that rejected him betrays itself in a way that energizes the poem beyond a mere conventional exercise and makes it the first literary example of a characteristic tension in the black West Indian psyche. The following lines

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of Williams’s poem are from Long’s translation: “This rule was ‘stablish’d by th’ Eternal Mind; / Nor virtue’s self, nor prudence was confin’d / To colour; none imbues the honest heart; / To science none belongs, and none to art. / Oh! Muse, of blackest tint, why shrinks thy breast, / Why fears t’ approach the Caesar of the West! / Dispel thy doubts, with confidence ascend / The regal dome, and hail him for thy friend: / Nor blush, altho’ in garb funereal drest, / Thy body’s white, tho’ clad in sable vest” (Long [1774], 2: 483). Here, for the first time, the issue of color appears as a theme in the work of a West Indian poet. One important exception to the general shift to the lyric in the postslavery period is the longest of the long poems, Horatio Nelson Huggins’s Hiroona. Though apparently written toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was published posthumously, in 1930, by Huggins’s children. Born on St. Vincent, Huggins eventually settled in Trinidad, where he became a Canon of the Anglican Church. His poem recounts the history of Hiroona, a poetic variant of Hiroon, the Carib name of his native island. More particularly, it tells of the St. Vincent Caribs, a story that culminates in their heroic, but unsuccessful, resistance to the British and their subsequent banishment to Rattan Island in the Gulf of Mexico. Written in sometimes heroic, sometimes tetrametric couplets, the poem largely eschews the paraphernalia of classical allusions. Despite the imperial provenance of the author’s Christian names, it forthrightly describes the European imperial adventure in the Caribbean as a tragedy. Huggins’s Caribs are still heathen and savage, but he can simultaneously see them as noble, heroic, and grievously oppressed. He addresses Columbus as “proud Civilisation’s pioneer” but also admonishes him, “Yet know thy well-meant zeal, that led thee here, / Doth bode th’ unmeasured grief, th’ unnumbered tear! / O’er these fair lands shall havoc’s deluge sweep” (Huggins [1930], 15). Near the poem’s end, the Carib chieftain, Warramou, curses the white man. His curse is prophetic of England’s loss of interest in the sugarcane isles: “But mark you well the words I say, / There comes, and quickly comes a day / When England’s hell shall spurn these isles; / Although she lavish now her smiles / And spend her treasure and her blood / Shall deem them worthless, past all good; / Shall deem their keep not worth the cost; / Her millions spent shall reckon lost” (344). Henry Gibbs Dalton also addressed the native Indians’ plight. Born in Guyana and educated in England, Dalton does this in his Tropical Lays and Other Poems, 1853, in poems such as “The Carib’s Complaint.” According to Norman Cameron, Dalton was “the first [Guyanese] poet to describe local life and nature” (Cameron [1931], 4), for instance, in “The Essequibo and its Tributaries,” a six-hundred-eighty-line narrative in tetrametric couplets. The poem begins: “In April’s month, one afternoon / I deemed it once no trifling boon / To leave the city’s troubled toil, / And ramble o’er Guiana’s soil / And mark the wonders strange, / Described by those who o’er it range” (25). Cameron is perhaps being a little over-generous when he remarks that “Such descriptive poems are of immense value in making travel interesting, and can be of considerable assistance to tourists” (5). In contrast to the poetry of the scribal tradition, the verse of the presumably unlettered blacks was comparatively vigorous, fresh, and witty in its simple, uncluttered style. It exhibited the craft of oral composition and the creative potential of a language that the slaves had forged from the melding of English and the West African tongues. This Creole’s potential and validity are still not fully acknowledged. The forms of this verse show influences from the English ballad tradition in addition to distinctively African arrangements and features: “Guinea Corn, I

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long to see you / Guinea Corn, I long to plant you / Guinea Corn, I long to mould you” (Burnett [1986], 4). Significantly enough, it is not the sugarcane that the slave invokes. The folksong tradition developed and flourished well into the twentieth century, producing a repertoire of enduring popularity and, in effect, the more memorable verse of its time. One thinks of songs like “Linstead Market,” “Dis Long Time Gal,” “Trouble Oh,” and “Sammy Dead Oh.” “Sammy Dead Oh” (Burnett [1986], 28) is a lament with a moral. Sammy “plant piece a corn dung a gully” (plants a patch of maize in or near the gully), and its yield is so great that his neighbors, envious of his success, contrive his death. With characteristically nuanced economy, the song omits how the death occurred and leaves the readers to guess at obeah. The lament is not just for the individual, Sammy, but for what is perceived as humankind’s flaw: “Neighbour cyaan bear to see neighbour flourish.” This dictum seems to be a variant of the cynical and self-deprecatory popular saying “Nayga cyaan bear see nayga prosper.” Sammy dies and is “gone dung a hell fe shoot blackbird.” We may puzzle over why Sammy, the innocent victim, is sent to Hell, but this eventuality adds to his fate’s pathos. Besides, the vivid homegrown detail of his spending eternity shooting blackbirds (with a slingshot we imagine) is most apt. In the world of the living, such an activity is normally taken to be an ill-omened wastefulness. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, poets emerge who have usually been regarded as pioneers in native West Indian poetry. Egbert Martin of Guyana and Thomas Henry MacDermot of Jamaica, who used the respective pseudonyms Leo and Tom Redcam, are two notable examples. They were not so much models of excellence that later poets emulated, but they combined reasonable competence with a sense of mission to write a poetry for their place. Of course, that place was still very much within the British empire, and self-assertion was usually that of “true” sons of empire. Martin won first prize in a competition sponsored by a London newspaper, in which poets throughout the British empire vied with one another to compose the best continuation of the British National Anthem. Similarly, MacDermot also has his poems of patriotism to England: “England, All Hail” and “At Coronation Time: A Song for the Children of Jamaica” (Redcam [1951]). This homage to the “mother country” recurred throughout the colonial period; it is one aspect of that absence of self-questioning that marks West Indian poetry up to about the end of the 1930s. The Great War gave the colonial patriotic impulse an understandable fillip, as shown in Donald McDonald’s Songs of an Islander, 1917. McDonald, an Antiguan whose son was a hero of the Royal Air Force, in his barbedly casual “Breakfast in Bed (Influenza in War Time),” anticipates P. M. Sherlock’s “Dinner Party 1940” (in Edna Manley [1943], 81). Another major focus of Martin and MacDermot was a variously dreamy or quasi-mystical Nature poetry, deriving from the Romantics and Tennyson, which was to remain one of the favorite modes of Caribbean versifiers for some time. Here is Martin: “Music that floods the soul in waves of delicious sound. / Music that gushes fresh, spontaneously around / Music in every voice and murmur of nature found / These are the themes of song” (Seymour [1961], 21). And MacDermot: “Chastely austere, lone where the shadows deepen / And winds wake notes as from aeolian strings, / Thy blossom expands, white as an angel’s wings / When Night, slowmoving, steals across the landscape…” / (Redcam [1951], 5). Martin could also write a more down-to-earth, didactic, social comment type of poem, such as “Trade,” in which he bids society not to despise “The tradesman seen / Hard toiling for his daily bread / Bold front whose eyes give

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way to none. / Clean, honest hands tho’ hard and black” (Burnett [1986], 130). This tradesman was no doubt Martin’s own father, a tailor. Martin’s untimely death before age thirty adds an aura of poignancy to his otherwise slight achievement. MacDermot, on the other hand, was adept at deploying a Tennysonian sound and feeling, as in “Grey Rain on the Dark Brown Shingles” or in the blank verse of his dramatic poem about Christopher Columbus, “San Gloria: A Drama of Christopher Columbus”: “A dark foreboding haunts me lest I die / Amid the careless beauty of this isle, / And these great heights, blue-forestgarmented, / That wave slow signal to the mighty deep, / Callous to smaller things, across my grave / Stare…” (Redcam [1951], 83–84). MacDermot also wrote the odd dialect poem. A piece such as “A Market Basket in the Car” is a worthy precursor of Louise Bennett’s great achievement. But the accolade for being the groundbreakers in the use of the local vernacular in scribal poetry must go to Michael McTurk, Edward Cordle, James Martinez, and Claude McKay. With the exception of McKay, these poets have not been acknowledged as ancestor-poets of the region in the same way that Martin and MacDermot have. This is no doubt due to the fact that recognition of dialect as a serious medium was very slow in coming. Yet, interestingly enough, even though the dialect poetry of this period was no more accomplished than the Standard English verse, it is more valuable as a reflection of social realities. McTurk and Cordle were both members of the privileged classes. The former, born in Liverpool, was, at various times, sugar planter, land surveyor, and traveling magistrate in the Guyanese interior. Cordle, a printer, was a white Barbadian. They both used dramatic monologue, but in ballad-like stanzas. Their poems are communications, in some instances letters, from one imagined dialect speaker to another. In his Essays and Fables in the Vernacular, 1899, McTurk’s persona, “Quow” (also his pen-name), addresses his friend “Jimmis,” while in Overheard, 1903, Cordle’s “Lizzie” tells her friend “Susie” about her life with her “Joe.” In Barbados, Cordle’s poems are usually referred to as the “Lizzie and Joe” poems. Both Essays and Fables and Overheard are amusing accounts of the lives and times of their black lower-class protagonists and, to that extent, informative social history documents. They also tell us something about the point of view of the “researcher.” However sympathetic and “true” they may be, their truths are interpretations of what is “overheard.” And the “native,” whatever his virtues — earthy common sense, inventiveness of expression, and the like — is represented as a “quaint” curiosity. Paula Burnett describes the Belizean Martinez as “the first of the Caribbean’s popular [published] vernacular poets to come from the world he portrays in his poems” (Burnett [1986], 375). His dialect verse, like that of the Jamaican McKay, is often in the lyric mode and not as consistently aimed at humorous effect, as was the work of McTurk and Cordle. Martinez and McKay also wrote poetry in Standard English, which reflects their divided cultural heritage. McKay might well not have written in dialect at all but for the prompting of his friend and mentor Walter Jekyll, a British folklorist and amateur anthropologist. After McKay left Jamaica in 1912 for the United States, where he eventually became one of the Harlem Renaissance’s leading poets and novelists, he virtually ceased to write poems in Jamaican dialect, as in the two collections of poetry he published during this period, Spring in New Hampshire, 1920, and Harlem Shadows, 1922. This cessation was in keeping with his reaction to what he saw as the slighting of the Creole poetry in Songs of Jamaica, 1912, and Constab Ballads, 1912. In My

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Green Hills of Jamaica, 1979, McKay writes: “I used to think I would show them something. Someday I would write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them because they thought I was not serious, simply because I wrote in the dialect which they did not consider profound” (McKay [1979], 86–87). Not surprisingly, the fully developed use of dialect, or Creole, as a serious medium for poetry had to wait for another few decades. Despite the fact that they are “prentice work,” Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads display a certain folksy charm, as do many poems that record peasant simplicities and rural folkways. They sing the delights of country food, give amusing accounts of having a sore toe dressed with bluestone, moralize about “Dat Dirty Rum,” or offer idealized scenes of peasant love: “We sit beneat’ de yampy shade, / My lee sweetheart an’ I; / De gully ripples ‘cross de glade, / Tom Rafflins hurry by. / Her pa an’ ma about de fiel’ / Are brukin’ sugar-pine; / An’ plenty, plenty is de yiel’, / Dem look so pink an’ fine” (McKay [1912-a], 102). Despite the distinctively Jamaican linguistic features, the essential structure of these lines is Standard English with a sometimes uneasy mix of registers, Jamaican dialect and English literariness. Behind a poem such as this one, we sense a Burnsian model; another poem, “Rise and Fall,” gives “thoughts of Burns — with apologies to his immortal spirit for making him speak in Jamaican dialect” (100). Sometimes, too, we can hear the tones of A. E. Housman, as in those Constab Ballads that express camaraderie, friendship, and love between and among men: “I watched him as his cheek grew pale, / He that once was strong and hale; / The red had faded all away, / And left it ashen, dull and gray. / … / The funeral, oh it was grand! / We honored him with arms and band; / And not a man but turned away / Wet-eyed from where his comrade lay” (McKay [1912-b], 28–29). There is an unresolved dichotomy in the treatment of class, social injustice, and cultural identity. A deep compassion for the peasant’s and the social outcast’s hard lives, a compassion that, at times, approaches protest, is mediated and deflected by the image of the grin-and-bear-it peasant who, jolly in spite of everything, stoically accepts his hardships as the inevitable way of the world: “Life will continue so for aye, / Some people sad, some people gay, / Some mockin’ life while udders party; / But we mus’ fashion-out we way / An’ sabe a mite fe rainy day — / All we can do” (McKay [1912-a], 27). In “Hard Times,” the persona even rationalizes away the selfcontempt of the idea that suffering is God’s justice on the black man’s “badness”: “De picknies hab fe go to school / Widout a bite fe taste; / And I am working like a mule, / While buccra, sittin in de cool, / Hab nuff nenyam fe waste. / … / De peas won’t pop, de corn can’t grow, / Poor people face look sad; / Dat Gahd would cuss de lan’ I’d know, / For black naygur too bad” (54). If somehow McKay intends this ending to position the speaker ironically, that irony is not well achieved. The poem has invested too much justifiable pathos in the speaker for the reader to accept its sudden removal. The note of social protest is sounded nowhere so strongly in Songs of Jamaica or Constab Ballads as it is in two uncollected McKay poems from the same period: “Passive Resistance” and “Gordon to the Oppressed Natives” (Cooper [1987], 115, 53). The latter, which appeared in the Daily Gleaner on 3 May 1912, had, ironically enough, won a prize in a London weekly’s empire (my emphasis) poetry competition. Against the grain of official opinion at the time, McKay represents as a native hero George William Gordon, a Jamaican who had been hanged as an instigator of the Morant Bay rebellion of 1865. The Jamaican Government did not

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designate Gordon a national hero until more than fifty years after McKay published his poem. Also published in the Daily Gleaner (6 April 1912), “Passive Resistance” deals with a contemporary riot of Kingston’s working-class and unemployed. Although the poem’s communal voice apologizes for the destruction of property and promises, “There ‘ll be no more riotin’,” it nevertheless maintains a defiant position: “We’ll keep up a bloodless war, / We will pay the farthings-fare / An’ we send the challenge forth, / ‘Only touch us if you dare!’
” (Cooper [1973], 116). These poems present McKay as a rebel and protest poet even before he left Jamaica. His sense of social injustice and his capacity for intense compassion were further sharpened and moved to eloquence, as they were, by his experience of the black U. S. American situation. McKay’s later poetry is all in Standard English and, at times, wears too self-consciously the dress of the English tradition. His many protest sonnets, which trace their lineage through Wordsworth to Milton, have about them a stiffly histrionic, even strident, formality. His penchant for sculptured, lapidary verse finds more congenial subject-matter in a reverential sonnet like “St Isaacs Church, Petrograd”: “Bow down my soul in worship very low / And in the holy silences be lost” (McKay [1953], 84). Relatively quiet poems like “Harlem Shadows” and “Harlem Dancer” engage the racial theme to more poignant effect than do the more aggressive pieces. McKay was preeminently a poet of lyric ecstasy. Most of his best lyrics are in the more personal, intimate vein; they are found among the love poems and the poems of unabashed nostalgia for childhood and native land: “A Memory of June,” “Jasmine,” Memorial,” “The Snow Fairy”, “Home Thoughts,” “Wild May,” “Adolescence,” “My Mother,” and the muchanthologized “Flame-Heart”: “And suddenly my thought then turned to you / Who came to me upon a winter’s night, / When snow-sprites round my attic window flew, / Your hair dishevelled, eyes aglow with light. / My heart was like the weather when you came, / The wanton winds were blowing loud and long” (98). Despite his nostalgia, McKay never returned to Jamaica. Although he established himself as part of the black American literary canon, distance and the vagaries of book distribution helped ensure that he was not widely read in the West Indies and had relatively little influence on poetry that was being written there. Meanwhile, the region’s mainstream poetry was largely the work of Martin’s and MacDermot’s direct literary descendants, the most accomplished among these being the Guyanese Walter MacArthur Lawrence and the Jamaicans Walter Adolphe Roberts and Vivian L. Virtue. Like that of their progenitors, their work is dominated by late nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century English influences. Lawrence, whose posthumous The Poet of Guyana, edited by P. H. Daly, appeared in 1948, is very Swinburnian in many of his pieces, whether he extols the grandeur of the Kaieteur Falls or is exhortatingly anti-colonialist, as in “Guyana Allegory”: “Who, who can behold thee, O glorious Kaieteur, / let down as it were from the fathomless blue, / A shimmering veil on the face of the mountain / obscuring its flaws from inquisitive view” (Seymour [1954], 79). The aestheticism of the English fin-de-siècle, with origins in Swinburne and in some nineteenth-century French poetry, is Roberts’s primary impulse, especially in his first two collections, Pierrot Wounded, 1919, and Pan and Peacocks, 1928. One of his many villanelles, “Villanelle of the Master’s Praise,” is a tribute to Swinburne. It ends: “Tell him, Dolores, Fragoletta tell / That we make songs for the dead Prince of Song. / He tuned our pipes before dark death befell: / We bring our best in greeting and farewell” (Roberts [1928], 23). Roberts’s third and last collection, Medallions, 1950, includes a few poems that voice nationalist

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and anti-colonial sentiments: “Villanelle of Jamaica,” “The Maroon Girl,” “Simon Bolivar,” and “On a Monument to Marti.” The last two also express Roberts’s pan-Caribbean perspective: “Cuba, dishevelled, naked to the waist, / Springs up erect from the dark earth and screams / Her joy in liberty” (Roberts [1950], 11). In Vivian Virtue’s work, there is a parallel change towards a more politically conscious poetry. This reflects the movement towards anti-colonialism and socio-political change that swept through the English-speaking Caribbean in the 1930s and 1940s. In Virtue’s poetry, we see this development if we compare his Wings of the Morning, 1938, with his contributions to Focus 1948. But with Virtue, as with Roberts, the main inclination is towards the cult of beauty, eloquence, and high tradition, although, with Virtue, the mode is Georgian, rather than fin-de-siècle. Not surprisingly, one of his lyrics, “A Grave in Skyros,” is a tribute to Rupert Brooke: “… In Gloucestershire, the little meads of home / Are flowerful with the ringing spring: and wings / Of lyric throstles brush the morning dew / From bank and bough that lately saw him roam; / Nor swallows from their tropic sojournings / Return … he tarries ‘neath a sunnier blue” (Virtue [1938], 30). In the year before Virtue published Wings of the Morning, a Jamaican woman named Una Marson, his senior by six years, had published her third book of poetry, The Moth and the Star, 1937. This book broke important new ground for West Indian poetry. Marson’s two previous volumes, Tropic Reveries, 1930, and Heights and Depths, 1931, had been written in the conventional mode of tender effusions, celebratory or plaintive, about nature, love nostalgia and religion. These poems use only simple diction and simple metrics, sometimes falling into the jingling and pedestrian, a fluctuation somewhat like Wordsworth’s in Lyrical Ballads. The poems are what one might have expected after reading the author’s “Preface” to Tropic Reveries, in which she announces them as “the heart-throbs” of one who from earliest childhood has worshipped at the shrine of the muses and dwelt among the open spaces and silent hills where the cadences of Nature’s voice tempt one to answering song” (Marson [1930], n. p.). But even these conventional poems sometimes sounded a modern note. For one, the love poems wanted to “speak out” and to “speak plain”; they had something new to say. Marson did not, as did the male poets of the time, want to manipulate high-sounding conventions of poetic rhetoric. For another, these are, for the first time, explorations of the female situation and sensibility beyond what had been traditionally expected of lady poets. The light, ironic adaptations of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy and Kipling’s “If” articulate incisive, liberated thoughts about woman in relation to marriage: “Who would fardels bear / To pine and sigh under a single life / But that the dread of something after marriage” (81), and “If you can walk when he takes out the Ford / And teaches girls to drive” (84). Taken together, Marson’s poems about heterosexual love make a compelling drama out of a woman torn between conflicting ideas and impulses with herself. Against the rationality and wit of “To Wed or Not to Wed” and “If,” she sometimes expresses, albeit with unusual candor, seemingly traditional female emotions — an eagerness to give herself entirely to a mastering male, even if he treats her badly. At another moment, Marson rationalizes the received idea of women as naturally more faithful than men and gives herself the doubtful consolation of the inevitable as heroic, fatalistic virtue: “Until the earth shall cease shall woman lay / Her all at manhood’s feet and seek in vain / Love constant firm and true from him to gain. / It is her lot. Be thou content — love on / And always welcome him” (Marson [1931], 23). While such sentiments

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may be objectionable to today’s feminists, they are an integral part of the development of Marson’s own feminism. In The Moth and the Star, which was in various ways a marked development on the earlier collections, the feminist consciousness also spoke for women in affairs other than those of the heart. For example, “The Stone Breakers”, which anticipates George Campbell’s “History Makers,” portrays women as socio-economically exploited. And the “Little Brown Girl,” strolling along about London, “seeking, seeking,” appears to be concerned about a self-realization that is not necessarily limited to the love of some man. This new female consciousness is related to a new black consciousness. For example, in “Cinema Eyes,” a black mother, who admits to having grown up with “a cinema mind” — “I used to go to the Cinema / To see beautiful white faces” — tells her daughter that she will let her go to the movies only “When black beauties / Are chosen for the screen; / That you may know / Your own sweet beauty” (Marson [1937], 88). In “At the Prison Gates,” black consciousness fuses with class consciousness to protest the plight of the Great Depression’s working-class victims: “The sorrowful army / Of Kingston’s unemployed” marches to the gates of a prison to ask the prison Director if they can “join [his] band of prisoners / And work, so that we are fed.” Marson continues: “And I hear a great stir of voices / Among those who rule the land / In politics and those who rule in gold; / But the tramp of the weary feet still sounds” (86). This poem shows how Marson’s extension of her thematic range also involved new dimensions of form and style. Here, as in many other poems, her preference for simple diction and syntax further eschews the prettily poetic and the “superadded charm” (to borrow Wordsworth’s phrase from “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”) of rhyme and obvious meter. In other poems, her new consciousness finds appropriate form in the blues, as in “Kinky Hair Blues,” “Canefield Blues,” and “Brown Baby Blues,” a variation on the West Indian folk song / calypso “Brown Skin Gal.” In Marson’s blues poems, one may feel the influence of the African-American poet Langston Hughes. Marson’s concern for the common people is sometimes articulated through experiments with Jamaican Creole. In the dramatic and impressionistic “Gettin’ De Spirit,” Marson anticipates Philip Sherlock’s “Pocomania” and E. McG. Keane’s “Shaker Funeral” (in Burnett [1986], 154 and 226). Marson’s comic but serious “Quashie Comes to London” is a harbinger of Louise Bennett and, along with “Little Brown Girl,” perhaps the earliest treatment of a recurrent theme in West Indian literature: Caliban’s encounter with Prospero’s metropolitan seat of empire. Marson’s career path in the early and mid-1930s partly explains her poetic advances. During this period, she lived in London, where she worked as Secretary of the League of Coloured People. She edited the League’s journal and also briefly served as private secretary to the Emperor Haile Selassie during his exile. She was a member of the International Alliance for Women and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After her return to Jamaica in 1936, Marson’s social and cultural activism led to her founding the Jamaica Save the Children Fund and the Readers and Writers Club. When the progressive weekly newspaper Public Opinion began to appear in 1937, she was one of its feature writers; her first article, published on 10 April 1937, being entitled, significantly enough, “Feminism.” She returned to England in 1938 to work for the BBC World Service and, for a short while in 1945, produced the recently started “Caribbean Voices” program. Marson’s work with “Caribbean Voices” and the Readers and Writers Club allowed her to help discover and encourage other poets.

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Other events and efforts, both earlier and contemporary, also worked to promote a native West Indian poetic tradition. For instance, there was the friendship between MacDermot and McKay, based on mutual respect and distinguished by the high regard in which the older man held his more gifted junior. McKay’s biographer, Wayne Cooper, has noted how MacDermot promoted McKay, largely through the Jamaica Times newspaper that he edited. There is, for example, the detailed coverage that MacDermot gave to “An Evening with Present Day Jamaican Writers” on 5 June 1912, an event sponsored by the James Hill Literary Society, of which McKay was both founder and Secretary. MacDermot rightly saw the event as unusual and auspicious (see Cooper [1987], 57). MacDermot himself inspired Virtue and many other Jamaican poets of the first three decades of the twentieth century, one of whom, J. E. Clare McFarlane, founded the Poetry League of Jamaica in 1927. The League, in 1933, conferred on MacDermot, posthumously, the title of Poet Laureate of Jamaica. The middle-class, magisterial-genteel aura that surrounded the League also characterizes McFarlane’s poetry. He has a penchant for long, plodding philosophical narratives such as Daphne, 1931, and The Magdalen, 1957, in which neo-Wordsworthian and Tennysonian sentiment is conveyed in neoclassical blank verse. His best-known piece, and deservedly so, is the short, didactic lyric “On National Vanity,” well-turned and cogent. McFarlane’s work as critic and anthologist enhanced the continuity he helped sustain. Even if his A Literature in the Making, 1956, which consists of essays first published between 1929 and 1931, now seems mostly wrong-headed and reactionary, it must still be acknowledged as the first sustained attempt to give local poetry serious critical attention. McFarlane also edited the first anthology of poetry from the West Indies, Voices from Summerland: An Anthology of Jamaican Poetry, 1929. This copious selection from twenty-six poets, most of whom are of only minor historical interest, shows that some local attention was paid to McKay’s development abroad, for it includes six of his better poems from the 1920s. Voices is not as scholarly an anthology as Norman Cameron’s Guianese Poetry, 1931, a collection that covers a hundred years from 1831 to 1931. Although McFarlane’s second anthology, A Treasury of Jamaican Poetry, appeared as late as 1949, it confirms its editor as representative of a fashion that had already been superseded. The section headings reflect the collection’s limitations: “Of the Homeland,” “Of Nature,” “Of Imagination and Reflection.” The only George Campbell poem included is “Litany,” the only one by M. G. Smith “Moon,” and the only two by Marson “Darlingford” and “The Approach.” The 1930s also saw the activity of the groups that had formed loosely around two Trinidadian little magazines, The Beacon, 1931–33, and Trinidad, 1929–30, as well as Barbados’s The Forum. By the end of the 1930s, the Jamaican weekly paper Public Opinion also played a leading role in promoting West Indian literature. On all three islands, literary advances were set in the context of a new sociopolitical consciousness, a new buoyancy of questioning and debate. Labor unrest and its attendant alertness to economic injustice, coupled with an upsurge of nationalistic, anti-colonial feeling, engaged young intellects. The poetry of the 1940s was, broadly speaking, a progression of the 1930s’ spirit and a demonstration that West Indian poetry had moved substantially into the twentieth century. In general, the poetry of the 1940s and 1950s exhibited a new level of seriousness, characterized variously by a nationalistic and indigenizing impulse, exploration of social realities and problems, cultural soul-searching, and anxiety about identity. There was also stylistic experimentation, which, in many instances,

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manifested itself as a confused search for an authentic voice, and which was too obviously derivative of modern English and American poets then in vogue — especially Auden, Eliot, Pound, and Dylan Thomas. Still, this feature represents an important break from the RomanticVictorian-Georgian tradition. One must also recognize the importance of the little magazines: Bim, first published in Barbados in 1941; Focus, first published in Jamaica in 1943; Kyk-Over-Al, first published in Guyana in 1945; and the BBC’s “Caribbean Voices” program, first broadcast in 1945. To get an idea of their importance, one only has to consider, for example, that Derek Walcott’s “Tale of the Islands” first appeared in Bim in 1958. Focus, an irregularly published annual edited by its founder, the sculptor Edna Manley, had only four issues, in 1943, 1948, 1956, and 1960. But it was nevertheless the most knowingly “progressive” and ideologically purposeful publication, challenged in this respect only by Kyk. To scan the first two issues of Focus is to sense the spirit of the “new” Jamaica. Of the printed journals, Kyk was the one that became most quickly and most actively West Indian in orientation, while “Caribbean Voices” was committed to representing and reaching the region as a whole from its inception. This program, diligently kept going by Irish-born Henry Swanzy, with assistance in preselection of material by Cedric Lindo in Jamaica, not only added the stimulus of metropolitan “publication” and the opportunity for West Indian writers to “hear” themselves. It also gave poets the benefit of criticism from “the other side,” as in Swanzy’s regular surveys of work broadcast during the preceding six months. Roy Fuller twice gave critical commentaries on Walcott’s poetry, on 22 May 1949 and on 23 March 1952, and Stephen Spender discussed West Indian poetry in a short interview Swanzy conducted on 5 August 1951. The Irish poet Harry Craig also offered critical commentaries on the poetry. To balance these, there was Neville Dawes, himself one of the most promising poets of the time. He spoke, on 8 June 1952, about “The Need for a Critical Tradition” — that is, a tradition of West Indian criticism of West Indian poetry. The editors of Bim and Kyk, Frank Collymore and A. J. Seymour, respectively, also have a special place in the history of West Indian poetry because of their own poetry’s merit. Between 1951 and 1953, Seymour also published “Miniature Poets,” a series of fifteen chapbooks, each of thirteen of them devoted to the work of a different one of his contemporaries. Collymore and Seymour continue, in varying degrees, the break with nineteenth-century English sensibility in their own poetry. Both display an appreciable variety of form and style. With both, a primary impulse is to record as accurately as possible the peculiar life and landscape around them: “Black waters, rustling through the vegetation / That towers and tangles banks, run silently / Over lost stellings” (in McDonald [1984], 106). Collymore’s repertoire ranges from the whimsical, to the bitter-sweet love lyric, to the ironically self-deflating and satiric, to the deeply challenging recognition of the strength of personality in the poor, outcast individual: “An old peasant woman, barefooted / Clad in a faded gown, her head / Wrapped in a dingy cloth, She walked / Slowly up the hill; her face / Shrivelled with age, skin and bone / Only, the dark living skin / Drawn taut upon the bone that soon / Would claim identity with clay and rock” (Collymore [1971], 56). This is clean, spare writing, tenaciously tracking its subject. Seymour’s ambition reaches farther and is more self-indulgent. His work is sprinkled with individual lines that stick in the memory primarily because of their sound and sweep: “Beauty about us in the breathe of names” (Seymour [1984], 98); “Sun is a shapely fire turning in air”

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(104); “Music came thundering through the North-East Trades” (111); “There runs a dream of perished Dutch plantations / In these Guiana rivers to the sea” (106). The last quotation is typical of Seymour’s concern with the theme of history and his tendency to treat it in terms of romance and heroic gestures. It is understandable that Guyanese history and landscape led him to essay an epic reach, as in his retelling of Amerindian legends in “The Legend of Kaieteur” and “Amalivaca,” a movement in the direction of large optimistic assertions of national, even socialist, destiny: “Tomorrow / They will make a hammer to smash the slums / And build the schools. / / Like a river, the people hold history in their hands / And to-morrow belongs to them” (107). Attention to the idea of the oppressed as a potential political force, a concept that Marson already voiced, found eloquent, if uneven and sometimes strident, expression in the work of Jamaica’s George Campbell and, to a lesser extent, Barbados’s William S. Arthur. Campbell’s First Poems, 1945, caused a stir throughout the region. Nearly thirty years later, at the beginning of Another Life, 1973, Derek Walcott recalled its impact on him: “And from a new book, / bound in sea-green linen, whose lines / matched the exhilaration which their reader, / rowing the air around him now, conveyed, / another life it seemed would start again” (Walcott [1973], 7). Campbell attracted attention largely on account of his bold, defiant assertion of class, color, and national consciousness (the three being interfused) in forms that largely broke free of the shackles of traditional metrics. The declamatory “Negro Aroused,” inspired by the Edna Manley carving of the same title, is typical: “Negro aroused! Awakened from / The ignominious sleep of dominance! / Freedom! off with these shackles / That torment, I lift my head and scream to heaven / Freedom!” (Campbell [1945], 23). But he also wrote in the hushed, surer tone of “Holy” and “Litany”: “I hold the splendid daylight in my hands / Inwardly grateful for a lovely day. / Thank you life” (10). In the last two poems, there is a hint of religious, near-mystical feeling. Campbell seeks out a symbolic mode of expression to convey the solemn elation and sense of new vision of the historical moment, a characteristic of the work of one or two other Focus poets. One thinks, for instance, of M. G. Smith’s “Testament” and “Music,” or of Basil McFarlane’s “Ascension”: “Carry me up some morning to the heights, / Now that I have died … / Here among the stone piles have I died; / Here upon the sterile desert, / Here by the cacti crucified” (McFarlane [1948], 147). The indigenizing of 1940s and 1950s poetry was also a matter of straightforward declarations of the beauty and difference of the local landscape and its people, a difference that was sometimes explicitly contrasted with the European. A new-found theme, the beauty of the black person, is voiced in poems such as Philip Sherlock’s “Jamaican Fisherman” (in Hendriks and Lindo [1962], 126), Geoffrey Drayton’s “Negro Divers,” 1950, and H. A. Vaughan’s “Revelation”: “Turn sideways now and let them see / What loveliness escapes the schools” (in Figueroa [1966], 63). With respect to landscape, examples are H. D. Carberry’s “Nature” and Daniel Williams’s “We Who Do Not Know the Snow” (in Figueroa [1966], 25, 29). Closely related to these are the poems written from temperate lands that nostalgically and often idealistically catalogue features of the native landscape and way of life: for example, Carberry’s “I Shall Remember” (in Hendriks and Lindo [1962], 89), Drayton’s “Seeds of the Pomegranate” (in Figueroa [1966], 60), and, the classic of the kind, McKay’s “Flame-Heart.” Landscape and nature imagery are used not just descriptively but also symbolically and with metaphorical depth. One must mention Louis Simpson, who was also encouraged to write by the literary-cultural

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awakening associated with the Manley-Campbell group. Born and raised in Jamaica, Simpson began to publish poetry locally while still in school. Upon leaving school, however, he emigrated to the U. S. and did not return for fifty years. Described on the dust jacket of his Collected Poems, 1988, as “the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother,” he became one of the foremost American poets of his time. His At the End of the Open Road, 1963, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1964. Although Simpson’s Jamaican literary contemporaries never forgot him, he was hardly a force in the emergence of a West Indian poetic tradition. Then there is the British poet Edward Lucie-Smith, who was born in Jamaica and spent his early years there, and whose A Tropical Childhood, 1961, contains a few poems that show the deep impressions of his childhood experience on his imagination. Preeminent among the poets associated with Bim, Focus, Kyk-over-al, and “Caribbean Voices” were Edward (later Kamau) Brathwaite of Barbados, Martin Carter of Guyana, and Derek Walcott of St Lucia. There were also Cecil Herbert, Ian McDonald, Eric Roach and Harold Telemaque of Trinidad, A. N. Forde and George Lamming of Barbados, John Figueroa and A. L. Hendriks of Jamaica, Jan Carew and Wilson Harris of Guyana, Owen Campbell, Daniel Williams, and E. McG. Keane of St. Vincent. A few of these went on to produce substantial bodies of work and to gain sizeable reputations, most notably Hendriks, McDonald, and Roach; Harris and Lamming soon gave up poetry for the novel. Standing prominently alongside these men, although this fact came to be acknowledged only in retrospect, but not a part of their literary milieu, was the singular Louise Bennett. More detailed attention will be paid her, Brathwaite, Carter, and Walcott later in this essay. The immediate postwar period saw a great wave of migration from the West Indies to the so-called mother country. The disillusionment and identity crisis of the culturally colonized immigrant, who reaches “the land of eternal singers: / the home of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley” with high expectations, are recorded with authoritative candor in Milton Vishnu Williams’s “Letter to Anne Cluysenaar”: “I landed at Plymouth on June sixth, / nineteen hundred and sixty, Dear Anne, / thinking that I had come to the mother country” (Williams [1986], 56). The migrants, many of whom went to Britain to study, included Edgar Mittelholzer, Lamming, and Samuel Selvon, who were to become leading West Indian writers. Some of this period’s poems, which begin to explore meditatively and critically the idea of what it means to be West Indian, engage the questions of responsibility in terms of the difficult choice between “there” and “here.” In “We,” Owen Campbell sees the lure of continents as deluding and decides that the West Indian’s place is “here,” at home: “We / Have dreamt of cities / Tall as tales in smoke of industries; / And the rumours of gold / We heard were hard on our failing faiths / / … / / Yet we are duped often / By the passage of the too rich hope / That lures this sight, and hides / From us our true selves as it crosses / / So we have decided / Not to construct hope on continents / … / We have decided / to build here, on our slender soil” (Campbell [1951], 95). In “Piarco,” Roach reflects on “whole villages [that] come” to Piarco airport, “cliqued, cawing like poggoes / round one they’re posting / into alien season, / civilisations that broke / and twined us round their will” (Roach [1992], 160). He concludes: “Islands cage us / and we long to leave them; / the cities scorn us / and we long to love them” (161). A few poems, notably Lamming’s meditatively eloquent “Swans” (in Figueroa [1970], 112), explore the West Indian’s sense of dislocation in England. A particularly searching piece by

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Lamming is his “Birthday Poem: For Clifford Sealy.” Sealy was a member of a vibrant little literary group in Trinidad, of which Lamming had also been a member until he left the West Indies for Britain. After likening Sealy’s underprivileged birth and boyhood to his own and showing how their early lives, reflecting their islands’ history, determined their adult choices, Lamming writes that the news from the West Indies that reaches him in London indicates no changes in the islands. A few incisive images scathingly fix a whole society: “Young poets are decorated with foreign approval / For precocious statements in a borrowed language, / Fashionable women whom comfort couldn’t bless with sense / Still flock to applaud lectures by men / Who’ve a soft spot for the sound of their voices.” Then follows an equally tart picture of life among West Indian intellectuals in London: “Life is similar in (what some call) the Mother Country / Where our people wear professions like a hat / That cannot prove what the head contains. / … / Students whom the huge city has shorn of glamour / Divorced from their status by a defect of colour / Find consolation in Saturday nights / With eloquent white whores that dance; / Or at nightfall over their new habit of tea / Argue with an elephant’s lack of intelligence / Our culture must be spelt with a West Indian C.” (120–21). At the same time, A. N. Forde, writing “at home,” casts a cynical eye on the seemingly confused and overly self-conscious West Indian search for cultural identity: “We clap hands wistfully / At the rhythm of the steel band / … / On rusty pots and pans / That bicker in the bleakness of the night / We blab of a new brotherhood / Called West Indian grasping at the entity of the rainbow, / / Forgetting the spite of shade / And the barracking of the home crowd. / Fondly we search for regionalia / In our poetry to fool a world that we are sprung from foam” (Forde [1950], 33). The theme of color as a social and cultural problem is touched upon in Roach’s “Letter to Lamming in England,” a fine companion-piece both to Lamming’s “Birthday Poem: For Clifford Sealy” and Walcott’s “To a Painter in England” (Walcott [1962], 16). In Roach’s “Letter to Lamming,” “Our islands still are greener than we know them, / Our hopes are jungles of quick, turbulent growth. / But, / The brown boot scorns the black, / And skins not white as white / Deny the black old matriarch in the cupboard” (Roach [1992], 81). Roach exhorts Lamming to “Remember cadences of island patois, / Old men’s goat skin drumming, / Young men’s tin percussion / The sun’s rose ruddy in our blood, / The wine excitement of our island women …” (82). Lamming himself read Roach’s “Letter” on “Caribbean Voices” on 13 April 1952, and Henry Swanzy asked him for comment on it afterwards. Unfortunately, those comments do not appear in the transcript of the broadcast. Some little attempt was made to capture in poetry the “cadences of island patois” and the rhythms of West Indian music: “Old men’s goatskin drumming, / Young men’s tin percussion.” In addition to Philip Sherlock’s well-known “Pocomania” (in Burnett [1986], 154) and his lesserknown “Paradise” (in Figueroa [1970], 76), we may note Daniel Williams’s “The Shakers” (broadcast on “Caribbean Voices” on 15 July 1951), a somewhat awkwardly Eliotesque sequence that attempts to evoke the rhythms and spirit of a Shaker ceremony and E. McG. “Shake” Keane’s more memorable “Shaker Funeral”: “Sorrow sin — / bound, pelting din / big chorusclash / o’ the mourners… / Drums, flags / pious rags o’ / robes stenching / sweat” (Keane [1950], 17). In its small way, this poem anticipated the much larger achievement of Brathwaite in turning African, African-American, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms to poetic profit. Roach himself is not exactly noted for using the “cadences of island patois.” In “Caribbean

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Calypso,” where he seems to be essaying a calypso rhythm, the source of the music might just as well be Audenesque. But Roach is nevertheless remembered for taking seriously the study of the folk and of native folkways. His work is distinguished by an inventiveness of image and an authority of line that were, at the time, surpassed by few. That authority is, in part, a function of how well he modifies a basic iambic beat: “John Hawkins pounced upon a continent, / Kidnapped the innocents in paradise / Middle-passaged for the Spanish Indies / Telling his psalms to Trades; bartered, sold me / For indigo, molasses, cotton spice / And such sort of savoury merchandise” (Roach [1992], 153). As in that passage, Roach’s poetry recalls the West Indian’s bitter history and his effort to transform or transcend it: “Buried living in clay, / Resurrected to the sun, / They yearn to kiss the clouds, / To fondle the moon’s drum / And thrum the Trades’ guitars” (153). Here, too, we sense the local experience of nature and landscape being forged into language that goes beyond the picturesque and exotic to achieve something primally symbolic: “The drunken hawk’s blood of / The poet streams through climates of the mind / Seeking a word’s integrity / A human truth. So, from my private hillock / In Atlantic I join cry: / Come, seine the archipelago; / Disdain the sea; gather the islands’ hills / Into the blue horizons of our love” (127). Roach’s “Ballad of Canga” (Roach [1992], 117–18), which evokes, with a language of verve and gusto, a legendary rebel folk hero, makes a fitting companion piece to those of Ian McDonald’s poems that celebrate the heroic in folk personality, history, and legend. In poems such as “The Stick Fighters,” “Jaffo the Calypsonian,” “The Legend of Mangamouche and La Cour Harpe,” and “The Four Knives of Freeman the Canecutter,” McDonald achieves in a small space an epic quality. He uses a long, dignifiedly plain line that every now and then gambles winningly with stock emotive words such as “great” and “terrific.” In his poems, he allows his folk heroes to live for themselves. He writes about the folk or peasant character, whether in the epic or lyric vein, and about their lives’ hardships and sweet simplicities without moralizing or sentimentalizing them. His “Rumshop Girl” is a case in point: “She stood arms akimbo, making her dark sweeteyes. / Good to be hungry and eat that cheese, that soft bread. / Good to be thirsty and drink the cold-dewed beer in a gulp. / Good to be a man and see the girl, arms akimbo, / make her eyes sweet to me —” (McDonald [1994], 10). He remembers with pain and respect the embittered, life-bruised “Yusman Ali, Charcoal Seller,” who “farts at the beauty of the raindipped moon. / The smooth men in their livery of success / He curses for his killing heart / And yearns for thorns to tear their ease. / His spit blazes in the sun. An emperor’s bracelet shines” (48). “Rumshop Girl” and “Yusman Ali, Charcoal Seller” were first collected in McDonald’s Selected Poetry, 1983. In Mercy Ward, 1988, McDonald establishes himself as a master portraitist. He celebrates the poignant courage and defiance of the human spirit and the human instinct for beauty and tenderness in the most mortal and extreme of settings, as in a Georgetown public hospital. Milton Vishnu Williams, who had his early exposure in Kyk in the 1950s, exhibits at times a commanding straightforwardness of utterance not unlike McDonald’s. But this directness takes on a visionary, Blake-like quality modified by strange associations of image and idea and dark intimations of despair and psychological anguish. Even though Williams has lived in England since 1960, his work has remained very much the product of the Guyanese socio-political environment. Martin Carter is perhaps his chief poetic role model, even more so than “thunder-

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voiced Walt and proud / obdurate Pound” (Williams [1986], 47). Williams’s “For Martin Carter,” another letter-from-exile, defines the soul-bond with his “Dear Friend and brother” in the context of their country’s history: “And I know we are cursed by our adoption, / by our transplantation and subsequent mutilation / in the rice and canefields of the New World / of Guyana … / And I understand now more than in nineteen / fifty-three, when our constitution was superseded, / and you were placed behind barbed-wire fences, / how you vanguarded our rehabilitation” (67). If the scarred memory of West Indian history and the character of the “common” people constitute grounding concerns for poets like Roach, McDonald, and Williams, the question of the West Indianness of West Indian poetry is complicated by the work of Hendriks and Figueroa. Their poetic stances are similar in certain ways. It is indicative of Figueroa’s own poetic bent that, in reviewing Hendriks’s work, he emphasizes what he sees as Hendriks’s universality. He questions whether what others might label “cultural dualism” in Hendriks “is really the result of colonialism and imperialism, as everything must be now with some critics and gurus” (Figueroa [1976-a], 22). The entry on Figueroa in Herdeck’s Caribbean Writers, 1979, pointedly quotes James T. Livingston’s opinion that Figueroa is “perhaps the most classical of West Indian poets.” But Herdeck immediately adds that Figueroa “has also written poems that use the [Jamaican] dialect” (Herdeck [1979], 74). In Hendriks’s “The Islanders: a verse sequence,” we do not find an account or evocation of West Indian island life as such. Rather, Hendriks engages in an almost purely symbolic use of “island,” “sea,” “wind,” “tree,” and so on, as part of a meditative, philosophical excursion into some basic metaphysical questions, of life, being, and purpose: “Forever some are asking / Where is the place we come from? / Why are we on the island? / Is there elsewhere we shall go? / / Others concern themselves, / Are we certain that we are?” (Hendriks [1988], 43). Such questions virtually form the title of another ambitious verse sequence, “D’ou venons nous? Que sommes nous? Ou allons nous?” If this work, like “The Islanders,” sounds at times a little too mannered in an Eliotesque way, and a little more portentously earnest than illuminating, it still yields enough of Hendriks at his best — quiet, controlled, probing, undemonstrative but still sinewy. There is a flexibly taut and almost tactile quality of movement and image: “in compliant morning / Up adroit ladders of air / To careful, planned slaughters / Sea-birds / Climb westwardly, / Plunge / shadowless, / Slice the blue membrane, / Pincer the astonished catch, / Coast possessively away. / The imperative of blue / Is the plunge outward” (49). In one of his most engaging modes, Hendriks writes from an unusually wry and compassionate angle of vision about the mundane, as in “The Human Paw.” There is a laconic mordancy in some of the more autobiographical pieces, such as “Swap?,” “Cirrhosis,” and “After Shave”: “Searching an uncertain / chin and ageing neck for remnants of the beard / twitch thin, useless, neurasthenic hands” (Hendriks [1988], 110). And he activates the compelling undertow of mortality in poems like “This Inevitable Water.” Hendriks’s Caribbean and Jamaican feeling, with some of the ambiguities and tensions that it entails, is not in doubt, especially in poems such as “Madonna of the Unknown Nation,” “Mare Nostrum,” “Heaven,” “The West Indies as Ithaca,” and “Kingstonian.” Beside the metaphysical ambition of “The Islanders,” there are the “small islander’s simplicities” (to borrow Derek Walcott’s phrase from Sea Grapes, 1976) of “The Fringe of the Sea”: “All who have lived upon small islands / want to sleep and awaken / close to the fringe of the sea” (75). As some of the poems just mentioned

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show, Hendriks has produced an appreciable body of Creole poems that have helped establish the poetic range and authority of that medium. It is not just a matter of his slumming jauntily in the vernacular. Pieces like “My Man” and “A West Indian, to His Heir” will become Creole classics. In them, we find a seamless melding of the lyrical and the dramatic, the autobiographical and the communal, earthiness and fine sensibility, humor and pathos, reflection and celebration. If is significant that neither Figueroa’s nor Hendriks’s first collections, published in 1962 and 1965, respectively, used dialect. In this regard, they had to catch up with the times. Figueroa’s less frequent use of Creole manifests itself in an ironic counterpoint between Creole and Standard English, for instance in “Portrait of a Woman (and a Man)”: “You see I intend to be / A nurse / No need to apologise / (Lawd it sweet!) / / But if you try to kiss / Me I will scream” (Figueroa [1976-b], 99). This comedy-of-manners quality is one facet of a barbed playfulness, sometimes directed against himself, that Figueroa shares with Hendriks. In the case of Figueroa, however, it can become satirically argumentative, as in “‘I Have A Dream’ / Columbus Lost,” “Cosmopolitan Pig,” and “Problems of a Writer Who Does Not Quite…” In these poems, the butt of criticism is any narrow Afrocentrism or regionalism in West Indian poetry and culture, or any prejudice that seeks to restrain the West Indian writer’s freedom to make free with socalled alien, irrelevant, or superior cultures. The point is made in the witty juxtaposition in “Cosmopolitan Pig”
’s subtitle — “Nihil alienum mihi humanum est, or ‘Man ‘top yu ‘tupidness’
”: “The stone I break from Carib hills / To make a pot or build a church / Binds me to Pyramids” (105). But if “Barbados, or Peru / Provence or Rome” are “But places which Any Man / Can make their home” (Figueroa [1976-b], 105), Figueroa’s other cultural and spiritual home, as is Hendriks’s, is really Europe — “Provence or Rome” rather than “Egypt or Peru.” Figueroa and Henriks may well prove to be two of the last, most explicit upholders of European cultural traditions in West Indian poetry. Part of their historical contribution is that they represent a movement beyond the earlier, relatively uncritical imitation of European poetry and have, in the process, played their part in striking a distinctively West Indian accent. In both, too, but again more markedly and substantially in Figueroa, there is a religious impulse that places them within one appreciable current of West Indian poetry which E. McG. Keane noticed is his essay “Some Religious Attitudes in West Indian Poetry” (see Keane [1951] and [1952]). With Hendriks, this impulse expresses itself largely as an intimation of the possibility and immanence of the transcendental. With Figueroa, it is more of a devotional, and sometimes soul-wrestling, Catholicism: “And I commend you also / To her who held within her womb / The star / (‘Thy heart a sword of sorrow shall transfix’) / O clemens, o pia, o dulcis Virgo Maria” (Figueroa [1976-b], 55). In contrast to Figueroa’s and Hendrik’s verse, Louise Bennett’s is entirely secular. It is also written entirely in Jamaican Creole. There is no necessary connection between these two facts, but the juxtaposition may help to indicate the limits within which Bennett chose to work. She does not attempt the lyrical or the meditative, the poignant or the emotionally profound. Her mode is primarily dramatic monologue, incorporating at times the short narrative. The vehicle is always comedy, whether the humor lies in the sheer high-spiritedness, natural theatricality, and verbal agility of her personae, or in the irony and social satire that often involve a subtle interplay and counterpoint between the attitudes of personae and poet. We are engaged variously

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by the freshness and acuity of their grassroots wisdom, and by her always sympathetic, understanding, yet sharply probing and objective eye that exposes their prejudices or naiveté. Bennett’s invariable reliance on the comic, her total commitment to Creole as an artistic medium, and the fact that, from the beginning, she performed her poems, in theaters, at concerts, and on the radio, ensured that she would, for a long time, be regarded as merely a popular comedienne. In those late colonial days, the struggle to erase the stigma attached to dialect had hardly begun. To the extent that educated ears might have professed to entertain dialect, it was only as low entertainment. In her commitment to Creole and to the “common” people’s voice, Bennett was one of the most revolutionary poets of the 1940s, though she was generally not recognized as such. Her first collection appeared in 1942 — three years before George Campbell’s First Poems, 1945, — but it took more than two decades for her to begin to attract serious critical comment. Not surprisingly, her own valuation of her work was initially constrained by, and in some measure conspired with, the times. For instance, Bennett’s first collection was entitled (Jamaica) Dialect Verses, 1942. But, in 1966, she remarked, in an interview with Dennis Scott: “You know, I wasn’t ever asked to a Jamaican Poetry League meeting? I was never thought good enough to be represented in that anthology Focus. The anthology which appeared in 1962 was the first time that anything representing the community of writers contained anything of mine in it” (Scott [1968], 98). Interestingly enough, in the 1962 anthology to which she refers — the Independence Anthology of Jamaica Literature edited by A. L. Henriks and Cedric Lindo — her contribution, the classic “[Colonisation] In Reverse,” appears not in the section “Poems” but under “Miscellaneous (Autobiography, History, Folklore, Humour).” It was no doubt from an awareness of the facile and dismissive pigeon-holing of her, which may have resulted partly from the limits within which she chose to work, that Scott asked her about her focus on laughter. She replied, inter alia: “I don’t feel tragedy as strongly as I feel comedy. I can portray the tragic side of things or the serious side of things; but immediately the comedy of it comes to mind and that’s what I want to express” (97). She also expressed the opinion that the “nature of dialect is almost the nature of comedy though it may be difficult to define either of them” (97). Scott himself, especially in the famous “Uncle Time,” and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, in pieces such as “Rites” and “The Dust” from The Arrivants, 1973, were later to break new ground by demonstrating that dialect could be more than comical. Still, Bennett may have been on to an important point. While in Scott’s and Brathwaite’s poems laughter is not exactly the motive, there is a kind of gusto in the personae’s manipulation of language that carries with it a sense of good spirits, a certain amusement that is part of the comic, in the fullest sense of that term. The predilection for believing that the tragic is essentially more “serious” than the comic, and that tragedy is necessarily a higher art form than comedy, may itself be a function of the historical moment in which the observer-critic is located. To comprehend all that is serious and rewarding in Bennett’s comedy involves much more than remarking on her wit or reading the poetry as a vivid representation of Jamaican folkways. A play of ideas that have ultimately to do with a people’s articulation of their sense of themselves and of their place in history is very much part of Bennett’s comedy. Distinguishing Jamaicanness or West Indianness is not an end it itself but the inevitable condition of the people defining themselves as persons. One must appreciate the subtle and complex art of Bennett’s

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comedy, which includes the fact that it is derived largely from an oral tradition and is performance-oriented. Two critics who have acknowledged the sophistication of Bennett’s art are Mervyn Morris (see Morris [1967]) and Rex Nettleford (in Bennett [1966]). One aspect of Bennett’s art that is worth emphasizing, however obvious it may be, is the always changing distance between Bennett the person and the artist and her poetic personae. For example, in “Colonisation in Reverse,” one quickly accepts the wit and reliability of the speaker as reporter of and commentator on a topical event of far-reaching historical and psychosocial interest — the flood of postwar Jamaican migration to England. One assents gleefully to the speaker’s view of the situation. However, this general approval and delight is skillfully complicated by the sense that one can never be sure that the speaker is fully conscious of all the irony in her monologue and that, at certain moments, the reader may be amused as much at her as with her. The poem opens with Bennett using the speaker to establish the poetic context’s dramatic vraisemblance. It is an oral situation, one in which a woman “naturally” takes pleasure in exchanging “labrish” (news, views, gossip) with her friend or neighbor; the method of delivery is characterized by a high degree of verbal and gestural expressiveness. The opening statement — an expression of satisfaction and pride in the news to be discussed — leads us to expect no barbs in the news itself. When the news is disclosed, however, in the second half of the stanza, its irony is immediate and resonant, even with a possible edge of “wicked” gloating. The unexpected incongruity in the juxtaposition of the quatrain’s two halves increases the irony: “What a joyful news, Miss Mattie; / Ah feel like me heart gwine burs — / Jamaica people colonisin / Englan in reverse” (Bennett [1982], 106). There is also an extra dimension of pleasure in the possibility that the speaker does not intend quite as much pleasure as we receive. For instance, the speaker may hardly be considering the fact that England would not be regarding the counter-colonization with joy. Still, the speaker is sufficiently knowing, and she has reason enough for a straightforward pride in her countrymen’s resourcefulness and self-assertion that their “colonisation” of the “motherlan” bespeaks. But the play of qualifying irony and counter-irony continues to energize the poem. For instance, the speaker’s reference to England as “the motherland” is perhaps not as innocent as one might assume. When she utters the definitive ideas that the Jamaican immigrants “Jussa … tun history upside dung” (are simply turning history upside down), and that “Jamaica live fi box bread / Out a English people mout” [Bennett [1982], 106–07), our pleasure is not just in the poetic justice of the actions described, but also in the fact that the people, as the persona represents them, are able to verbalize those actions so memorably, in their own language. Ultimately, it is language itself, the art of it, which is the site of “sweet revenge,” albeit in good humor. This self-reflexive alertness to language’s importance and challenge, its centrality in the unfolding drama of West Indian consciousness, is a dynamic that both runs through Bennett’s work and, at times, becomes her poetry’s explicit subject. Dialect is not just a transparent medium for the personae’s situations and sentiments. Significantly, the first poem in her first collection, (Jamaica) Dialect Verses, is entitled “Jamaica Patois” [also in Bennett [1966], 87). This poem indirectly establishes her self-assuredly amused awareness of the subversive challenge of her use of patois. Like the vast majority of Bennett’s poems, “Jamaica Patois” deals with a particular local, contemporary situation. During World War II, refugees from Gibraltar were interned at Mona in Jamaica. The poem’s first-

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person narrator satirizes another woman who has pretensions to elevated social status on the basis of a tenuous association with the foreigners. Through the speaker’s “bad talking” of Miss Liza’s “forming” (pretensions), Bennett pokes fun at the Jamaican penchant for over-valuing the foreign and denigrating the local. Language is the medium through which Miss Liza assumes superior status. She begins to affect Spanish and pretends not to understand Jamaican. Part of the satire is her obviously deficient Spanish — for instance, “muyee beng” for “muy bien” — which is mixed up with and “corrupted” by the very dialect from which she tries to distance herself: “For is hard fe intiendah / Jamaica diniera!” (Bennett [1966], 87). The poem’s story reaches its climax when the narrator plays a trick on the pretender to test the depth of her newly acquired linguistic identity. The narrator buys certain items from Miss Liza’s shop, but Liza asks the buyer to “add dem up sinorita,” because she, Liza, does not understand the terms of Jamaican currency. The narrator, knowing full well that the total is one shilling and penny-halfpenny (“mack-an-tup”), claims that it is a lesser amount, “jus two bit-antup.” At this, Liza, unable to pretend any longer, shows her true (linguistic) colors, “An bawl out pon top o’ her voice / Fe tief and policeman!” When the policeman asks Liza how much the customer should pay, “Miss Liza bawl out / ‘Is shilling an quatty.’
” Liza wins a Pyrrhic victory. She receives the correct sum of money as payment and thinks that she has exposed a would-be cheat. But it is she who is exposed; her true cultural identity is demonstrated through her language as the poem is brought to a deft, pointed conclusion: “So Liza she can’t form no more / Pon dis Senorita, / For me know say she undastan’ / We Jamaica Patois” (Bennett [1966], 87). The dialectal possessive “we” establishes a communal belonging and identity. The drama has been played out in the arena of language, and, ultimately, it is “Jamaica Patois” that is the vindicated hero. The narrator’s “fixing” Miss Liza linguistically, in the language of the people, is Bennett signaling to her local audience that she knows them well enough and knows what sort of literary prejudices she is up against. The urgent sociopolitical theme that began to make itself heard in the 1940s, most notably in George Campbell’s work, found an even more commanding voice in the 1950s in Guyana’s Martin Carter. Whereas Claude McKay had come to the protest mode largely through his experience as a black man in the U. S., Campbell and Carter, given their historical circumstances, found fit occasion for protest on home ground. Carter renews a defiant elation and faith in the brotherhood of the oppressed and in the expectation of a new, better society arising out of painful, even sacrificial struggle. He, too, has an initially heady idealism: “that night there will be thousands of torches / from the hospitals the lame will come / the mad will be sane again / for the revolution” (Carter [1989], 15). Like Campbell and Seymour, Carter has his “tomorrow” poem: “Tomorrow and the world / and the songs of life and all my friends — / Ah yes, tomorrow and the whole world / awake and full of good life” (12). He curses the “British soldier, man in khaki” (60) and invokes the spirits of freedom-fighting slave ancestors, Accabreh and Quamina. But, if this kind of sentiment and apostrophe to “the revolution” is not without its ingenuousness, the expression has a refreshing directness that only occasionally becomes somewhat hectic and carried away by itself. Like Campbell, Carter eschews the descriptive and prefers a symbolic distillation of experience and history: “The cane field is green, dark green / green with a life of its own / the heart of a slave is red deep red / red with a life of its own” (49). From early on in his career, in a poem such as “Cartman of Dayclean,” Carter activated a resonant suggestiveness

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of symbol out of a familiar, home-grown, but distinctive figure alive in the local consciousness. The symbolic “red” figures of Carter’s early protest poetry reflect the Marxist coloring of the Guyanese independence struggle. Carter himself was actively involved in the movement and was detained for three months in 1953 when direct British rule was reimposed on the colony. Out of that experience came his Poems of Resistance from British Guiana, 1954. Though it was this volume that quickly made him famous within the region, any of his three earlier collections could have appropriately carried that title. For the publication of Resistance, he was imprisoned for another three months. Some of his most memorable poems of these two years were produced out of the crucible of the prison experience. They speak with plain dignity: “After twenty days and twenty nights in prison / You wake up and you search for birds and sunlight” (Carter [1989], 55). The biblical echo in “twenty days and twenty nights” is apposite, recalling Christ’s forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. In the 1964 republication of Resistance, the phrase “from British Guiana” was dropped from the book’s title and replaced by “from Guyana” in the 1979 edition, the country having attained independence from Great Britain in 1966. A new wave of Guyanese political violence in the early 1960s provoked in Carter a renewed revolutionary celebration and optimism: “When the sun and streets exploded, / and a city of clerks / turned a city of men” (Carter [1989], 81). But Guyanese politics had, by this time, become complicated by internal rivalry and betrayal, and the poet’s voice takes on a note of bitter disbelief as he cries: “So jail me quickly, clang the illiterate door / if freedom writes no happier alphabet” (81). We hear him become “a sadder and a wiser man” as his poetry becomes more baffled, more questioning, and more plaintive: “And how to leap these sharp entanglements / or skirt this village of the angry streets? / How utter truth when falsehood is the truth? / How welcome drams, but flee the newest lie?” ( 84). The later poetry is more oblique, and Carter’s vatic quality develops in the direction of cryptic conundrum as he contemplates in wonderment the sense of being “caught … / in the great dark of the bright connection of words” (115). By 1980, the Guyanese revolutionary spirit had lost its edge in the sordid tyranny of postindependence politics. In response, Carter writes poems such as the searingly condemnatory “Ground Doves,” which uses the image of the gentle, familiar bird, with its symbolism of peace, fragility, and the potentially salvific, to suggest the violence inflicted upon a people: “Vile, with exhalations / our time’s new wind / terrifies the timid ground / doves, in a swamp of vapours / They seek refuge / as you and I do, above / that wind. On electric wires / which stretch from nowhere / to somewhere, they perch to perish / with singed feathers. They / fall. We shall have / to pick them up. And burn our hands” (Carter [1989], 147). While speaking to the time and place that produced it, a poem such as this, like Carter’s work as a whole, distills the essential human anguish of its particular situation. Of a passionate spirit, finding in life, even in its moments of disillusionment, endless revelation, Carter’s poetry, growing naturally out of its Guyanese earth, was never bothered by any need to make difference a theme. Identity is not his issue. His magisterial accents and definitive tone, whether simple or complex, were content to find appropriate rhythms within and around the reach of the iambic. Yet he refused to be imprisoned by that meter; he modulated it, almost imperceptibly, into a flatter, freer, less insistent beat, where the meaning, rather than the metrical foot, moves the poem’s sound. Compare the more declamatory beat of “Cartman of Dayclean” — “The bleeding music of appellant man / starts like a song but fades into a groan” (20) — with the leaner, tougher sound

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of “Bent”: “On the street, the sun / rages / The bent back of an old woman” (146). Carter has achieved a model of high seriousness and an unswerving commitment to craft and quest, despite the constraints of a society hardly equal to the needs and capacity of a burning, voracious intellect. Because of its limited circulation and its relative inaccessibility until recently, and, given the history of its production, its long-time pigeon-holing as protest poetry, Carter’s work has not been as widely known, nor has its stature been as widely recognized, as one might otherwise have expected. It must also have mattered that Carter never published a single poem in Bim. Since Bim was a major gateway into the “Caribbean Voices” program, it is not surprising that only two Carter poems were ever broadcast on that program, and only in the later 1950s. By contrast, Derek Walcott and Edward Kamau Brathwaite began to make their presences felt in Bim from 1949 and 1950 on, respectively. Carter had first appeared in Kykover-al in 1948. Brathwaite and Walcott became the twin peaks of West Indian poetry, the dominant role models in its development, and embodiments of the idea of poetry as vocation (even though Brathwaite made his living as an academic historian). Both worked out of a strong sense of being pioneers in the forging of a poetry that spoke with distinction of, for, and to the West Indies. Although they have broached many similar themes and concerns, they have differed and at times even seemed opposed to each other in vision and bias, and in their approaches to questions of style, technique, and tradition. Nevertheless, they have served as major and convenient reference points for discussion about the nature and evolution of West Indian poetry. The Brathwaite-Walcott debate, first made public in Patricia Ismond’s 1971 article, is not of the kind that will be resolved. When Walcott was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and hailed by the Prize Committee as the great poet of the (anglophone) Caribbean, some disagreed, claiming that the great poet of the Caribbean is Brathwaite. The subtextual issue here was not so much who was greater, as who was more truly Caribbean. Still, the polarizing of the two is, to some extent, more factitious than real. The transatlantic poetry establishment has been, generally speaking, wilfully blind in refusing to recognize Brathwaite because his work does not seem to cater to that establishment. At the same time, it should be possible for those suspicious of Walcott’s high profile with the establishment to understand that to be hailed, as persons like Joseph Brodsky have hailed him, as the great contemporary poet of the English language, does not necessarily compromise his claim to being a great West Indian poet. Both Walcott and Brathwaite realized from early on that the “great tradition” of English poetry that they had inherited with their colonial education could become oppressive, crippling their movement toward self-realization. However, whereas Brathwaite came to profess a radical break with that tradition and to espouse the cause of an “alter / native” one, Walcott, knowingly and unapologetically, sought to find himself within the possibilities of English literature. He wrestled with it, extended it, and appropriated it to his West Indian self and purposes. Of the two, Walcott, prodigiously, “hit the headlines” first. His first collection, 25 Poems, 1948, which he himself published and which appeared around his nineteenth birthday, created a sensation in the eastern Caribbean throughout that little network of literary cognoscenti that had formed, for the most part, around Frank Collymore. The idea of an imminent major move forward in the creation of a West Indian literature was very exciting. According to Brathwaite: “In 1948, when [Walcott’s] first verse burst upon the world, there were many champions, but

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many more disparagers seized their chance and tried to smash the verse — ‘intellectual,’ ‘imitative,’ ‘cerebral,’ ‘obscure,’ ‘incoherent,’ were some of the epithets they used” (Brathwaite [1963], 4). It is not difficult to understand why Walcott’s detractors used those epithets. The features to which they responded were substantially the same ones that evoked the encomiums of the champions. It is not easy to find documentary evidence of the disparagers now; the champions’ enthusiasm has stayed more readily in mind. What both groups must have sensed was a precocious virtuosity and the likelihood that a radical change of direction was being inaugurated in West Indian poetry. Looking back at 25 Poems, we may at first wonder what the fuss was about; but when we place the work in its historical context, its significance is plain. Walcott’s work was “imitative,” but in a bold and fecund way. The sheer ability to absorb so sensitively so many challenging influences was itself an indication of imaginative capacity. When we consider who those influences were, we see that a decisive break was being made with the Romantic-Georgian (and weakly neoclassical) tradition. As we move through 25 Poems to Epitaph for the Young, 1949, and Poems, 1951, we hear Eliot, Spender, MacNeice, Pound, and especially Auden. Poems adds the voices of Donne and Marvell. We hear, too, the essentially Romantic voices of Dylan Thomas and Hart Crane, but we may regard these as modern Romantics. In short, here was new intellectual depth in West Indian poetry, which moved beyond the conventional apostrophes to Nature and to Beauty, beyond conventionally poetic sentiments. It even moved beyond the simple assertiveness of the new protest poetry. This intellectual dimension was broached in the work of a few others, in Lamming, Roach, the more complex Carter, and in Wilson Harris’s Eternity to Season, 1954. For all their faults, Walcott’s early books were impressive evidence of intellect, imagination, and technique. These virtues strengthened as the young poet’s life experience increased. Much of the early work’s subject-matter, as well as its premature angst, was drawn from literature. The difference that time and experience made is the difference between, “just last night I typed / Another morbid poem about the bone” (Walcott [c.1951], 28) and “Half my friends are dead. / I will make you new ones, said earth” (Walcott [1976], 81). But amidst the rather postured intimations of mortality, the carrying-on about “the bone” and “the worm,” and the yearning after the myth and subtlety of temperate seasons, we also find some arresting, autobiographical detail, such as the “snapshot” of the young Walcott and his friend Dunstan St Omer, in “The Cracked Playground,” being instructed in painting by Harry Simmons at Simmons’s villa. These swift sketches foreshadow the fine clarity, sharpened by time, of the character-portraits that contributed to the appeal of the autobiographical Another Life, 1973, twenty-five years later. We also find in the early work sharp social commentary that brings into focus the themes of class and color and shows Walcott capable of a satirical verve, a vein that he more or less left off working for a long time. In the early social criticism, he showed himself in tune with, and indeed a maker of, the mood of the late 1940s and 1950s. His “Call for Breakers and Builders” resembles other aforementioned West Indian poems of its time — some of the work of George Campbell, A. J. Seymour, E. M. Roach, and others. These poems express a sense of new possibility for the creation of a “brave new [Caribbean] world,” differentiated in terms of its difference from Europe. But Walcott’s vision of a new day makes explicit the unpleasant social realities that have to be transformed: “We do not ask a landscape of tall chimneys, … / If we

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know anything, we know we can have a better / Island, bright as advertisements let it lose its litter / Of hovels, hunger, and let there be no loss of anger / Infectious in the peasant…. / Almost impossible and absurd the distant love for / England. Love is here, and luck under you Feet” (Walcott [1949], 19). Only ten years elapsed between Walcott’s third, locally produced collection, Poems, and his fourth, In A Green Night, 1962, the first of his volumes to be published by a metropolitan press. Apart from Carter’s Poems of Resistance, there were no other particularly striking individual books of poetry in the interim. During the same time, West Indian novelists came into their own with the remarkable flowering of the 1950s, and, by 1960, poetry seemed to have receded to the background. A few of those, most notably Lamming, who had started out as poets, had, for practical purposes, become novelists. The 1960 issue of Focus carried an article by one of the bright new novelists, John Hearne, entitled “Who killed the King?” and subtitled “An Inquiry Into the Death of the West Indian Poet.” As Hearne put it, “Only in Derek Walcott can we discern the lineaments and potential of an important poet” (Hearne [1960], 138). But West Indian poetry had not died; it was in a period of gestation. The best poets were improving their craft, and new ones of great ability were in embryo. It was that much easier for the novelists to attract the attention of the British publishers, especially given the quick, remarkable impact of the West Indian novel on the postwar British reading public. It must also be noted that, by the early 1950s, a debate had begun about the direction of West Indian poetry and the need for and nature of a responsible criticism of it. As noted above, this debate emerged especially in reviews and in critical discussions aired by the “Caribbean Voices” program. The views expressed must have had some influences on the poets who heard them (and most did), especially as any such views emanating from London still carried an aura of authority. In A Green Night, 1962, was a landmark. Here, for the first time, a West Indian poet, writing out of the West Indies and clearly identified with the West Indies, had a collection published by a major metropolitan publishing house. The book consolidated the promise of the earlier volumes and suggested that the poet was about to come truly into his own. The collection includes a few of the more successful pieces from 25 Poems and from Poems. The Metaphysical influence is even stronger now, and Wallace Stevens’s finely cadenced manner also instructs the young poet’s bent toward a strikingly sensuous, but thinking poetry. Walcott’s work also captures the tension between an impulse toward the sonorous, richly wrought line and a wish “to write / Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight, / … ordinary / As a tumbler of island water” (Walcott [1962], 77). Poems that carry strong auguries for the ways in which Walcott developed include “Ruins of a Great House.” This poem remains memorable, not so much for the eloquent intermingling of so many borrowed lines and accents, as for the sensitive, intense, and challenging engagement with West Indian history. Similarly, the Marvellesque manner of the title poem works well to convey a personal, pervasive, and deeply felt Walcottian idea and ideal, “the mind [that] enspheres all circumstance” (73). The central opposition addressed in “A Far Cry From Africa” was rather too neatly, too geometrically, and, in the long run, simplistically posed. But it did establish clearly the theme of dividedness that Walcott was to cultivate and subtilize. That this poem, and especially the line about being “divided to the vein,” has been so easily and repeatedly seized upon by Walcott interpreters and admirers alike is the result of a weakness in the poem’s articulation of that tension.

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The sonnet sequence “Tales of the Islands,” which had first appeared in Bim in 1958, flashed the most exciting and innovative signals. The condensed lyricism of the conventional sonnet is adapted to prose narrative’s less accented inflection. Each poem — most have a detached, ironic tone — is a short story in sonnet form. Walcott may have learned something from what Auden did with the sonnet, but this is not Auden. In one or two instances, the clever interweaving of Creole with Standard English enhances the West Indianness of the characters and situations. Neither the experiment in conflating lyric and narrative modes nor the playing along the continuum of West Indian speech registers was immediately extended to other poems. But both were later resumed and advanced with much success, as in Another Life, “The Schooner Flight,” “The Spoiler’s Return,” and Omeros, 1990. If poems like “The Schooner Flight” and “The Spoiler’s Return” have made some readers regret that Walcott did not undertake Caribbean vernacular in his poems more often, one might be reminded that he exercised this talent brilliantly in his plays. A full knowledge of Walcott the poet must include knowledge of Walcott the poetic dramatist and champion of poetic drama. His poetic voice developed through his wrestling with the “mighty line” of Marlowe and Shakespeare. The history of Creole’s incorporation into West Indian poetry must recognize Walcott’s pioneering achievement in plays like Sea at Dauphin, Ti-Jean and His Brothers, and Dream on Monkey Mountain (in Walcott [1970]). In The Castaway, 1965, and The Gulf, 1969, the definitive Walcott emerges. He later assumes different guises, always trying something new and never afraid to absorb new influences. Though now there is assurance in the sinewy, largely free, occasionally rhymed verse, Walcott is always ready, at well-judged moments, to gather his lines up into an iambic dignity. Indeed, his rhythmic procedure may be heard as a variety of departures from strict iambic pentameter, a breaking up of the pentameter in the direction of the natural speaking voice, with occasional explicit returns to the pentameter. This kind of formal adventure and flexibility assumes wide scope in Another Life. A continuously varied suite of rhythmic modes, the poem has a prosiness that, from time to time, peaks into lyric intensity. On the whole, it is intriguingly at once autobiography, novel, and poem. A significant few of the pieces in the next collection, Sea Grapes, 1979, continue the incantatory mode used at the moment of resolution in Another Life. A distinguishing feature of The Star-Apple Kingdom, 1976, and The Fortunate Traveller, 1981, is the continued exploration of narrative possibilities. “The Schooner Flight” effects a fascinating interplay of narrative, drama, and lyric. In Midsummer, 1984, the formal challenge is to express and contain the seething midsummer heat and thrust of the voracious imagination, feeding on itself and on the world, in a sequence of over fifty extended sonnets, both widened and lengthened, whose line moves between iambic, alexandrine, and hexameter. The verse’s untiring self-renewal enacts his restless, questing, self-questioning mind seeking to reconcile word and world. In The Arkansas Testament, 1987, the poet’s increasing preference for more patterned verse forms combines with his will to experiment with simple tetrametric quatrains. This challenge — to combine formal discipline with naturalness or plainness of utterance — leads, in Omeros, 1990, to an ambitious attempt at the long poem. Walcott sustains as the narrative vehicle an open-ended, modernized terza rima, one of the traditional European forms that had always attracted him and which tests his ingenuity with rhyme.

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Throughout this odyssey among verse forms, a pervasive, distinguishing, and, in some respects, complicating feature of Walcott’s style is his fertile, arresting use of image and metaphor. The images usually arise out of the particular situation or event remembered or imagined. Since an informing principle of the poem is the logic of association by which image begets or attracts image, the poem’s meaning is embodied in the web of metaphor. One random, fairly recent example is “Winter Lamps” (in Walcott [1987], 82). As the poet-persona, smarting from the breakdown of his marriage, walks home to an empty house on a winter evening in Brookline, Massachusetts, details of the scene through which he moves impinge on his consciousness. These details become images that convey the charge of his feelings and thoughts. Ultimately, it is as if these images and metaphors produce, direct, and shape the emotions, indeed the poem, rather than vice versa. By this felicity of image and metaphor, Walcott, in other poems, reinvents the Caribbean landscape. He sees it not only as a landscape without figures, so to speak, but also as a language that, through the qualities of Caribbean heat and light, contains the qualities of Caribbean life. Walcott defines himself by the landscape and by the lives of the people who inhabit it: “the midsummer sea, the hot pitch road, this grass, these shacks that made me” (Walcott [1984], 74). His burden of love for the “common” people is weighted with the gravity of his feeling for place: “I drag as on a chain behind me, laterite landscapes — / streams where the sunset has fallen, the fences of villages, / and buffalo brooding like clouds of indigo, I pull the voices / of children behind me that die with the first star, the shapes / entering shops to buy kerosene, and the palms that darken / with the lines in my mother’s hand” (64). In the “chain” is the whole history of grief that Caribbean people inherited; it is an instance of how Walcott’s poetry can subsume Caribbean history with a single word. History itself, the idea and tyranny of history, becomes a central, comprehensive theme. But if the poet is “satisfied / if [his] hand gave voice to one people’s grief” (Walcott [1986], 360), he has also done more than that. He has sung the resilience of “Friday’s progeny, / The brood of Crusoe’s slave” (Walcott [1965], 37) and their capacity to endure and fashion culture out of catastrophe. So a stand of gnarled, weather-beaten sea-almond trees on any Atlantic-facing Caribbean coast, “this further shore of Africa,” represents the mothers who survived the Middle Passage to bring forth a people — “their leaves’ broad dialect a coarse, / enduring sound / they shared together” (37). Here was a sound to complement the beat of the iambic, the sound of an alternative tradition such as his brother and himself as children received from their great-aunt, Sidone, in the deep St Lucian country “where the dasheen leaves thicken and folk stories begin” (Walcott [1984], 24). And out of forest and fishing village he has sought to fashion a mythology “to make out of these foresters and fishermen / heraldic men!” (Walcott [1986], 217). Walcott’s compassionate Caribbean vision, while sparked especially by the plight and fortitude of the Middle Passage’s children, extends to all the races that made the Caribbean. When he speaks of “my race,” he means the Caribbean people. His vision extends further to embrace all human suffering and survival. His concern for the black diaspora is deepened, not diminished, by his profound sense of the Native Americans’ tragedy, his outrage and lament for the Cherokee Trail of Tears, for the victims of Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago, and his horror of all systems that “lose / sight of the single human through the cause” (Walcott [1986], 376). Through it all irradiates a reverence for life beyond the lost faith of childhood. Walcott’s poetry is energized by his sense of himself as being his own man within the

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enduring tradition of Western literature. In this regard, the way in which his feeling for the Classics, which he inherited with his education, has threaded through his work and been itself a major theme, is instructive. The relationship has never been one of unthinking reverence and ape-like imitation. It has been self-aware and complex, the awe and love mediated by irony, the marble reworked into coral stone. So at the end of the strenuous voyage which is Omeros, the poet himself asks, with a labored sigh of resignation, which is also creative acceptance, “When would the scales drop / / from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War / in two fisherman cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop? / When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse / Shaking off its wreath of flies?” (Walcott [1990], 271). Omeros may prove to be the last great monument to the influence of the classics on West Indian literature. Significantly, it is also the work in which Walcott’s engagement with Africa is deepest and most sustained. Africa assumed a new significance and centrality in West Indian poetry with the 1967 publication of Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage, the first book of The Arrivants, 1973. This trilogy clearly established Brathwaite’s single-minded pursuit of an alternative tradition for West Indian poetry. He grounded it in the retrieval and recognition of African cultures and of communal knowledge lost or submerged in the Middle Passage, as well as in the continuities between these and contemporary forms of popular cultural expression in the Caribbean. The first book’s title, Rights of Passage, could have fit all of Brathwaite’s work, which constitutes the African diaspora’s New World epic. Rights sought to enact for the West Indies a rite of passage into full self-awareness and self-confidence, a process that involved the recovery of lost rites and the assertion of rights earned, yet too long denied, in the rough passage of centuries. Coming as it did in the late 1960s, The Arrivants could not have been better timed for maximum impact. This was the heyday of the Black Power movement in the U. S. and in the Caribbean. The 1968 Walter Rodney Affair in Jamaica, when the brilliant young Guyanese historian-activist was barred from reentering Jamaica to continue his work at the University of the West Indies, was a seminal event in activating black consciousness. The movement reached a sort of abortive climax in the attempted revolution in Trinidad and Tobago during the early 1970s. The political color of this period was reflected in innovative developments in music, theater, and literature. Brathwaite’s poetry was a leading example. Brathwaite’s finding his voice and theme encapsulates the story of West Indian poetry finding itself. He has, on many occasions, explained and theorized the process. He came to the notice of most readers fully grown, so to speak, and of certain purpose. The poetry published before Rights, however, begins as Europeanized as anyone else’s. Then came a few sporadic, seemingly sudden, and, in retrospect, decisive signals of the seminal Brathwaite. Still, there are continuities between the apprentice and the poet he became. His early influences were not as varied as Walcott’s. Even in his apprenticeship he was single-minded. His first published poems, such as “Shadow Suite” and “Fantasie in Blue and Silver,” which appeared in his school magazine, The Harrisonian, in December 1949, and in Bim in 1950, were distinctly Eliotesque, in matter as in manner. “Shadow Suite,” which begins with a quotation from Murder in the Cathedral, reads at points like an unintentional parody in Eliot. There is nothing particularly West Indian in the poems that Brathwaite published in Bim between mid-1950 and mid-1957, except for fleeting references to flambuoyants and coconut trees in “Fantasie.” Then, unexpectedly, comes “The Spade” (Bim, 25 [1957], 52–53), an amusing, jazzy portrait of a “cool” black

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“cat” steeping out a new path for Brathwaite down the Boulevard St Michel, a poem that could have fitted seamlessly into Rights. Three “Poems from Ghana” (Bim, 27 [1958], 139–40), which come a year later, begin to reflect Brathwaite’s Ghanaian experience. Though Ghana was crucial in his poetic development, these poems do not yet have a decisive grounding in Africa. They are arresting, and one of them, “The Beast,” has been much anthologized. But they are the poems of an observer, looking with curious eyes at a different culture. Then, a few months later, in June of 1959, Bim carried another poem that became a favorite anthology piece and a landmark: the centering “South.” Brathwaite later gives it a central place in Rights, and the book seems to develop around it. On its first appearance, “South” represented an eruption, albeit finely crafted and controlled, of all the feeling for Barbados and for the Caribbean that he had been carrying inside himself, now weighted and sharpened by distance. The African experience combines with the English / European one to enrich and complicate that feeling. “South” at once advances the tradition of those poems in which the wandering West Indian “recaptures” his island(s) in an act of self-identification and helps mark the beginning of that purposeful, all-embracing engagement with the meaning of being both West Indian and part of the black diaspora. This engagement proved the major focus of Brathwaite’s poetic career: “But today I recapture the islands’ / bright beaches: blue mist from the ocean / rolling into the fisherman’s houses. / By these shores I was born” (Brathwaite [1967], 56). In 1959 and 1960, we get Brathwaite’s European “Portraits,” such as “Judas of Barcelona” and “Machiavelli’s Mother,” which were later included in Other Exiles, 1975. In 1961, “The Leopard” leaps at us in Bim. In its first version, the poem consists of eight sections. When the poet later revises it and places it in Islands, 1969, he sensibly jettisons the last four sections, which had foreclosed the symbolic potential of the poem, the leopard becoming circumscribed to represent Samson and Christ. In the first four sections, the leopard is simply beautiful, compelling, primal energy trapped, caged, but unyielding, biding his time for revolt and to restore his freedom to be himself. Combined with the African provenance of the leopard, this figure has a strong connection with the cycle of themes of diaspora, exile, enslavement, alienation, separation from oneself, and the yearning for redress, freedom, and self-recovery: “unlock him and now let him / / from his triggered branch / and guillotining vantage / in one fine final falling / fall upon the quick fear — / / footed deer … / / both hurt and hunter / by this fatal lunge made whole” (Brathwaite [1969], 89–90). Between the appearance of “South” and “The Leopard” in Bim, another signal publication occurred in Kyk-Over-Al in December 1960: a short sequence of poems that celebrated and drew on two major forms of African-American music, jazz and the blues. Both musical forms were to be of major importance in the evolution of Brathwaite’s aesthetic and theme. Most of the poems in this sequence later entered the collections Black & Blues, 1976, and Jah Music, 1986. In the transition, the earlier titles, which identified instruments and musical forms, gave way to titles that paid homage to great black performers: for instance, “Piano” became “Basic Basie” and “Interlude for Alto Saxophone” “Trane” (Coltrane). Even in those early poems that do not strike any West Indian, or black, note, Brathwaite shines as a virtuoso of poetic sound and an inspired improviser of rhythm and melody apposite to the rendering of black experience. This feature is consonant with his early fascination with Eliot and can be heard in, for example, his penchant for alliteration, assonance, arpeggios, and

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arabesques of sound. At the level of overall structure, almost all of Brathwaite’s books of poetry are orchestrated suites of varying melodic and rhythmic movements and, to that extent, extensions of Eliot’s method of achieving the long poem by such flexible, but integrated sequences. (By contrast, Walcott, having done something not dissimilar in Another Life, makes a point, in Omeros, of returning to the classical method, by keeping strictly to the same variations within it.) In this way, Brathwaite draws on an impressive range of black musical expressions from both sides of the Atlantic and articulates them in varieties of black vernacular and Standard English to reenact, or evoke, significant moods and moments of West Indian or black experience. He has helped widen the scope of West Indian speech for poetic expression. Brathwaite bends and stretches words and invents word-sounds to evoke mood, emotion, and meaning, even if the reader may not always be able to know just how a particular movement is intended to sound. The poems are apparently first conceived as possibilities of sound, as if the poet thinks first in sound and as if sound attains the force and quality of metaphor. The title of the collection Jah Music highlights the fact that all of the music on which Brathwaite draws derives ultimately from a sense of the sacred and from religious observance. Generally speaking, all of his poetry is Jah’s music directed toward reinvoking the gods and the sacred spirits of the ancestors, who at times seemed to have been lost in the ocean-crossing. This invocation’s goal is to renew a sense of community and shared purpose among dispersed African peoples. For Brathwaite, then, poetry is ritual: reenactment, invocation, communion, reflection, dedication, and renewal. Failure to recognize the ritual structure and motive may result in misreading or undervaluing the poetry at certain points, as a given segment of a ritual has its full significance and resonance only when apprehended as part of the larger whole, a necessary gesture in a cycle and pattern of gestures. The ritualistic mode is implicit even in Brathwaite’s impulse toward trilogies and triadic arrangement of details. The title Rights of Passage signals the idea of ritual in the subsumed “rites.” Specific rituals are often the subject or structural framework of individual poems, while a ritualistic significance is sometimes uncovered in certain otherwise casual social forms. Symbol, as well as metaphor, plays a central part in the elaboration and integration of Brathwaite’s individual books. This feature is in keeping with his large, comprehensive sweeps of imagination and theory, of imaginative theorizing, and of his reworking of history as myth. His essays, including those collected in Roots, 1986, continue and complete this enterprise. The Arrivants is a modern epic, the story, lament, and celebration of the black diaspora in which journey constitutes the central idea, motif, and organizing principle. Its anonymous hero is a fluid composite of all the changing faces and voices of the New World black. The hero seeks to reconnect with the sacred spirit of the ancestors that has sustained him, however unrecognizedly. He seeks renewal and community, a home out of dispersal and dispossession, fragmentation and exile. Underneath Brathwaite’s flexuous, non-linear style, we detect a broad pattern of development. As the poet moves from an evocation of malaise and restless movement in Rights, through a revisiting and exploration of the original African starting place and source in Masks, 1968, and, out of the retracing of the Middle Passage, a projection, in Islands, of renewed purpose, he engages the possibility of a rewarding New World, one that coheres around and is energized by the creative impulses and constructs of the folk. So the trilogy ends with “Jou’vert,” a poem that evokes the joyous enactment of that name in the ritual of the Trinidad

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Carnival. This breaking-free, with its creative connotations underscored by a reference to Trinidad’s great folk invention of the steel band and its allusions to the Christian ritual of Easter, announces a new break of day: “hearts / no longer bound / to black and bitter / ashes in the ground / / now walking / making / / making / with their / / rhythms some- / thing torn / / and new” (Brathwaite [1969], 112–13). The Arrivants is matrix and point of departure for all of Brathwaite’s subsequent books of poetry, each an expansion of the theme or a more detailed reworking of some particular aspect of it. The second trilogy’s first two books, Mother Poem, 1977, and Sun Poem, 1982, are relatively autobiographical excavations. Brathwaite explores the ideas of ancestry, tradition, and ancestral, or traditional, struggle against repressive circumstance and colonial mind-enslavement, mostly as seen in the familial, domestic context. These books recognize both female and male lines of descent, the imperatives of each, and the symbiosis of male and female principles. In both books, the primary landscape and social context are those of the poet’s native Barbados. By contrast, the third book, X / Self, 1987, sets the West Indian or black theme in a global, or at least Western, perspective. Brathwaite theorizes his theme into the sweeping symbols, at once simplifying and creative, of a mythology. The theory, or myth, on which the poem is based is “explained” in the essay “Metaphors of Underdevelopment: A Proem for Hernan Cortez,” 1985. Without this essay, readers may have difficulty finding their bearings. For instance, in X / Self, “Rome burns / and our slavery begins” repeatedly. The essay explains, “now, in terms of my own culture-view, it all began with the collapse of the pillars of Hercules and the fall of the roman empire” (Brathwaite [1985], 455). Brathwaite has also made a significant contribution to West Indian poetry by promoting other, mostly younger poets — by seeking them out, encouraging and in some cases inspiring them, and publishing their work either in the journal Savacou, which he founded, or as individual collections under the Savacou imprint. For instance, the Savacou double issue 3/4, “New Writing 1970,” “an anthology of prose and verse,” is an important historical statement, catching the pulse beat of that moment and the shape of things to come. So too, at the other end of the decade, was another double issue, 14/15, another anthology, New Poets From Jamaica. Savacou 3/4 occasioned a critical fracas that brought into focus much of what was at stake in the opening up of West Indian poetry. The new, black, urban-proletarian, Rastafarianate, revolutionary voice, as represented most memorably in Bongo Jerry’s landmark “Mabrak,” stood at this conflict’s center. Interestingly and ironically enough, the apprehension of the literary establishment was voiced by E. M. Roach in his review of the anthology in the Trinidad Guardian (14 July 1971). Roach’s patrician side protested, somewhat bad-temperedly, what he saw as a surrender of high standards to the new unkempt brigade. It is worth remembering that the steam of Trinidad’s abortive Black Power revolution was still very much in the air. Other poets and critics responded to Roach, the most informed and painstaking intervention being that of the critic Gordon Rohlehr. Rohlehr sought to educate the audience of the social significance, artistic standards, and integrity of the new poetry (Rohlehr [1992]). The debate was rekindled when, after Roach’s suicide, Wayne Brown published, in Tapia, 26 May 1974, an elegy, later titled “Quinam Bay,” that spoke scathingly of “the carrion / that drove [Roach], hurt hawk, from the echoing air / with their hunger for bloodbath” (Brown [1989], 90). Once again, Rohlehr responded, no doubt feeling that he was one of those Brown attacked. In “A Carrion Time,” Rohlehr said: “The issues

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raised [initially] were so fundamental to West Indian poetry that it was always likely that the debate would continue in disguised form” (Rohlehr [1975], 92). The issues remain fundamental, even if what was once the counter-poetry has moved ever closer to center-stage. To the same context belongs yet another anthology, Breaklight, 1971, which highlighted the radical mood of the time. If one were to put “New Writing 1970” and Breaklight beside John Figueroa’s two-volume anthology Caribbean Voices, of which volume one appeared in 1966 and volume two in 1970, one would get a good conspectus of the West Indian poetry scene at the turn of the decade, how the poetry had developed to that point (in Figueroa), and certain important pointers to future developments (in the Brathwaite and Salkey anthologies). Breaklight included, for instance, “One Flower,” a poem by the Black Power leader Michael Abdul Malik, who soon became the notorious Michael X, subject of V. S. Naipaul’s “The Killings in Trinidad,” 1980. Malik’s poem is better than many others in the anthology that seem to have secured their place chiefly because they made politically correct noises. This anthology’s editor was the Jamaican Andrew Salkey, himself a poet and novelist, who, along with the Trinidadian poet and publisher John La Rose, was closely associated with Brathwaite in the founding of the influential Caribbean Artists Movement. The markedly uneven quality of Salkey’s own poetry is evident when one compares the labored sequence Jamaica, 1973, a sort of history of the island in verse, with the later In the Hills Where Her Dreams Live, 1979, which commemorates the Chilean revolutionary struggle. When Salkey allows his poetry to distill itself out of an ideological agenda, he shows that poetry and politics can achieve a satisfying blend. The poems in another collection, Away, 1980, constitute a meditation on revolutionary exile. He examines his ambivalent feelings toward his sad and irritating, yet exhilarating and beautiful, island-home, in a sustained elaboration of a common theme in West Indian poetry. Here again, the poet shows often enough his best qualities, as in the ironic, clear-eyed “Summer Song”: “There seems almost nothing / to hold on to, now; nothing; / … / “There’s nothing, here, now; / nothing, back there, either!” / Whispers sneak over everything; / everything’s cold and clear” (Salkey [1980], 76). Among the poets featured in Salkey’s Breaklight, as well as in the Savacou anthology “New Writing 1970,” were the four most notable figures to appear in the immediate wake of Brathwaite, Carter, and Walcott: the Trinidadian Wayne Brown and the Jamaicans Anthony McNeill, Mervyn Morris, and Dennis Scott. By 1973, when Walcott’s Another Life appeared, each had published a well-received first collection, and one of them even a second: Brown’s On the Coast, 1972, McNeill’s Hello Ungod, 1971, and Reel from “The Life Movie,” 1972, Morris’s The Pond, 1973, and Scott’s Uncle Time, 1973. All four first collections found reputable publishers in England or in the United States. McNeill’s Reel, which included all but two of the twenty pieces from Hello Ungod, was Number 3 in the Savacou Poets Series. These four poets were in close contact with one another in the 1960s. They critically commented on one another’s work even before publication, a benefit that fostered rigorous technique and tough intelligence. They saw the landscape as theirs and as a given, though not as something to be taken for granted. As far as public, social themes were concerned, they wrote as if freed of any sense of history-as-burden or of the preoccupation with colonialism. Yet, there remained a clear understanding of the colonial legacy subsumed in their representations of contemporary society. That legacy was even the immediate subject of the odd poem, for

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example, Brown’s “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Morris’s “For Consciousness,” and Scott’s “Pages From A Journal, 1834.” All four work the lyric vein, although Brown, who also writes prose fiction, does exercise an impulse toward narrative and certain qualities of fictional prose. This is one respect in which he shows an affinity with Walcott, to whom On the Coast is dedicated. In this collection, Brown is very much the progeny of the Walcott of The Castaway and The Gulf. In certain postures of sensibility, he uses Walcott’s passion for the sea and for sea imagery, and even certain of his stylistic idiosyncrasies. “England, Autumn,” one of Brown’s own compelling pieces in his second collection, Voyages, 1989, may be read as a response to those metropolitan critics who, in line with one contemporary fashion, berated Walcott and others for sonority in modern verse. The poem itself is an illustration of its own argument: “But doesn’t heaven / prophesy still over England? / Since when was lightning ironic, / or thunder without sonority?” (Brown [1989], 87). In the introduction to his 1981 edition of Walcott’s Selected Poetry, Brown observes that, despite his “conscious, indeed wilful, rebellion against the iambic pentameter … one has the impression that the pentameter remains the natural vehicle for [Walcott’s] sensibility” (Brown [1981], xi). Brown’s own sonorities involve appreciable variations on what he hears as “the iambic breathing of the world” (Brown [1989], 92). “Round Trip Back (For the exiled novelists),” another West Indian poem about returning home, invites intertextual exploration not only with Walcott’s “For the Exiled Novelists” but also with Walcott’s other homecoming poems. “The Tourists” provides a good example of Brown’s characteristic philosophical stance and stylistic control. The Yeatsian phrase, he “cast[s] a cold eye,” is an inverse index of the passionate heart. To borrow Walcott’s line, “all [his] indifference is a different rage” (Walcott [1965], 62). “The Tourists” is typical of Brown’s oblique glance at sociological themes and his insistence on personal integrity and private space. Most of the poem is a wry, cynical, carefully distanced description of a typical West Indian tourist-beach scene. Then, summing up the scene, it shifts its focus to a contrasting detail near the edge of the picture: “A scene from a tourist / brochure. Under the sun / all is languid, and those who come / will find nothing unusual, not / one gesture or motion overdone / / But for one parrot fish which turns / grave somersaults on the stainless steel / spear that’s just usurped its dim / purpose; which was to swim / as usual through blue air, in silence, like the sun” (Brown [1972], 8). The fish becomes a symbol of the poet and of his function as Brown sees them: his responsibility to himself and his relationship to the world. Resisting ideological flag-waving and distrustful of the crowd-pleasing gesture, Brown practices a stoic, patrician gravity of tone, jealously guarding and affirming the integrity of the poetic imagination and its power to articulate timeless verities in memorable, authoritative words. McNeill’s voice comes closest to pure lyric cry, full of grateful wonder and dreadful apprehension. His poems are non-discursive messages to the world: signals flashed into the dark from a highly-tuned sensibility that walks a nerve-edge highwire through a nightmare circus. At every step is the risk of collapse and catastrophe, yet simultaneously the possibility of connection and ecstasy. His “Hello Ungod” and “God Dread” may read like footnotes to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, but they appropriate Beckett’s mindscape to McNeill’s own particular angst. Hello Ungod and Reel sound a very modern and, at the same time original note in their mix of the language and imagery of the counter-culture of drugs and Rastafarianism with the imagery of jazz, cinema, and other electronic media. The sense of the individual consciousness in extremity

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that negotiates a precarious balance is deepened both by the evocation of a matchingly precarious social milieu and by the contrasting discipline of relatively ordered, symmetrical verse forms. Such visible restraint is largely abandoned in McNeill’s third collection, Credences at the Altar of Cloud, 1979. Here, even the title suggests unusual identifications of idea and image, and consciousness seems to have broken through the natural order into some other field of energy. A pervasive derangement of language and the way in which the poems move, or open themselves, with startling disjunctions reflects this development. His poems sometimes read like scintillating, cryptic marginalia to an absent text. They possess a surrealistic quality: Marc Chagall is invoked, and the book’s illustrations include reproductions from Guy Lombal paintings. The names of kindred spirits, poets, and jazz musicians, are recited like mantras: “cummings and trane and now / miracle-merwin” (McNeill [1979], 113). The stream-ofconsciousness runs not only according to “thought’s dictation” or the flutter of a jumpy cinema Reel. Now, even the slips of the finger on the typewriter keys and of a jumpy typewriter carriage are jealously preserved, versions of the “mutants” for which the poetic persona has a special feeling of sympathy and identification: “In any event, / / everything you say is a poem / / everything you write / everything you do / / even deceit is lovely / because the tongue fell on the word / / once / / and it woke” (89). It is all a fulfillment of the idea that “a poet is someone who lights words” (93). Although McNeill, from Credences onward, seemed far less concerned with depicting or interpreting a society as such, the work was still, to quote from “Who’s Sammy?”, the labor and gift of “A subtile buffoon and Jesus-man / who, pinned to a lewd grin, / undertakes for us all / the clown’s crucifixion” (McNeill [1975], 17). In his “Notes on a Correspondence” with McNeill, which constitutes the Introduction to Reel, Scott observes that McNeill’s poems, “like all important art / efacts, … celebrate the nexus which ought to exist between the sensitivities of the maker and those of his community” (McNeill [1975], 1). Scott’s own poems are a distinctive instance of just such a celebration. The same sensitivity and intense concern drive his “Letters to My Son,” a love poem to his wife, or the poems that speak for the “sufferers” of his socially divided community and gauge the pressure of its potentially explosive tensions. “Chillsong,” from the collection Dreadwalk, 1982, images the uncompromising responsibility of the poet and exemplifies the rigorous craft that transmutes idea and feeling into artifact. The poem is a cold-beaked bird snapping a grasshopper, “crunch[ing] his back like a bone-edged wind.” The poem is also the grasshopper’s grace: “Let us celebrate that jumping grace / which any stray bird may consume, / may release, may lock down with a steel mouth / into a cold / waiting / as a poem cuts us off from ordinariness / with its iced mouth, truth” (Scott [1982], 7). But the poem’s truth may also be the fire of passion. In “Frostsong: For Joy,” from Strategies, 1989, “That heat you make is a hammer on my days. / They receive you as seeds do, planted / They explode” (Scott [1989], 49). In “For the Last Time, Fire,” the imminence of the oppressed poor’s uprising is a phoenix-fire of destruction and renewal (Scott [1973], 46). And in “Elegies,” the poet reflects, “When we were poets world burned / with a bright ash,” and “once there was / a thin fierce heat in the hand, in the head, / the leap into desire, the falling dance / like bright ash in the evenings” (Scott [1989]. 20). The leap, the dance, “that jumping grace” reflects upon Scott’s time as a dancer with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. Although the word “song” is incorporated, sometimes ironically, into so many of his titles, it is the art of the dance that the energy of his poems brings more

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distinctively to mind. Not only is there frequent reference to dance, but the most characteristic Scott poems move and shape themselves like a modern dance solo; they possess a supple muscularity and a continuous, arresting variation of pause and fluidity, tension and release. This movement combines with a sensuous play of metaphor and symbol to produce that deep, grained texture unique to a Scott poem. The stealthy, well-timed irony of understatement, the resonant fade-out, or the abrupt, “hanging” ending further subtilize this texture. Scott has also helped to delineate new dimensions of seriousness and subtlety in the literary use of Jamaican Creole and Rastafarian “dread talk.” Most memorable in this respect is the landmark title poem of his first collection, “Uncle Time,” a poem that catches the lyrical note of the folk sensibility and its poetic way of imaging ideas. The folk’s grassroots wisdom, in its more ironic, witty vein, is also caught in Morris’s “For Consciousness,” from Shadow boxing, 1979. This poem telescopes in a few lines a sharp view of Jamaican history, telling us that “in the new plantation story,” “plenty busha doan ride horse / an some doan t’ink dem white” (Morris [1979], 17). Like McNeill and Scott, Morris uses Creole sparingly, but judiciously and with telling effect. In the dramatic monologue sequence On Holy Week, 1976, a careful use of Creole “naturalizes” the Crucifixion story, thereby uncovering the essential humanity of that historical drama and rekindling the timelessness of the divine, the miraculous. One of Morris’s deservedly best-known Creole pieces is “Valley Prince.” Written in memory of the legendary and seminal trombonist Don Drummond, one of the chief begetters of modern Jamaican popular music, the poem celebrates him, as do McNeill’s “for the D” (in McNeill [1975]) and Goodison’s “For Don Drummond” (in Goodison [1980]). Reasonableness, good sense, open-mindedness, being honest with oneself — these are among the virtues that Morris’s poetry represents. These qualities are usually negotiated through wit, irony, an epigrammatic style, and increasingly minimalist forms. In “Meeting the Mage,” the poet-persona ironically identifies irony as his “cancer” (Morris [1992], 43). We do not look to him for a particularly sensuous texture, compelling rhythmic tensions and innovativeness, or a simulation of passionate intensity. Yet we may sometimes be taken by surprise at how much tenderness his dry wit can set vibrating, or at the sudden glimpses of the raw, rough irrational that his reasonableness both counters and acknowledges: “dark dark dark / inside / the world I want / to bury” (51). His vivacity shines through his poetry’s stealth. He pulls us up short in a chuckle of recognition; what happens underneath or through the deceptively easy, accessible, conventional rhythmic exterior of the poems plays on double meanings and on the layers of meaning he achieves so often through the clever exploitation of line breaks: “facts lie / behind the poems / which are true / fictions” (44). Morris’s good sense and moral courage inform his resistance to the simplicities of political correctness and to coteries of the self-righteous elect. To borrow Walcott’s line, Morris refuses to “lose sight of the single human through the cause” (Walcott [1979], 39). “For Consciousness” is only one of a number of poems that take a satirical view of the “thought-inspectors” of 1970s black radicalism. At the same time, no irony qualifies Morris’s admiration for the black activist Walter Rodney, who “dared / to be involved / in nurturing / upheavals” (Morris [1992], 46). But Morris makes a point of seeing Rodney as “a man / who cared / when anybody hurt / not just the wretched of the earth” (46). Morris’s “Maverick” may be taken as his quintessential persona, the figure who comprehends all the facets of the poet’s art and view of life: “They charged him with

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a lack of guts / and still he wouldn’t do as they desired; / to all their quick solutions offering ‘buts’ / instead of the agreement they required. / / They dropped him from the inner group — / achieving thus consensus of a fashion. / The relics were a loyal group / who could be certified for passion” (39). Also represented in Breaklight was the Guyanese Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson, another poet of the Brathwaite-Walcott generation and of enduring quality. Although his first slim volume, The Four and Other Poems, 1954, was published when he was barely twenty, and although his work appeared in virtually all of the likely Caribbean literary periodicals, he published comparatively little, and his first substantial collection, Snowscape with Signature, 1993, did not appear until after his death. A friend of Walcott’s from their undergraduate days at the University College of the West Indies, when they were both in the forefront of extracurricular artistic activity on the campus, Hopkinson, one of the most brilliant Caribbean actors, went on to become a leading light of Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop during the 1960s. Generally speaking, his poetry, like that of McNeill, Morris, and Scott, exhibits an educated thoughtfulness and stylistic discipline. There are traces of affinity with Walcott’s sensibility and way of proceeding. As its title suggests, “The Agean, the Caribbean” (Hopkinson [1993]) takes up a theme, or pervasive interest, in Walcott, and, more particularly, it invites comparison with Walcott’s early “Bronze” (Walcott [1962]). Hopkinson, too, nicely balances concern for the private space with concern for the public condition in “Retour Au Pays Natal” (Hopkinson [1993]). He became a convert to Islam, and the poems that come out of that development are distinguished by a near-mystical sweetness and light and provide yet another current in the stream of Caribbean religious poetry. Besides McNeill, Morris, and Scott, other poets who began to attract more than passing attention during the 1970s include Victor Questel of Trinidad and Tobago and John Robert Lee and Kendel Hippolyte of St. Lucia. All three were admirers of Walcott’s craft, and one may find some continuities, for example, in their way with metaphor, between him and them, especially in the work of his fellow St Lucians. For instance, Hippolyte’s “A village guide (if you return),” from Bearings, 1986, speaks back to Walcott’s “Return to D’Ennery, Rain,” even as it connects with Lee’s “Return” and “Fragments to a Return.” At the same time, all three convey something of the mood of the 1970s younger generation, variously counter-establishment, disillusioned, revolutionary, with a substantial investment in the virtues of the folk. Hippolyte speaks for his generation in his damning invocation of “mammon”: “ghost, guardian-spirit of banks, transnational corporations, / daylight deals in air-conditioned sewers / ghoul, eating the flesh of our dead childhood” (Hippolyte [1986], 17). Questel was very much a product of Trinidad’s 1970 revolutionary awakening. One of those at the University of the West Indies’ St. Augustine campus who were actively involved in the movement, he found early publication in The New Voices, 1973. Edited and published by Anson Gonzalez, himself a poet, The New Voices provided an imaginative outlet for the time’s mood. Lee and Hippolyte both came into close contact with the socialist spirit and the Rastafaribased counter-culture of 1970s Jamaica while they were students at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies. Lee had previously studied at the Cave Hill (Barbados) campus, where he was involved with a small, but vibrant, literary group. He advances the idea of himself, Hippolyte, Questel, and others as constituting a new generation of West Indian poets. His

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“Anniversary for Paul Layne (1945–1971),” with an epigraph from Michael Foster, commemorates these two very promising Barbadian poets who died tragically young. Lee writes, in a rhetoric that comes perhaps a little easily: “with your other heirs / I must wake our snoring people / from their stale visions” (Lee [1988], 6). “Autograph of A Dead Black Poet” commemorates Questel. Lee’s restless spirit later found a cause in born-again Evangelicalism. He turned his poetic gift to the service of this cause and made a notable contribution to the small body of serious West Indian devotional poetry. By the end of the 1970s, two major new developments became evident: an impressive efflorescence of poetry by West Indian women and the rise of dub poetry. The development of women’s poetry is graphically illustrated by a comparison of two anthologies, one from each end of the decade: Seven Jamaican Poets, 1971, edited by Mervyn Morris, and Jamaica Woman, 1980, a collaboration between Morris and Pamela Mordecai. While not attempting to be exhaustive, Seven Jamaican Poets gave a reasonably comprehensive sampling of the best of Jamaican poetry at that time. That all seven poets were men was, in general, true to the reality of that moment. In hindsight, one might say that the only female poet then likely to have been included was Louise Bennett. However, her non-inclusion may well have been a result of editorial policy only to feature poets who had not had large exposure. Bennett’s Jamaica Labrish had appeared five years earlier. Another Jamaican, Barbara Ferland, with a handful of poems in the 1950s and 1960s, had promised much, but she had, by 1971, left Jamaica and dropped out of literary sight. It was not until 1994 that she published her first collection, Without Shoes I Must Run, comprising just thirty-two short lyrics, “piercing sweet” but also mostly diamond hard, and including the handful for which she had earned a reputation decades earlier. By 1980, however, Morris and Mordecai edited Jamaica Woman, an anthology of no fewer than fifteen mostly young women poets, whose work demanded serious attention. Fittingly, the idea for the anthology originated with Mordecai, herself one of the most accomplished poets in the collection. The flowering of Jamaica Woman had been heralded only a few weeks earlier by the Savacou anthology New Poets from Jamaica, 1979, in which seven of the thirteen poets were women. Savacou also published first collections by two of these newly emerging women: Jean Goulbourne’s Actors in the Arena, 1977, and Beverley Brown’s Dream Diary, 1982. Only three of the seven women represented in New Poets reappeared in Jamaica Woman. Neither collection included the talented Rachel Manley, who had already published two slim volumes. Perhaps the omission was purely inadvertent. There had been other, even earlier indicators of the flowering. A 1976 issue of The New Voices (4.7+8) had featured a selection of “Poems from Canada” by young West Indians living there. All the poets were female, including at least two who were eventually to gain wide reputations: Lillian Allen and Dionne Brand. The dearth of published women writers of stature at the beginning of the 1970s was typical of the West Indian literary scene as a whole. One can only guess at the reasons for this. A notable exception among poets was Judy Miles of Trinidad and Tobago, whose sharp sensibility shone briefly during the late 1960s and then disappeared when she emigrated. She was one of only four women among the forty-two poets represented in Salkey’s Breaklight; and even so, each of the four was allowed just one poem, while ten of the men were allowed at least five each. Similarly, in the Savacou anthology “New Writing 1970” there were only two women poets, with but one poem each. Phyllis Shand Allfrey of Dominica, better known for her novel

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The Orchid House, 1953, had turned out a few slight, but well crafted, volumes, beginning with In Circles: Poems, 1940. The increasing interest in women’s poetry that the 1970s and 1980s were to attract is reflected in three anthologies that appeared at the beginning of the 1990s. Two of these also signaled the growing interest in comparative study of Caribbean literatures within the anglophone Caribbean. In 1990, the Trinidadian Ramabai Espinet edited Creation Fire, a generous pan-Caribbean selection of women’s poetry whose representation of the various language sectors is uneven. The balance was more evenly and more selectively held in the 1992 issue of The Literary Review (35.4) devoted to “Women Poets of the Caribbean” and edited by Pam[ela] Mordecai and Betty Wilson. 1990 also saw the publication of Margaret Watts’s edition of Washer Woman Hangs Her Poems in the Sun, devoted to less established women poets of Trinidad and Tobago. The significance of the late 1970s and early 1980s female poetic windfall is clearest if we go back three decades to J. E. Clare McFarlane’s Treasury of Jamaican Poetry. It contained lady versifiers aplenty — seventeen out of a total of forty-one — none of whom achieved any real stature. As the 1970s passed, an increasing number of the new women poets published individual collections. Notable in this group are Merle Collins of Grenada; Mahadai Das and Grace Nichols of Guyana; Jean Binta Breeze, Christine Craig, Gloria Escoffery, Lorna Goodison, Velma Pollard, and Olive Senior of Jamaica; and Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Nourbese Philip of Trinidad and Tobago. Though Escoffery had been publishing since the 1950s, her poetry appeared only sporadically, and she was known primarily as a painter. Her poetic stature was enhanced with the appearance of her collection Loggerhead, 1988. These women extended the horizons of West Indian poetry partly by bringing to it concerns that related most immediately to female experience and, more broadly, to a wider social consciousness. Their language and expressiveness have, in some cases, been correspondingly innovative, as, for example, in the kind of detail, perception, and image that belong most nearly to a woman’s world. At the same time, much of the best work of some of them is not particularly gender-specific. This is generally true, for instance, of the Jamaican Judith Hamilton, one of the most distinctive of women poets in her terse obliquity. Although her work had been highly respected since the late 1970s, her first collection, Rain Carvers, was not published until 1992. Rachel Manley’s “Any Thursday,” from Poems 2, 1978, evokes the ennui of the young mother bound to the housewife’s routine: “Tidying up / for tidying down. / Baby pulls, / then baby grows / and does not pull” (Manley [1978], 22). She looks into the mirror not only to see her present self but also to recover her truest self. Somewhat wryly, she “remembers Joan of Arc / International Women’s Year, / seeks a mirror / any Thursday, / anywhere” (22). In Mordecai’s “Up Tropic,” from Journey Poem, 1989, the persona claims her space and individuality in relation to her man: “I want my own / greening. / … / or free me up / tropic for rooting / elsewhere” (Mordecai [1989], 23). Mordecai’s De Man, 1995, a dramatic poem about Holy Week, complements and talks back to Mervyn Morris’s On Holy Week. Manley, Mordecai and other women poets uncover the female line of continuity and affirm its importance to the communal wellbeing. They present women in quest of the mother, of the daughter, of the female soul-mate, as in Philip’s sequence “And Over Every Land and Sea,” from She Tries Her Tongue, 1989. They imagine generations: the past, the unborn, the future, and the lost. In Claire Harris’s “this was the child I dreamt,” from her Fables from the Women’s Quarters, 1984, the persona hauntingly

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laments her lost / aborted daughter, whom she had “dreamt” — “soft as the dark and strong strong / as her forefather’s will.” But now, “I have become the charnel house of my own seed / the dead end of my line / never again will their strength gleam / black in sunlight” (Harris [1984], 35). For Das, the “Unborn Children” are also the aborted poems. She cries: “O widows of Old Greece with your black shawls! / Raise your voices with their seasoned sorrows / to my invisible funerals” (Das [1988], 12). In the Trinidadian Jennifer Rahim’s first collection, Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists, 1992, the mother-daughter relationship, from conception to giving birth and suckling, yields a matrix of tropes for female self-realization and self-articulation: “Rounded with word / you leaned back mama / rolling out from your / dark cave the talk you talked / words that drew me down / your passage Out / where the words sang / hotter fuller in my ears” (Rahim [1992]). This new poetry by women is charged with the exhilaration of claiming the freedom to speak out for women. A variety of fresh metaphors of self-becoming and self-definition disturbs the comfortable categories of expectation into which woman’s creative consciousness has been traditionally subsumed: “Oh she had things that grew —” Das writes, “horns and tails, arms of different lengths, / automatic fangs near bureaucrats, a tail, / (a bit of bother when she wore a dress); / … / ‘Aiee!’ they cried, ‘What a monster!’ / ‘This is not a plant!’ said the editor-in-chief” (Das [1988], 52). And Brand exults in No Language Is Neutral, 1990, “I have become myself. A woman who looks / at a woman and says, here, I have found you, / in this, I am blackening in my way. / … my eyes followed me to myself, touched myself / as a place, another life, terra. They say this place / does not exist, then, my tongue is mythic” (Brand [1990], 51). The lesbian factor, which becomes explicit in No Language, had earlier been given voice in Gifts from my Grandmother, c.1986, a first collection by Meiling Jin, who had migrated to England from Guyana with her family when she was eight. Hers is an arresting economy and simplicity of speech: “My lover’s sheets are green, / a soft soothing colour / and when she holds me, / I feel safe enough to sleep” (Jin [c.1986], 57). West Indian feminism, in these poets, articulates the female self as an integral, necessary factor in the wider communal situation. It engages questions of history, class, and race. It claims woman’s place as cultural conservator and voice of the tribe’s renewal, as in Nichols’s “Epilogue”: “I have crossed an ocean / I have lost my tongue / from the root of the old / one / a new one has sprung” (Nichols [1983], 80). The new woman’s voice speaks out against maledominated power structures, and, especially in the cases of Brand, Collins, and Goodison, allies itself with contemporary Third-World / black revolutionary struggles. Brand and Collins were directly involved in the Grenadian revolutionary movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The revolutionary orientation of these two is reflected in the allusion to the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal in Brand’s title Winter Epigrams & Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia, 1983, and in the title of Collins’s Because the Dawn Breaks! Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People, 1985. Goodison generates a sense of rich and varied creativity, the capacity of “a full woman.” In a moment of extremity, in which she bequeaths her “last poem” to her son, she cries out in simultaneous hurt and exultation: “O but it should be laid out / and chronicled, crazy like my life / with a place for all my several lives / daughter, sister, mistress, friend, warrior / wife / and a high holy ending for the blessed / one / me as mother to a man” (Goodison [1986], 7). Her poetry draws on the depth and range of this multi-dimensional life. The fullness of the female self

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comprehends anger, cutting satire, and a sensuous joy of being. It moves between a full-bodied earthiness and affirmation of sexuality, as in some of the poems in Tamarind Season, 1980, and I Am Becoming My Mother, 1986, and the transfiguring, mystical spirituality of Heartease, 1988. Goodison’s voice fuses literary sophistication and a street-smart naturalness of utterance; it ranges dexterously along the continuum and subtle scale of Jamaican speech. At her most confidingly personal, she speaks for other people; her most public, communal gestures are energized by a sense of intimate personal sympathy with her subject. Goodison’s recreation of the texture of contemporary experience resonates with a deep sense of history. In “We Are the Women,” her tribute to the resilience and initiative of Jamaican working-class women is deepened by her seeing them as continuing a long history of suffering and resistance which goes back to the days of slavery: “We are the women / with thread bags / anchored deep in our bosoms / containing blood agreements / silver coins and cloves of garlic / an apocrypha / of Nanny’s secrets” (Goodison [1986], 12). Nanny is the Maroon heroine who led her people in guerrilla warfare against the British, and who is the subject of another Goodison poem, “Nanny” (44). Nanny is also extolled by Nichols in I Is A Long-Memoried Woman. A poem such as “We Are the Women” finds a sister-poem in Nichols’s “I Coming Back” (in Nichols [1983]) and Craig’s “Elsa’s Version”: “You rass man / stop put we down / in dutty song or / high-up editorial. / You can confuse, abuse / an mess wid you own self / till you good an ready / to deal wid I as / a real somebody” (Craig [1984], 58). The compassion that cuts across class lines in “We Are the Women,” “I Coming Back,” and “Elsa’s Version” also cuts across cultural boundaries in poems like Goodison’s “This Is A Hymn” and “Heartease New England 1987” (Goodison [1988]), Jane King’s “Bag Lady” (King [1994]), and Pollard’s “Bag Woman”: “Bag Winter / rain woman / perhaps I know / how ungentle is snow / how wet / hurting your furniture” (Pollard [1992], 35). Goodison’s gift for recognizing the deeply human center of self in the Other is well exemplified in the portraits of legendary street characters of her Kingston childhood that feature in her collection To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, 1995. These persons, otherwise remembered simply as bizarre comic outcasts, are, in Goodison’s imagination, humanized by personal histories that give feeling and reason to their eccentricity. More generally, this collection is her song to her country; it evokes those qualities in the place and the people from which she draws blessing and strength. The title poem, a humorously insightful ramble through the quaint variety of Jamaican place names, ends: “I recite these names in a rosary, speak them / when I pray, for Heartease, my mecca, aye Jamaica” (Goodison [1995], 71). The last phrase may be read as a double pun: Jah-Mecca, as well as a definitive identification of poet with place — “I Jamaica.” Goodison’s tending of a “Garden of the Women Once Fallen,” a mini-sequence begun in I Am Becoming My Mother and continued in To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, provides a convenient transition into the rich harvest of wisdom and delight which is Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, 1994. Building on the promise of her first collection, Talking of Trees, 1985, Gardening brings the quality of Senior’s poetry to an equal level with her acclaimed fiction. Her storytelling art now flowers authoritatively in verse, paralleling the fiction in its subtle control and variation of narrative voice. One remarks, for instance, her skill at exploiting the self-dramatizing asides of what is almost invariably a female narrator. The iconography of her Book of Plants and of her pantheon of African gods in the New World is always inventive and efficacious, never

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foreclosed or programmatic: “Gardening in the Tropics, you never know / what you’ll turn up” (Senior [1994], 83). What she turns up in this collection includes the haunting, deeply moving memorial to Jean Rhys entitled “Meditation on Red” and the provocative play of irony and counter-irony which is the oblique disquisition on feminism in “Amazon Women.” One aspect of Goodison’s vibrant sense of identity, which she shares with Brathwaite and other contemporary Caribbean poets, has to do with her feeling for Caribbean and AfricanAmerican “people music,” and with the social conscience and native consciousness that this music subsumes. The more conventional term “popular music” will not quite do here, lacking the particular cultural orientation and grounding that engages Goodison. Those of her poems that celebrate, or are inspired by, jazz and the twentieth-century Jamaican ska-rocksteady-reggae tradition help to locate her theme and sensibility. In her “Jah Music,” “this red and yellow and dark green / sound / stained from travelling underground / … / has the healing / more than weed and white rum healing / more than bush tea and fever grass cooling / and it pulses without a symphony conductor / all it need is a dub organiser” (Goodison [1986], 36). The “dub organiser” is the person at the console of the recording studio who dubs, mixes, orchestrates sounds. This dubbing provided the master-idea for dub poetry, a form that came characteristically out of the urban proletariat, with a strong influence of Rastafarian-reggae culture. It is more than coincidental that dub poetry welled up during the 1970s, in the wake of the Black Power movement, contemporaneously with the heightened political consciousness and polarization of Jamaican society and with the embattled, disenchanted situation of the newly-emerging black British youth. Moving to a reggae beat, and often performed, rather than read, to live musical backing, dub poetry traces its lineage to the oral inventiveness of the street, the tenement yard, and “dreadtalk.” Extending the range of artistic use of the oral tradition, and speaking the language and injecting the urgency of new, deprived generations, it gave poetry a new popularity and has influenced more mainstream, literary products. If, at its worst, dub poetry and its near-relations are no more than poetry-as-antics, at its best they deploy a new urgency of form and content, distinguished by subtlety, wit, and an intelligence that the prejudice of “high culture” did not want to find in them. A landmark example of the genre is Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Five Nights of Bleeding,” a poem that evokes the mood and predicament of a generation of West Indian / black British youths. The poem recounts a series of violent clashes between rival groups of youths, and between the youths and the police. The action develops in the context of dances being held in Brixton and other parts of London. The poem skilfully interfuses impressions of the music with impressions of violence. In so doing, it affirms the deep cultural significance of the music and its identification with social protest: “night number four at a blues dance / a blues dance: / two rooms packed an the pressure pushing up; / hot. hot heads. ritual of blood in a blues dance. / broke glass; / splintering fire, axes, blades, brain — blast; / rebellion rushing down the wrong road …” (Johnson [1975], 17). “Pressure,” as in the expression “sounds and pressure,” is a resonant word in the culture of reggae and dub. It suggests, at one and the same time, the heavy beat of the music and the pressure of hard times. The protest note — the cry on behalf of the oppressed, the “sufferers” of the ghetto — is a feature of dub poetry. In the most impressive practitioners, such as Oku Onuora (Orlando Wong), Michael Smith, Mutabaruka (Allan Hope), Jean Binta Breeze, and Johnson, it is

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distinguished by wit, irony, rhythmic dexterity, a nimble play of voices, a pulsating beat, and a sure sense of shape. It is also remarkable how, as exemplified in “Five Nights of Bleeding,” some of this work can, in short flights, suggest an epic sweep of suffering and resistance. For instance, in Onuora’s “Pressure Drop” we hear: “dawta sigh / ‘lard! hear de pickney dem a cry’ / man a pass sey dawta fat / dawta smile but dawta cyan check dat” (Wong [1978], 13). Wong’s poem is a blood relation and a precursor to Smith’s searing, echoing “Me Cyaan Believe It”: “Me daughter bwoy-frien name Sailor / an im pass through de port like a ship / more gran-picni fi feed / and de whole a wi in need / what a night what a plight / an we cyaan get a bite / an me cyaan believe it” (Smith [1986], 13). Breeze’s “riddym ravings (the mad woman’s poem)” is another tour-de-force which brilliantly exploits the connection between music and social protest. The wisdom of its persona, a “mad” street-woman, society’s victim, is conveyed through her fantasy that there is a “riddym box,” a radio in her head, with a DJ whose message speaks to and for her personally. Like “riddym ravings,” “baby madda” is another dub version of woman’s story. This “dawta,” having left her mother’s home to follow the way of Jah and make an alternative life with her Rastaman, finds, to her disillusionment, that no sooner than she bears a child, the man decides that “im kean tek de strain.” He tells her: “go home to you madda / she wi help you mind de yout / go home to you madda / I a tell you, is de truth” (Breeze [1988], 64). Practitioners of dub are not to be thought of as restricted exclusively to that mode. Their work shades into poems that, taken by themselves, do not suggest dub. At the same time, their work also shades into reggae and DJ lyrics. The lyrics of the reggae genius Bob Marley have been analyzed as poetry, as has many a calypso. Dub poets perform both at poetry readings that sometimes include more traditional literary poets, as well as at reggae / DJ concerts. Furthermore, dub is continuous with all the varieties of orality and Creole usage that have informed so much West Indian poetry since the 1970s. All of these “versions” (to use another keyword from dub culture) may be conveniently comprehended under the term performance poetry. One thinks, for example, of the work of the Guyanese Marc Matthews and John Agard, and of the Trinidadians Faustin Charles and Malik (Delano de Couteau): “He could trimble / ah mountain / pouning drum / rap like Moses / rap like John / ah say / Mih Daddy was strong / so strong / Lord all mighty” (Malik, “Oui Papa,” in Burnett [1986], 49). The experiments of some Eastern Caribbean poets also incorporate the spirit and sound of pan, or steelband music, the rhythm of the road-march shuffle and jump-up, and the prismatic vibrancy of carnival, as in Questel’s “Down Beat”: “Pulling at meh weed / Smoking out meh need / Cursing dem all /Forgetting it all /Swaying down the kiss meh arse /streets /to a rhythm rehearsed in bed /and the down beat in meh head” (Questel [1979], 22). John Agard’s Man to Pan, 1982, is subtitled “a cycle of poems to be performed with drums and steelpans.” Here, the art of pan provides metaphors of resistance, communal initiative, and nurturing ancestral links: “On new ground we scatter old drum seeds /letting them shape a destiny of sound /unburdening the iron in our blood. /Thunder roots new voice in steel / and lightning seams metal with song. / / Who would have dreamed that Shango heart / would beat this far would follow us / across strange water to stranger earth / rising to thunder from oildrums rust?” (Agard [1982], 13). The music of the steel drum (“pan”), an instrument invented by the Trinidadian proletariat in response to repressive circumstances, is itself a historic expression of West Indian creativity and capacity for resistance.

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Much of this largely Creole poetry also draws, even if at times only by the merest suggestion, on the storyteller’s folk art. Louise Bennett drew on it, and it had always been one informing principle of the calypso. Merle Collins exploits it with consummate dramatic skill in poems such as “It Crow Fire” and “Crick Crack” in her collection Rotten Pomerack, 1992: “But some stories come / with no crick with no crack / and still monkey does well / break they back on a / rotten pomerack” (Collins [1992], 61). The poet who has committed himself most to the storytelling mode, with all its inherent Caribbean / African sense of the theatrical, is the Trinidadian Paul Keens-Douglas. He does his lyrical turn in “My Trinidad,” written for musical accompaniment, and in his short-line rhymed pieces with pronounced and very regular stress patterns. But it is in the free-verse narrative monologues, which often incorporate dialogue, that he is most expansive. The implied participatory presence of audience or interlocutor is vital, as is the sense of gesture and movement. These pieces are, to some extent, elaborations on the stand-up comic’s art. To the ear, the distinction between verse, prose, and speech is sometimes blurred. The folk characters, whether speaker or subject, are all connoisseurs of their language, who amuse the reader both by their naiveté and by their shrewdness. Keens-Douglas artistically exploits and comments on situations that are in themselves communal life-theater. For example, the West Indian secular ritual of cricket, seen as a total drama integrating players and spectators, provides some of his most hilarious performances. “Tanti at de Oval” (Keens-Douglas [1976], 26–32) details the misadventures of one of his most irrepressible characters, the rustic, selfconfidently eloquent Tanti Merle, when she is taken to see a cricket match at the Queens Park Oval for the first time. The mystique, communal ritual, and elaborate talk of West Indian cricket are also comprehended by Bruce St John’s “Cricket,” a worthy addition to the increasing cluster of West Indian cricket poems that grew around Brathwaite’s classic “Rites.” These poems are at once about art, identity, community, history, and decolonization. “Cricket” is typical of St John’s art in that, while it incorporates the storytelling mode to some extent, its metier is a kind of didactic “reasoning.” The poem displays the verbal virtuosity of its persona, a corner-shop philosopher. His earthily sententious performance alternates between a comical pseudo-logic and an acute grasp of common sense. Though dialogue and colloquial style also predominate in St John’s Standard English poetry, they never quite work there. The extended analogy between cricket and Christianity, which is central to “Cricket,” might have seemed, if rendered in Standard English, too awkwardly extravagant and literary. In St John’s poem, the account of a remembered moment of play is itself a most appropriate figure to represent the artistic movement of his dialogue: “De ‘Holy Ghost’ stretch down the wicket / An’ ‘e jook an’ ‘e poke like t’ings tight, / All of a sudden ‘e step back / An’ ‘e stretch up in de air an’ ‘e smack! / A fielder pun de boundary pounce / Like a cat! Down han’ ‘pon de ball / An’ de ball twis’ out ‘e han’ an’ de man / Eatin’ grass an’ de ball hit de board / An’ bounce back!” (St John [1962], 18–19). St John also enriched the variety of West Indian Creole as a poetic medium in his manipulation of the Barbadian version, another augmentation of Brathwaite’s achievement. One of the instructive pleasures to be had from tracing the expansion and artistic ramifications in the use of Creole in West Indian poetry is in discriminating between the varieties of “island patois” (and here, “island” also denotes Guyana) and the ways in which the artistic use of these varieties may reflect varieties of national personality.

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Another major development that was firmly in place by the early 1980s was the emergence of the East Indian, or Indo-Caribbean, voice. This development was a salutary extension of Caribbean poetry’s imaginative engagement with the region’s history and culture. Poets such as Cyril Dabydeen, David Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Arnold Itwaru, Rooplal Monar, Sasenarine Persaud, and Rupert Roopnarine have claimed the Indo-Caribbean space in Caribbean representations of the experience and idea of diaspora. Here, one must acknowledge Walcott’s singular contribution by way of his enduring, eloquent empathy with the Indo-Caribbean persona, notably in his plays, in poems such as “Exile,” “The Saddhu of Couva,” and in Another Life. In his first collection, Poems in Recession, 1972, a title that echoes Martin Carter, Cyril Dabydeen had reflected the concerns of socialism, complicated by Guyana’s African-Indian racial tensions. He shows that migration to Canada brought with it a deepening of the exploration of the idea of identity — the paradox of man’s essential homelessness and his capacity to achieve a diverse sense of home: “I begin my book of legends / to be other than I am. / I walk across the high bridge, / barefooted in the blistering sun. / … / Dismay follows with a young / bull bellowing; my father’s lasso / converges. He looks back / as I imagine an outside life — / fishing in Ontario, skiing down / Vancouver mountains / from glossy magazines. / … / Finally, my mother, to remind me / of myself, sends a postcard from / Tobago — she on her first holiday / after fifty years or more” (Cyril Dabydeen [1986], 14–15). Like David Dabydeen, Rooplal Monar, also Guyanese, voices the Indo-Caribbean cry of dispossession, the sentence of hard labor in cane and rice fields, the inner agony of making new identities out of old. In Monar’s “Limbo,” the persona cries, “Ancestral blood still seeps in my veins / Generations of gods cloud my eyes / How will ripe cane-arrows / Bring life to my logie?” (Monar [1987], 27). Monar’s “Babu” is “Huddled by the front door / of a decayed, rat-infested logie, / victim of rain and sun, / Babu’s eyes scan the canefield horizons” (15). The fire of “whiplash [which] explodes from sunburnt hands” is even more searing in David Dabydeen’s Slave Song, 1984. He extracts from Guyanese Creole a language that is “angry, crude, energetic,” and rawly sexual, to convey the experience of indenture, slavery, and their resulting social aftermath. In Coolie Odyssey, 1988, published to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Indians as indentured laborers in the Caribbean, the sad legacy of violence and aggressive emotion persists through the latter-day diaspora. Dabydeen’s “London Taxi Driver,” “has come far and paid much for the journey / From some village in Berbice where mule carts laze / And stumble over broken paths” (David Dabydeen [1988], 26). This poem smoulders with the solitary, violent designs of Caliban’s revenge on Prospero through Miranda. In “For Rohan Babulal Kanhai,” the heroic exploits of one of the great cricketers of the West Indies are translated into terms of sweet revenge for the hurt of history, against “White Overseer” and “Blackman.” In the title poem, the poet, writing from “a winter of England’s scorn,” pays tribute to his forebears, the survivors of the first diaspora. Crossing the Atlantic again, he is late for his mother’s funeral: “You will understand the connections were difficult. / Three airplanes boarded and many changes / Of machines and landscapes like reincarnations / To bring me to this library of graves, / This small clearing of scrubland. / There are no headstones, epitaphs, dates. / The ancestors curl and dry to scrolls of parchment” (12). The various journeys of the West Indian person and imagination, the crossing and recrossing of oceans, bring us to a development in what may be called the demography of West

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Indian poetry. The poetry eventually appropriated two major locales outside the Caribbean in terms of both its creation and its reception: Britain and Canada. This appropriation is reflected in E. A. Markham’s anthology, Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain, 1989. Four years earlier, Lorris Elliott had published Other Voices: Writings by Blacks in Canada, a more sweeping, less discriminating collection than Hinterland. As the foregoing narrative has shown, much of the significant West Indian writing of the 1980s emanated from a generation of writers who, by force of circumstances, grew up in England or chose early in their careers to migrate to Canada. In the U. S. A., there were the Jamaicans Opal Adisa Palmer and Geoffrey Philp. Another Jamaican, Claudia Rankine, made an impressive debut in 1994 with her collection Nothing in Nature is Private. These writers are, strictly speaking, not all of one and the same generation. They include the pioneering figure of James Berry, a Jamaican who arrived in England in 1948 in his midtwenties, and Fred D’Aguiar, who was born in London of Guyanese parents in 1960. D’Aguiar spent his childhood in Guyana and returned to London at the age of twelve. Even if they are to some extent marginalized, writers such as Berry and D’Aguiar have become part of the British literary scene. For them, their British, especially black British, audience may be more real than an audience in the West Indies. Nevertheless, they identify in crucial ways with their Caribbean origins. Their sense of location is creatively problematic, and they chart new dimensions of postcolonial sensibility. Similarly, Caribbean-Canadian poets such as Dionne Brand, Cyril Dabydeen, Claire Harris, and Marlene Nourbese Philip are, understandably though regrettably, a less audible presence in the West Indies than in Canada. One dynamic of their work derives from the tensions experienced by the black immigrant and reflects a special relationship with the adopted home. They claim a rightful place in it and chafe at the feeling that it does not fully accept them. At the same time, they draw on a deep sense of connection with their Caribbean origins. In the context of the U. S. A., the idea of the divided immigrant is strong in Geoffrey Philp’s Exodus, 1990. Nostalgia for the original homeland contrasts with rationalization of having left it. Of course, not all the poet-migrants are necessarily taken by the theme of moving between two homes and cultures. Brian Chan, a Guyanese who migrated to Canada, largely eschews sociological themes. He prefers to explore philosophical problems of individual being. His major mode is the oracular and even cryptic, in which unusual combinations of image seem to work more in the interest of the play of ideas rather than for the sensuous evocation of experience and emotion. A sophisticated, dry wit is conducive to the tone of one who, in Yeats’s phrase, “cast[s] a cold eye on life, on death.” The speaker in “Lonstein’s Convention” says: “A washer of the dead is what I am: / I refuse to embalm or embellish. / … And for every corpse I lay out naked, / there’s some mother waiting to have it dressed / and spruced up for a cocktail memorial. / Hopeless. But as I say, I wash, that’s all” (Chan [1988], 25). In contrast to Chan, Rohan Preston, who emigrated from Jamaica in his teens, focusses his poetic energy chiefly on the problem of race and color in the U. S. A. In prefatory remarks to the poems in his Dreams in Soy Sauce, 1992, he tells of the rough surprise of his first encounter with his “new country,” which showed him a reality quite different from the dream of a promised land on which he had been nurtured in Jamaica. This theme is repeated in the “Letter from Foreign” to his grandmother: “Dear Mum, there are so many things I have / to tell ‘bout ‘Merica, the

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place where you said / the streets are gold and there are many people / with good hair (like those in the movies)” (Preston [1992], 31). Acknowledging a variety of literary influences, including Brathwaite and Walcott, as well as influences from black popular culture, Preston can be variously scathing, parodic, playful, and witty. He wonders, “What to do with old white women, / the ones who recoil from you on the bus,” and goes on to develop a playfully violent fantasy: “Walking upright, / without tremble, you can decline to help / them cross intersections, hoping to view / / raccoon guts ironed, lab-like, into / the pavement.” But he rejects this solution and achieves a more low-key, but more mature and more self-possessed ending: “But no, that’s too graphic — / just wish them a nice day, and smile” (4). The immigrant’s sense of a special, awkward, and intense relationship to the new home was early and artfully expressed by Brand in “Winter Epigrams,” which ends: “comrade winter, / look what you’ve done. / I have written epigrams to you, / e’en poems, / can it be that … ? / no, no, I am not your lover, / perhaps … your enemy” (Brand [1983], 18). Claire Harris’s Drawing Down A Daughter, 1992, fuses feminist interests with the theme of the immigrant’s complex sense of double identity. The poem is the monologue of a Trinidadian woman who has chosen to make Canada her home, because she finds Trinidadian society too stifling. However, the creative hold that aspects of the remembered Trinidadian lifestyle have on her imagination is repeatedly manifested. Harris’s imagination moves between the River Bow at Calgary, where she lives in a flat, to the lush natural habitat around the Lopinot River in rural Trinidad. The monologue is addressed to her soon-to-be-born daughter, but it encompasses a variety of voices, modes, and moods. The complex feelings of the mother anticipating giving birth are further complicated by historically resonant considerations of her situation as black Caribbean immigrant in Canada: “inside her the child thrashing / daughter she needs / dreads / for who would bring a child / skin shimmering black God’s / night breath curled crisp / about her face courage / of enslaved ancestors in her eyes / who would choose to cradle such tropic / grace on the Bow’s frozen banks / / and this man / fleeing racism as his body must once / have fled the coffle” (Harris [1992], 17–18). An ironic complication that the woman has to deal with is that her black Canadian husband wants them to return to Trinidad in order to get away from Canadian racism. The need to retain her Caribbean sense of self even while attempting to put down roots in new soil is also a dynamic of Rankine’s Nothing in Nature is Private, 1994, a remarkably accomplished first collection that shifts locale and language between the United States and Jamaica. The protagonist of “American Light” becomes conscious of herself as a timorous yet threatening shadow intruding on the “lit landscape” that it covets: “In the lit landscape, in its peeled / back places, making the space / uncomfortable, representing no fault / in the self is a shadow / of a gesture of wanting, coveting / the American light” (Rankine [1994], 2). The linebreaks are skilfully managed so as to generate additional nuances of meaning. “New Windows” integrates the gender issue into the delineation of the black immigrant consciousness with Rankine’s characteristic economy, obliquity and cool irony. At the end of the poem, after the white man who “had come about windows” has left, the rain, which had been wanting to fall “all morning,” “comes down easy.” The rain suggests the tears of release for the persona’s pentup hurt. When she went to open the door to the man, he said, “I need to speak to your employer, / to someone who lives here.” She remembers the white southern businessman whom she had found herself seated beside on an airline flight, and who had “wanted to understand

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how / he came to be sitting next to [her] in first / class on that otherwise ordinary Thursday.” Now, as she goes to lower the “wide-open windows” against the rain, she finds herself “leaning / forward, out, into this home” (25–27). Similar considerations are dramatized and illustrated in E. A. Markham’s anthology Hinterland. Markham, himself one of the finest Caribbean-British poets, works “to protect (first of all) and then to extend what we might call our living spaces, both public and private … certain cultural / spiritual spaces … : how not to be limited, how not to be ghettoized; how not to collude with corrupting self-censorship” (Markham [1989], 195). The enterprise includes an insistence on the claim of the work to being West Indian, as well as a resistance to any premature closure that label might imply. Markham’s poetry releases a delightfully “wicked,” subversive, polyvocal sense of irony in the persona “Lambchops.” In the opening couplets of one of the Lambchops poems, “Racial Prejudice Day (a white poem),” Markham writes: “Makes you proud, yes / to be of this company. / / We’re not a thinking people, / admit it. Or a feeling / / people: we take things / as they come. Perhaps, you’ll say, / / we’re dead. That’s a joke / we’ve got this great asset / (and it’s truly national: / / the Polls agree) of recognizing / the foreigner” (Markham [1982], 9). The singular, ordinary, something-for-everybody Lambchops — a quietly hilarious mask — sees through clenched, small-minded postures of aggression or self-defense. In Markham, the West Indian appropriation of the trope of traveling reaches a high level of crafted ease and self-assurance. He moves with it as if he is in his element and can subsume all the voyages. In “Hinterland,” we find him, this stranger from “remote” Montserrat, in Portrush, Ulster, “an outpost on the weathermap,” on a night of “wind and rain,” “on the edge / of the edge, the sea hurling defiance / to old and new gods …” (Markham [1989], 209). He feels curiously at home, saying to his “travelling relic” “from [his] suitcase, from [his] head”: “I have / Explored the world, tasted its strangeness, / Persisted and colluded out of strength, / Out of weakness, failed to colonise it / With family tongue or name” (209). This failure is no cause for sadness or regret; it is a comment on the dubiously successful European colonizations of the Caribbean. It marks a freedom: at the edge, he, the colonized, is centered. Like Markham, like the Dabydeens, like Brand, like Linton Kwesi Johnson, like Nichols, indeed like so many others, James Berry and Fred D’Aguiar keep open the lines of dialogue between the voyager-migrant, his / her starting-place and his / her way-stations. Their work enhances the idea of the Caribbean as literal and metaphorical point of departure. D’Aguiar’s Guyanese matriarch Mama Dot and Guyanese village Airy Hall — ancestral woman, ancestral place — are part of what defines him and sustains him in his journeying. In “Letter From Mama Dot,” she tells him, from her store of stay-at-home wisdom: “You are a traveller to them. / A West Indian working in England; / a Friday, Tonto, or Punkawallah; / Sponging off the state. Our languages / remain pidgin, like our dark, third, / underdeveloped world” (D’Aguiar [1985], 21). In “Lucy’s Letter,” Berry’s Lucy, writing back home to her friend Leela, is herself a folksy evocation of “native” life. But she balances her nostalgia for the traditional village ways and her detailing of the technological monotony of her urban British life with the pragmatic acknowledgment that her economic circumstances have improved, and “money-rustle regular” (Berry [1982], 39). She has no illusions and knows instinctively that she is a Bluefoot Traveller, 1976, to use the title of one of Berry’s anthologies of poetry by West Indians living in Britain, “bluefoot” being a pejorative Creole expression for an outsider / Negro. As Berry sees it, the work of the

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West Indian British writer has been one “way that the British people have had themselves reflected back through black people’s eyes.” Although the work “has often struck up bells of alarm,” it enhances “the consciousness-expansion process that black people’s presence has set up in Britain.” This process will “help the learners to feel that when they have calmed down they are bigger, deeper and more expansive human beings” (Berry quoted in Markham [1989], 176). The appearance of the comprehensive Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English in 1986 was part of a small spate of mostly good anthologies that attested to the markedly increasing international visibility of West Indian poetry during the 1980s. Earlier, Stewart Brown’s edition of Caribbean Poetry Now, 1984, provided both a very useful teaching text and a discriminating cross-section of high-quality poetry for the general reader. Later, Brown collaborated with Ian McDonald in editing The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry, 1992. In the U. S., The Greenfield Review devoted half of a double issue, Winter / Spring 1985 and the Graham House Review an entire issue, Spring 1991, to recent West Indian poetry. Out of the Greenfield’s selection there developed a fuller anthology, Crossing Water, 1992, edited by the Barbadian Anthony Kellman, himself one of the talented younger poets. The Canadian-based Ramabai Espinet’s Creation Fire has already been mentioned, as has The Literary Review’s special number edited by Mordecai and Wilson. The Penguin anthology brought into focus the question of categorization between oral and scribal modes that was signaled at the outset of the present narrative. This question also relates to the Roach-Rohlehr debate mentioned earlier. Burnett chose to divide the poets into two groups, “The Oral Tradition” and “The Literary Tradition.” While rightly suggesting the increasingly important relationship between these two broadly differing modes in West Indian poetry, this categorization has been challenged as simplistic and misleading. The dichotomy fails to recognize the high degree of interplay and fusion between the modes and the inadequacy of drawing a clear line between the poets on this basis. The question of categorization on an oral / literary axis was enriched, but not settled, by the 1989 appearance of Voiceprint, edited by Stewart Brown, Mervyn Morris, and Gordon Rohlehr. The text describes itself as “an anthology of oral and related poetry from the Caribbean.” The title is rewardingly suggestive, but the category “oral and related” brings its own problems. To speak of an “oral tradition” in West Indian poetry is one thing, but to speak of “oral poetry,” as being clearly distinguished from some other poetry called scribal, is something else. Moreover, if one speaks of “oral and related poetry” (my emphasis) from the West Indies, which poetry would one exclude as not related? The emphasis on orality is implicit, for instance, in the inclusion, in Voiceprint, of Edward Baugh and in the absence of Mark McWatt. These two poets, both from the academic literary environment, came into some prominence with individual first collections at the end of the 1980s. Baugh’s poems collected in A Tale from the Rainforest, 1988, had appeared infrequently in periodicals and anthologies since the early 1960s, but his work had only recently attained critical mass. Like so many other Jamaican poets, he moves between Creole and Standard English. His range spans more or less satirical social comment, wry self-scrutiny, the anatomy of memory, and sensuous celebrations of romantic love. Love, memory, and a resolute tracking, in Interiors, 1988, of the mind and heart are dominant concerns of McWatt. He pursues these concerns through exploration of the figurative resources of the enigmatic, seductive Guyanese interior: rainforest, river, waterfall, gold and the lure / lore of metaphysical El Doradoes. His second collection, The

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Language of El Dorado, 1994, continues the exploration of “interiors” and confirms his gift for combining thoughtfulness and good sense with sensuous immediacy and passion. Of the poets who came to the fore in the early 1990s, the most impressive, apart from Claudia Rankine and Rohan Preston, are Jane King of St Lucia and Kwame Dawes, Earl McKenzie, and Ralph Thompson of Jamaica. Among them they exhibit a vibrant variety of talent. King’s voice, in her Fellow Traveller, 1994, may still be searching for its rhythm, but she works a quietly sharp intelligence, questioning facile conventional attitudes, whether in personal and heterosexual relationships, or in social matters of class and color. Dawes’s quality is more emphatic, characterized by an exuberant energy of metaphor. In this respect his work bears some resemblance to Thompson’s, although there are significant differences of thematic terrain. In Progeny of Air, 1994, Dawes breaks new ground with his vivid account of the stresses of male adolescence in the hot-house context of a high school for boys. He evokes the agony of conscience in the sensitive young man wrestling with the demands of his sexuality and with the casual brutality of his peers who would bend him toward a crude masculinity. The concern with the agon between spirit and flesh strikes a happy bargain with Dawes’s impulse toward novelistic narrative in his The Prophets, 1995, a novel-poem about sex and religion in Kingston’s revivalist subculture. This experiment in form invites comparison with Walcott’s Omeros, to which it bears some obvious affinity. The gift for narrative action in verse, with well-realized physical detail, is also evident in Thompson’s The Denting of a Wave, 1992. Thompson, a contemporary, friend and admirer of Walcott, was late in showing his poetic hand. His tightly crafted poems breathe the wisdom of experience and are sensuous with the texture of experience, as action, as war, as threat of violence, against which the moments of tenderness and calm joy are especially precious. McKenzie, in Against Linearity, 1992, arrests with a luminescently plain speech and a profound simplicity. He does achieve what is often said to be one function of poetry — to make us see the commonplace with fresh eyes and notice the wonder in what we had always looked at but never seen. These collections by King, Dawes, McKenzie, and Thompson allow us to note an important development in publication opportunities for West Indian poets. King’s book was published by Sandberry Press of Kingston, in its Caribbean Poetry Series. This small press, dedicated to Caribbean poetry, began publishing in the late 1980s. The books by Dawes, McKenzie, and Thompson were published by the not much older Peepal Tree Press of Leeds. Dedicated almost exclusively to West Indian prose and poetry, this press has been remarkably prolific for its size. It has published not only new poets but also long-practicing poets who had not hitherto enjoyed publication of individual collections. There was Eric Roach’s posthumous The Flowering Rock, mentioned above. A welcome collection from a lesser known poet of the Roach years is Cecil Gray’s The Woolgatherer, 1994. Another recent and appreciable outlet for West Indian poetry is the little magazine The Caribbean Writer, published out of the St. Croix campus of the University of the Virgin Islands. This enterprise has also begun to publish individual collections. In his 1960 article “Who Killed the King?,” John Hearne expressed his belief that the poet is “the king of artistic expression in any time, the magically endowed insulator, interpreter, between us and the incomprehensible menace of the universe” (Hearne [1960], 137). He was saddened by the apparent failure of West Indian poetry to fulfil the promise that it had shown about two decades earlier: “A detached observer in 1938 would have been justified in predicting

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the emergence of a passionate and beautiful West Indian poetry” (137). The breakthrough of the promise whose fading Hearne regretted had itself been a long enough time in coming. Caribbean poetry rose despite a traditionally unfavorable climate that had fostered the idea that the best poetry was only a rather rarefied evocation of lofty, but innocuous, sentiments not concerned with the serious business of the here and now. A. J. Seymour was not atypical when he wrote: “When I was younger, I sometimes got the feeling from the educated and well placed individuals around me that it was positively indecent that a young Guyanese should want to write poetry. That sort of activity was for a person born in another country. You should read about it happening in England or America but in a colony it meant that you were young and conceited and so should be taken down a peg or two…. I remember one or two persons in 1937 asking me why should I want to publish a book of poems at all. It hadn’t been done, at least not for years and years” (Seymour [1968], 48–49). As Seymour’s statement makes clear, the self-realization of West Indian poetry necessarily entailed the colonial’s redefinition of his relationship to the colonial situation. To an extent, it was a question of audience. The process, however delayed, was inevitable. By 1970, it could be observed, in relation to a poetry reading that took place at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies on January 16, that “the West Indian poet has at last found an audience, his own audience, to which he can speak without distracting anxieties and uncertainties about the relationship between that audience and himself…. [T]he West Indian poet of today does not have to feel himself so much of an upstart as Seymour did in 1937” (Baugh [1971], 18). By the end of the 1980s, the many-branched developments in West Indian poetry fulfilled Hearne’s criteria of “passion” and “beauty.” They represented an exploitation of the creative resources and tensions of a heterogeneous cultural heritage, a reimagining of history and, in Walcott’s terms, borrowed from the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, the Adamic naming of a new world of possibility. The process has also been centrally a drama of language that saw a poetry of “the English in the Caribbean” being transformed into a poetry of the creolization of English in the Caribbean.

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———. 1990. No Language is Neutral. Toronto: Coach House Press. Brathwaite, Edward [Kamau]. 1963. In A Green Night. Rev. In A Green Night by Derek Walcott. The Voice of St Lucia. 13 April: 4. ———. 1967. Rights of Passage. London; New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press. ———. 1968. Masks. London; New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press. ———. 1969. Islands. London; New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press. ———. 1973. The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy. London: Oxford University Press. (Includes Rights of Passage, Masks, and Islands). ———. 1975. Other Exiles. London; New York; Toronto: Oxford University Press. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1976. Black + Blues. Havana: Casa de las Américas. ———. 1977. Mother Poem. Oxford; London; New York: Oxford University Press. ———, ed. 1979. New Poets from Jamaica. Kingston: Savacou. ———. 1982. Sun Poem. Oxford; New York; Toronto; Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Brathwaite, [Edward] Kamau. 1985. Metaphors of Underdevelopment: a Proem for Hernan Cortez. New England Review and Breadloaf Quarterly. 7.4 (Summer): 443–76. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1986-a. Jah Music. Kingston: Savacou Cooperative. ———. 1986-b. Roots. Havana: Casa de las Américas. ———. 1987. X / Self. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Breeze, Jean Binta. 1988. Riddym Ravings and Other Poems. Ed. by Mervyn Morris. London: Race Today Publications. Brown, Beverley. 1982. Dream Diary. Mona: Savacou Co-operative. Brown, Stewart, ed. [1984]. 1992. Second edition. Caribbean Poetry Now. London; Sydney; Auckland; Toronto: Edward Arnold. Brown, Stewart, Mervyn Morris & Gordon Rohlehr, eds. 1989. Voiceprint: an Anthology of Oral and Related Poetry from the Caribbean. Harlow, Essex: Longman. Brown, Stewart and Ian McDonald, eds. 1992. The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry. Oxford: Heinemann. Brown, Wayne. 1972. On the Coast. London: André Deutsch. ———, ed. 1981. Derek Walcott: Selected Poetry. London: Heinemann. ———. 1989. Voyages. Port of Spain: Inprint Caribbean. Burnett, Paula, ed. 1986. The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin. Cameron, Norman E., ed. 1931. Guianese Poetry: Covering the Hundred Years’ Period 1831–1931. Georgetown: the author. (Kraus reprint, 1970). Campbell, George. 1945. First Poems. Kingston: City Printery. Campbell, Owen. 1951. We. Bim. 14 (June): 95. Carter, Martin. 1954. Poems of Resistance from British Guiana. London: Lawrence & Wishart. ———. 1989. Selected Poems. Georgetown: Demerara Publishers. (1997, revised ed. Guyana: Red Thread Women’s Press). Chan, Brian. 1988. Thief with Leaf. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Chapman, M. J. 1833. Barbadoes and Other Poems. London: James Fraser. Collins, Merle. 1985. Because the Dawn Breaks! Poems Dedicated to the Grenadian People. London: BogleL’Ouverture Publications. ———. 1992. Rotten Pomerack. London: Virago. Collymore, Frank A. 1971. Selected Poetry. Bridgetown: Cole’s Printery. Cooper, Wayne F. 1987. Claude McKay. Baton Rouge; London: Louisiana State University Press. Cordle, Edward A. 1903. Overheard. [Bridgetown:] C. F. Cole. Craig, Christine. 1984. Quadrille for Tigers. Sebastopol; Berkeley, CA: Mina Press. Dabydeen, Cyril. c.1972. Poems in Recession. Georgetown, Guyana: the author. ———. 1986. Islands Lovelier Than A Vision. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Dabydeen, David. 1984. Slave Song. Mundelstrup: Dangaroo Press. ———. 1988. Coolie Odyssey. London; Coventry: Hansib Publishing and Dangaroo Press. D’Aguiar, Fred. 1985. Mama Dot. London: Chatto & Windus.

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———. 1989. Airy Hall. London: Chatto & Windus. Dalton, Henry Gibbs. 1853. Tropical Lays, and Other Poems. London: J. Evans. Das, Mahadai. 1988. Bones. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Dawes, Kwame. 1994. Progeny of Air. Leeds: Peepal Tree. ———. 1995. Prophets. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Drayton, Geoffrey. 1950. Negro Divers. Bim. 13 (December): 67. Dunbar, Robert Nugent. 1835. The Cruise: or a Prospect of the West Indian Archipelago. London: James Cochrane & Co. ———. 1853. Illustrations of the Beauties of Tropical Scenery. London: R. Hardwicke. (Includes most of The Cruise). Edwards, Bryan. 1801. An Historical Survey of the Island of Saint Domingo. London: ptd for J. Stockdale. Elliott, Loris, ed 1985. Other Voices: Writings by Blacks in Canada. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. Escoffery, Gloria. 1988. Loggerhead. Kingston: Sandberry Press. Espinet, Ramabai, ed. 1990. Creation Fire: a CAFRA Anthology of Caribbean Women’s Poetry. Toronto: Sister Vision; Tunapuna, Trinidad & Tobago: CAFRA. Ferland, Barbara. 1994. Without Shoes I Must Run. Leeds: the author. Figueroa, John. 1962. Love Leaps Here. n. p: the author. ———, ed. 1966. Caribbean Voices: An Anthology of West Indian Poetry. Vol. 1. Dreams and Visions. London: Evans Brothers. ———, ed. 1970. Caribbean Voices: An Anthology of West Indian Poetry. Vol. 2. The Blue Horizons. London: Evans Brothers. ———. 1976-a. He Will Write Again. New Poetry. 33: 20–26. ———. 1976-b. Ignoring Hurts. Washington, D. C.: Three Continents. Forde, A. N. 1950. Across A Fisherman’s Net. Bim. 13 (December): 33. Froude, J. A. 1888. The English in the West Indies; or, the Bow of Ulysses. London: Longmans, Green. Gonzalez, Anson. 1979. Collected Poems. Diego Martin, Trinidad: The New Voices. Goodison, Lorna. 1980. Tamarind Season. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica. ———. 1986. I Am Becoming My Mother. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. ———. 1988. Heartease. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. ———. 1995. To Us, All Flowers Are Roses. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Goulbourne, Jean. 1977. Actors in the Arena. Kingston: Savacou Publications. Grainger, James, M. D. [1764]. 1766. The Sugar-Cane: A Poem in Four Books. London: for R. & J. Dodsley. Gray, Cecil. 1994. The Woolgatherer. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Hamilton, Judith. 1992. Rain Carvers. Kingston: Sandberry Press. Harris, Claire. 1984. Fables from the Women’s Quarters. Toronto: Williams-Wallace. ———. 1992. Drawing Down A Daughter. Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions. Harris, Wilson. [1954]. 1978. Eternity to Season. London: New Beacon. Hearne, John. 1960. Who Killed the King? An Inquiry into the Death of the West Indian Poet. Focus. 1960: 137–42. Hendriks, A. L. and Cedric Lindo, eds. 1962. The Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature. Kingston: Ministry of Development and Welfare. Hendriks, A. L. 1965. On This Mountain and Other Poems. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1988. To Speak Simply: Selected Poems 1961–1986. Sutton, Surrey: Hippopotamus Press. Herdeck, Donald, ed. 1979. Caribbean Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Dictionary. Washington, D. C.: Three Continents Press. Hippolyte, Kendel. 1986. Bearings. St Lucia: the author. Hopkinson, [Abdur-Rahman] Slade. 1954. The Four and Other Poems. Barbados: Advocate Co. ———, Abdur-Rahman Slade. 1993. Snowscape with Signature: Poems 1952–1992. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Hosack, William. 1876. The Isle of Streams; or the Jamaica Hermit. Edinburgh: MacLachlan & Stewart. Huggins, Horatio Nelson. 1930. Hiroona: An Historical Romance in Poetic Form. Trinidad: Franklin Electric Printery.

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Ismond, Patricia. 1971. Walcott versus Brathwaite. Caribbean Quarterly. 17.3–4: 54–71. Jin, Meiling. c.1986. Gifts From My Grandmother. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. Johnson, Linton Kwesi. 1975. Dread Beat and Blood. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture. Keane, E. McG. 1950. L’Oubli. Barbados: the author. ———. 1951. Some Religious Attitudes in West Indian Poetry. Part 1. Bim. 4.15 (Dec.): 169–74. ———. 1952. Some Religious Attitudes in West Indian Poetry. Part 2. Bim. 4.16 (June): 266–71. Keens-Douglas, Paul. 1976. Tim Tim. Port of Spain: Keensdee Productions. Kellman, Anthony, ed. 1992. Crossing Water: Contemporary Poetry from the English-Speaking Caribbean. Greenfield Center, New York: Greenfield Review Press. King, Jane. 1994. Fellow Traveller. Kingston: Sandberry Press. Lawrence, Walter MacArthur. 1948. The Poet of Guyana. Ed. by P. H. Daly. Georgetown: Daily Chronicle. Lee, John Robert. 1988. Saint Lucian: Selected Poems 1967–1987. Castries: Phelps Publishing Co. Long, Edward. 1774. The History of Jamaica. Vol. 2. London: ptd for T. Lowndes. Lucie-Smith, Edward. 1961. A Tropical Childhood and Other Poems. London: Oxford University Press. McDonald, Donald. 1917. Songs of an Islander. London: Eliot Stock. McDonald, Ian. 1983. Selected Poems. Georgetown, Guyana: The Labour Advocate. ———, ed. 1984. AJS at 70. Georgetown, Guyana: n. pub. ———. 1988. Mercy Ward. Colstock, Cornwall: Peterloo Poets. ———. 1994. Jaffo the Calypsonian. Leeds: Peepal Tree. McFarlane, Basil. 1948. Ascension. Focus: 147. McFarlane, J. E. Clare, ed. 1929. Voices from Summerland: An Anthology of Jamaican Poetry. London: Fowler Wright. ———. 1931. Daphne: A Tale of the Hills of St. Andrew, Jamaica. London: Fowler Wright. ———, ed. 1949. A Treasury of Jamaican Poetry. London: University of London Press. ———. 1956. A Literature in the Making. Kingston: Pioneer Press. ———. 1957. The Magdalen: The Story of a Supreme Love. Kingston: New Dawn Press. McKay, Claude. 1912-a. Constab Ballads. London: Watts. ———. 1912-b. Songs of Jamaica. Kingston: Aston W. Gardner; London: Jamaica Agency. ———. 1920. Spring in New Hampshire. London: Grant Richards. ———. 1922. Harlem Shadows. New York: Harcourt, Brace. ———. 1953. Selected Poems of Claude McKay. San Diego; New York; London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ———. 1979. My Green Hills of Jamaica. Kingston; Port of Spain: Heinemann. McKenzie, Earl. 1992. Against Linearity. Leeds: Peepal Tree. McNeill, Anthony. 1971. Hello Ungod. Baltimore: Peaceweed Press. ———. [1972]. 1975. Reel from “The Life Movie.” Kingston: Savacou Publications. ———. 1979. Credences at the Altar of Cloud. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica. McTurk, Michael (Quow). [1899]. 1949. Essays and Fables in the Vernacular. Ed. by Vincent Roth. Georgetown, British Guiana: Daily Chronicle. McWatt, Mark. 1988. Interiors. Sydney; Mundelstrup; Coventry: Dangaroo Press. ———. 1994. The Language of El Dorado. Sydney; Mundelstrup; Hebden Bridge: Dangaroo Press. Manley, Rachel. c.1978. Poems 2. Wildey, Barbados: the author. Markham, E. A. 1982. Love, Politics & Food. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Von Hallett Publications. ———, ed. 1989. Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe. Marson, Una. 1930. Tropic Reveries. Kingston: the author. ———. 1931. Heights and Depths. Kingston: the author. ———. 1937. The Moth and the Star. Kingston: the author. Monar, Rooplal. 1987. Koker. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Montgomery, James. [1809]. 1810. The West Indies and Other Poems. London: ptd for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown.

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Mordecai, Pamela, and Mervyn Morris, eds. 1980. Jamaica Woman: an Anthology of Poems. Kingston; Port of Spain: Heinemann. Mordecai, Pamela, ed. 1987. From Our Yard: Jamaican Poetry Since Independence. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications. ———. 1989. Journey Poem. Kingston: Sandberry Press. Mordecai, Pam and Betty Wilson, eds. 1992. Women Poets of the Caribbean. Special issue of The Literary Review (35.4). Mordecai, Pamela. 1995. De Man. Kingston: Sandberry Press. Morris, Mervyn. 1967. On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously. Jamaica Journal. 1.1: 69–74. ———, ed. 1971. Seven Jamaican Poets. Kingston: Bolivar. ———. [1973]. 1997. Rev. ed. The Pond. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. ———. 1976. On Holy Week. Kingston: Sangster’s. ———. 1979. Shadowboxing. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. ———. 1992. Examination Centre. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. Naipaul, V. S. 1980. The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad. London: André Deutsch; New York: Knopf. Nichols, Grace. 1983. I Is A Long-Memoried Woman. London: Karnak House. Nugent, Maria. 1907. Lady Nugent’s Journal: Jamaica One Hundred Years Ago. Reprinted from a journal kept by Maria Lady Nugent, from 1801–1805. Ed. by F. Cundall. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica. Philip, Marlene Nourbese. 1989. She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. Charlottetown: Ragweed. Philp, Geoffrey. 1990. Exodus. Kingshill, St Croix: The Caribbean Writer. Pollard, Velma. 1992. Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Preston, Rohan B. 1992. Dreams in Soy Sauce. Chicago: Tia Chucha and Northwestern University Press. Questel, Victor D. and Anson Gonzalez. 1972. Score. Diego Martin, Trinidad: the authors. Questel, Victor D. 1979. Near Mourning Ground. Trinidad & Tobago: The New Voices. Rahim, Jennifer. 1992. Mothers Are Not the Only Linguists and Other Poems. Diego Martin, Trinidad & Tobago: The New Voices. Rankine, Claudia. 1994. Nothing in Nature is Private. Cleveland, Ohio: The Cleveland Poetry Center. Redcam, Tom (Thomas Henry MacDermot). 1951. Orange Valley and Other Poems. Kingston: Pioneer Press. Roach, Eric. 1971. A Type Not Found In All Generations. Trinidad Guardian. 14 July: 6 and 8. Roach, E. M. 1992. The Flowering Rock: Collected Poems 1938–1974. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Roberts, Walter Adolphe. 1919. Pierrot Wounded and Other Poems. New York: Britton Publishing Co. ———. 1928. Pan and Peacocks. Boston: Four Seas. Rohlehr, Gordon. 1972. West Indian Poetry: Some Problems of Assessment. Part 1. Bim. 14.54: 80–88. ———. 1975. A Carrion Time. Bim. 15.58: 92–109. Roopnarine, Rupert. 1988. Web of October. Leeds: Peepal Tree. St John, Bruce. 1962. Bumbatuk 1. Bridgetown: Cedar Press. Salkey, Andrew, ed. 1971. Breaklight: An Anthology of Caribbean Poetry. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 1973. Jamaica. London: Hutchinson. ———. 1979. In the Hills Where Her Dreams Live: Poems for Chile, 1973–1978. Havana: Casa de las Américas. ———. 1980. Away. London; New York: Allison & Busby. Scott, Dennis. 1968. Bennett on Bennett (interview with Louise Bennett). Caribbean Quarterly. 14.1 & 2: 97–101. ———. 1973. Uncle Time. n. p.: University of Pittsburgh Press. ———. 1982. Dreadwalk. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon. ———. 1989. Strategies. Kingston: Sandberry Press. Senior, Olive. 1985. Talking of Trees. Kingston: Calabash. ———. 1994. Gardening in the Tropics. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Seymour, A. J., ed. 1954. An Anthology of Guianese Poetry. Georgetown: Kyk-over-al. (Kyk-over-al. 6.19. [YearEnd 1954]). ———, ed. 1961. Themes of Song: An Anthology of Guianese Poetry. Georgetown, British Guiana: n.p. ———. 1968. Edgar Mittelholzer: The Man and His Work. Georgetown: National History & Arts Council, Ministry of Education.

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Simpson, Louis. 1963. At the End of the Open Road. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. ———. 1988. Collected Poems. New York: Paragon House. Singleton, John. 1767. A General Description of the West Indian Islands. Barbados: ptd by George Esmond & William Walker for the author. (Republished 1777, 2nd ed., as A Description of the West Indies: A Poem in Four Books. London: James Marks). Smith, Michael. 1986. It A Come. London: Race Today Publications. Thompson, Ralph. 1992. The Denting of a Wave. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Virtue, Vivian L. 1938. Wings of the Morning. Kingston, Jamaica: New Dawn Press. Walcott, Derek. 1948. 25 Poems. Barbados: Advocate Co. ———. 1949. Epitaph for the Young. Barbados: Advocate Co. ———. 1951. Poems. Kingston: City Printery Ltd. ———. 1962. In A Green Night. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1965. The Castaway and Other Poems. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 1969. The Gulf. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1971. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1973. Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1976. Sea Grapes. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1979. The Star-Apple Kingdom. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1981-a. The Fortunate Traveller. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1981-b. Selected Poetry. Ed. by Wayne Brown. London: Heinemann. ———. 1984. Midsummer. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1986. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1987. The Arkansas Testament. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; London: Faber & Faber. ———. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; London: Faber & Faber. Watts, Margaret, ed. 1990. Washer Woman Hangs Her Poems in the Sun: Poems by Women of Trinidad and Tobago. Maraval, Trinidad & Tobago: the editor. Weekes, Nathaniel. 1754. Barbadoes, a Poem. London: ptd by J. & J. Lewis for R. & J. Dodsley, Pall-mall. Williams, Milton Vishnu. 1986. Years of Fighting Exile: Collected Poems 1955–1985. Leeds: Peepal Tree. Wong, Orlando [Oku Onuora]. 1978. Echo. Kingston: Sangster’s.

Drama

Theatralizing the Anglophone Caribbean, 1492 to the 1980s ROB CANFIELD

University of Arizona

Prologue I make the cry my maker cannot make With his great round mouth: he must blow through mine! … But wherefore rough, why cold and ill at ease? Aha, that is a question! Ask, for that, What knows — the something over Setebos That made Him, or He, may be, found and fought, Worsted, drove off and did to nothing, perchance, There may be something quiet o’er His head, Out of his reach, that feels nor joy nor grief. Robert Browning, “Caliban upon Setebos”

Robert Browning’s poetic imaging of Caliban’s metaphysical brooding upon the nature of the transcendental seems especially fitting as an epigraph for a rereading of anglophone Caribbean theater. More than the typical Browning dramatic monologue, this poem serves as a paradigmatic reenactment of the problematics of theater in the West Indies, of the dialectics in the construction of Caribbean theater in general, and of the crux of the relationships that demand centerstage in Caribbean performances: the relation between the master of the image and the images of self-mastery, between the colonizer’s script and the role of the colonized, between the conquests of the stage and the enactments of resistance. Browning’s location of his Victorian revisions of the “primitive,” of theodicy and bourgeois morality into the mouth of Caliban, and hence onto the Caribbean, which has been, for centuries now, a topos for cultural representations, seems more than simply dramatic irony. In a sense, this poem, too, becomes part of the histories of Caribbean theater as it indicates, in its metatheatrical nature, the dynamics of theatrical representation in what Antonio Benítez-Rojo terms, in his The Repeating Island, 1989, this “meta-archipelago” of the Caribbean, this site of struggle that has been a stage since those initial moments of mythic discovery. While Caliban may remain chained to his mask in this poem, he can still liberate our understandings not only of colonial theatrics but of the engenderings of postcolonial theaters and rituals of self-expression which reclaim these stages in the twentieth century. Such a reorientation of a theory of theater in the Caribbean must first move beyond the notion of theater as simply dramaturgical device, as genre or product of technique, and instead perceive theater as a process of signification, a cultural “contact zone” (to borrow a term from Mary Louise Pratt) through which a community reinvents itself via a dialectic between actor and audience and author / director. The Brechtian conceptualization of the stage as sociopolitical

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forum can then be transformed, as many Caribbean playwrights and filmmakers have reworked Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, and other Western theorists of drama, to realize the Caribbean stage as a cultural ontological space upon which the foundational ideologies and systems of representation play the leading roles. On this stage, cultures can legitimize and even revolutionize images and identities, voices and languages, the very roles and relations that constitute the socioeconomic realities of the Caribbean. Hence, while Brecht and Artaud become crucial in the development of Caribbean theater, I am more interested here in the specific colonial implications of Eurocentrisms underlying “Western” theatrics such as Artaud’s call for “No More Masterpieces!” (Wiles [1980], 130), especially as Caribbean playwrights move beyond these Western theorists to account for the function of theater in a locale that has, for so long, been a literal master-piece, either paradise or devil’s island. Rather than decontextualize both Western drama and Caribbean drama in an attempt to discuss these “histories,” theories, and realities in terms of influences and appropriations, I turn to Caribbean and to postcolonial theorists and playwrights for delineations of theater’s cultural role. As Juris Silenieks notes in his article on francophone Caribbean theater in volume I of this History of Literature in the Caribbean, 1994, critics such as Edouard Glissant posit readings of Caribbean theater which not only reposition the very act of theatrical production but also highlight a continuum of cultural processes in tandem with colonialism and decolonization, imperialism and revolution, conquest and “creolity.” In “Theater, Consciousness of the People,” a chapter from his Caribbean Discourse, 1989, Glissant comments, “And so we enact for ourselves theatrical scenes, on the stage of our continued wandering, such that it can appear ridiculous to recommend to us the value of that form of self-analysis provided by theatrical activity. But the simple ‘street scene’ does not provide us with the vital mechanism of the popular consciousness; in it energy intensifies into nothing but an everyday delirium. The street scene as a rule does not create popular consciousness but reinforces it and contributes to structuring it in those places where it already exists — that is, really, for a community already secure in its history and its traditions. Or else it is also an everyday manifestation of theatralization that in the street feeds on our impulses. The theatralization of our impulses makes theatrical activity useless. The creation of theater ‘in real life’ makes it unnecessary to have theater as spectacle in a chosen arena. Community theater, on the other hand, diverts energy from the individual manifestation of delirium or from the collective tendency to the theatrical, so as to orient it towards the shaping of a popular consciousness. But individual delirium and collective theatralization, as forms of cultural resistance, are the first catalysts of this consciousness” (Glissant [1989], 195). The emphasis here upon theater as a principal form of cultural production, upon “theatralization” as more than simply the theatrical but as cultural signifier and socioideological ritual, and upon the significance of these rituals in the struggle for Caribbean self-representation forces critics to reorient a theory of Caribbean theater and its relations to systems of power, to mechanisms of control as well as to movements toward liberation. Glissant continues in this article to develop this trope of theatralization, elaborating the evolution of national theater in the Caribbean (the French Antilles particularly) as a process of mimetic conflict centered on the images and identities which emerge out of the initial “ruptures” of the colonial / imperial experience. He delineates this particular moment in Caribbean theatrical histories: “The rupture of the slave trade, then the experience of slavery, introduces between

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blind belief and clear consciousness a gap that we have never finished filling. The absence of representation, of echo, of any sign, makes this emptiness forever yawn under our feet…. The exploitation of this kind of colony requires depersonalization. At the servile stage, the slave, after having been deported, must be mentally dislocated. The Caribbean person must be persuaded that he is different (in order to prevent him from representing himself) … It is only through an evolution of the historical consciousness that a transition can be achieved, from the beliefs before the rupture, to the realities of deportation, to the consciousness of the people” (201–02). Despite Glissant’s rhetoric of rupture and dislocation, and despite both his “negative” treatments of the role of the intelligentsia (as Juris Silenieks points out) and his problematic discussions of the masses as mimetically inept, he hints at a moment when Caribbean theatralizations might become aware of their own role as cultural productions. Via this awareness, they could engender a critical consciousness that might, for Glissant, bridge the fissure separating the Caribbean’s varied communities and individuals. It is this “theater of disorder,” as Glissant terms it, which continues processes of hybridization in order to create a “theater of creolity” more responsible to Caribbean realities. He foreshadows the beginnings of such theatralizations: “A theater springing from a ‘collective politics’… is emerging everywhere in South America with the same provisional characteristics: a schematic conception of ‘character’ (there is no ‘profound’ psychological examination), exemplary situations, historical implications, audience participation, elementary decor and costume, importance of physical gesture … it is possible that a new art form is in the process of being shaped” (220). In light of Glissant’s trope of theatralization and his celebration of a “theater of creolity,” we might recontextualize a theory of Caribbean theater to revision the cultural production enacted upon these stages, and, like Browning’s Caliban, attempt to inquire into the metarepresentational nature of Caribbean theater to reveal its cultural implications. In the dramas of the West Indies, as well as in Puerto Rico and in Haiti, a new theater has begun to rename these rituals of cultural signification, to infiltrate the master-stages that have dissembled the Caribbean, and to struggle for critical reinterpretation of the role of theater. In plays such as Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, 1978, and Trevor Rhone’s Two Can Play, 1986, Sylvia Wynter’s Maskerade, 1971, and Zeno Obi Constance’s The Ritual, 1985, we may read the emergence of what Kamau Brathwaite terms “nation performance” (Brathwaite [1984], 46) socially inclusive in its performance style and subject matter. More crucial is a metatheater, spotlighted in each play, that focuses on the very act of theatralization. Once theater itself becomes the main actor on the stage, the audience / spectators not only become included in the performance but, more importantly, engaged as the co-agents in the reconstruction of the ritual. Like the linguistic processes of transforming French “marbre” into English “marble,” this theater, which I will term throughout the theater of dissimilation, has begun in its creolizing potentialities to repossess Caribbean stages, finally giving voice not only to the masses of Caribbean peoples traditionally misrepresented in master-scripts but to the very mechanisms that continue to erase and denigrate, enslave and encrypt. That such a revisioning depends, to a great extent, upon the methodologies of postcolonial criticism and the languages of cultural critique is a rather obvious point by now. Yet, while critics and scholars have, as Silenieks points out, realized the sense that “the colonial situation is essentially a dramatic one of binary, conflictual oppositions, and that theater is the genre par

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excellence to convey the experience of the colonized” (Silenieks [1994], 517), not much has been said, to my knowledge, about the theatrical nature of postcolonial critical discourse. Not enough dialogue exists regarding the connections between the emergence of this discourse and the contemporaneous development of postcolonial theaters like those in the West Indies and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Our critical conflation of theatralizing tendencies perhaps evinces a further significance to this study. Just as Caribbean playwrights in the 1980s seem to turn to issues of representation and of cultural imperialism, so, too, do critics initiate discussions that metaphorize colonial / imperial relations in theatrical terms: masks, mirrors, mimicries. Edward Said’s statement that “culture is a sort of theater where political and ideological causes engage one another” (Said [1993], xiii), is just one of many examples of the trope of theatralization and of the synergistic relationship between critical discourse and theatrical stage. Critics such as Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins have begun to pinpoint the implications of a metatheatrical movement in the anglophone Caribbean in their Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, 1997. Highlighting metatheater as part of a larger theatrical resistance, Gilbert and Tompkins comment: “Metatheatre reminds us that any performance stages the necessary provisionality of representation. Although often playfully postmodern as well as strategic, it should not be seen as simply part of the postmodern intertextual experiment. By developing multiple self-reflexive discourses through role-playing, role doubling / splitting, plays within plays, interventionary frameworks, and other metatheatrical devices, post-colonial works interrogate received models of theatre at the same time as they illustrate, quite self-consciously, that they are acting out their own histories / identities in a complex replay that can never be finished or final” (Gilbert and Tompkins [1997], 23) My own employment of theatrical language throughout this essay, then, is not only intentional, but also indicative of the significance of theater as the central cultural ritual in the decolonizations of our own critical endeavors.

1. In the history books the discoverer sets a shod foot on virgin sand, kneels, and the savage also kneels from his bushes in awe. Such images are stamped on the colonial memory, such heresy as the world’s becoming holy from Crusoe’s footprint or the imprint of Columbus’ knee … The poets of the “new Aegean,” of the Isles of the Blest, the Fortunate Isles, of the remote Bermudas, of Prospero’s isle, of Crusoe’s Juan Fernandez, of Cythera, of all those rocks named like the beads of a chaplet, they know that the vision of paradise wrecks here. Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History”

To begin constructing a historiography of theatralizations of the anglophone Caribbean, we must look beyond initial performances and “original” theater-houses to the beginnings of the “historical” Caribbean, the first European representations that (from the colonizer’s perception) created the New World as empty space awaiting the enactment of Old World dramas. Earliest colonial narratives, myths, legends, and discourses seem replete with representations and imagings of these “new” topoi and their native inhabitants. Yet, the indigenous peoples are from the outseit misrepresented and misimagined. For European imperialists and playwrights alike, they would play the roles necessitated by colonial policies and ideologies, conquering mythoi,

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and justifying world visions. Mary Louise Pratt’s designation of the “chief coordinates of the text of Euroimperialism” as “redundancy, discontinuity, and unreality” (Pratt [1992], 2) seems particularly appropriate to the theatrical texts that enacted these misimagings, and which would stage these unrealities in order to reaffirm European illusions of superiority, mastery, sovereignty and European codes of morality and social hierarchy. In this sense, the theater of the West Indies begins with the master-script and with a white masque, a dissemblance of the New World and a disfiguration of Caribbean identities. Perhaps the most crucial, and one of the earliest, of these theaters of dissemblance emerges in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As Peter Hulme demonstrates in his Colonial Encounters, 1992, Shakespeare’s play has recently begun to signify more than merely an Elizabethan fantasy of the threat of usurpation and the desire for monarchic restoration, as critics have begun to unpack the very Caribbean dynamics of Shakespeare’s enactment. Hulme clarifies the significance of this play for both initial English entries into the Caribbean and for histories of Caribbean theatralizations: “It is a period of wonderful stories: of Ralegh’s discovery of the ‘large rich and beautiful’ empire of Guiana in 1595; of the loss of the Olive Branch in the Caribbee Islands in 1605 and the reappearance of several of its crew in England many years later; of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture in the Bermudas in 1609 and the miraculous survival of its crew and passengers; of the terrible massacre by the Indians of over a third of the English settlers in Virginia in 1622, from which the colony somehow recovered. From this time of disaster and heroism two stories in particular have survived and prospered to such an extent that they have become emblematic of the founding years of English colonialism: Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, first performed in 1611, where Columbus’s ‘canibal’ makes his anagrammatic appearance, and the story of Pocahontas and John Smith, first told by Smith in 1624” (Hulme [1992], 90). Hulme continues to argue the misrepresentational nature of The Tempest’s enactments, the sense in which this play is ultimately about misrepresentation, from the “double inscription” of Caliban out of both Columbus’s borrowed Herodotean discourse and Prospero’s own narratives of the island and of Sycorax, to the performance of the Jacobean masque played on this “interlude” of an island, to Prospero’s direction of his own righteous recentering which reorients the anarchies of Alonso and Antonio and repositions the aristocratic code in proper, and Prosperan, fashion. Most importantly, Hulme clarifies the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as paradigmatic not only of the English colonial relationship, but also of the mimetic relationship that was to dominate the West Indies for the first three centuries of its theatralizations. Hulme comments: “The traditional identification of Prospero with Shakespeare, though totally spurious, half grasps the crucial point that Prospero, like Shakespeare, is a dramatist and creator of theatrical effects. The analogies between the play he stages and The Tempest itself are close and important” (115). Again, in reference to Prospero’s (and Shakespeare’s, we might add) casting of Caliban: “Prospero’s play is in fact a subtle instrument of revenge and Caliban occupies a crucial role in it, though this is a fact kept hidden from Caliban as long as possible: he, like the other ‘actors,’ is not aware that he is in a play at all, let alone aware of the nature of his part” (120). The metatheater of The Tempest evidences more than simply a recentering of Prosperan power, then, as it enacts its conflicts upon the stages of both the West Indies (or, a dissembled image of some such marginal and presumably uninhabited space) and Caliban himself. It makes both into a blurred topos and denies any actual West Indian enactments, especially of “native” revolution.

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Moreover, in the roles created for Caliban by Prospero, The Tempest serves to disfigure the “colonized,” theatralizing an image of the “native,” the slave, or the ambiguous colonial Other not only as monstrously incapable of civilization but also as mimetically incapable of selfrepresentation. Caliban (and the others as well) depend upon Prospero’s productions, or so the play would have us believe, despite the fact, as Hulme highlights, that these productions are also “illusions,” themselves misrepresentations, Prospero’s playing at the margins to reestablish his own centrality. Similarly, other English playwrights disfigure the West Indies as they perform European ideological conflicts over the constructed spaces of Caribbean images and identities, perpetuating these early theaters of dissemblance and the discourses of othering enacted through them. John Gay’s Polly, published in 1729 as the sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, 1727, and as a continuation of its anti-capitalist and anti-Old World implications, brings Polly Peachum and Macheath to the West Indies, to the marginal space upon which Gay can enact his own performances on the margins. Like The Tempest, Polly is a play about misrepresentation. It opens with a discussion between Poet and Players concerning the responsibilities of proper representation, the mimetic dichotomies between the true and the false, and the relation of these dichotomies to myths of social hierarchies, class pretense, and European hypocrisies. We quickly realize that such a prologue appropriately sets the stage for Gay’s attacks on English socioeconomic systems and upon the masks that justify them, as well as for his satire on colonial duplicity and creole mimicry of that duplicity. Such attacks would seem a subversion of the theatralizations of The Tempest and of the relationship between Prospero and Caliban were it not for the fact that Gay repositions this colonial relationship around two central idealizations: the figure of Polly, who chooses not to play the role of the disguised in order to reorient, as Prospero does, all of these hierarchies of signification, but instead to escape what Gay may see as the utter contamination of any signifiers from the Old World and to rewrite the Prosperan relationship with the figure of Cawawkee, the noble savage who proves (along with his father, Pohetohee) to be the only other character worthy of Gay’s admiration. In a sense, then, Gay attempts to transform the Prospero-Caliban relationship of master-playwright, who conscripts his slave-actor into a role and enactment ordained by the very gods of Olympos, as well as by Christian Providence, into an eighteenth-century fantasy of idealized, even romanticized, transcendence of misrepresentation — The coupling of Cawawkee and Polly at the end of the play is an enactment ordained by the social contract, echoing similar enactments, like that of Crusoe and Friday. That Gay’s idealizations dissemble both native and woman as topoi for the inscription of his satiric intent is crucial to our understanding of the development of these early English theatralizations of the West Indies, for even in the desire to expose and escape the relations of power at the heart of European social and colonial dialectics, Gay ends in perpetuating the imperialist and mercantilist dependencies upon constructs of the very identities so dispossessed by these systems of power. Polly becomes Gay gone native, able to emerge victorious against the Maroon insurgents led by Macheath in blackface, to condemn Macheath finally for his duplicity, and to cement an alliance (the only stable oath in the play) to Pohetohee and the natives. Cawawkee becomes a projection of the tenets of “civilization,” of Gay’s moral alternative to the immorality of his own society and to Macheath himself, whom Cawawkee threatens to supplant, as he proposes to Polly at the beginning of the play’s final dance. Again,

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the West Indian identities have become every bit as disfigured as Caliban in his “monstrosity” and “savagery.” Yet, in Gay’s portrayal, Maroons and Arawaks transform into embodiments of the “new” eighteenth-century fears and desires of English colonists, imperialists, and playwrights, with the blacker part played by the blackguard who must be condemned by the purity of both Pohetohee and Polly, socializing the real centrifugal threat lurking behind this play just as Caliban, ultimately, is socialized by Prospero’s wand. The threat is not Polly gone native, for she and Cawawkee have no economy; the threat is Macheath gone Maroon, for he and they do. If The Tempest and Polly represent two examples, divergent and yet so similar, of the theater of dissemblance and the varieties of its theatralizations of West Indian otherings and misimagings so central to the master-script, we might add one final play, Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian, 1771. It completes the problematic mimetic triangle of West Indian identities and images in and on these early stages of colonial enactment. While Shakespeare and Gay choose to manipulate the realities of the New World and its inhabitants to perform their reaffirmations or subversions of Old World codes and systems of power, Cumberland locates another problematic colonial relationship, “that between colonizer and Mother Country” (Houston [1992], 55), by dislocating the colonial Belcour from the West Indies and placing him within the empire and upon its stage. In another binary relationship that mirrors those in The Tempest and Polly, Belcour, other by dint of his estrangement from what Houston terms the center of the Mother Country, attempts to earn his role in the economy of the play by “proving a wise investment” to his father, Stockwell, and thus a valid representative of the wealth of his English patronage. Overcoming his initial theatralizations as a colonial buffoon, Belcour must now overcome his mimetic double, Charles, marry Charles’s sister Louisa with the aid of a providential inheritance, and prove his worth to his father who then reveals to Belcour his identity and reaffirms his place in the genealogies of the cast and in the ranks of other eighteenth-century gentlemen. Houston clarifies the significances of such a theatralization for English audiences: “Thus The West Indian deals with larger relationships that parallel the personal ones of the characters in the play. Obviously, Cumberland has his finger on the pulse of the time period, because the play was very popular. According to The London Stage, The West Indian opened on the 19th of Jan., 1771, and ‘ran for 28 crowded nights.’ When compared with other plays that opened that year, The West Indian enjoyed remarkable success. The 18th Century English audience likely found it entertaining to watch an ‘other’ stoke the fires of their national identity onstage” (Houston [1992], 58). What makes The West Indian even more significant to our histories of West Indian theatralizations is that it also serves as an example of the earliest plays performed in the anglophone Caribbean. No doubt Belcour’s enactment pleased and even comforted the colonial elite that comprised the first West Indian audiences. Kole Omotoso, in his insightful study The Theatrical into Theater: A Study of the Drama and Theatre of the English-speaking Caribbean, 1982, emphasizes the confluences of these initial productions: “In Barbados in April 1810 a meeting of like-minded peoples was held in Bridgetown to raise funds for a theatre. The foundation stone of that theatre was laid in July of that same year. On January 1, 1812, the theatre opened with the comedy entitled The West Indian and a farce called The Spoiled Child” (Omotoso [1982], 17). That Cumberland’s play is itself a foundation stone in the theatralizations of West Indians becomes even more disturbing after our realization of its misrepresentations. Omotoso delineates the dark ironies in these “original” performances: “There are servants, black

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and white, in the play and one wonders who played these parts when the play was first performed in the West Indies. It would have been interesting to read the reaction of slaves to a play whose action revolves around the inheritance from the hard labours of slavery” (19). Omotoso’s comment leads us into another facet of the theater of dissemblance and into another mask of the master-script. While English playwrights disfigured the Caribbean on the master-stage in the Mother Country, so, too, did the first theaters in the West Indies enact predominantly English productions of colonial misimagings. Local military groups and travelling companies from both England and America produced performances of plays ranging from Shakespearean tragedies to Sheridan, from Rowe’s Royal Convert, 1707, to George Lillo’s The London Merchant, 1731, from Cumberland to George Coleman the Younger’s 1787 rendition of Inkle and Yarico. Omotoso provides evidence of this representation of master-scripts and their relation to historical beginnings of West Indian theater: “The most important source of theatrical entertainment for the West Indian colonies came from travelling theatres which visited from England and the American colonies. Many undistinguished English companies came to play their Shakespeare’s and current melodramas in the colonies and they were usually augmented with local talent. It is reported that ‘a company of strolling puppeteers, come from England, set up their fairy drama at Bridgetown, where for the Novelty of the Matter, they found a good market. From thence they went to the leeward islands and thence home.’ The dates on which many of the island colonies had their own first theatres indicate the prevalence, during this period, of the visiting English players. These dates have been given as 1682 for Jamaica, 1729 for Barbados, 1788 for Antigua, 1832 for St. Lucia and about 1820 for Trinidad” (Omotoso [1982], 16). Perhaps most intriguing in these imported theaters and exported theatralizations is the fact that American theater during the colonial period literally began and developed, as critics such as Omotoso and Ivy Baxter demonstrate, in the West Indies. Baxter traces this further transplantation of master-stages in her Arts of an Island: “Jamaica, in Seilhamer’s opinion, had always been ‘the retreat of colonial players.’ It was here that Douglas recruited his first company in 1758, and to this island he returned in 1762 to recruit his second company, which he took to Philadelphia in 1774–75. Between 1745 and 1749 John Moody, who was later to become the great comedian of Garrick’s London farces, had a successful company in Jamaica. News of these successes led William Hallam to form a company and to attempt his theatrical campaign in North America and the colonies. Hallam’s brother, Lewis, directed the company, which played first in Williamsburg, Virginia and then in New York, Philadelphia and Jamaica. When they arrived in Jamaica, the two companies united” (Baxter [1970], 249). These initial “retreats,” then, became an additional component in the initial dissemblings of West Indian theater: the marginal locus for the original disseminations of American theater and a test-market for the reproduction of master-scripts from the Mother Country. Baxter again delineates: “When Lewis Hallam came to Jamaica with his company in 1774, they performed at the Kingston Theatre. No record of the opening night exists. However, the types of plays presented were comedies by contemporary English playwrights, individual scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, like Garrick’s adaptation of the sheep-shearing scene from The Winter’s Tale, entitled ‘Florizel and Perdita,’ and full-length Shakespeare plays. Performances always had, as well, an item or two of pantomime, comic imitation, or dance” (251). He continues to emphasize the particular economics of these theatralizations: “Hallam was anxious to be up to the minute. Sheridan’s comedies were very

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popular in England at this time, so he tried to get them onto the stage in Jamaica as fast as he could. The Duenna, The Rivals, and School for Scandal seem to have actually been played in Jamaica before they were performed on the American mainland” (251). Such popular billings may seem rather innocuous given the sense that any nascent theatrical company must play to its audience and for a particular market. Yet, as we realize the further problematics of these specific companies, these specific audiences, and their precise histories, the duplicities behind these dissemblances become essential to our understanding of West Indian theatralizations. Henry Fowler, in his “History of Theatre in Jamaica,” spotlights the villain: “The date of 1774 for the building of the Kingston Theatre is significant, for as the American Revolution approached, the theatres in America faced crippling opposition from Puritan influences, and theatrical managers sought more congenial and favourable environment. The campaign against the theatre in America culminated in the resolution passed by the Continental Congress in 1778 that ‘presenting playhouses and theatrical entertainment has a fatal tendency to divert the minds of the people from due attention to the means necessary for the defence of their country’; and Congress further decreed ‘that any person holding an office under the United States who shall act, promote, encourage or attend such plays shall be deemed unworthy to hold such an office and shall be accordingly dismissed.’ The result was that the American Company of Comedians, driven out of America, presented in Jamaica during the period 1774–84 annual seasons of unprecedented theatrical activity” (Fowler [1968], 54). Hallam’s production of popular English plays on the margins of this appropriated stage belies the ideologies of these initial representations and the politics, perhaps, of Revolutionary American theater. Moreover, though, the ironies of these outcast and marooned theatre groups and the discourses of erasure which comprise Congressional censure seem especially dark in light of the realities of the West Indies in the eighteenth century. That such theaters would be banished from a decolonizing effort and from a struggle for freedom and equality only to replay such imagings within and upon the very arenas of colonial acquisition and acculturation indicates not only a perpetuation of dissembling theatralizations, but also the initial rumblings of a relationship between American theaters that would manifest itself in future supplantations.

2. That these simple mummeries sometimes approached a dramatic form is evidenced in a further account of Christmas revels, this time in Jamaica. Bayley, an English officer’s son who lived for four years in the West Indies during the 1820s, quotes a Mr. Barclay, who in 1823 spent Christmas on an estate in Jamaica where he experienced “a novelty I had never before witnessed, in a rude representation of some passages of Richard III which they made sufficient farcical. The Joncanoe men, disrobed of part of their paraphernalia, were the two heroes and fought, not for a kingdom but a queen, whom the victor carried off in triumph. Richard calling out ‘a horse! a horse!’ etc. was laughable enough … How the negroes had acquired even the very imperfect knowledge they seemed to have of the play, we could form no idea.” Errol Hill, Trinidad Carnival

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If the early histories of West Indian theatralizations are replete with the dissemblances of transported imagings, the misrepresentations of Caribbean identities and realities, and the appropriations of this centrifugal stage for the recenterings of European ideologies of power, so, too, does the trope of theatralization permeate the very “natural histories” constructed so unnaturally out of the West Indies to legitimize, codify, and articulate the righteousness of English dominance in the region during the nineteenth century. Moreover, as English pretensions toward a new notion of “civilization” began to influence and inscribe revised colonial agendas, the roles afforded to West Indians, particularly to the majority of slaves and mulatto populations, also became revised to reposition the necessities of colonial dependency and master-slave hierarchies around “new” images. These images included not only devilish actors lurking in transgressive alcoves or conjuring through their performances visions of occult sabbaths and pagan dionysia, but also mimetically inferior “primitives” struggling to ape their master’s scripts and to image themselves with the masks of European culture. Perhaps not surprisingly, these taxonomies and histories tend to recenter themselves in central passages regarding slave theaters, particularly those practiced on the plantations themselves, and around the rituals of creole society in the West Indies, such as carnival and canboulay. It is as if such spectacles were not only the most affronting to the imperial eyes of these travelers, documenters, and military personnel, but also paradigmatic of the dichotomies and developments of these creole societies. Bayley’s now somewhat famous commentary, included in his account of his four-year stint in the West Indies, for example, elucidates the sense that while slaves might impersonate the roles of English nationalizing theater, their very nature makes them incapable of anything but misrepresentation, as if blackness also meant being devoid of any knowledge of cultural expression. Doubly enslaved by metaphors of mimetic inferiority and the always emphasized mimicry of white plantocracy and European metropolitan imagings, the slaves painted in the bacchanalian portraits of these “historical” spectacles become the central images of the new canvas of English epistemes and colonial endeavors. We read of Monk Lewis’s fascinations with staging Rowe’s Fair Penitent, 1703, a medley involving Home’s Douglas, 1757, and much more: “A play was now proposed to us, and, of course, accepted. Three men and a girl … made their appearance; the men dressed like the tumblers at Astley’s, the lady very tastefully in white and silver, and all with their faces concealed by masks of thin blue silk; and they proceeded to perform the quarrel between Douglas and Glenalvon, and the fourth act of ‘The Fair Penitent’ … and then there came something about green and white flowers, and a Duchess, and a lily-white pig, and going on board of a dashing man of war; but what they all had to do with the Duke, or with each other, I could not even make a guess” (quoted in Brathwaite [1971], 300). Lewis’s reduction of such slave theaters into displays of slave inferiority and mimetic ineptitude would be echoed by other colonial travelers. Indeed, the central act of Maria Nugent’s diaries is another reproduction of the implicitly superior drama of the empire which Nugent, like Lewis, reduces to the rhetoric of paternalistic amusement: “Then there was a party of actors — … a little child was introduced, supposed to be a king, who stabbed all the rest. They told me that some of the children who appeared were to represent Tipoo Saib’s [sic] children, and the man was Henry the Fourth” (299). As such “incomprehensible” mimicries confounded these travelers and historians, so, too, did the spectacles in the streets and in the fields enthrall and possess these surveying monarchs,

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as Mary Louise Pratt might term them. Accounts such as those by Bryan Edwards, from 1801–1819, give further evidence to the predominance of theatrical ritual as a focal point for these nineteenth century revisionings: “The town was like a very gay fair, with booths, furnished with everything good to eat and fine to wear … Returning to the villa we were greeted by a party which frightened the boys. It was the Moco Jumbie and his flute. The Jumbo was on stilts, with a head mounted on the actor’s head which was concealed; the music was from two baskets, like strawberry baskets, with little bells within, shook in time. The swordsman danced with an air of menace, the musician was comical, and Jumbo assumed the ‘antic terrible’ and was very active on his stilts” (quoted in Hill [1972], 12). Similarly, that young English officer writes to Bayley about his experience at the carnival of 1827: “I wish, Bayley, you had been here in the time of the carnival; you have no idea of the gaiety of the place in that season. Ovid’s Metamorphoses were nothing compared to the changes that took place in the persons of the Catholics of Trinidad. High and low, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, all found masking suits for the carnival. A party of ladies, having converted themselves into a party of brigands, assailed me in my quarters and nearly frightened me out of my wits. I was going to cut and run when Ensign * — — who was with me, not knowing the joke, and thinking there were so many devils come to take him before his time, drew his sword” (quoted in Hill [1972], 10). The officer’s final lines indicate both the disturbing realities of these masquerades and the “nature” of nineteenth-century fears of rebellious “devils,” echoing the tensions in creole societies over the imminent revolutions of the dispossessed and enslaved fueled by the revolution of 1804 in Haiti and the Maroon Wars in Jamaica in the mid-eighteenth century. That such roles and misrepresentations bastioned other ideologies of colonial othering and discourses of difference, further dissembling the West Indies in much the same way that travel narratives of Mexico of the period would project a “dark,” “wild,” and eroticized Mexican identity via a centering on the spectacle of the bullfight, seems crucial to our understandings of the mechanisms of these imperialist discourses and enactments. Even more crucial, though, is the sense that what was being misrepresented was, perhaps, the first truly West Indian theater, a performance of another colonial process at work on these plantations and dancing in these streets: an initial theater of creolity which would threaten not only the white plantocracy and its attendant mulatto middle class, but also the monology of the master-script. In league with the resistances in Haiti and the Maroon War in Jamaica, then, a further resistance was emerging in the West Indies which would sound the abeng for future generations of playwrights and performers in the twentieth century, and in the 1980s particularly. Rituals such as carnival, joncanoe, canboulay, as well as pocomania and other “folk” traditions, represented a creolization, as Kamau Brathwaite has termed it, and a dialogization of the “official” theaters, roles, discourses which had dominated this stage. Once a spectacle reserved for the white planters who could, like Prospero, play in the centrifugal by donning the black face of their slaves and masquerading in the role of the oppressed, rituals like canboulay were gradually inverted and inhabited by the masses of West Indian laborers who would, in rather Bakhtinian terms, supplant the “official” with the “unofficial,” the dominant with the subaltern, in a carnivalesque reversal of roles and in a reaffirmation of creole syncretic and mimetic development. Scholars such as Errol Hill help define these early slave theaters and their postEmancipation successors as significant enactments in the struggle for Afro-Caribbean survival

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and in the battle for West Indian representation. Hill quotes a planter’s rendition of the early canboulay ceremonies: “At the time carnival flourished, the elite of society was masked or disguised. The favorite costume of the ladies was the graceful and costly ‘mulatress’ of the period, while gentlemen adopted that of the garden Negro, in Creole, ‘negue jadin,’ or the black field slave. At carnival time our mothers and even grandmothers have danced the belair to the African drum whose sounds did not offend their dainty ears, and our fathers and grandfathers danced the bamboula, the ghouba, and the calinda … Sometimes also the negue jadin united in bands would proceed on evenings to the cannes brulees. Their splendid march with torches through the town streets imitated what actually took place on the estates when a plantation was on fire” (Hill [1972], 11). Hill continues to delineate the dialogies of post-Emancipation rituals: “Emancipation became effective in Trinidad on August 1, 1834, and the carnival of that year already exhibits signs of a takeover by working-class elements that had previously been restricted from joining the celebrations. Enjoying the traditional licence of the festival, the revelers determined with brazen effrontery to debunk the authority that had been paraded before them so often in the displays of military force … It must be admitted that there were many objectionable features of the nineteenth-century carnival following its takeover by the populace. But the very idea of carnival is the temporary inversion of accepted norms of behaviour” (14–18). Though carnival and other creolizing theatralizations succeeded in such inversion, to the point of official censure throughout the nineteenth century by local governors and via “legal” decrees like the Riot Act of 1895, and while these enactments did indeed, as Hill posits, have “a ritualistic significance, rooted in the experience of slavery and in celebration of freedom from slavery” (21), we must realize that, ideologically, these fetes often reified, despite their inversion, European stereotypes and discourses of mastery, social hierarchy, monarchic / aristocratic and patriarchal codes, and the roles of the elite. While certainly crucial in the syncretism of Caribbean cultures, then, these rituals reperformed (though perhaps in parody) the scripts of colonial / imperialist imagings while infusing these scripts with Afro-Caribbean elements and lower class participants. Thus, these “temporary” inversions, when sanctioned by official logos, often centered around the acquisition of power via conquest and violence, around the reconstruction of West Indian women as topoi for such conquerings and as representations of European concepts of the feminine, and around the still binarized relationship of master to slave. While “emancipated” West Indians could pretend to the social levellings of such enactments, they would not be able to liberate fully the populations of the still-marginalized and still-exploited precisely because of these perpetuated and still-dissembled images, identities, and masks. That carnival would be so misinterpreted by the travelers, historians, and documenters of the region during this period evidences a further problematic, then, for carnival became a stage, ironically, for the reinscription of these roles of the aping West Indian, of the delirious West Indian, of the eroticized West Indian. Flora Spencer’s commentary on the Crop-Over festival of Barbados provides an insight into this larger tragedy of misrepresentation. Spencer socializes the potential threats of these cultural resistances as she sentimentalizes slave realities, echoing Thomas Carlyle’s “The Nigger Question” and other nineteenth-century portraits of slave life and complacency: “Barbadian Negroes came to love plantation life and developed customs and attitudes, told myths and legends, and derived pleasure from the success of the industry” (quoted in Omotoso [1982], 37). Much more than infantile entertainment, such resistances, when

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most pronounced as parody, satire, and carnivalesque reversal, were undoubtedly the beginnings of a theater of creolity. Yet, they were not to infiltrate the theater houses that still catered to European productions for another century, and they were not to be recognized, at least by the Mother Country and the colonial elite, as legitimate acts of self-representation.

3. We imitate the images of ourselves. Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says: An Overture”

The initial decades of the twentieth century radically transformed both West Indian cultures and the theatralizations that would accompany these social revolutions, ideological shifts, and colonial situations. As nationalizing tendencies swept the archipelago, discourses and debates dominated intellectual and largely middle-class circles regarding the affirmation of a West Indian identity and culture which resisted white colonial imagings and reified African counteridentities, counter-histories, and counter-roles. Determined to dissimulate the realities of the masses of West Indians from the dissembling theatralizations of the past, political leaders such as Marcus Garvey joined artists and authors, such as Claude McKay and Louise Bennett, in a resurrection of “folk” culture, in a reconstruction of notions of Caribbeanness and in the recognition and declaration of the dignity, legitimacy, and sovereignty of the African race demystified from the misrepresentations of colonial / imperialist discourses and systems of power. By the 1930s, West Indian theater had begun to center itself in a similar dissimulation and within these sites of struggle, particularly in Jamaica and Trinidad. It was in an attempt to create a national theater and a West Indian drama which could, as George Bernard Shaw admonishes in a speech made during a 1911 visit to Jamaica, avoid the illusions of the Mother Country and reclaim the stage. Theater productions such as the Christmas Morning Concerts at the Ward Theater began to display the talents of Jamaican performers like Ernest Cupidon. Louise Bennett’s poetic performances of folk songs and stories became dramatic repositionings replete with patois that celebrated the role of the folk in the construction of a uniquely Jamaican language, identity, and sensibility. Ivy Baxter emphasizes the most crucial theatrical development in this decade: “The 1930’s was the period, when for the first time, the content of plays acted on the local stage was consciously Jamaican, in contrast to English and American plays. The first Jamaican plays were Susan Proudleigh, The White Witch of Rose Hall, and Jane’s Career by Herbert George De Lisser. Ethelred Marlow, One Soja Man, by W. G. Ogilvie, Upheaval by Frank Hill, Forbidden Fruit, and Under the Skin by Archie Lindo followed; later came West Indian plays by Esther Chapman and Una Marson’s London Calling, and Pocomania” (Baxter [1971], 257). Similar movements in the 1940s would cement this movement toward a national dramatic tradition throughout the West Indies. The Little Theater Movement, founded as an institution of culture in 1942 in Jamaica, initiated annual pantomimes which, as Baxter comments, were “a decided effort … to bring contrasting racial elements and a variety of amateur talent into a single production” (260). Soon, companies such as the Whitehall Players in Trinidad and the St Lucia Arts Guild would ally themselves in these endeavors to promote

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essentially Caribbean drama and to dethrone the gods of Prosperan masques as they tore away the masks of colonial theatralization. Perhaps the most significant of these early theaters of dissimulation is C. L. R. James’s play The Black Jacobins, also known as Toussaint L’Ouverture, which was first performed in 1936 at the London Westminster Theatre. James’s dramatic revision of the Haitian Revolution and its relation to the colonial / historical dialectic would underlie the bulk of his brilliant scholarship and his Marxist critique, for instance, in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revoltuion, 1938, as well as his struggles for African Nationalism and his exilic revolutions with George Padmore and Nkrumah. Centering on a reenactment of this crucial moment in Caribbean histories, James attempts, in both texts, to reexplore the relationship between Toussaint L’Overture’s expropriation and internalization of French ideologies of liberation, equality, and bourgeois democracy and the realities of Haitian independence. Moreover, from the outset of the play, James connects these realities to the realities of the West Indian masses in the 1930s and to the nationalizing movements in the Caribbean of the period. With experimental techniques that rival Brechtian theater, James infuses a linear, master-plotted sense of historical enactment with a cast of characters representing those roles so often stereotyped from the master-narratives of history: The Slaves, The Barber, The Thief, The Entertainer, The Waiter, The Courier, The Leader, all of which also represent the historical figures of the play: Toussaint, Christophe, Dessalines. In so doing, James demands audience awareness of the mimetic nature of both the creation of Haitian independence and national identity and the “roles” they, as a nationalizing community, play in similar mimetic acts. James underscores his emphasis on the role of the masses in his production notes: “The stage is divided into four areas. There is a main central area, two smaller areas — one on each side, and a large area upstage for crowds, banner-bearers, etc. The upstage area is outdoors. In the prologue it is used for slaves in silhouette. In the Play it is possible that crowds may assemble at the back and be spoken to from the back of the main central area. Crowds say little but their presence is felt powerfully at all critical moments. This is the key point of the play … It must be felt, dramatically, and be projected as essential to action in the downstage areas” (James [1992], 68). The infiltration of the stage by the crowds here reflects the ways in which West Indian theaters of dissimulation depended upon a metaphor, trope, or notion of the folk who would be liberated by nationalist productions and Africanist revolutions. James’s socialist insistences upon these marginalized groups of shanty dwellers, peasants, maroons, and the dispossessed so misrepresented by the very bourgeois ideologies exported from those Jacobite revolutions and declarations of independence and rerepresented in the foundational discourses of Caribbean decolonization, become cemented in the enactment of The Black Jacobins as James voices his critique of Toussaint and Dessalines through the characters of the peasant Samedi Smith and the people’s hero, Moise, who translates Toussaint’s words into Creole and who vehemently reminds him of the urgencies of representing the black population in his fight for freedom. Moise exclaims in defiance at one point: “I am against taking anything from the British, either from their general or from their king. They don’t own us. They can give us nothing. That is what I am against. But that we should declare ourselves free from the French; that we should make San Domingo a free and independent country; that I am for … We will have to ask the people … But we don’t take anything from the British. We don’t become independent because the British

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will help us. We do it because the country belongs to us. We have made it what it is, and we alone can make it what it can be” (James [1992], 83). Moise sums up James’s agenda: “Until you cut yourself off from all the symbols of colonialism and slavery and be truly independent, you will remain just an old man with a dream of an impossible fraternity” (96). What James does, then, is not only clarify the problematics of Caribbean “mimicries” and middle-class complicities as part of both Haitian tragedies and his own contemporary political environment, but also emphasize the misrepresentation inherent in these early decolonizing enactments, perhaps in part as a warning to other decolonizing enactments like those of the developing West Indian theaters of the 1930s and 1940s. The most crucial scene in the play may be MarieJeanne’s reading of Racine to Dessalines, highlighting James’s sense of the role played by theater itself in the inscription of a European identity onto the Caribbean. James writes: “Dessalines: And you say this man was not a General. Marie-Jeanne: No. I told you he wrote plays. His name was Racine. The play is called Iphigenie! (The drums are louder) Dessalines: Well, that suits them in France. In France they write plays. But listen, listen. This is San Domingo. We can’t write plays about voodoo!” (106). Dessalines’s final lines indicate his tragic flaw in James’s rendition: the dismissal of the black folk communities that will intercede at the ending of the play with their increasing drumming to interrupt and call into question Dessalines’s celebration of himself as Emperor. They also indicate James’s awareness of theatralization as a means either to enslave and erase or to liberate. For James, a West Indian theater must meld the master-script with the “plays about voodoo,” the rituals of the masses, in order to truly liberate. Yet, what limits James’s play from being entirely representative and liberating for these masses is what also, in some senses, limited both the Africanist movements throughout the Caribbean in the 1930s and 1940s, like Garveyism and Négritude, and the theatralizations of these early theaters of dissimulation. In the desire to create an essentially West Indian drama and to represent and reaffirm an essentially West Indian identity and an African identity at its root, as James’s Samedi Smith and Moise do in James’s play, playwrights often essentialized these identities into binaries of difference and idealizations of a people’s “hero” who was as imagined as the “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Anderson’s phrase, of their emergent nationalisms. Now the topos for nationalist as well as decolonizing revisioning, the lower classes and black populations became conscripted into the metaphors of these largely middle-class productions as symbols of socialist hopes, realist exposures, comic burlesques, modernist experiments, and, often, folklorized (sentimentalized and romanticized) projections. Just as the white elite and the mulatto middle class would tend to dominate these first theatrical movements, as Baxter has pointed out with the initial Little Theatre Movement in Jamaica (see Baxter [1971], 261), colonial dialectics dominate these characterizations and direct these revolutionary enactments. Ironically, James’s Black Jacobins, as Edward Said points out, “was first presented not as a book but as an acting vehicle in London for Paul Robeson; during the performances of the play, Robeson and James alternated the parts of Toussaint and Dessalines” (Said [1993], 248). Like Toussaint, James and the other playwrights of West Indian theaters of dissimulation would find themselves torn between the roles of the master and the counter-roles of the revolutionary in a theatralization of Hegelian reciprocity and a reproduction of colonial / imperial discourses and mechanisms of imaging. While initiating a crucial moment in the development of West Indian theater, then, these rituals potentially reinscribed the marginalized, the dispossessed, and the

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erased into a dialectic of othering which further obscured the faces behind these new black masks. Most importantly, these revisionings often perpetuated a role for woman which, like Gay’s Polly, ultimately would relegate her to the wings of these cultural renaissances. As James’s Marie-Jeanne enacts these disfigurations of the feminine as traitor, deceiver, or maternal bosom of the Mother Country and Nation State, Négritude poets like Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, anthropologists and novelists like Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay, and the musicians from Billie Holliday to the calypsonians of Trinidad misrepresent the figure of the African / African American / African Caribbean woman as a topos for phallogocentric, patriarchal, even racialist discourses and imagings. In a struggle to resist and rename the roles of the masterscript and the gods of European tradition, these theaters of dissimulation often became dissemblance themselves, still obscuring old roles behind ostensibly new masks of counteridentification. As nationalist theaters developed into the 1960s and the era of Independence, West Indian theatralizations tended to dichotomize the roles of West Indian identity further into either a celebration of these figurations of the masses or a more critical focus on the disfigurations of the colonial relationship and the tragedies of West Indian mimicry. Omotoso (borrowing a metaphor from one of these second-generation playwrights) terms this dichotomy the tension between “the theatrical and theater” and delineates the central conflict between the dramatic efforts of playwrights such as Errol Hill and Derek Walcott as representative of contrasting visions for the location of the essential West Indian reality and experience. Omotoso clarifies: “Against the promotion of carnival to the position of national theatre Derek Walcott posits the Caribbeancolonial condition which underlies its incapacity to create anything for itself. ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture,’ the introduction to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays is a bitter poetic lamentation of the lack of support which characterized his 20 or so years of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, years spent attempting to ‘transform the theatrical into theatre’
” (Omotoso [1982], 51). While Omotoso’s distinction may help us realize the divergent directions of West Indian theater during these years, we might also realize that both Hill and Walcott ultimately enact similar theatralizations in their attempts to dissimulate and revision their decolonizing mise-en-scène and their nationalizing theater. As Omotoso intimates, Errol Hill turns to the early theaters of resistance and rituals of the folk to mandate a national theater and identity for West Indian drama, conscripting the carnival players, the calypsonian, and calypso drama to reaffirm popular theater and Afro-Caribbean culture as foundational performances of Trinidadian, even of Caribbean, “being.” Repositioning these “original” creolizations on the stage so long denied to them, Hill potentially continues the creolizing processes of the slave theaters, ostensibly infiltrating master-stages and master-scripts and reorienting their dissembling misimagings. In Hill’s social comedies, the Moco Jumbie who so frightened Bryan Edwards’s company, the “devils” who plagued Bayley’s friend, and the processions that had threatened the elite and middle class to the point of violent suppression throughout the riots of the 1930s were given center-stage, exemplified in his 1960 production of Man Better Man, 1964. Man Better Man attempts to redirect theatrical tendencies away from the mimicry of European plots, styles, and dramatic discourses by voicing the play’s enactments in the languages of West Indian, particularly lower-class West Indian, oral traditions, street communities and their festivals. The play’s frame is a calypso drama, and the dialogue throughout is a

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coupling of calypso song and Creole / patois ritual songs, like those of Diable Papa, the play’s trickster obeahman. The Prologue initiates this social engagement: “The Prologue evokes the carnival ‘canboulay’ procession of olden times. A chorus of women led by Hannibal, the calypsonian, dance onto the forestage singing a traditional stickfighters’ chant. The women are dressed in white with white headbands and carry lighted bottle-flambeaux. Hannibal sings the two-line verses, accompanying himself on a guitar or cuatro, and the women answer in chorus. During the singing, images of the stickfighters appear behind a scrim … At the end of the Prologue, the chorus of women dance off, the calypsonian makes his exit, and the scrim is raised to reveal the setting for Scene 1: ‘El Toro’ general store” (Hill [1985], 144). The historical conflation of nineteenth-century rituals with the lower-class settings of Hill’s main play, like James’s revisionist experiments in The Black Jacobins, potentially dissimulates European misrepresentations of these histories of dissemblance and domination, conquest and colonial systems of power and mechanisms of misimaging. Yet, unlike James’s play, Hill’s Man Better Man may end up, in its best of intentions, reinscribing the roles so crucial to colonial / imperialist discourses and to West Indian social hierarchies of racial and class difference. In his attempt to rename the gods, Hill may essentially reduce the masses to replaying the dialogies of Carnival, folklorizing these characters into miscastings as misappropriated as those of Bryan Edwards, Monk Lewis, and F. W. Bayley. Hannibal’s calypso prologue evinces the reinscription: “Out in the road, warrior, / Rouse yourself for the great encounter. / Foreday morning is no time to slumber, / Grab your poui and join in the slaughter. / Blow the conch-shell and beat the calinda, / Face the foe without fear or favor … / Down on your knees to your master, / No retreat from certain disaster” (144–45). While Hill may be glorifying the calypsonian as folk poet he is also, throughout Man Better Man, rerepresenting the problems with these street theatralizations and recentering the identity of the West Indian on the metaphors of binaries of mastery and slavery (“Down on your knees to your master”), on violent phallic assertion of figurations of the masculine (and of the feminine, as we shall see), and on an image of these calypso wars and their heroes rather reminiscent of Caliban’s disfigured revolutions and emplotted duplicities. The central enactments of Man Better Man will emphasize these duplicitous roles, for this is a play about misrepresentation and dissimulation centering around the tricksterism of Diable Papa and the complicities of the lower-class community in manipulating a stickfight between Briscoe and Tiny Satan, contenders for the prize of Petite Belle and the calypso crown. Disturbingly, Hill develops the figure of this greedy obeahman and the gullible cast in scenes that subvert Hill’s social-realist agendas and undercut his social comedy. These are not the calypsonians and calypso dramas who had, as Keith Warner points out in his study on the Trinidad calypso, motivated the social critiques and reconstructions of the P. N. P. and Eric Williams’s vision of the West Indian Federation. Nor are these the stagings of critical moments in the histories of calypsonian struggles, like those of the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, though Hill may attempt social commentary in his exposure of the duplicities of fraudulent pretenders to an African folk tradition, as he does with the “fake” Diable Papa, he also underwrites this commentary with an identification of these traditions as essentially comical as he has Briscoe enact a nine-night dispossession and frighten the rest of the cast into recognition of their transgressions. Thus, the trickster’s threat is duly socialized by this community now reconnected to the realities of these folk beliefs, as Diable Papa and his medium Minnee are exiled from the

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stage and the harmony of the social comedy and the victory of Briscoe become reaffirmed in panegyric refrains that echo those of the Prologue. Hill directs: “Crackerjack: Briscoe / I speak for the whole brood of stick-men / you earn our gratitude / You come from behind and spring to fame / With Lion courage, rescuing the game / From obeah, greed and politics, / And you give it back to the poui-sticks. / Therefore is needful we demonstrate / That the village consider you a great / And glorious warrior of renown … Hannibal: (singing) Briscoe set the village free, make it safe for you and me, Briscoe prove the better man, Briscoe is the champion” (Hill [1985], 233). Whether Man Better Man actually liberates through this theatralization becomes even more questionable as we realize that this has been a play principally about men bettering men and continuing to batter their women with a rhetoric of possessive love and the discourses of mastery and objectification. Petite Belle, Minnee, and Inez all enact problematic roles for woman, all of them becoming Hill’s medium of exchange as they become vehicles for the male power struggles enacted on the site of their bodies, their images, their typically West Indian experiences. In mandating a national theater, then, Hill may also be mandating a further marginalization of woman out of any agency in her representations and into the place occupied, ultimately, by Miranda, Polly, the Sable Venus, Marie-Jeanne, and others. Such repossessions of the dispossessed may dissimulate in their attempts to remain true to the calypso script, restaging the misogyny of calypso lyrics which, regardless of its authenticity in African or Caribbean culture, remains a constraint upon the potential social levellings of these theatralizations and upon the formation of a critical West Indian identity out of these audiences. If Hill turns to the folk and to the lower classes to lionize the figure of the calypsonian as victorious Caliban and repository of West Indian theater and being, Derek Walcott will turn away from such folklorizations and revision lower-class performances to theatralize an essential West Indian non-being, a schizophrenic and delusional product of the processes of decolonization. In his Dream on Monkey Mountain, 1968, Walcott brilliantly deconstructs the mimicry inherent in the struggles for a West Indian theater and self as he conducts a charbonnier, Makak, and his sidekick Moustique through an evening of drunken disillusionments and despairing revelations of what Walcott sees as the central problem in post-Independence Caribbean selfdefinition: the inability to break with the dissembling images of the master-script and to dissimulate the masks of whiteness that underlie not only lower-class, but perhaps all of West Indian realities. Employing experimental techniques as part of his project to translate occidental and oriental dramaturgies and modernist revolutions into a legitimized and internationally connected West Indian theater, Walcott doubles the space of the Caribbean with the space of the prison house. The play oscillates between scenes that reconstruct Makak’s “dark night of the soul” — his hallucinations of the figure of the white woman who directs his delirium — and his mock trial by the inhabitants of the prison who taunt and condemn him with mimicked discourses of colonial dehumanization. Like James’s, Walcott’s principal focus is on the varieties of enslaving mimicries which comprise colonial / imperialist relations and their disseminations into the postcolonialist processes that dominate the West Indian stages of the late 1960s. Like the central metaphor of the reflective surfaces of the African drum and the full, white moon which runs throughout the play, Walcott’s cast becomes trapped in their own reflective illusionings of power, freedom, identity, and agency. Such illusionings range from Makak’s schizophrenic split between his African and European images to the mulatto Corporal Lestrade’s

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oppressive abuse of what he sees as “colonial justice” and his racist and classist discourses of brutality and mastery. In a transpositioning of Jean Genet and Frantz Fanon, Walcott theatralizes the collective dissimulation that will, for him, continue to constrain West Indian notions of independence and to make moot the possibilities of any valid West Indian productions. Sartre’s reading of Genet’s dramatic cosmos as one filled with “illusion, betrayal, and failure” (Sartre [1954], 10) seems fitting as the epigraph for Walcott’s play, for its characters are incarcerated by the very misrepresentations of their selves, unable to reinvent an identity that escapes the binaries of their histories. Patrick Colm Hogan has recently mapped the ways in which Walcott theatralizes Frantz Fanon’s reading of such reciprocities and decolonizing psychologies: “Later in the play, Makak comes to consider the situation of blacks in a society structured by white racism. In a moment of despair, he says: ‘we are black, ourselves shadows in the firelight of the white man’s mind’ … One meaning of this line is that, in a world dominated by whites, blacks have no more free volition, no more power than shadows. It also suggests that the selves or egos of blacks are reduced to shadows by the white racist’s perception of them. Whites are like the men in Plato’s cave who confuse shadows with reality. The white understanding of blacks is as distant from black reality as the understanding of a shadow is from the understanding of a man or a woman. But Makak does not say, ‘We are black, appearing to whites like shadows in the firelight of their minds.’ Rather, he says that ‘we are … ourselves shadows,’ implying that blacks have accepted and internalized the racism which reduces them to shadows. In this sense, Walcott presents blacks as prisoners in the cave. And the shadows they see on the wall are not images of others, but of themselves, the only image they have of themselves” (Hogan [1994], 108). Hogan insightfully reads out the ideological implications of these enactments: “Mimeticism creates both Makak’s madness and Lestrade’s pathetic and cruel conformity. It is also what creates reactionary nativism. Anti-colonial and post-colonial theorists from Frantz Fanon to Ashis Nandy have noted the close connection between a desire to become European and a subsequent repudiation of all things European … To a great extent, the plot of Dream on Monkey Mountain is organized by reference to mimeticism and reactionary nativism. It in effect maps the development of the latter out of the former…
. Walcott presents us with a valuable, if tacit, anatomy of subaltern identity” (110). Hill’s social comedy has become Walcott’s sociological tragedy. These subaltern identities have, as in Hill, become the topoi for a cultural revisioning that threatens to marginalize further the images of West Indianness into the very Platonic binaries that Hill restages and Walcott deconstructs: either an essential being or a non-being located within an appropriated and disfigured folk. Hence, while lines like Makak’s in Dream on Monkey Mountain may diagnose the instability of decolonizing individuals, they also threaten, as Fanon may, to generalize these processes and peoples into, ultimately, the roles of Hegelian dialectics and existential angst. Sounding much like V. S. Naipaul and other authors and playwrights who perpetuate the image of a ruinate and ruptured West Indian reality, Makak deplores: “Locked in a dream, and treading their own darkness. Snarling at their shadows, snapping at their own tails, devouring their own entrails like the hyena, eaten with self-hatred. O Gods, O Gods, why did you give me this burden?” (Walcott [1970], 305). In rejecting Hill’s folklorizing tendencies, Walcott dispossesses the masses of West Indians from both their apparitions of absolute identity and their hope of

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anything other than violent revolution against their own white masks. As Hogan points out, Makak’s final decapitation of the figure of the white woman becomes a problematic reinscription of both the “nature” of these lower-class enactments and the historical determinacy that prompts Fanon to equally dark conclusions. Hogan points to the precise problematics with Walcott’s last act: “In 1967, when the play was first produced, perhaps the consequences of revolutionary violence were not so obvious. Perhaps the resolution, the discovery of name and roots, the rejection of mimeticism through the humiliation and murder of the white woman, would not have seemed so mistaken, so brutal, so close to mysogyny” (Hogan [1994], 117). Moreover, if this final enactment dissimulates racial and class realities, it also further compounds the problematic figuration of the feminine so much a part of past performances. Though Walcott may be merely theatralizing Fanon’s analyses of the psychology of decolonizing desire in Black Skin, White Masks, 1952, such a depiction becomes especially pernicious when seen in league with the histories of theatralizations of West Indian women. Still dependent upon colonial / imperialist discourses of othering, the role of woman remains chained in Dream on Monkey Mountain to male fantasies, militant manias, and mimetic molestations. As other nationalist theaters and decolonizing mises-en-scène emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some playwrights, such as Michael Gilkes in Guyana, began to theatralize the identity struggles of the West Indian archipelago in dissimulations that seemed to escape the binary of social comedy and sociological tragedy seen in Hill and Walcott. Enacting an inquiry into the now prismatic and heteroglossic West Indian identity as they envisioned an exit from Makak’s prison cell and the dialectics of self-mastery, plays like Gilkes’s Couvade, 1975 (first performed at Carifesta in 1972) become explorations of both a multiplicitous self as nati / onal identity and as cultural cornerstone. They represent the urgent need for a reconstruction not only of the histories of dissimulation but of the role of the West Indian artist / playwright in the theatralization of resistance and reinvention. Gilkes’s main character, Lionel, is an artist possessed by the various fragments of his submerged, erased, and misrepresented identity. Lionel struggles against the myopic and cynical arguments of Arthur to liberate his artistic reimaging of the central Caribbean experience. That experience is located, for both Lionel and Gilkes, in the hybridization represented by communities like the black Caribs and in the crucial rituals of these communities which manifest themselves in the various visions and possessions in this “Dream Play of Guyana,” from shamanic Amerindian ceremonies to Ashanti visitations. Lionel delineates the play’s central metaphor, the ritual of Couvade, as he resists Arthur’s constant dismissal: “Quite a well-known, so-called, pagan ritual still seen in many parts of the world. It’s a ceremony in which the spirits of the dead are supposed to return and talk to the living. Through the meeting of past and present, a regeneration of the tribal consciousness takes place” (Gilkes [1982], 22). Couvade represents these regenerative rituals as a call for cultural consciousness in the Caribbean which can move beyond the nightmares on Monkey Mountain and the folklorizations of the past. In his introduction to Couvade, Errol Hill emphasizes the significance of this development of West Indian theatralizations: “What others believe to be the symptoms of nervous exhaustion are to the artist tangible and terrifying experiences that provide a mythic dimension to the realistic parts of the plot. Lionel’s exploration of ancient traditions has released powerful archetypal cult figures: the Amerindian shaman, the African Ashanti priest, the Hindu god, Shiva. These and other cultural influences contend for Lionel’s soul. It is not enough, they

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seem to say, for the Caribbean leader to hold an incomplete vision of some distant future or millennium, nor to attempt a blending of cultures merely in words or paint. The artist-thinker must himself become the living image of the new Caribbean man, he must cross the door between dream and reality, he must wear the ancestral robes, he must be reborn … But the volatile Caribbean working classes are not forgotten. They appear as pork-knockers, folk preachers and political party followers. Through their lifestyle traditions and beliefs from the past are retained and transmitted to our time. By requiring that the principal roles in the three areas of ancestral, middle-class, and folk sequences be shared among the same actors, even that one role should metamorphose into another, the author eloquently pleads … for a culturally and socially unified Caribbean” (ix). While Couvade may to some extent remain bound to an essentializing enactment and a romanticizing conscription of the folk, the lower classes, and even the dead, Gilkes initiates a movement that continues into the 1980s to transform West Indian theater not just into a celebration of the hybrid as the new god renamed, but into a renaming of the very rituals of theatralization and of West Indian articulation. Like the reggae performances contemporaneous with Gilkes’s production, these enactments and movements would struggle to voice an alternative revolution to the identity politics of their post-independence milieu.

4. The premier of the Jimmy Cliff roots / reggae film The Harder They Come (Kingston 1972) marked a dislocation in the socio-colonial pentameter, in the same way that its music and its stars and their style, marked a revolution in the hierarchical structure in the arts of the Caribbean. At the premier, the traditional order of service was reversed. Instead of the elite, from their cars moving (complimentary) into the Carib Cinema watched by the poor and admiring multitude, the multitude took over … and demanded that they see what they had wrought. ‘For the first time at last’ it was the people (the raw material) not the critics, who decided the criteria of praise, the measure of good qualification; ‘for the first time at last’, a local face, a native ikon, a nation language voice was hero. In this small corner of our world, a Revolution as significant as Emancipation. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice

As West Indian theatralizations developed into the late 1970s and early 1980s, playwrights continued the redefinition and reorientation of West Indian realities begun by the second generation during the struggles for political and mimetic independence. Unable to account for those realities by remaining enslaved to the binaries and mimicries of the 1960s and early 1970s theaters of dissimulation, some playwrights began to transform their enactments to signal a new type of theater and a revised resistance to the master-script and to the mechanisms of power still dominating the islands and their imagings. Emerging out of the insistence upon either a reconstituted or a deconstructed national self that would lead the revolutions against misrepresentative policies, social systems, and institutions of colonial oppression, playwrights rejected the depictions of such absolute identities or non-identities and began to develop a theater that, in its meta-theatrical nature, attempted to explore and expose the very act of theatralization, of representation, of imaging itself as the significant means to power and empowerment, to

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resistance and liberation. The act of theater becomes the main actor on stage in these struggles to involute the construction of West Indian selves and figurations and to infiltrate the mechanisms so central to colonial / imperialist dialectics, especially to the now predominant neocolonial systems of cultural imperialism which function in the Caribbean through the tourist industry and the film and media industries. Such enactments, like Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, 1978, and Trevor Rhone’s Two Can Play, 1982, reposition these issues of representation and construction to elicit a critical awareness of the act of theatralization and the space of cultural production on the West Indian stage. They call attention to theater as the locus for what Guy DeBord terms the “social relationship” of imperialism which mediates other power relations in the West Indies (DeBord [1994], 12). Realizing the fallacies of romanticizing the folk and the masses as a national identity to be identified with or of denying the subtle creolizations that underwrite the sociological tragedies of lower-class “delusions,” these enactments of an emergent theater of dissimilation and dis-assimilation spotlight once marginal roles. They depict characters inquiring into the very “roles” they play, the very masks constructed by and for them, and the reinvention of these roles through such critical awareness. In effect, then, the creolizing tendencies of earlier slave theaters and carnivalesque performances become more fully realized in what Glissant might term “theaters of creolity” as playwrights begin to construct a theater that not only includes the voices of the dispossessed but has them rearticulate the means of their dispossession and repossess their own imagings and images, no longer renaming the gods but the rituals themselves. Just as Brathwaite’s masses would reclaim the Carib Cinema, demanding a “nation performance” of their “nation language” (already, as Brathwaite discusses, a hybrid form of signification which involutes the dominant signifier), the actors in these plays dissimilate, that is, rewrite and reinvent, the dominant dialogue of the master-script and the histories of their theatralizations. Such dissimilation begins the moment we are introduced to the principal actors in Walcott’s 1978 production of Pantomime. Jackson Phillips, a retired calypsonian, and Harry Trewe, a retired English actor and proprietor of a tourist hotel in the West Indies, appear on the stage as embodiments of both a neo-colonial relationship (as Phillips serves Trewe’s guests at the hotel) and the dialectic of West Indian histories of theatralization. The displaced English actor and the disgruntled creole mimic, as Walcott might define his calypsonian, inhabit the new space of their theatralized relationship: the arena of both the Hotel, symbol of imperialist transplantation, and the West Indian stage itself. The metatheatrical nature of this relationship becomes compounded as we learn that not only does Phillips work in what John Frow terms “the commodified relation to the Other” (Frow [1991], 150), engendered by the neocolonial relations of tourism and the service industry, but that he has become conscripted into a theatrical performance designed as part of that service, as Harry Trewe emphasizes throughout, to “entertain the guests.” Even more importantly, the play to be performed is Trewe’s rendition of a Christmas pantomime that represents a synopsis of Robinson Crusoe, a text so central to European ideologies of mercantile capitalism and the colonial systems which legitimized and enforced the relations of othering and “gratitude” that have survived to permeate the neocolonial relationship between Trewe and Jackson (see Hulme [1992]). The self-referentiality of such a reproduction becomes clear as Trewe requests Jackson’s aid in the project: “Look, I’m a liberal, Jackson. I’ve done the whole routine. Aldermaston, Suez, Ban the Bomb, Burn the Bra, Pity the Poor Pakis, et cetera. I’ve

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even tried jumping up to the steel band at Notting Hill Gate, and I’d no idea I’d wind up in this ironic position of giving orders, but if the new script I’ve been given says: HARRY TREWE, HOTEL MANAGER, then I’m going to play … [it] to the hilt, damnit … We could turn this little place right here into a little cabaret, with some very witty acts. Build up the right audience. Get an edge on the others. So, I thought, Suppose I get this material down to two people. Me and … well, me and somebody else. Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday. We could work up a good satire, you know, on the master-servant — no offense — relationship. Labor management, white-black and so on … making some trenchant points about topical things, you know. Add that show to the special dinner for the price of one ticket” (Walcott [1980], 108–09). The dramatic ironies become cemented when Trewe relates his design to reverse the roles in the panto, attempting to “feel what it was like to be Friday” and to “make a point about the hotel industry, about manners, conduct, to generally improve relations all around … imagine first the humor and then the impact of that” (110). Rather than creating a light and reductive improvisation, however, this reversal of roles allows Phillips to begin to deconstruct the misrepresentations at the heart of the representation of the colonial relationship and its apocryphal discourses of civilized difference, necessary dependencies and righteous ownership. He fires back at Trewe as he initiates this involution of Crusoe’s text: “For three hundred years I served you. Three hundred years I served you breakfast in … in my white jacket on a veranda, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib … in that sun that never set on your empire I was your shadow, I did what you did, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib … that was my pantomime. Every movement you made, your shadow copied … and you smiled at me as a child does smile at his shadow’s helpless obedience, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib, Mr. Crusoe … But after a while the child does get frighten of the shadow he make. He say to himself, That is too much obedience, I better hads stop. But the shadow don’t stop, no matter if the child stop playing that pantomime, and the shadow does follow that child everywhere … until it is the shadow that start dominating the child, it is the servant that start dominating the master” (112–13). Despite Trewe’s constant demands to “keep it light,” Jackson continues his deconstruction of their relationship, inserting African images and languages into Trewe’s script and ridiculing Trewe’s entreaties to follow some sort of realism and rationalism in his improvisation. Jackson further enlightens Trewe as to the hypocrisies of Trewe’s design: “You see, it’s your people who introduced us to this culture: Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, the classics, and so on, and when we start getting as good as them, you can’t leave halfway … I think it’s a matter of prejudice. I think that you cannot believe: one, that I can act, and two: that any black man should play Robinson Crusoe … here I am getting into my part and you object. This is the story … this is history. This moment that we are now acting here is the history of imperialism; it’s nothing less than that … Now, I could go down to that beach by myself with this hat, and I could play Robinson Crusoe, I could play Columbus, I could play Sir Francis Drake, I could play anybody discovering anywhere, but I don’t want you to tell me when and where to draw the line! Or what to discover and when to discover it” (Walcott [1980], 125). The chaos such revelations produce becomes too much for Trewe, and, by the end of the first act of Pantomime, he has abandoned his script and project, unable to confront the realities behind the dissemblances of his own identity and image and that of his neocolonial other. Closing the curtain on Jackson’s potential revolution, Trewe resigns: “All right, so it’s Thursday. He comes across this naked

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white cannibal called Thursday, you know. And then look at what would happen. He would have to start to … well, he’d have to, sorry … This cannibal, who is a Christian, would have to start unlearning his Christianity. He would have to be taught … I mean … he’d have to be taught by this African … that everything was wrong, that what he was doing … I mean, for nearly two thousand years … was wrong. That his civilisation, his culture, his whatever, was … horrible. Was all … wrong. Barbarous, I mean, you know. And Crusoe would then have to teach him things like, you know, about … Africa, his gods, patamba, and so on … and it would get very, very complicated, and I suppose ultimately it would be very boring, and what we’d have on our hands would be a play and not a little pantomime” (126). Threatened by the uncertainties and instabilities of his representation and reversal of the Crusoe text, Trewe fends off the utter destruction of his cultural contexts, and Jackson is ordered back to work and back into his original role. Thus, Trewe avoids the horrors of the colonizer’s recognition of what Homi Bhabha has termed his “metonymy of presence,” the partial and ambivalent representations of his role and the roles of the colonized (see Bahbha [1985], 150). He skirts, for this change of costume at least, the potential “slippage,” as Bhabha again defines it, between himself and the shadow that Jackson elucidates, between the constructs of his mastery and the realities of his always misrepresented colonial presence. What Walcott does, then, is to present not only the very enactment of this ambivalence and slippage on centerstage but to connect the “original” texts of colonialism, like Crusoe, with the “originary” act of West Indian theatralization: an act of misimaging that recalls Prospero’s masques. The audience, perhaps, realizes before Harry Trewe that the West Indies has always been the stage for what Bhabha terms the “dislocation and distortion” of the images of the Mother Country and its foundational logoi, mythoi, and constructs of identity. Walcott continues, in the second act of Pantomime, to unpack these “dislocations” even further to reveal to both Trewe and to the audience the implications of such “distortions” and the potentials of such involutions of the rituals of theatralization. As Jackson and Trewe resume their panto, this time so that Jackson can make Trewe into a “brand-new man” (Walcott [1980], 137), Jackson resumes his deconstruction of colonial discourses and duplicities. He refuses to read Trewe’s lines as Trewe penned them and infiltrates Trewe’s bathroom to drown the parrot that represents (for Jackson) the mimicry of the master-script in its refrain of the old Nazi proprietor’s name, “Heinegger! Heinegger!.” Finally, he pushes Trewe to the point of violent confrontation. Thus, Jackson reveals the darker significance of the Crusoe panto and of Trewe’s histories of theatralization. Having brought Trewe to this ultimate moment of slippage, Jackson impersonates Trewe’s wife, the original Crusoe in Trewe’s pantomimes back in London, who killed Trewe’s son in a vehicular manslaughter and forced Trewe to abandon the theater and the Mother Country. Posing with the photo of Trewe’s wife as his new mask, Jackson provokes Trewe to attack her image with an ice-pick, just as Makak attacks the apparition of the white woman in Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mounain. Now more than a delusion of whiteness, this figure of woman becomes the very apparatus of power and representation which, for Walcott, lies behind all colonial relations: the absolute image of the Mother Country which can never be achieved either by colonizer or colonized through “classical or creole acting,” in Jackson’s terms. Trewe ultimately concedes as his rage subsides: “That’s the real reason I wanted to do the panto. To do it better than you ever did. You played Crusoe in the panto, Ellen. I was Friday. Black bloody greasepaint that made

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you howl. You wiped the stage with me … Ellen … well. Why not? I was no bloody good” (164). In a sense, then, Jackson Phillips brings Harry Trewe and the rest of the audience of this panto to a final recognition of the “transparency,” as Bhabha calls it, of their roles and their theatralized relations, and to a dissimilation of the discourses enacted therein. More importantly, as the play closes and Trewe and Jackson resolve their tensions, Jackson performs one final rewriting of their relationship, choosing first to return to his calypso and then, crucially, to realign himself in the neocolonial dialectic by remaining with his mimetic other, now cleared of any delusions of possession and mastery. In the last lines of the play, Jackson asserts his revised role: “Starting from Friday, Robinson, we could talk ‘bout a raise?” (Walcott [1980], 170). Despite Walcott’s problematic insistence upon a misogynistic figuration of woman, he succeeds in developing West Indian theater to a point of self-recognition, to a moment of creole consciousness and critical awareness of the possible liberations of renamed rituals of imaging. Trevor Rhone continues this renaming of the rituals and this development of West Indian theatralizations in his metatheatrical Two Can Play, 1986, first performed in 1982. Rather than deconstructing the constructs of the Mother Country, as Walcott does in Pantomime, Rhone focuses on another relation of neocolonial / imperialist systems of power: North American control of the mechanisms of representation and information in the West Indies, and in Jamaica particularly, which has supplanted the misimagings of the Mother Country with the American dreams of Lady Liberty, of prosperity, and of potential camouflage in the American image of homogeneity. The U. S. American domination of the image becomes, for Rhone, the more dangerous form of imperialist oppression to emerge in the late 1970s and early 1980s, underwriting the neocolonial agendas of the Reagan Administration and defining the internal politics of Jamaica. John Lent has recently elaborated this remastery of the West Indies through American repossessions of the means of representation: “In the 1970’s, a typical day’s format of a … television station … looked something like this: the first one and one-half hours of children’s shows (‘Sesame Street’ and a local ‘Romper Room’) were followed by adventure and light comedy (‘Daniel Boone,’ ‘Joe 90,’ ‘Gentle Ben,’ ‘Daktari,’ ‘I Dream of Jeannie,’ ‘Bewitched,’ ‘Flying Nun,’ or ‘Real McCoys’) until news and sports at 7 p.m. From 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.. shows were designed for adult audiences and included panels, mystery and intrigue shows, light comedy, and variety. Typical programs during this period included ‘Name of the Game,’ ‘The Val Doonican Show,’ ‘Mod Squad,’ ‘Love American Style,’ ‘Lancer,’ ‘Hawaii Five-O,’ ‘Ben Casey,’ and ‘Adam 12’” (Lent [1990], 41). Lent continues to delineate the 1980s and American policies of cultural imperialism: “Foreign programming had become even more pervasive in the 1980s. Calling it ‘cultural displacement by invitation,’ Wilson said it affects the people’s perception of self, inflates the kind of material return expected from national economies, and in a real sense, questions the legitimacy of some of our cultural traditions and values … In the 1980’s, with Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, the foreign media sources flowed into the region virtually uninhibited” (42–43). Developing his resistance to this hegemony of the United States image and to West Indian complicities in the industries of U. S. neocolonialism and capitalist commodification, Rhone builds upon earlier theatralizations like his Smile Orange, 1971, a biting satire upon the tourist trade, and The Harder They Come, 1972, his filmic exploration of the injustices of the Jamaican music industry and the inscription of Jamaican identities and realities through American cultural imperialism. In Two Can Play, he enacts his

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most poignant deconstruction of the duplicities of the American dream. More than just an example of what Michael Manley, in his introduction to Two Can Play, terms Rhone’s “dramatic realism,” this is a play that centers on the act of imaging and theatralization, on representation and misrepresentation, and upon the encryption of West Indian constructions of identity by American discourses, codes, and apparatuses of media control. As in Walcott’s Pantomime, this enactment revolves around a focus upon two main characters, Jim and Gloria, and their struggles to escape the prison-house of their lower-middle-class existence and the political violence of a Jamaica on the eve of the 1980 Seaga elections that would cement, as Rhone hints throughout, the neocolonial relationship between “Uncle Sam” and Jamaica. We first encounter Jim and Gloria in a world not only of gunfire and factional dispute, but also of wire-tappings, panopticons, and the constant threat of surveillance. Jim declares to Gloria in the first scene of the play, “Uncle Sam is a bitch. Him have satellite up in the sky can read the number on dis house” (Rhone [1986], 7), and reveals both the instability of this relationship and his further relation with America: “Paranoid? A not paranoid; mi nerves on edge, that’s all. Gloria, them [their three children] is illegal immigrant. Them convert the one entry, one week visa to permanent. One mistake, one slip up, and they right back here. A tell them, go underground, get lost, don’t give Uncle Sam a chance to catch you” (7). Rhone elaborates these crucial tropes of masquerade as he further unpacks the mechanisms of imperialist simulacra. Deciding to abandon Jamaica for the promise of America and the reunion with their three children, Jim and Gloria enact a variety of schemes to infiltrate the new empire and to play within its images. In metatheatrical scenes that spotlight the capitalist and counterfeit nature of American ideologies, Jim and Gloria expose the realities behind Jamaican desires to assimilate into American roles. Moving from their performance of the cigarette girl and customer, a performance that reveals the materialism at the heart of their existences, to the replaying of Immigration official and potential immigrant, Jim and Gloria theatralize the problematics of participating in this American illusion of inclusion and equality. The ironies of the “Identikit,” one of the alternatives for falsifying their images which uses the names of the dead as alias, clarifies Rhone’s notion of a falseness which underlies both American pretensions to total control of the image and West Indian internalizations of the empire’s misrepresentations. Choosing to avoid the possible problems with the Identikit, Jim and Gloria decide upon the design that will insure them access to America, instigate their reinvention and eventual liberation: the divorce and remarriage of Gloria to a U. S. citizen paid for his part in their play with the cash smuggled in the very apparatus of the image, a Kodak Instamatic camera. As Jim and Gloria test the cash for any counterfeit bills that might give them away, we realize fully Rhone’s implications, for the very symbols of American dominance, the dollars, are threatened with a falseness. While Rhone’s play effectively dissimilates discourses of dominance by locating the “masses” on-stage and into an inquiry into the roles that dispossess them of any agency, we understand the deeper significances of Two Can Play as the second act unfolds. Like Walcott’s Jackson Phillips, who demystifies and reinvents the relationship between himself and his dominant other and mimetic double, Harry Trewe, it is Gloria who enacts the ultimate reorientation of both Jim and the audience as she shatters Jim’s, and Jamaica’s, vision of empire and rewrites her own role in the oppressive relationship of her marriage. Returning from her

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stint, Gloria educates Jim as to the realities of his illusions of America: “A don’t think it worth the price, Jim. Is two America. White America, Black America. Which one yuh going to? A check out a lot o’ things up dere — job, housing. At least we don’t owe nutten on dis” (Rhone [1986], 50). Able now, because of her partial independence from Jim and his sexist control of her, and perhaps due to her experience in masked reinvention in the U. S., to have critical awareness of her legitimacy as an empowered being (and as a sexual being, as we see in the masturbation scene), Gloria redirects the discourses that oppress her and that have kept her dependent for so long. No longer a silent voice trapped behind the security gate that bifurcates both the house and her marriage, Gloria initiates her involution of her images, declaring to Jim, “A guess a better warn yuh. A’m starting evening classes at St. John’s College … three evenings a week.” In a line that finally pinpoints her connection to the issues of commodification and the disseminations of neocolonialist objectification, she asserts: “A’m not yuh property to lend, lease, or rent. Yuh selfishness in the bed is just the tip o’ the iceberg … If A can deal with life on an international level, why A should make you subject me to be nutten but a damn dishwasher. A finish wid dat” (64–65). Most importantly, it is Gloria who will, by the end of the play, make the decision not to assimilate into the American dream but instead to remain in Jamaica, in the house that has in some ways been transmogrified from the space of the prison to the locale for a new social relationship, one that blossoms along with the orange tree as the curtain falls. Crucially, then, Rhone seems to perceive the urgency of rewriting all the roles engendered by these systems of power which serve to exploit and marginalize, especially the role of woman that has been so distorted in the theatralizations of the West Indies. Though Rhone’s play may be read problematically as a further inscription and idealization of this topos of cultural revisioning, as Gloria ends the play still on her back, beckoning her now transformed lover as a symbol of maternal devotion, we can perhaps concede that this image at least counters the figurations of Lady Liberty embracing her poor, downtrodden masses. Bourgeois as Rhone’s play is, ultimately it signals the beginnings of a West Indian theater that creates a critical awareness of the real culprit behind conquest’s duplicitous designs: the master-script that, though fully revealed as fraudulent in Two Can Play, still looms over the stage of the West Indies and continues to dissemble its central enactments.

5. O sable Queen! thy mild domain I seek, and court thy gentle reign, So soothing, soft and sweet; Where meeting love, sincere delight, Fond pleasure, ready joys invite, And unbought raptures meet. Bryan Edwards, History of the West Indies

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Rob Canfield This year I write my own play, Slim, And my own part in the play. Miss Gatha in Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade

From early theaters of dissemblance, which merely played European scripts on West Indian stages, to the theaters of dissimulation of the 1930s to 1960s, which attempted to construct national theaters that could enact a break from colonial scripts and roles, to the theaters of dissimilation and dis-assimilation in the 1970s and 1980s, which try to involute the imaging mechanisms behind systems of neo- and postcolonial power, the figure of the feminine is persistently reinscribed with images that not only objectify, eroticize, romanticize, and even erase her “part” but which also appropriate the feminine for the ideological designs of cultural revisioning. From Miranda and Polly Peachum to C. L. R. James’s Marie Jeanne; from Walcott’s feminized figures of nativist delusions to Errol Hill’s internalizing Set Girls and Walcott’s depiction of the threat of woman as the epicenter of the relation between Jackson Phillips and Harry Trewe in Pantomime to Trevor Rhone’s hopeful-yet-bourgeois investment in the figure of Grace at the end of Two Can Play, the inscription and conscription of the role of woman becomes the play’s central act. Even as West Indian dramatists move away from issues of reidentification and into a metatheater that seeks to creolize, and thus liberate, West Indian theatralizations, patriarchal, colonial / imperialist, and racist figurations still pervade. It is in West Indian women’s theater, especially at its zenith in the 1970s and 1980s, that these images of oppression “interface” (as Dennis Scott terms it), that the masks constructed for West Indian women are abjected, and that the figure of woman is reinscribed as the mechanisms of her initial inscriptions are exposed. Anglophone Caribbean women’s theater emerges predominantly in Jamaica in the 1930s, originating in the cultural flourishing that would mark West Indian redefinitions not only of a specific Caribbean identity but also of a distinctly Caribbean national theater that could begin to resist the discourses of colonialism so dependent upon certain ideological roles for the colonized other. West Indian playwrights, in league with the variety of West Indian political, social, and cultural institutions created to reaffirm an essentially West Indian self, rooted in both colonial histories of oppression and in a reorientation around Afro-Caribbean, even African, cultural traditions, began to dissimulate the dissembled images of the master’s script and to enact what were ostensibly West Indian realities on a reclaimed stage. According to Ivy Baxter, such movements were largely the creation of upper- and middle-class women, who had enough social standing within West Indian cultural hierarchies to promote such nationalist productions and who had sufficient economic security to finance emergent theater groups. “The developing theatre in Jamaica was affected by growing Jamaican nationalism, which helped to create this movement. This was evident by the formation of theatre groups. The most important of these was the Kingston Dramatic Society which developed in 1929, as the Dramatic Section of the Kingston and St. Andrew Literary and Debating Association…
. In 1936, this society put on, at St. Georges Hall, the first Exhibition of Jamaican Arts and Crafts. This was followed by the art exhibition arranged by Esther Chapman in 1939, and that of Edna Manley’s works in 1938. The Y. M. C. A. was the first to produce a play by a Jamaican playwright, Susan Proudleigh, by H. G. De Lisser; the Kingston Dramatic Society followed soon after with many

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others. Norman Washington Manley and Edna Manley were the patrons of this organization…
. Another arts club which developed subsequently was the Quadrangle or Four Arts Club, founded in August 1938. Two leading members of this group were Esther Chapman, editor of the West Indian Review and Burnett Webster … among its earliest members was the late Doris Hastings, American wife of a Jamaican businessman, Howard Hastings. Her professional dramatic career in the United States enabled her to create the group known as the Radio Players, who performed over the government radio station, ZQI, and later on the Jamaican commercial station, RJR” (Baxter [1970], 258). Perhaps the most significant of these early women’s involvements in theater is Greta Fowler’s contribution to the Jamaican Little Theatre Movement in 1942. Working in conjunction with other women from “a new urban British colony” (259), Fowler would continue the endeavors of these early 1930s theater matrons to create what would become the crux of early Jamaican movements toward self-expression: the Jamaican Pantomime. “Another [of the contributors to the Little Theatre Movement in league with Fowler] was Elinor Lithgow, the wife of an Army Officer stationed here. She began to direct plays in the Little Theatre manner, which is different from large scale operettas and follies. The two of her outstanding productions were Quiet Wedding and Shining Hour. Roma Fitchett, the English wife of a Jamaican barrister, who was also known as Roma Presano, was a singer…
. Working with Ranny Williams, the Jamaican comedian, she rearranged the format of the Christmas Morning Concert … Roma introduced [the element of theme linkage] as well as scene changes and more elaborate decor into this particular Christmas Morning Concert, and thus the idea of Jamaican Pantomime was born” (259). These upper- and middle-class women, who were prominent in the early development of nationalist theater companies, also initiated productions, though relatively few, written by West Indian women. Like Elinor Lithgow, playwrights Vera Bell and Una Marson utilized the new forums for plays that attempted to rewrite West Indian identifications. Bell’s Soliday and the Wicked Bird, probably performed in 1945, became one of the favorites of the Pantomime productions of the Fowler Little Theatre; it enacted a Jamaican folk legend of the Maroon tale of Bubiabo, underwriting the middle-class pretensions of nationalist Women’s theater to begin to dissimulate the coeval ideologies of race and class. Marson’s somewhat militant London Calling, 1937, and Pocomania, 1939, go further still in their attempt to locate West Indian spectacles in the histories of resistance and lower-class (both working and peasant) identities that prelude nationalist revisionings. Here, then, was not only the inception of woman’s voice on the previously patriarchal stage of both political resistance and theatrical production; this was also the prologue to later refigurations of a type of theater that could link the issues of women’s rights and roles to other struggles for selfhood. Yet, what limits much of this early West Indian women’s theater is also what limits these other struggles. Like other instances of this theater of dissimulation, from James’s Black Jacobins to Errol Hill’s Man Better Man, these enactments tend either to essentialize West Indian identities or to folklorize them, centering on nationalist constructs of a viable West Indian identity which sublimate both the role of woman and the roles of the dispossessed masses under the larger design of cultural affirmation based on bourgeois (that is, mulatto middle-class) reimagings. Even Una Marson’s plays become less about the dissimulation of gender imagings than about resistance to colonial systems of control which conscript women and lower-class West Indians alike to their campaign. Just as movements like

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the Women’s Self-Help Movement and the People’s Convention of Robert Love would argue more for the inclusion of women in upper-class power structures than for a closer analysis of gender oppression and its mechanisms of articulation throughout Jamaican social hierarchies, so, too, would Jamaican women playwrights invest their plays with representations of woman as vehicles for a patriarchal tension between colonizer and colonized. Rhoda Reddock asserts such focal displacements in her analysis of the early women’s movement in the West Indies: “In addition to its actual membership, the Garvey movement had a strong influence on middle-strata black and colored women. In addition to fostering racial pride, it provided a place for women in their quest for personal dignity and that of their oppressed race. In Trinidad and Tobago, for example, feminist Audrey Jeffers and women members of the Coterie of Social Workers stressed their aim of raising the status of colored women. Similarly, in Jamaica, middle-strata liberal feminists such as Una Marson, Amy Bailey, and others of the Women’s Liberal Club challenged the leadership of white upper-class women’s organizations” (Reddock [1994], 76). Although crucial in the foundation of West Indian theater and significant to the expression of women’s voices in early nationalist theatralizations, these matriarchs of anglophone Caribbean women’s theater may have merely replaced one mask for another as they transformed the always-misrepresented figure of the feminine from a receptacle for European discourse into something that could be reappropriated for the designs of bourgeois decolonizations, romanticized and essentialized still behind a veil of solidarity. As a second generation of playwrights emerges in the 1950s and 1960s to continue the efforts of these matriarchs in developing a women’s theater in league with other theaters of dissimulation, the initial misrepresentations of the 1930s and 1940s are not only revised but also subverted in performances that now place at center-stage the struggles between upper- and middle-class women and their lower-class black “counterparts.” In an effort to dissimulate both European images of the feminine and the internalization of these roles by middle-class “mimicries,” this new wave of West Indian women playwrights begins radically to question the agency of nationalist representations and bourgeois women’s theater. They problematize the essential identities earlier productions constructed and the complicities with imperialist inscriptions of the other inherent in middle-class ideologies. Plays such as Veronica Fonrose’s The Evil Spirit, 1966, and Cicely Waite-Smith’s The Impossible Situation, 1966, locate the tensions of postcoloniality in relations between middle class women and other marginalized figures in the West Indies, from the obeahman to the domestic servant, mirroring the dichotomies of other dissimulating enactments, like those of the emergent Derek Walcott and Errol Hill, while perhaps transcending the sexism of these other productions. Fonrose’s The Evil Spirit, from its initial stage notes, pinpoints the object of its dissimulation as the West Indian middle-class and its delusions of superiority, difference, and postIndependence empowerment. The entirety of the play’s action occurs in that central location of bourgeois existence, the salon “sitting room” of “a middle-class family” in Trinidad. Here, Mrs. Dawson struggles with the crisis of patriarchal economies and middle-class social position as she attempts to marry off her daughters. Convinced that supernatural forces work to restrain her daughters’ “marketability,” Mrs. Dawson hires an obeahman; as the play opens, we find her immersed in rituals of purification advised by Mr. Jackson, the “seer-man” whom Mrs. Dawson identifies as “an honest man. Not the money-making type” (Fonrose [1966], 5). The play’s

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central tension, and its ostensible light comedy, emerges in the juxtaposition of folk “superstitions” (as Mr. Dawson terms them) and middle-class “superstitions,” illusions such as the identities gained through marriage contracts, social mobility, and self-mastery. Mrs. Dawson exclaims at one point, “What I know is, that every lovely girl must be married, and if she’s not, suggests that something is wrong, for all men love pretty girls” (16). Subtly, Fonrose depicts the younger generation of women as internalizing such illusions when she has Gem exclaim, “I want to get married and have a lovely home,” to which Ivy replies, “You’re right, any girl who doesn’t want to get married is a fool. A perfect fool” (10–11). That marriage is essential both to the identity of women and to the constructions of the middle class becomes even clearer as Mr. Dawson reads the liberating letter that will resolve these crises and redirect Mrs. Dawson’s delusions of “jumbies” and lower-class “folly”: “[Mr. Dawson:] O. K. Let’s forget it, and talk of something else. This morning as I was going through the gate, the post-man gave me a letter. I did not open it, until I reached the office, and then I had a pleasant surprise. [Mrs. Dawson:] (excitedly) What was it? Have you won the Jamaica sweepstake? … (despairingly) I thought you had won the sweep. I’ve been dreaming about it all day and night, and thinking of what I’d buy with the money. [Mr. Dawson:] You’ve been dreaming about this too, in so much that you’ve given away money to know what’s preventing it” (16–17). The irony that underwrites Mr. Dawson’s reading of the letter, in which Gem’s prospective husband announces his intentions, lies not only in the fact that this contract exists between the two men of the play — Roland must follow patriarchal procedure and address his intent to Mr. Dawson — but that such aspirations to identity and status parallel the Jamaica Sweep in the “dreams” of the West Indian middle class. What is more, such illusions become somehow more viable than the commodified follies of the lower classes. As Mrs. Dawson chases Mr. Jackson out of her sitting room at the end of the play, calling him a “scamp” and a thief, we realize that the scene’s real humor lies in its unmasking of bourgeois concepts of difference. The obeahman, we note as the curtain drops, has perhaps been correct all along, and his “superstitions” have, perhaps, produced this sentimentalized happy ending, quite despite Mrs. Dawson’s deliverance. There is indeed an evil spirit in this house, lurking still, Fonrose implies: the spirit of middleclass superiority and its systems of enslavement that ultimately rehearse and replay discourses of dominance. If Fonrose begins to shift the focus of West Indian women’s theater from nationalist dissimulations to a more critical decoding of post-Independence dialectics, Cicely Waite-Smith (also known as Cicely Howland) enacts similar, yet more politicized, revisionings in The Impossible Situation, another short one-act play set in Trinidad anf first produced in Jamaica in 1957. Like Fonrose, Waite-Smith locates her play’s action in a specifically middle-class arena, “The Channing living room, in the West Indies: expensively furnished, modern, in somewhat doubtful taste belonging to people who have ‘arrived’” (Waite-Smith [1966], 5). Again like Fonrose, Waite-Smith exposes the pretensions and delusions of her middle-class cast by centering on how the role of the feminine is figured in relation to class and racial dialectics. Indeed, since the play’s principal dialogue is between two women, the ascendant Mrs. Channing and her domestic servant Bernice, Waite-Smith even embodies these dialectics in the crisis of woman’s identity. To do so, she depicts tensions over Mrs. Channing’s lost earrings, the mark of both middle-class aesthetics of femininity and nouveau riche prestige. These earrings become

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the touchstone for Mrs. Channing’s conflict with Bernice, who, at the opening of the play, stands accused of stealing them. As the play unfolds, we learn that the earrings signify more than merely petty misdemeanors, for they quickly become symbols of racial and class difference: “[Mrs. Channing:] So that’s your story, is it? Well, we’ll see what the police have to say about it! [Bernice:] You going call the police? [Mrs. Channing:] (furious) You can bet your last penny I am! Do you think I’m going on being taken in and lied to and stolen from by a damned nigger? You’re all alike! I wouldn’t trust one of you round the corner with a dead fowl!” (8–9). Unmasking middle-class women’s prejudices, Waite-Smith moves beyond Fonrose to imply that these codes of difference have been internalized. She calls attention to the dark irony and hypocrisy of such discourses in the mouth of female characters who continue to other and enslave their counterparts, buying (literally) into patriarchal oppressions and recolonizations of West Indian self-imagings. In a more resistant dramatic moment, Waite-Smith allows Bernice to voice the fundamental problematic underlying earlier women’s theatrical romanticizations: “[Bernice:] (with hatred) And where I going find another job without a recommendation? You can take advantage of me now and you can call the police! But the day will come when things will be different and when brown woman like you will have to suffer for them wickedness!” (9). No longer is the inclusivity of 1930s women’s theater valid. Instead, such myths are dismantled, along with the motivations behind middle-class (and mulatto women’s) mimicries. As Helen Channing finds her earrings in her own purse, realizing the “impossible situation” her “mistake” has engendered, Waite-Smith intimates the irrationality of bourgeois fear: “[Mr. Channing:] Tell her you found them, I suppose. [Mrs. Channing:] I can’t do that. It would put me in an impossible position…
. [Mrs. Channing:] Oh God, why do we have to live like this! [Mr. Channing:] What d’you mean? Like what? [Mrs. Channing:] (incoherently — searching to express her inner anguish — something she has never faced before) I don’t know … All this suspicion and lying and — hatred. Being afraid all the time …
. What about the gun you keep by your bedside? What about the way you check and double-check all the doors and windows at night? Isn’t that fear? Well, with me it’s fear. And you don’t have to deal with the servants. You don’t know what it’s like. Locking up every single thing — food and everything … knowing how they despise you for it … Having to endure what they’re feeling about the car and my clothes and the silver … Never trusting them … And you can’t trust them…
. If I could only tell her the truth … But I can’t … I’ll just throw them away somewhere … Then perhaps they’ll be forgotten” (12–13). We realize, as Helen Channing speaks her final lines, that these earrings will not be forgotten; nor will the issues they have come to symbolize. The audience can no longer escape the subversive implications of this dissimulating theater and the sense that women’s theater is not only a crucial facet of West Indian decolonization but also of primary importance in revisioning West Indian identities, counter-identities, and the chains which confine them still. The old Prosperan gods of patriarchy have become the Helen Channings of postcoloniality. In her 1967 production of Uncle Robert: A Family Poem, 1957, a play that was first performed in Jamaica in 1957, Waite-Smith compounds Fonrose’s ironies. She resists mulatto middle-class ideologies of patriarchal power and difference and explodes bourgeois West Indian myths of aesthetic liberation and transcendental selfhood. Uncle Robert opens not in the salon, but on the other side of social barriers that usually separate the varieties of Caribbean realities. Like Errol Hill, who chooses to center his chorus in the character of the calypsonian and, thus,

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relocates the theatrical in the figures of popular, lower-class performances, Waite-Smith speaks her prologue through the troubador Chorus, who articulates similar relocations: “[Chorus:] Good Evening. Let me introduce myself to you. I am the Chorus. That is to say, I am both storyteller and onlooker…
. In a minute or two I am going to ask you to take a walk down the street with me and have a look at some people I have been watching over the fence, a group of people as close as the fingers on my hand and as separate as blue sea and Blue Mountain. Yes, what we call a family. Let me remind you that family stories are in the very best tradition. Twenty-five centuries ago and more the Ancient Greeks told stories that have never been equalled, as you know. The names of their heroes ring down the ages as familiar as Mother Goose and Brer Anancy … Ulyses … King Agamemnon … Helen of Troy …
. Family life: this was, this is, the stumbling block, bugbear, battlefield, ivory tower, institution, heaven, and hell, that then and now brings a man face to face with the gods. So follow me now. Let us go down one of our streets in the year 1957 and I will show you some of our local family heroes in the very thick of battle. Safely, of course, from the sidelines” (Waite-Smith [1967], 5–6). Uncle Robert, like other theatralizations of the period from Hill to Walcott, attempts to rewrite Caribbean experience and validate it alongside Western masterpieces. Local characters play out very located roles comparable to the foundational images of Western cultural identifications. Yet, unlike Hill, Walcott, and the predecessors of women’s theater in the 1930s, Waite-Smith’s Chorus positions us as spectators, on the margins, gazing in upon the very illusions of such validation within the central middle-class entity, the family, and its enactments of West Indian “tragedies.” Rather than “renaming the gods,” as other playwrights of dissimulation attempt to do, Waite-Smith deconstructs the very notion of such an endeavor and links it to other middle-class delusions. To do so, Waite-Smith revolves the play around the figure of Robert, a middle-class poet, and his struggles to produce a West Indian epic. Waite-Smith introduces Robert as he discusses the garden, the central image of the play, with Lancelot, his lower-class counterpart, and she hints at the problematics of such Ariel-like figures and such relations. The garden comes to represent the West Indies itself, actually worked by Lancelot and only managed by Robert who sees it as a metaphor for a displaced West Indian identity that has become his idée fixe. Just such misperceptions lead Robert to his poetic project. He confesses to Lancelot: “One day, Lancelot, I shall write a great epic poem…
. Don’t fool yourself, the Greeks and all aren’t the only ones to have heroes and gods. We’ll have ours too, ‘commensurate with the grandeur of the earthquake and the ferocity of the hurricane.’ Black gods and white gods and (winking) ripe brown goddesses, eh Lancelot?” (10). Such eroticizations of the feminine combine with Robert’s other fantasies of romanticized identities to be found in the “purity” of undissembled Caribbean communities, like the mountain village in which he has chosen to “create.” Epitomizing bourgeois desires to go native and escape the liberal’s guilty conscience and the revelation that, as Robert puts it, “History’s just a record of one bloody crime after another” (18), Waite-Smith’s Poet retires to his idyllic cavern to revision such histories and cleanse himself in visions of a truer self. Returning scenes later, Robert speaks to his nephew Matthew of his epiphany on the mount: “Matthew: I don’t like myself… I don’t like my thoughts… I don’t even understand myself. [Robert:] I know. We’ve been given quite a heritage, but we don’t seem to have much idea what to do with it. Europe and Africa. Two feet to stand on. There: there’s balance for you. No sense trying to keep your

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balance on one foot, is there? Some of us like to think we can stand firmly on the European foot, all by itself. We’d damn well amputate the other one if we could. Others — like John [Matthew’s homosexual partner] perhaps — want it the other way: Africa’s enough for them. Ever looked at yourself in the mirror? Embrace your whole heritage, boy. Not just your dual colour — both cultures, both feelings, both worlds… If you do that — if John does it — then you’ll know who you are. You’re free” (Waite-Smith [1967], 57). Even Robert’s romanticizations of the “native” experience have not prevented him from reaching the same epiphany that West Indian playwrights reach, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of hybrid identities and prismatic voices (see my discussion of Michael Gilkes above). Waite-Smith seems to support these beginnings of decolonization and reconstruction, allowing Robert such wisdom, for a moment at least, before he is stabbed to death by Lancelot. As the family gathers around the corpse of this Janus figure, destroyed before he could create his Homeric manifesto, we realize that this has not only been a play about the delusions of middle-class cultural destiny and about reidentifications; it is a play about the realities that such misrepresentations engender in their wake. Robert’s absence in the hills creates entropy in this very fragile family unit, exposing the petty natures and insecurities which underlie each character’s mask. This crisis culminates in Sylvia’s destruction of the garden to spite Robert’s spurning her very affected love for his own poetic desire. Highly symbolic in its reflection upon the role of middle-class women in the defeated designs of artistic (including dramatic) endeavor, the garden’s destruction leads to the play’s most crucial commentary and its perhaps most telling subversive moment: Lancelot’s scapegoating for the “crime” that inspires his homicidal act of rebellion against his patriarchal mimetic other, whom he had once wanted to join in the hills. Waite-Smith’s point seems clear, as Lancelot enacts what has become the archetypal mimetic action of lower-class resistance. This is a struggle between men, both deluded still by the Prosperan gods of Eurocentric discourse, both unable to escape futility and reinscription in roles that enchain them to a not-so-Greek fate. Most important, however, is the way in which Waite-Smith relates all this to a refocused figure of woman. Throughout the play, she depicts both the matriarchal-yet-patriarchal Granma and the younger women, like Sylvia and Babs, as parodic fops, constantly either crying out their racial prejudices or cooing about love. They replay middle-class roles of the coquette while bespeaking their separation from the realities of the masses. Babs even comments that the jazz to which she has begun to listen “brings out the negro in me” (Waite-Smith [1967], 18), and Sylvia’s every line drips with malapropisms of middle-class affectation, such as “Robert, I’d rather hear you laugh than all the perfumes of Arabia” (22). In contrast to such bourgeois duplicities and dupes, Waite-Smith positions the figure of Ruby, mother of Lancelot and cook in the household. Though never romanticized beyond her myopic belief that “the Party will change everything, solve everything,” Ruby becomes the locus of the play’s final act and of its central implications. As the Chorus possesses Ruby, the audience glimpses Waite-Smith’s only hope in this otherwise tragic dissimulation: “[Chorus:] No-one has ever spoken for this woman. HE might have spoken for her, had he lived. Disgrace, hunger and fear — she knows them all. She knows the strength and texture of the woven net. Who will speak for her now? She and her kind will not easily be explained or comforted” (71). These last lines encapsulate the message of Waite-Smith’s performance, for as the curtain closes on Ruby alone onstage, the audience is

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forced, finally, to focus upon the figure of a woman dispossessed by the machinations of the middle-class and the reproductions of a master-script. This second generation of playwrights shifts the ideological focus of women’s theater from the dissimulations of European misimagings to the further dissimulations of the West Indian reenactments of those misimagings, thus forcing us to stand on the other side of Waite-Smith’s “fence” and critique the identities West Indian theaters posit during the Independence era. But these playwrights continue to locate their theatralizations in identity politics and essentialized binaries of self and non-self which still figure the realities of women’s experiences in existential dilemmas and in dichotomies of difference. Even if anglophone Caribbean women’s theater in the late 1960s is probably more effective than other theaters of dissimulation, it is as yet restricted by its very attempt to rip away the masks of patriarchy and mimicry rather than involute the mechanisms of these discourses. Such involution becomes the project of the third wave of West Indian women’s theater in the 1970s and 1980s, when playwrights begin to transform the theater of dissimulation into what I have termed a theater of dissimilation, which attempts to liberate representations of the feminine from the confines of theatralizations that simply seek to subvert appropriation of colonial / imperialist discourses and disfigurations of woman. The theater of dissimilation endeavors to produce a metatheatrical renaming and infiltrate the very systems of imaging themselves. It is at this time that women’s theater begins to play a lead part in the development of a “nation theater,” which, like Kamau Brathwaite’s “nation language,” creolizes the West Indian stage and script. “Nation theater” does more than counterpose the dispossessed against those who repossess the masks of patriarchy and difference; instead, it inhabits the very center of the rituals of theatralization with the realities of the margins and the voices of the marginalized who begin to rewrite their own roles. In doing so, this theater of dissimilation is able to resist neocolonial means of domination, including the control of the images of identity and the constructs of West Indian selfhood by foreign, largely U. S. American, capitalist colonizers. The earliest, and perhaps most significant, of these emergent plays is Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade, published in 1979 but first performed for a telecast on Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation television in December 1973. The initial stage notes suggest that this enactment will depart radically from the theatralizations of prior women’s theater to reposition its action and implications in the cultural rituals of the masses of both rural and urban poor. Moreover, these rituals will be compounded by a series of “stages,” both historical and dramatic, which serve to force audience awareness of the process of cultural revisioning, of theatrical imagings throughout class hierarchies, and of viewers’ own roles in the reproduction of certain discourses and spectacles which define social self-conceptions and limit social revolution. Wynter hints at such restagings: “The play is enacted on three levels of awareness: Lovey and his apprentice are real — Lovey reliving the past, trying to paint the picture to the young boy. On the second level there are the ‘shades’ of the Jonkunnu Band. On the third level there are the seemingly real scenes with Driver, Brainsy, etc. and the play within the play” (Wynter [1979], 26). She emphasizes both the experimental nature of this production and the significance of its refocusing: “There is the reality of Lovey and the Apprentice: the illusion of the Jonkunnu Band: the seeming reality of Brainsy’s shop and Miss Gatha’s room: the Jonkunnu Band in the Kingston streets and the play within a play. This play within the play should also be on two levels: when

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the actors are acting their parts in a larger-than-life manner, and when they forget to act and their true emotions are revealed…
. The text is written in what seems at first glance to be blank verse: on examination this is found not to be the case — it is written this way to present dialect as an art form, and to illustrate the cadence and rhythm of stage dialect speech … Some poetic licence has been taken in respect to Driver’s lines when he refers to buses, telephones, electricity — none of which were in use at the time: such poetic licence is perfectly in order in a play that has fantasy in its context” (28–29). Wynter does bring onto the previously bourgeois stage a play that enacts an earlier period in the history of West Indian expression: the Jonkunnu ceremony and the Riot of 1841, all staged within the larger frame of the “pappyshow” of Lovey and his apprentice, a contemporary street ritual. But this is not just an Errol Hill reperformance of notions of an essentialized West Indian theater rooted in a romanticization of the folk. As Lovey informs us at the beginning of the play, this is a theatralization of the dialogies of such lower-class performances and of their internalizations of patriarchal master-scripts: “Come one, come all / Come high, come low / Come and see our puppet show! / Come close, sit down. / Listen well while I relate / A terrible tale of love and hate … / Blow for blow / Lead for lead / Blood for blood. / Actor-Boy Prince / Stone cold dead on a Kingston street! / After that, riot! Soldier! Gun! / I remember well, how I remember well, / That Christmas Jonkunnu masquerade: / The people, the tale / And the part that we played in the play” (Wynter [1979], 30). Wynter clarifies such critical theatralizations as she juxtaposes this “unofficial” voice to the “official” voice of Mayor Mitchell: “Take heed. Know what is good for you: / Play your play / Jump your masquerade / But keep the peace … / Or else I stamp out Jonkunnu! / Stamp it into the ground / Stamp it once and for all out of this Town!” (11). Bound within the space between these official and unofficial discourses, Driver emerges onstage to reveal the conflicts Wynter perceives in such replayings. Driver, the carriage-driver for Mayor Mitchell, desires to rewrite his part in the traditional play as he aspires to mimic the power of his patriarch and of the upper class. He comments to Brainsy: “You know something? / I tired of playing Horsehead, Brainsy, / Year in, year out, / Making an ass of myself. / I born for better part than that man, / I born to play a King!” (32). More importantly, however, Driver’s desires to reconstruct within the image of his Master stem from underlying desires both to possess the figure of the feminine and to seduce the young Quashiba into playing her own rewritten part as a vehicle for patriarchal empowerment. As Driver relates his design to Brainsy, we realize that Wynter is attempting to explode these mimicries, and the ritual of carnival itself, as dependent upon the imagings of the master-script. Driver elates: “That’s part of the plan / To catch that ground dove in my hand … / That’s why I must be King … / / I have a Throne, Brainsy! A / Kingdom! And a crown of gold. / That’s the plan, Brainsy, you don’t see? / That’s what I’ll blind her with: / Fill up her eyes with dreams: / I am going to make her a Queen, Brainsy, / In the Kingdom of the play / She’ll wear the finest dress she’ll ever see! / Gold Earrings in her ears / Silk shoes and gloves to match. / A crown of gold / And silver stars sprinkle all over her frock. / She’ll be my masquerade Queen, / In our imagining, / I’ll be Actor-Boy, her King. / My arms will be her Kingdom / My love will be her Throne” (34). That such imperialist designs depend both upon the conquest of woman’s body and upon the theatralizations of hegemonic power in illusory representations of wealth, prestige, and fantasies of position cements Wynter’s critique of the very role such enactments play in the reimprisoning of women and the masses.

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Perhaps it is just such internalizations that keep the people bound to the strings that control their gesturings, just as Lovey manipulates his puppets. Yet, this is not merely a play about male fantasy and lower-class mimicries. Instead of simply exposing the mechanisms of the dialogy between the official and unofficial voices of mastery, Wynter allows woman to attempt to liberate her part from Driver’s restaging. Driver’s traditional Queen and long-time lover, Miss Gatha, will emerge to interrupt this “new” script and reclaim the role of woman. Lovey sets the stage for such an involution: “But Driver forget one factor in the equation: / Miss Gatha from way back / Play the Queen in Jonkunnu / Work her finger to the bone / Make Driver a decent home. / Now she begin to suspect / The dolly house mash up / Her life over and done with / Throw away like scrapses on a dry / leaf fire!” (Wynter [1979], 36). Again in metatheatrical language, Gatha questions Driver’s passions: “What part you decide for me to play? / Or, you write me out of it, Driver? / Write out my scene?” (37). Resisting such revisionings of her part, Gatha again revises the masquerade (now terming it “Maskarade,” as if Gatha’s play lent Wynter’s its title), to don the disguise of Executioner and, as she tells Slim, to “write my own part in the play” (38). In this “play within the play” in scene 2, Gatha intercedes in Jonkunnu traditional plot and instigates an actual battle between Cuffee, Quashiba’s young lover to whom Driver has assigned the part of Actor-Boy, and Driver in his role as King. Lovey, again, conjures the scene: “The play still playing according to the pattern. / they fighting now / And just as it should turn out / The young prince supposed to win: / Touch the old King with his stick, / The old King fall down on the ground / Pretend him dead … / / This is the pattern of the Maskarade / Play: / The young challenge the old: / One of them die: / The doctor bring him back alive. / After, all sing and dance and celebrate, / And jump up Maskarade! … / This time the pattern change: / Real life catch up with the play. / Cuffee was young and strong, / Driver was old and expert. / Cuffee heart fill with rage and hate, / Driver head fill with a dream: / A last dream of love / And a moonlight drive / With a young girl around his neck / In a carriage by the sea … / / When another actor enter on the scene / And write a different script…
. / This was no play thing now…
.” (45–47). As a result of Gatha’s involution of her part and her act of resistance, the riot breaks out throughout Kingston. It drives Mayor Mitchell into retreat and the Jonkunnu band into the hills, where they lurk still, Wynter tells us, as a symbolic flame of social revolution and subaltern rebellion. Wynter conflates these actions of dis-assimilation in her final lines: “[Gatha:] Is me. / After all these years / Driver write me out of the play: / Blot out my part, my scene: / So I write a different end, Brainsy, / To a different play…
. / / [Lovey:] Jonkunnu play over? / Jonkunnu play just begun! / Mayor Mitchell or no Mayor Mitchell, / Jonkunnu play, ban or no ban, go on” (49–50). Wynter has not only prefigured future tensions between West Indian social classes but has located such prophetic enactments in the refiguration of woman which, though perhaps somewhat problematic still in its retreat to a subaltern identification, nevertheless begins a process of dissimilating the languages and images, rituals and representations of West Indian realities. In the 1970s, other theaters and playwrights emerge to continue this process and refiguration. As critics like Rhonda Cobham have demonstrated, theatrical companies such as the Sistren Collective extend Wynter’s renaming of the rituals, especially in their most succesful production of Bellywoman Bangarang from 1978–1986. Sistren not only stages the dramas of lower-class women in a documentation of patriarchal oppression but also locates these critiques in the rituals

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of women’s experience: the children’s ring game, symbolic in Bellywoman Bangarang of the struggle for liberation from the constructs of the feminine. “The rituals that emerged from the workshops that seemed to work best, given the women’s relative youth and their absence of any marked association with specific religious rituals or festivals, were those connected with childhood and the street…
. Over time, these frames and bridges emerged as the embodiment of the metaphysical concerns of the narratives” (Cobham [1990], 235–36). Though the play is still unpublished and therefore unavailable to this author, it is safe to say that Bellywoman Bangarang seems to resist both traditional master-scripts and social internalizations as the children’s ring game becomes an enclosing metaphor for the cultural enclosure of the figure of the feminine. It is represented on stage by the four pregnant teenagers who can never break free from the confines of their “play-within-the-play.” Unable to muster the defiance of a Miss Gatha or the hopeful investment in the subaltern revolutionary, Sistren leaves these characters destitute and broken through the play’s ending, which perhaps enacts the “other side” of these 1970s dissimilations: the despair of lower-class women who can never entirely revision their realities. Cobham intimates such despair in her articulation of Sistren’s message: “Gloria is beaten, first by her mother and later by her baby’s father; Yvonne’s pregnancy results in her being violently evicted by her Godmother and Marie is raped. Only Didi seems to escape overt physical violence, since hers is the one relationship that seems at the outset to be based on mutual attraction. Yet she too must endure a form of spiritual violence as she confronts the irony that her romance with ‘Dennis, just Dennis’ has been based on mutual exploitation: she wanted the food he had offered, he wanted her body” (237). If this is a play that renames the rituals to “raise questions about ways in which the process of mothering, be it social, biological or institutional, may be undermined or put at risk by the economic realities of Caribbean society” (238), it is also a play about the failure of such revisionings to produce any empowerment beyond critical awareness. Like the ring game at its center, this is a play that cannot break free: “The play uses the actual words and format of children’s games familiar to Jamaicans. Many of them are ring games which constantly replay certain prescribed movements and directives. The repetition becomes an image of the cycle of failed nurturance which is played out from state to institution and back to state. The idea of a circle also illustrates the way in which each generation of women is forced to repeat the cycle of early pregnancy, overwork, inadequate mothering … It suggests that the circle is a shifting, open-ended structure that may simultaneously reconstitute itself as trap or bulwark…
. In a later use of a similar figure a wider, institutional circle of barriers is invoked. Whereas in the former circle the chances are about even that the ball will be caught or dropped, in this sterner fastness of economic and social limitation, the image is one of animals penned in, who may find, in breaking through their pen, that their destination is the slaughterhouse” (242). Like Jackson Phillips and Harry Trewe in Walcott’s Pantomime, these characters exit the stage, still bound to the systems of imaging which control their reconstructions and still struggling to represent the marginalized West Indian woman on center-stage. While the masks may have been abjected, they have not yet been fully reconstructed. As the theater of dissimilation and dis-assimilation develops into the 1980s, another group of playwrights joins these women playwrights not only to continue renaming the rituals but to offer more positive solutions to the dilemmas of the 1970s. Critics such as Elaine Savory Fido

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and Judy Stone note the significant emergence of a lineage of male playwrights, stemming back to the “experimental” and “ritual” theater of Dennis Scott, who focus their 1980s’ enactments upon the refiguration of the feminine and its relation to cultural revisionings and lower-class theatralizations. Perhaps the most significant of these is the Trinidadian playwright Zeno Obi Constance, whose The Ritual, Or Friday Morning, First Period, 1983, offers one of the most critical representations not only of the systems of power and imaging which confine West Indian woman, but also of the role of theatralization itself in resisting such domination. Constance opens his ritual at another site of internalization: the schoolhouse, where five unnamed girls alternate parts as they inhabit the role of Omega, a pregnant classmate and paradigm of the final sign to which her name alludes; this process eventually conscripts the audience to participate in a rather Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt. Insisting upon the dialogue of the streets and the lower class, Constance fully creolizes the once master-script of West Indian theater as he involutes this center of power struggle with the arenas of marginalization and the voices of the marginalized. As the curtain rises on these schoolgirls, they, too, have begun to internalize discourses of objectification, standards of beauty and femininity, and the moralities of patriarchy. Standing “as if in a trance,” the girls break the initial silence of what is a possession ritual of sorts to voice these social indoctrinations as they mock their friend Joylyn, commenting amongst themselves, “Joylyn want one good man to cool she down, leh she behave she self” (Constance [1983], 54). Such mockery ceases as the group begins to discuss Omega’s situation and decides to compound the possessive nature of this ritual by “playing we is Omega” (56). Throughout Part One of the play, the girls take turns playing Omega in a variety of scenarios that theatralize her plight: They move from Omega’s discussion of her pregnancy with her Rasta lover, Michael, who imposes his community’s moralities upon her, and her dialogue with her parents, who threaten her with violence and then ignore her, to a courtroom, where she is further brutalized with accusations of prostitution and the dehumanizations of the State. As the ritual of playing Omega continues, and the line between reality and game becomes thinner, the girls begin to become conscious of a larger significance in their enactments. “1: How you mean you eh playing? / 4: Look, let we finish the thing, nah. / 5: I cyah take much more ah this nah. / 4: So what? Let we done it. Me eh go feel good until we come to the end. / 5: No. / 1: (angrily) No, my ass. You know damn well why we doing it and we going to do it. / 5: What it going to prove eh! What it going to prove? / 1: It going to prove what it have to because all ah we is Omega. You and you and you; all ah we. All woman who ever love before or get love before; or skip school or storm taxi or cuss teacher or screw after party, all is Omega. And all ah we who carry the guilt of a girl who get pregnant but didn’t want to get pregnant. So we going to become Omega for a little while to understand she feelings, to know she better, cause is like to know we better” (66). Constance locates his revisioning in a heteroglossic fracturing of the notion of identity as essential and individual. Omega as construct becomes all of us as construct, and as complicitous in her oppression, objectification, and dismissal. Constance cements that point at the end of Part One: “1: [slapping number 5]: Ah say we doing it and we damn well doing it, if we have to do a thousand scenes, play a thousand plays, perform a thousand rituals until we understand Omega — not Omega the end — but Omega the beginning of a New Society. Is 400 years now we playing Omega. Like is since forever we is Omega. Since we step off them slave ships

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Caribbean woman is Omega, hustling man and getting seeded. Never sure who the father is … o we go try, we go become Omega until we understand and come so strong that Caribbean woman cyah get exploited again. Until black woman could walk tall with they heads held high. Cause if we cyah see that day even in we minds, then there is no hope. NOT NOW; NOT EVER” (Constance [1983], 67). With this renewed perspective, the girls enact Part Two of this ritual, performing a number of street scenes and instances of patriarchal exchange of the figure of woman, from the shopkeeper’s relation of his sexist tale to the interruption of the Taxi-driver, who also begins a story of male fantasy and mysogyny, to the Constable who harasses Michael and Omega as they court on the pretence that Omega seems out of place with a Rasta and not home safe where she should be. These scenes culminate with one final ritual, “the very best one,” as Number 1 terms it: it recalls an African birth ceremony vastly different from, and yet somehow connected to, the dismissals of such ceremonies in Omega’s world. Here, Constance centers the message of his play: “[As the Ashanti Elder prepares the ceremony] For through you and this child to be born our people can experience not only the past but the present and future to come. Let Adunna come and we shall perform the ritual of pregnancy that has been ours and will be ours forever” (74). Lest such reifications seem too romanticized and idealized, Constance yanks the girls out of their possession trance as the Teacher emerges to scold and scoff at the girls for “wasting time,” accusing them of not giving enough disciplined concern to Omega and her plight. Ironically, she demands the girls’ names — identifications that are now superfluous — to report them to the school authorities as the curtain drops. While the girls give their names for the first time in the play, Constance’s insistence that they are now all Omega subverts such reindoctrination, along with any nostalgia for an essentialized solution in myths of Africa and presumably pure cultural traditions. The only renaming that must occur is that ritualized in the play’s performance which demands involvement in a specifically West Indian reconfiguration of a prismatic self that is aware of its own construction. For Zeno Obi Constance, we must all write Omega’s last act together.

References Baxter, Ivy. 1970. The Arts of an Island. Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. [1989]. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Transl. by James Maraniss. Durham: Duke University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1985. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry. 12.1 (Autumn): 144–65. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1971. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1984. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon. Brereton, Bridget. 1995. Text, Testimony and Gender: An Examination of some Texts by Women on the Englishspeaking Caribbean, from the 1770s to the 1920s. Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. Ed. by Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey, 63–94. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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Cobham, Rhonda. 1990. “A Wha Kinda Pen Dis?”: The Function of Ritual Frameworks in Sistren’s Bellywoman Bangarang. Theatre Research International. 15.3: 233–49. Constance, Zeno Obi. 1984. The Ritual and Flight Through Fantasy. 2 Plays. San Fernando, Trinidad: the author. ———. 1985. The Ritual, or Friday Morning, First Period. Caribbean Plays for Playing. Ed. by Keith Noel. London: Heinemann. Cumberland, Richard. [c.1931]. The West Indian: Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. As They Were Performed at the Theatres-Royal by their Majesties’ Servants. Ed. by Dougald Macmillan and Howard Mumford Jones. New York: Henry Holt. DeBord, Guy. 1994. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Fanon, Frantz. [1952]. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. by Charles Markmann. New York: Grove. Fido, Elaine Savory. 1990. Finding a Way to Tell It: Methodology and Commitment in Theatre About Women in Barbados and Jamaica. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Ed. by Carol Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, 331–45. Trenton, N. J.: Africa World Press. Fonrose, Veronica. 1966. The Evil Spirit. Trinidad: University of the West Indies Extra-Mural Department. Ford-Smith, Honor. 1986. Sistren: Exploring Women’s Problems Through Drama. Jamaica Journal. 19.1 (February-April): 2–12. Fowler, Henry. 1968. “A History of Theatre in Jamaica.” Jamaica Journal 2.1: 52–61. Frow, John. 1991. “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia.” October. 57: 123–51. Gay, John. 1983. Dramatic Works, Vol. II. Ed. by John Fuller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins. 1996. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London: Routledge. Gilkes, Michael. 1982. Couvade: A Dream Play of Guyana. London: Longman. Glissant, Edouard. [1981]. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Hill, Errol. 1972. The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———, ed. 1985. Plays for Today: Derek Walcott, “Ti Jean and His Brothers,” Dennis Scott, “An Echo in the Bone,” Errol Hill, “Man Better Man.” Harlow, Essex: Longman. Hogan, Patrick Colm. 1994. “Mimeticism, Reactionary Nativism, and the Possibility of Postcolonial Identity in Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain.” Research in African Literatures 25.2: 103–19. Houston, James N., Jr. 1992. “Colonial Discourse in Richard Cumberland’s Play The West Indian: The Relationship of the Colonizer to the Homeland.” Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research (Second Series) 7.2: 55–59. Hulme, Peter. 1992. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Routledge. James, C. L. R. 1992. The C. L. R. James Reader. Ed. by Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Blackwell. Lent, John. 1990. Mass Communications in the Caribbean. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Noel, Keith. 1985. Introduction to Caribbean Plays for Playing. London: Heinemann. Omotoso, Kole. 1982. The Theatrical into Theatre: A Study of the Drama and Theatre of the English-Speaking Caribbean. London: New Beacon. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Reddock, Rhoda. 1994. Women, Labour and Politics in Trinidad and Tobago: A History. London: Zed Books. Rhone, Trevor. [c. 1972]. 1981. Smile Orange: Old Story Time and Other Plays. London: Longman. ———. 1986. Two Can Play and School’s Out. Introduction by Mervyn Morris and Michael Manley. Kingston: Longman.. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1954. Introduction to The Maids and Deathwatch: Two Plays by Jean Genet. New York: Grove. Silenieks, Juris. 1994. Toward créolité: Postnegritude Developments. A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. I. Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Ed. by A. James Arnold, 517-25. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Stone, Judy S. 1994. Theatre: Studies in West Indian Literature. London: Macmillan. Walcott, Derek. 1970. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. ———. [1974]. 1996. Rprt. “The Muse of History.” The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh. 354–58. London; New York: Routledge.

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———. 1980. Pantomime and Remembrance: Two Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Waite-Smith, Cicely. [1957]. 1967, rev. ed. Uncle Robert: A Family Poem. Trinidad: University of the West Indies. ———. 1966. The Impossible Situation. Port of Spain, Trinidad: University of the West Indies. Warner, Keith. 1982. The Trinidad Calypso: A Study of the Calypso as Oral Literature. London: Heinemann. Wiles, Timothy J. 1980. The Theater Event: Modern Theories of Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 1979. Maskarade: West Indian Plays for Schools. Ed. by Jeanne Wilson, 26–51. Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House.

Essay

The Essay LAURA G. YOW

Indiana University

From Michel de Montaigne’s description of the essay as “a formless and irregular utterance” to Aldous Huxley’s claim that the essay is “a literary device for saying almost everything about anything,” the genre has often appeared to be so comprehensive as to be indefinable. The term itself, derived from the French essai, a trial or attempt, connotes appropriately that which is tentative and open-ended, that which is inclusive rather than conclusive. A form “condemned” as “a hybrid” (Adorno [1991], 3), the essay is a curious, exploratory genre with a decided disrespect for established boundaries. If it is restless, however, the essay is also paradoxically rooted in a particular perspective; it does not claim to provide a totalizing world view but rather proffers a personal viewpoint. George Lamming sums up the situated nature of the essay as a form when he describes The Pleasures of Exile, 1960, as “a report on one man’s way of seeing” (Lamming [1960], 56). In the hands of Montaigne, such emphasis on the independence of the individual intellect constituted an epistemological revolt against the traditional authority of the auctores. Originally perceived as a space for the questioning of conventional wisdom, the essay has continued to be celebrated as “the critical form par excellence” and a formal refuge for “intellectual freedom” (Adorno [1991], 18 and 3). However, neither this freedom nor the individual who exercises it are ideologically neutral. The essay may have no “compelling tradition” (3), but it does have a history and, like that of the novel, it is a history associated with the articulation of the bourgeois individual and with the imperial project. In his “Notes on Hamlet,” 1953, C. L. R. James considers Hamlet the “kindred soul” and prototype of the modern “intellectual,” including “the essayist,” in “rational society” (James [1953], 244). James views Hamlet’s anguished indecision as the psychological corollary of the historical moment when theological and feudal authority begins to be overwhelmed by a “world of free individualisation” (244). The character of Hamlet is struggling, he asserts, “with nothing less than the freedom of the individual mind. I think therefore I am. Descartes, Hobbes, Bacon, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, the Royal Society — these men laid the scientific foundations of the modern world by investigation and speculation which they considered to be free” (244). This seeming “freedom of the individual mind” (245), expressed in the style and epistemology of the essay in its traditional form, is, as James indicates, actually limited, dependent upon specific circumstances. put into question. As Michael L. Hall has documented, the desultory discursivity of the essay arose in late-sixteenth-century Europe “as a product of the Renaissance ‘idea’ of discovery and in response to it” (Hall [1989], 73). This connection can be seen in the frequency with which the early essayists employed the voyage of discovery as a trope for intellectual inquiry. Thus, in 1646, Sir Thomas Browne wrote, concerning “Vulgar and Common Errors” in the realm of knowledge, that hapless individuals “are oft-times fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of Truth” (89). Still, discovery was not simply an “idea,” and the voyages of discovery

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were not merely metaphors for metaphysical exploration. Francis Bacon, considered the father of the essay in the English language, not only “laid the foundations” of a new scientific world view but helped lay the groundwork for the colonization of the New World. His essay “Of Plantations,” 1625, drew heavily on the “new sciences” in presenting what Hall has called “a practical program for planting colonies and systematically exploiting the new American lands”(76). The revolution in European consciousness that found literary form in the prose style of the essay thus opened avenues not just toward a new way of knowing but toward the imperial domination of the Americas as well as other ostensibly “untravelled parts” of the globe. The tensions between rootedness and restlessness, the questions of identity and subjectivity, as well as the problematic politics of knowledge which characterize the essay as a genre find apt parallels in concerns expressed by Caribbean artists and intellectuals. Exile, emigration, and a concomitant quest for community are both familiar topoi of anglophone Caribbean literature and facts of experience for many of the region’s inhabitants. Epistemologically, the essay’s emphasis on the local nature of truths and the authority of individual experience anticipate both poststructuralist and postcolonial redefinitions of the historical. As a public site for personal reflections, the essay can be seen as a space for the assertion of voices or alternative histories that have been suppressed or marginalized by a dominant discourse. Considerations such as these can help to orient our thoughts on how Caribbean authors writing in English have reshaped the “traditional” qualities of the essay form to their specific sociohistorical situations. Beyond providing what Lamming has recognized as an “occasion for speaking,” the essay has served as a site for a metadiscursive critique of the very categories of voice, language, identity, and history which mark a certain tendency of anglophone Caribbean writing. If the essay has a poetics, it might be described, following Edouard Glissant, as a “poetics of relation” (see Glissant [1989]). In Glissant’s formulation, a relational poetics involves a move from linearity to transversality, from a search for points of origin to an exploration of points of contact. His theory of postcolonial textuality recalls Adorno’s formulation of the discursive style of the essay which “abandons the royal road to the origins” (Adorno [1991], 13), as well as a teleological narrative of progress. Eschewing hierarchies, the essay “coordinates elements rather than subordinating them” (22). In its suspicion of linearity, the essay may be seen formally to embody critiques both of genealogy and of Enlightenment notions of progress which have marked much postcolonial theory. The study of the essay in the Caribbean is complicated by the fact that literary historiography has traditionally privileged the book, a commodity whose production in the West Indies has had a vexed history. The dissemination of an essay, however, does not require the same kind of industrial apparatus as a novel: most often published in newspapers and periodicals, the essay as a form is readily accessible to writers and their audiences on a local level. The proliferation and relative success of the “little magazines” in the anglophone Caribbean prior to the 1950s stand in stark contrast to the failures of the early book publishing ventures in the region. While scholars of anglophone Caribbean fiction currently cite the 1930s as the period during which a regional literature began to take shape and the 1950s as the era during which this writing gained the attention of metropolitan anglophone publishers and audiences, essays in English by Caribbean writers appeared as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Tiffin’s essay in this volume). This very fact of local publication leads, however, to great

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difficulties when attempting to chronicle the anglophone Caribbean essay. Not only, as Adorno has noted, does the genre not shy away from exploring “what is transient and ephemeral” (Adorno [1991], 10); the essays themselves often prove to be less than durable physical artifacts. A great number of the publications that provided writers with a local forum were short-lived, and relatively few have been preserved in libraries and archives that are themselves often prejudiced toward the book. As a result, many of the earliest examples of essay-writing in the anglophone Caribbean remain inaccessible to contemporary scholars, particularly to those who work outside of the archipelago. An exception that proves this rule are the essays of Trinidadian John Jacob Thomas, a teacher, member of the Civil Service and, as an author, one of the earliest voices in the modern anglophone Caribbean literary conversation. From March through July, 1888, Thomas responded in The St. George’s Chronicle and Grenada Gazette to the fraudulent assertions made by James Anthony Froude in The English in the West Indies: or, The Bow of Ulysses, 1888, concerning the inhabitants of the British West Indies. Subsequently realizing that Froude’s volume “was not likely to have the same ephemeral existence and effect as the newspaper and other periodical discussions” of it (Thomas [1963], 56), Thomas determined to publish his essays in book form. The following year, Froudacity: Or, West Indian Fables Explained, appeared in London. Deriding Froude as a “negrophobic political hobgoblin” (55), Thomas exposes the imperial ideology that subtends the Oxford professor’s rhetorically strong, if factually weak, case against West Indian self-government at a moment when the direction of British colonial policy is uncertain. In what Thomas terms an “anti-reform manifesto,” Froude had represented black West Indians as being incapable of politically representing themselves or, more pertinently, of politically representing “Anglo-West Indians.” Froude’s conservative political ends were best served by positing a strict dichotomy and unwavering antagonism between black and white people in the West Indies. In his discussion of slavery, he thus tends “to represent the Whites exclusively as ruling, and the Blacks indiscriminately as subject.” Thomas offers an important historical corrective to this particular “fable” (Thomas [1963], 155); he asserts that, prior to Emancipation, “the West Indies were ruled by slave-owners, who happened to be of all colours” (155), and thus counteracts any tendency to simplify the complexities of power in Caribbean societies into a racialized binary opposition. Yet, Thomas not only attacks Froude for “luxuriating in his contempt for exactitude” (79); he also takes issue with Froude’s decidedly non-essayistic approach to his object of study. Scorning any “local knowledge” of the islands and their inhabitants, Froude apparently preferred to conduct “his detailed scrutiny of a whole community” from the window of a moving carriage, from which vantage point he condescendingly concluded that “there are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own” (91 and 94). Thomas’s refutation of Froude establishes the essay in the anglophone Caribbean as a political instrument, a polemical space for the assertion of presence in the face of an assumption of absence. In publishing his rejoinder in London, Thomas participates in the elaboration of a black West Indian counter-discourse within the metropolitan public sphere. Though explicitly concerned with the British West Indies, this counter-discourse is diasporic in scope. Surveying the history and post-Emancipation achievements of “the extra-African millions,” Thomas determines that they have proven “apt apprentices in every conceivable department of civilised culture” (179). He closes his essay by considering whether this “civilised African race” will “remain forever… too

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isolated from one another for grand racial combinations,” or whether they might unite to “conquer or perish” in an attempt to deliver Africa from “annexation” or “forcible ‘protection’” (179) by European imperial powers. Though his belief that it is the “obvious duty” of “civilised” people of African descent to redeem Africa betrays an unquestioning acceptance of Western civilization as the only one worthy of the name, Thomas nonetheless envisions the possibility of a global movement for African liberation a full decade before fellow Trinidadian Henry Sylvester Williams was to organize the first Pan-African Conference in London. If Thomas was a relatively lone star on the anglophone Caribbean literary horizon, the intellectuals who combined to form the Trinidad and later the Beacon groups constituted one of many regional constellations to take shape in the 1930s and 1940s. In the pages of The Beacon, no single voice or point of view predominates, though C. L. R. James’s essays prefigure the scope and acuity of his later work. What is remarkable is the coexistence of multiple and conflicting positions presented by editor Albert Gomes and contributors such as James, Alfred Mendes, and Ralph Mentor, as well as by members of the Trinidadian general public, concerning culture, politics, class, and race in contemporary West Indian society. While the verdict was virtually unanimous that, as Ralph Mentor put it, “the time has arrived when the people of the West Indies must develop a literature and philosophy of their own” (Mentor [1932-c], 15), the content, characteristics, and social functions of such expressions were greatly contested. In his 1930 “Commentary” on the public indignation generated by James’s barrack-yard story “Triumph,” 1929, Alfred Mendes attempts to set out some of the criteria for an anglophone Caribbean art. Noting that “the Zeitgeist is one of revolt against established customs” (Mendes [1930], 21), he privileges literature as an oppositional realm. However, this opposition is not so much overtly political as it is moral and cultural, a means of affronting the Victorian sensibility of the Trinidadian middle class. Though Mendes advocates a “stark realism of vermin and vice” to disrupt “the smug complacency of the idle rich,” to confront them with the fact that Trinidadian “social organization is not what it ought to be” (23), his enthusiasm for vice far outweighs his concern for vermin. As a result, he ultimately appears more interested in a revolution in sexual mores than in the redress of social injustice. Still, Mendes’s defense of James’s attention to the Trinidadian working classes, as well as his discussion of the socially constructed nature of “quality” are important and highly political steps toward the demythification of existing literary norms and values. The short stories published in journals like The Beacon also constitute what Reinhard Sander has termed “the rudiments of a literary tradition” in the anglophone Caribbean (Sander [1988], 151). V. S. Naipaul has testified to the importance of this fiction for his own development as an author. His assertion that “the English language was mine; the tradition was not” (Naipaul [1964], 26), articulates a dilemma acknowledged by many colonial and postcolonial anglophone writers. The snowfalls and daffodils of British literature were not merely “alien” to Naipaul’s experience; they “were excluding,” leading him to think it “impossible that the life I knew in Trinidad could ever be turned into a book” (25). The local fiction of the 1930s, Naipaul writes, “converted what I saw into ‘writing,’” providing a “starting point” (25 and 26) for his own literary endeavors. In a series of editorials on West Indian literature, Albert Gomes addresses this issue, urging artists to “break away as far as possible from the English tradition,” which he deems “incongruous” with the regional “scene and spirit” (Gomes [1933-a], 31). These sentiments are echoed in

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a Jamaican context by Roger Mais, who attacks local writers for their lack of originality and devotion to outdated British poetic models. Like Gomes, Mais exhorts Jamaican authors to take the Jamaican public seriously, rather than spoon-feeding them poetical “pap” (Mais [1940], 182). Yet, while Mais is intent on inciting a mass “revolt in Jamaican letters” (183), Gomes looks forward to the appearance of a West Indian Walt Whitman who alone, he believes, can lead the “movement towards an art and language indigenous to our spirit and environment” (Gomes [1933-a], 31). Though Gomes champions the working classes as fit subjects for fiction, his vision of an individual literary talent as the foundation of an “indigenous” art bespeaks a refusal to see the inhabitants of the barrack-yards as cultural producers in their own right. Ignoring the rich history of calypso, kalinda, and other oral and performative folk forms, he concludes that Trinidad has “no Art and little Culture” (Gomes [1932-c], 8). Whereas Gomes perceives anglophone Caribbean writers to be “slaves” to “English culture and tradition,” J. E. Clare McFarlane, president of the Poetry League of Jamaica, encourages them to see themselves as its proud heirs. “We have received a very definite heritage,” he writes in “The Challenge of Our Time,” “and hold in trust a tradition which we cannot regard with levity” (McFarlane [1935], 174). McFarlane’s own gravity regarding the business of writing is related to his faith in the capacity of culture to provide coherence in a time of increasing crisis. Economic depression, ascendant political nationalism and the intense trade union activity, which manifested itself in widespread strikes and social uprisings throughout the archipelago in the 1930s, all contributed to McFarlane’s sense of living in “the twilight of an age,” and it is important to place his conservatism in this context. McFarlane differs from other poetical conservatives in the region in naming the “heritage” he claims as explicitly British. By contrast, Ernest Carr sees the “Tradition” without which there can be no “Art” as universal, “the common lot of all humanity” rather than the expression of “the history or philosophy of any race or people” (Carr [1933], 38). While Carr laments the fact that “the political unrest of the age has seeped into and infected the serenity of the sphere of art” (38), McFarlane understands literature as inherently political; his commitment to a British literary tradition is part and parcel of his commitment to the British empire. The indissoluble link between McFarlane’s political and aesthetic conservatism is evident in his insistence that it is “Poetry” upon which “the true foundation of this Empire rests, and by which it will be preserved throughout the storm that now hangs above the horizon of civilization” (McFarlane [1935], 175). In positing so overt an identification between politics and poetry, McFarlane is somewhat of an anomaly in the region for this period. Among those who advocated independence, for example, even James had yet to make the connection between culture and politics which would be so central to his later work. Though the early 1930s saw James move toward a manifestly nationalist politics, in the cultural sphere, as he writes in Beyond a Boundary, 1963, “Matthew Arnold still had possession” (James [1992], 121). However opposed their thoughts on art may be, McFarlane and Gomes agree that severe economic deprivation is the cause of arrested cultural development in the islands. Knowing it “impossible to teach the beauties of poetry to a hungry and ragged populace,” McFarlane insists that attention be paid to their “material well-being” (McFarlane [1935], 175). Gomes concurs with this point of view when he considers that “the ubiquitous tragedy of our islands” is the “spectacle” of “intellectual curiosity side-by-side with squalor and starvation” (Gomes [1933-b],85). Beyond a concern for the amelioration of social conditions, the two share the striking coinci-

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dence of conservative and liberal attitudes which marks the thinking of many anglophone Caribbean writers and intellectuals at the time. The populist and nationalist sentiments Gomes expressed with regard to literature, for instance, do not extend to the question of political participation. In both the artistic and the political realms, the “lower classes” were not to represent themselves but were to be represented by “intelligent people” (Gomes [1932-a], 3), with whom he explicitly contrasts them in a Beacon editorial condemning Captain Arthur Cipriani and the Trinidad Workingmen’s Association’s drive for self-government. Particularly odious, it seems, was Cipriani’s insistence that any move toward a Federated West Indies be accompanied by universal adult suffrage. “The average member of the working class,” Gomes opines, “is on an intellectual parity with any ape and is, consequently, incapable of distinguishing a counterfeit from a genuine coin” (3). The Beacon has often been described as an anti-establishment paper, and there is ample evidence that it was considered dangerously subversive. The material that appeared in its pages regularly attracted visits from the police and provoked attacks by the Catholic Church and the conservative daily press. The latter was responsible for advertising boycotts which, as Brinsley Samaroo has noted, accounted for the magazine’s uneven publication history and its eventual demise. (Samaroo [1978], i-ii) As Gomes writes, “In the end, faced with the choice between compromise and discontinuance, I chose the latter” (Gomes [1974], 167). Among other things, the members were pro-labor, professing definite socialist views and an express admiration for “the great and highly progressive experiment” of Russian Communism (Schneider [1931], 10). The Beacon was also resolutely anti-British in its support of the movement for Indian independence. In its “India Section,” it documented this struggle and published a number of contributions from Trinidadians of East Indian descent concerning the specificities of their history and social situation in the island. Though The Beacon was committed to anti-establishment attitudes in many instances, perhaps a more apt description of its ethos as a whole is given by Alfred Mendes, who characterizes the magazine as “liberal” in that “it allowed all sort and conditions of dissenting and assenting views to be expressed” (Mendes [1965], 6). For instance, Gomes’s editorial rants against self-government were precipitated by the publication, in The Beacon, of Cipriani’s 1931 essay in support of “The Federation of the British West Indies.” And while Gomes appears not to have thought much of the working class, he nonetheless gave voice to one of their members, James Cummings, whose essay exposing the “disgraceful and abominable” conditions that prevailed in Trinidadian barrack-rooms (Cummings [1931], 243) provided a much-needed counterpoint to the predominantly sentimental exposition of the yards in the short fiction of the period. This “liberal” tendency is perhaps most salient in a debate sparked by the Beacon’s publication of an essay on “Race Admixture” by Dr. Sidney Harland, in which the author claims to prove the biological foundation of the intellectual inferiority of the “Negro Race” (Harland [1931], 36–39). James’s response, which appeared in the following issue, briefly traces the history of racialist thinking about the “relative quality of Eastern and Western minds” (James [1931], 6) and takes issue both with the “antiquated” nature of Harland’s pseudoscientific “evidence” as well as with his lack of rigor in argumentation. In subsequent numbers, Gomes and Mentor join James in exposing the prejudices that motivate such ostensibly objective “scientific” research and the inevitable bias of the resultant “findings.” All three espouse an

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environmentalist view of development, and Mentor in particular points out the need to “appraise the results of unequal opportunities” before one comes to any conclusions about “ability” (Mentor [1932-a], 10). Mendes, who dismisses Harland’s biological argument for “Negro inferiority” in favor of a cultural one, presents a different side to this debate. Proclaiming “culture” to be the “only standard for judgment among races,” he pretends that, as “Africa has no indigenous culture to show the world” and “the Negro, as a race” has made no “contribution towards Art and Science,” one can “without fear of contradiction” assert the superiority of the “Nordic race” (Mendes [1931], 6). Mentor locates the source of Mendes’s “pompous” beliefs in a “lack of proper acquaintance with the history of the world” (Mentor [1932-a], 8), a lack that he attempts to rectify with a lengthy discourse on “Negro achievements” from Ancient Egypt to the present day. The essays written in response to Harland and Mendes, however, not only constitute an alternative history of achievement and creation; they also begin to problematize the apparent neutrality of such notions as “history,” “science,” “knowledge” and “culture,” though no explicit connection is yet being made between the biases implicit in these categories and the politics of imperialism. James, who had left Trinidad for England in 1932, may have shared Gomes’s views on race, but he was radically opposed to his opinion of the working class and their capacity for self-rule. Presenting The Case for West-Indian Self Government, 1933, James returns to the ground covered earlier by J. J. Thomas. Like his predecessor, he explicitly talks back to Froude, from whom he appropriates the title of the first section of his essay: “The English in the West Indies.” Yet James’s concerns are as urgently contemporary as were Thomas’s in 1899. In 1932, a Colonial Office Commission was appointed to take evidence in the islands concerning the “constitutional question,” and James enters the debate surrounding the viability and desirability of West Indian independence as a staunch proponent of self-rule. James’s analysis of Crown Colony rule demonstrates the structural inevitability of corruption; both the system of appointments and the disproportionate and unchecked power of the Colonial Governor breed “sycophancy” and stifle the “free expression of opinion” essential to good government (James [1933], 5). In a review of the essay, which originally appeared in the Caribbean in a longer version titled “The Life of Captain Cipriani,” 1932, Ralph Mentor appears appalled by what he terms James’s “rabidly anti-government mentality,” though he commends him for highlighting the “relationship between the colour problem in the West Indies and British rule” (Mentor [1932-c], 15). If the crown colony system creates officials who are more concerned with serving the interests of the empire than those of the people, then this situation is exacerbated by colonial racial politics. Beyond the fact that prejudice and color consciousness govern the nomination of local men of color to the Legislative Council, the personal advancement of select individuals “seems to depend … on the way … they dissociate themselves from their own people” (James [1933], 22). Thus, the political system is both informed by and reinforces what James terms the “trivial divisions and subdivisions of social rank and precedence” based on “colour distinctions” (9). Though in The Case for West Indian Self-Government, James gives evidence of breaking out of what he later called “the mould of nineteenth century intellectualism” (James [1992], 113) in favor of overt political engagement, he nonetheless betrays its lingering traces. British colonial misrule aside, the “case” for West Indian Self-Government ultimately rests on the fact that “in language and social customs, religion, education and outlook,” West Indians “are essentially

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Western” (James [1933], 5). James is not alone in differentiating West Indians from what he referred to as “primitive peoples in Africa” (10). The British Labour Party’s 1928 pledge to grant self-government was restricted to “those Dependencies with a population culturally more advanced, i. e., with a Europeanised or Oriental Civilisation,” and explicitly excluded the British colonies “in Africa and the Pacific” (quoted in Cipriani [1931], 2). In “Abyssinia and the Imperialists,”1936, however, James breaks definitively from this vision of West Indian exceptionalism to participate in a global struggle against colonialism. James calls the British role in the Italian-Ethiopian conflict a sorely-needed “lesson” for “Africans and people of African descent, especially those who have been poisoned by British imperialist education” (James [1992], 63). In speaking of and to “Africans and people of African descent,” James forges a rhetorical alliance, the political realization of which was the goal of his work with the International African Services Bureau. James’s critique of European imperialism as a purely capitalist venture masquerading as a benevolent “development” project both reflects the Marxist turn his thinking had taken earlier in the decade as well as the realization by the self-proclaimed “British intellectual” of the ambiguity inherent in a “Western” education. While James notes that “it is in the history and philosophy and literature of Western Europe that I have gained my understanding not only of Western Europe’s civilisation, but of the importance of the underdeveloped countries,” this very tradition is used by the British to “reinforce the power of arms” (James [1992], 63) in their exploitation of the colonies and their inhabitants, by soliciting the complicity of the colonized in their own subjugation. The gulf between imperial rhetoric and imperial intent is also the subject of “Now We Know,” an essay by Roger Mais which appeared in Public Opinion, the organ of the People’s National Party, on July 14, 1944. The occasion for Mais’s fervently anti-British tract was the publication of the Colonial Office’s constitutional proposals for Jamaica, which Mais saw as a “piece of hypocrisy and deception” designed to mask the “real official policy” of the empire, namely, the “non-dissolution of the colonial system” (Brathwaite [1974], viii). Mais attacks Winston Churchill for his conservative stance regarding decolonization and at the same time puts into question the participation of colonial troops in World War II. Churchill may have called imperial subjects to arms under the guise of combating fascism, but Mais asserts that “what we are fighting for is that England might retain her exclusive prerogative to the conquest and enslavement of other nations” (vii). Upon the publication of “Now We Know,” the police raided the offices of Public Opinion, searched Mais’s house and seized the original copy of the essay. Mais was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison for sedition and endangering England in time of war. Along with the drive for political independence, which gained momentum in the late 1930s and early 1940s, came a growing emphasis on the role of culture in the creation of a national community. Norman Manley, the leader of the People’s National Party in Jamaica and later its first elected Prime Minister, writes in “National Culture and the Artist,” 1939, that “political awakening must and always goes hand in hand with cultural growth” (Manley [1939], 72). Manley echoes the writers of the early 1930s in his insistence that “national culture” should reflect local subjects and celebrate the Jamaican “type of beauty,” which he describes as “a wonderful mixture of African and European” (72) elements. Though Manley privileges direct “political action” in the rousing of a “national consciousness,” he also recognizes the capacity

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of art to transform a mode of political organization into a “people” (73). Una Marson, poet, magazine editor, and one of the founders of the influential BBC program “Caribbean Voices,” also couches in political terms her call for increased financial and “spiritual” support for the arts in Jamaica: “The truth has not yet come home to the hearts and minds of the people of this island,” she writes, “that our status in the way of nationhood is more to be enhanced by our literary output than by rum and bananas” (Marson [1949], 186). Marson’s assertion that artists must be given the same kind of encouragement as is given to those who pursue “materialistic money-making careers” (186) is of a piece with critiques by Naipaul and others of the “philistinism” of anglophone Caribbean society (Naipaul [1958], 9). Bim, the Barbadian “little magazine” that George Lamming has described as “an oasis in that lonely desert of mass indifference, and educated middle-class treachery” (Lamming [1960], 41), appeared for the first time in December of 1942. Edited by Frank Collymore, Bim, along with journals like A. J. Seymour’s Kyk-Over-Al in Guyana and Edna Manley’s Focus in Jamaica, provided precisely the kind of encouragement of local writers that Marson felt was lacking in the region. The importance of such “regional cradles” in the development of anglophone Caribbean cultural and national independence has been extensively explored by Reinhard Sander (see Sander [1975] and [1988]). Though the predominantly literary essays in Bim reflect the levity desired by Collymore who, in an early call for contributions asked that nothing “too heavy” be submitted (see Collymore [1944]), the magazine’s contents are hardly apolitical. Rather, essays like Edgar Mittelholzer’s “Romantic Promenade,” 1946, or “Of Casuarinas and Cliffs: An Essay,” 1945, assert a quieter nationalism than did the pointedly polemical works that appeared, for example, in The Beacon or Public Opinion. Formally, these pieces are very traditional; Mittelholzer observes his surroundings, using the things he sees as a springboard for meditation. He does not indulge in introspection but, rather, reflects on the beauty of the environment. His essays work to refute the “artist in Barbados” who, “with a gesture of blasé desolation,” declares that “there’s nothing here to paint” (Mittelholzer [1945], 6). Beyond asserting the aesthetic value of the local landscape, Mittelholzer participates in the elaboration of what Benedict Anderson has called an “imagined community.” In “Romantic Promenade,” the essayist as “solitary walker” strolls “along the pitch walk that borders the Grand Savannah of Port of Spain,” pointing out “that huge, gnarled [tree] which stands at a point roughly equidistant between All Saints Church and the Turf Club Paddocks” (Mittelholzer [1946], 12). Mittelholzer’s use of “that” instead of the indefinite article “a” is a verbal marker of belonging; it implies the familiarity of both author and audience with Port of Spain. A Guyanese author, writing of Trinidad for publication in a Barbadian magazine, Mittelholzer implicitly imagines a community that is regional: his conception of a “local” audience actively incorporates the anglophone Caribbean as an integral cultural body. The regionalism embodied in this essay also reflects Collymore’s decision to expand Bim’s focus in response to the political move toward Federation (see Collymore [1964], 70). Corresponding to the “boom period” of the anglophone Caribbean novel in the late 1940s through the 1950s was an increased critical scrutiny of the literature of the region. In 1948, the British journal Life and Letters devoted a special issue to the subject of “West Indian Literature.” Peter Blackman puts into question the premise of the enterprise when he answers the question “Is There a West Indian Literature?” in the negative. But Blackman is not content to attribute

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this absence to what Henry Swanzy called “that tropical dolce far niente” (Swanzy [1949], 23). Rather, he sees the current state of artistic underdevelopment in the islands as the consequence of a history of British economic exploitation and cultural domination. One of the primary obstacles to the creation of a West Indian literature, in Blackman’s view, is the absence of a West Indian audience. In order to retain “the authentic fire,” the writer, he insists, must write for “people like himself” rather than for “far-off critics” (Blackman [1948], 100). But the islands’ poverty has resulted in a majority population that can neither read books nor afford to buy them. The West Indian author is therefore forced to look abroad, primarily to England, for a “market” that does not correspond to his or her ideal audience. A manifestation of the economic dispossession generated by the politics of the British empire, this figurative exile anticipates the mass migration of West Indian novelists to London in the 1950s. Blackman’s understanding of the intimate connection between economic and cultural dispossession is evident in his discussion of the way in which “English values” have “shaped and determined society” (98) in the anglophone Caribbean. Acknowledging the presence of African cultural survivals, despite efforts by slaveholders to suppress African languages and customs, he determines that they could nonetheless “offer no lasting opposition to the dominant Western heritage” (98). These elements of the colonial past combine to form a situation in which English is the sole language of a majority of West Indians, while the “content of the English heritage enshrined in the English language” is not valid for them and is, in many instances, actually “hostile to [their] self-respect” (100). However, Blackman is as alive to the liberatory potential of a “new and valid West Indian aesthetic” as he is to the oppressive nature of colonial cultural politics. If, like Manley, he credits the emergence of political nationalism with a rising self-consciousness about, and rejection of, “English values,” he also asserts that the cultural work of West Indian writers will “in no small way help to determine” the outcome of “the struggle for nationhood” (102). While the polemical essays of writers like James and Mais have an obvious function in this struggle, their primary target is political tyranny rather than the cultural hegemony to which Blackman points. It is the latter mode of imperial domination, the tenacious “myth” of European superiority and the imposition of this myth as “fact, history, absolute truth,” that primarily concerns George Lamming in The Pleasures of Exile, 1960. Writing prior to the achievement of formal independence in the anglophone Caribbean, he elaborates on Blackman’s analysis of the linguistic transmission of values and examines the impact of this transmission on the future of self-representation, both political and literary, in the West Indies. The overarching “theme” of the largely autobiographical essays that comprise The Pleasures of Exile is “the migration of the West Indian writer, as colonial and exile, from his native kingdom, once inhabited by Caliban, to the tempestuous island of Prospero and his language” (Lamming [1960], 13). While “economic necessity” had sparked the mass movement of West Indian laborers to the metropolitan market in the late 1940s, Lamming is concerned here with the “psychological origins” of the migration of anglophone Caribbean intellectuals to the imperial center in search of cultural capital. Reading Shakespeare’s Tempest as the cultural expression of England’s will to imperial domination, he highlights the fact that Prospero is not only “master” of the island he stole from Caliban but “schoolmaster” thereon. Lamming’s Caliban has been interpellated by means of “Prospero’s gift of Language” into a “colonial structure of awareness” which determines his “way of seeing” himself and the world. For the “writing Caliban,” educated in a system in which reading was

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“deliberately and exclusively English” and in which “culture” was imported “from outside,” this “way of seeing” is one that deems physical exile in the metropolis the precondition for a literary existence. “These men had to leave if they were going to function as writers since books, in that particular colonial conception of literature, were not … written by natives” (27). The “great mystery,” for Lamming, given Prospero’s “calculated and habitual annihilation” of Caliban in the realm of culture, is not why the West Indian writer chooses exile, but “that there should be West Indian writers at all. For a writer cannot function; and, indeed, he has no function as a writer if those who read and teach reading in his society have started their education by questioning his very right to write” (27). The multiple implications of and problems associated with asserting this “right to write” in the colonial context are dramatized, throughout The Pleasures of Exile, through Lamming’s use of the trope of the trial as a figure for his text. Lamming, as “witness” to the historical situation in the anglophone Caribbean, assumes the traditional authority of the essayist in presenting and interpreting his own “lived experience” (11). However, in troping his essayistic “occasion for speaking” as a trial, Lamming’s individual testimony resonates with the history of disfranchisement, both literal and symbolic, of colonised peoples. In his discussion of James’s The Black Jacobins, 1938, Lamming bears witness to the importance of “making available to all the result of certain enterprises undertaken by men who are still regarded as the descendants of languageless and deformed slaves” (119). The trial in this instance is the locus of a cultural and historical counter-discourse that works to subvert the imperial myth of colonial historylessness, infamously adhered to by V. S. Naipaul. Taking none other than Froude as his authority and guide in The Middle Passage, 1962, a book of travel essays on the anglophone Caribbean, Naipaul concludes “that the history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told…
. History,” he asserts, “is built around achievement and creation, and nothing was created in the West Indies” (Naipaul [1962], 29). Naipaul’s cynical vision of the anglophone Caribbean is akin to Hegel’s view of Africa as “no historical part of the world,” a region “with no movement or development to demonstrate” (quoted in Lamming [1960], 31). Not only does Naipaul assert that “nothing was created in the West Indies”; he in fact determines that “these small islands… will never create” (Naipaul [1970], 250). For Naipaul, the overwhelming power of the past can lead only to sterile protest, whether in politics or in literature. Unlike Naipaul, Lamming is not content to condemn the anglophone Caribbean to cultural and social chaos in perpetuity. Whereas Naipaul “describes the present and condemns [the West Indies] to a future [he himself] has chosen,” Lamming refuses such foregone conclusions. “The future,” he insists, “must always remain open” (Lamming [1960], 15). Though “colonialism” may be “the very base and structure of the West Indian’s cultural awareness,” this dependence is neither absolute nor permanent. “Caliban and his future now belong to Prospero,” but only “provided there is no extraordinary departure which explodes all of Prospero’s premises” (109). Lamming figures the possibility of resistance to the “monolithic authority of European culture,” and specifically the possibility of resistance through language and literature. Though claiming the right to bear witness, to give voice to an alternative narrative of “achievement and creation” that has been occluded by the dominant historical discourse, is a necessary condition of colonial liberation, it is not in itself sufficient. It is not enough that “the writing Caliban” has “got hold of his master’s weapons,” given that the master’s weapons have also taken hold of Caliban. Lamming stresses the fact that subjects not only possess a language but

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are, in turn, “possessed by all the conceptual and poetic possibilities” of that language (Lamming [1973], 10). Representation itself is no solution if, as in Naipaul’s case, the language one employs betrays a “humiliating lack of change” in one’s premises. “We shall never explode Prospero’s old myth,” Lamming writes, “until we christen Language afresh; until we show Language as the product of human endeavor” (Lamming [1960], 119). In other words, language and the “values implicit” therein must be denaturalized, demythified, returned to history. In the “extraordinary departure” that is The Pleasures of Exile, Lamming does not merely enact a reversal of the imperial hierarchy. He not only “trespasses” on Prospero’s geographical premises, he “explodes” Prospero’s ideological premises (119), that is, the binary oppositions that have traditionally structured the production of linguistic meaning and identity within imperial discourses. Lamming’s understanding of colonization as a “reciprocal process” (153) that “makes both master and slave colonial” (229) undermines the disabling “dichotomy” (180) geographically mapped as the split between center and margin and represented politically as the absolute difference between colonized and colonizer. His narrative persona, “changing the roles of judge and jury, and demanding to be prosecutor as well as chief witness for the defense” (11) occupies a multiplicity of subject positions. Positing a notion of identity as plural and fluid, Lamming introduces disorder into the court of law and irremediably complicates the fixed relations of power upon which colonial discourses are founded. Texts such as The Pleasures of Exile belong to what Edward Kamau Brathwaite perceives to be the first “phase” of West Indian and Caribbean intellectual life, that of the “consciousness of cultural dissociation” (Brathwaite [1970], 31). While Lamming succeeds in transforming his alienation from the anglophone Caribbean into a form of cosmopolitanism, asserting that “the pleasure and paradox of my own exile is that I belong wherever I am” (Lamming [1960], 50), Brathwaite is concerned with the question of “communal, as opposed to individual, wholeness” (Brathwaite [1970], 36). He has consistently focused on the “second phase” of Caribbean intellectual history, that of “transcending” or “healing” (31) the anguish occasioned by this dislocation, of “bridging the gap” between the West Indian intellectual and West Indian society. His literary criticism has continually wrestled with the tension between individual freedom and social responsibility in an attempt to reconcile the two. In his first published essay, “Sir Galahad and the Islands,” 1957, Brathwaite approaches the question of the writer-in-exile from the perspective of “home.” Edward Baugh has pointed to this essay as “the most important critical survey of West Indian literature by any critic of that period” (Baugh [1982], 66), but, in many ways, it puts the notion of the “survey” in question. Though Brathwaite’s refusal of a critically “objective” stance is not as clearly stated here as it is in later work, he nonetheless does not attempt an overview of his subject from what Sylvia Wynter has called “an Archimedean point outside the historical process” (Wynter [1968], 26). His primary concern is with the “value, to the West Indies,” of the writing of exile (Brathwaite [1993], 7). In his essay, Brathwaite proposes that the “desire (or the need) to migrate, whether in fact or by metaphor,” lies “at the heart of West Indian sensibility” (7). Exile is not merely a question of physical displacement from a geographical “home” but of what he has elsewhere called a generalized sense of “rootlessness, of not belonging to the landscape” (Brathwaite [1970], 29). Following Lamming and Naipaul, Brathwaite locates this desire in the “poverty,” both “material” and “cultural,” of anglophone Caribbean society, though he begins to question whether this cultural poverty is actual or

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whether it is another manifestation of the myth of colonial absence, born of the class barriers that prevent the predominantly middle-class writer from connecting to “the folk.” At this point, Brathwaite views “the folk” solely as suppliers of the raw “material” out of which West Indian writers will construct a literary “tradition”; ironically, he would seem to figure among those who, in the words of Sam Selvon’s “Calypsonian,” “think Calypso is no song at all” (quoted in Brathwaite [1993], 9). Taking as his point of departure two characters from Selvon’s work, Brathwaite identifies a shift whereby Razor Blade from “Calypsonian,” a representative “picaresque hero” of early West Indian fiction, “becomes Sir Galahad of The Lonely Londoners,” a figure whose developing social consciousness leads him to realize that “he does depend on people” (23). Brathwaite defines “social conscience” as “a coherent organization of values” which entails not only the recognition of one’s dependence on, but the assumption of, one’s responsibility to other people, a development that points to the end of the West Indian’s “exile,” or “alienation,” from his or her society. In “Roots,” 1963, a response of sorts to the questions raised in “Sir Galahad,” Brathwaite’s emergent sense of the intellectual’s social responsibility becomes concrete. Writing from the perspective of a number of emigrant writers’ return to the Caribbean, Brathwaite notes with a certain despair the chronic “helplessness” these writers express in their work when they confront the need for, and possibility of, social change. While, in “Sir Galahad,” Brathwaite subscribed to the view that the “emigrants” left home because of the environment’s poverty, in “Roots” he ascribes their “urge to escape” to a lack of commitment: the exiles have, in the words of Neville Dawes, “chosen the way of non-identification” (33). The emigrants may have returned to the islands physically, but they have yet to “return … to a sense of responsibility to West Indian society” (54). In the context of this persistent alienation, the publication of V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, 1961, holds particular importance for Brathwaite as the first West Indian novel whose central concern “is not rootlessness and the search for social identity” (Brathwaite [1993], 41). This novel also highlights the relationship between “tradition and the individual talent” which has been one of Brathwaite’s preoccupations. Drawing on T. S. Eliot’s seminal essay, Brathwaite conceives of the relationship between artist and tradition as reciprocal; the artist “’use[s]’ his tradition” and “is ‘used’ by it” (37). Such reciprocity is expressed in the relationship of the “creole” figure of Biswas to the “tenacious traditional socio-cultural matrix” represented by Hanuman House, as well as in the relationship of Naipaul himself to Indo-Caribbean society. In Brathwaite’s view, Naipaul can write a novel like Biswas not only because of his “remarkable individual talent” but because, as an anglophone Caribbean writer of East Indian descent, he has access to a “tradition,” as well as to the “values” associated with that tradition. With Naipaul, Brathwaite believes that “literature can grow only out of a strong framework of social convention” (Naipaul [1962 ], 70). “The black West Indian,” Brathwaite concludes, “cannot really expect novels like Biswas until he has a strong enough framework of social convention from which to operate” (Brathwaite [1993 ], 54). Though he flirts with a kind of cultural essentialism, Brathwaite begins, in “Roots,” to develop the notion of creolization so important to his later work. “Creolization,” as he sets it forth in The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820, 1971, is the “cultural process” by which disparate cultures respond to, and interact with, one another as well as the pressures of the environment, to form a “new construct” (Brathwaite [1971], 306). Beyond an ex-

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centric focus on the “great” traditions of Europe or Africa, creolization provides what Brathwaite calls “the conditions for and possibility of local residence” in a cultural sense, as well as the foundations of “authentically local institutions” (309). The notion of creolization is central to Brathwaite’s search for an “alternative to the European cultural tradition” imposed on the anglophone Caribbean, an alternative that takes into account “the non-European traditions of Africa, Asia and the Amerindians”(115). In Brathwaite’s view, this alternative must be rooted in the “folk,” whom he now sees as providing not merely the material for, but the models of a new Caribbean aesthetic. It is in jazz that Brathwaite finds one such “aesthetic model,” by which he means at once “a way of seeing” and a “critical tool” (Brathwaite [1993], 107). A product of post-Emancipation, urban African-American culture in the United States, jazz provides a structure in which a series of dichotomies — “cry / laugh, slave / free, country / urban, Africa / Europe” — find “resolution” in “the swing” (57). Not only does jazz serve as a model of cultural creolization; its “improvisational character” expresses “something of the ‘modern’ problem of the individual personality vis-a-vis the group” (58). Improvisation is thus a figure for what Brathwaite perceives to be the essential interaction between an individual talent and the tradition of “the group of which the artist is a part” (57). Brathwaite’s discussion of tradition in his later essays amounts to an assertion of the existence of a “strong framework of social convention” that he had originally regarded as lacking. The “rootless rogue” of early West Indian fiction was only apparently rootless: his “ancestral relationship with [a] folk or aboriginal culture” was not absent but merely “unheeded” (Brathwaite [1970], 44). Brathwaite’s emphasis, in “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” 1967, on music’s influence on the rhythmic qualities of anglophone Caribbean prose anticipates his later exploration into “nation language” in “History of the Voice,” an “electronic lecture” presented at Harvard in 1979 and published in book form in 1984. “Nation language,” according to Brathwaite, “is the process of using English in a different way from the ‘norm’” (Brathwaite [1984], 5). This alternative usage goes beyond a Caribbean dialect of English, with all its pejorative connotations, to a fundamental revision of the traditional forms of English versification. In Brathwaite’s view, “nation language” poets have for the most part ignored the pentameter, which cannot “describe the hurricane,” in favor of accentual and metrical patterns drawn from a “tradition of the spoken word” (Brathwaite [1993], 171). Brathwaite’s discussion of “nation language” responds to Gordon Rohlehr’s call for a literary criticism that can account for works created to be performed rather than read. “One who belongs to an oral tradition,” Rohlehr asserts in a discussion of Louise Bennett’s work, “ought to be appreciated in the act of performance” (Rohlehr [1992], 81). Accordingly, Brathwaite focuses on the way “meaning” is produced through performative elements such as “noise,” tone and gesture, as well as in the “continuum” between the poet and the audience (see Brathwaite [1984], 17–19). His attention not only to the performed poetry of Louise Bennett and Michael Smith, but to the works of calypsonians like The Mighty Sparrow significantly expands the field of the “literary” in the anglophone Caribbean. Brathwaite’s move towards a “roots-directed (re)-vision” of West Indian artistic production leads him to a critical engagement with a number of poets, critics, and dramatists working in the archipelago who have often been overshadowed by the writing of the “major novelists.” In “The Love Axe (1): Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic 1964–1974,” 1976, Brathwaite celebrates the

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performances of Yoruba House and Marina Maxwell’s Yard Theater, the dub poetry of Ras Dizzy and Bongo Jerry, as well as the “creative criticism” of Sylvia Wynter and Gordon Rohlehr. Brathwaite relates these popular artistic productions and critical statements to “native protest movements,” including the student uprisings at the University of the West Indies, galvanized by Walter Rodney and the student occupation of the Creative Arts Center in February of 1970. Through these grassroots political movements, Brathwaite asserts, imperative “links — artistic and intellectual — with the people … had been (re-)established” (Brathwaite [1976], 22). Brathwaite’s theoretical understanding of “the people” or “the folk” is neither pastoral nor monolithic. There is, however, a persistent tension in his critical practice between the acknowledgment of a multiplicity of “West Indian voices” born of the myriad creolizations of European, African, Asian, and Amerindian cultures and his own overwhelming emphasis on the “broadly ex-African base” of “a” West Indian culture. Given the historical devaluation and interdiction of African-oriented cultural practices and forms in the New World, as well as the critical neglect of African influences on anglophone Caribbean artistic production prior to the late 1960s, the need to assert the presence and value of African elements in Caribbean culture is evident. However, Brathwaite’s frequent conflation of the terms “New World Negro,” or “Afro-Caribbean,” with “West Indian,” or “Caribbean,” at times works to obscure the presence of other cultural influences. That Wilson Harris shares a number of Brathwaite’s critical concerns is evident from the title of his first book of essays, Tradition, the Writer, and Society, 1967. His conception of the “cross-cultural imagination as a liberation from monoliths” (Harris [1967], 40) in favor of cultural heterogeneity is, in many ways, akin to Brathwaite’s theorizing of creolization. However, the “cross-cultural strategy” Harris pursues eschews the genealogical logic at the heart of Brathwaite’s often troubling flirtation with racial and cultural authenticity. Where Brathwaite privileges the Caribbean relationship to “ancestral Africa” (Brathwaite [1993], 257), Harris seeks to expose the links between “all cultures and humanity,” to relate “figures in Europe with eclipsed figures in … the ancient pre-Columbian world” (Harris [1981], 30 and 26), to discern the connections between Greek myth and Haitian vodun. This strategy is intimately connected to what Harris calls the “intuitive imagination” (70), a kind of universal collective unconscious that he sees expressed in myth and fable. Though his emphasis on myth may appear apolitical, Harris’s critical essays reveal his acute consciousness of the politics of narrative form. “Even when sincerely held,” Harris writes, “political radicalism is only a fashionable attitude unless it is accompanied by profound insights into the experimental nature of the arts and sciences” (Harris [1967], 46). In “Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” 1965, Harris takes issue with the work of the majority of anglophone Caribbean novelists for remaining within the realist “framework of the nineteenth-century novel” (29), which he associates historically with the rise of the bourgeoisie as a class and with the spread of imperialism. Harris indicts realism as an “authoritarian” mode of representation (Harris [1981], 26), one that “persuades” the reader of the “fixed” or “inevitable existence” both of a “self-sufficient individual” (Harris [1967], 29) and of the social plane on which this individual operates. Though “historical documentary and protest literature” may attempt to “debunk imperialism” (Harris [1981], 26), they ironically reinforce imperial ideologies by adopting the discursive assumptions of a “realism of classes and classifications” (Harris [1967], 38). In opposition to a realist fiction of “hardened conventions,” Harris advocates “a fiction of implosion” (49) which constantly “seeks through complex

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rehearsal to consume its own biases” (Harris [1985], 127). Such fiction breaks with the notion of “consolidated character” in favor of what Harris terms “plural forms of profound identity” (Harris [1967], 40). Harris’s understanding of “character,” or “identity,” as a “series of subtle and nebulous links” between “old and new personalities” reflects the temporal aspect of his version of cross-cultural syncretism. His “revisionary” conception of the multiple temporal dimensions of a single image, individual, or event is radically opposed to the “linear bias” of “progressive realism” (Harris [1981], 72). Instead, Harris demands that we “find protean ways of visualising” the links between past, present, and future (83). This “protean” consciousness is equally evident in his attention to the “spatial logic” of the radical “structure of fiction” he envisions (Harris [1967], 51). An apt figure for this understanding of space is the “limbo,” a Caribbean dance form that, as Harris notes, has been traced back through the stifling and inhuman conditions on the slave ships of the Middle Passage to Anancy stories. Harris insists that the limbo is not the total recall of an African past, for that past has been “modified or traumatically eclipsed with the Middle Passage and with generations of change which followed it”; rather, it is a form that “translate[s], and accommodate[s] African and other legacies within a new architecture of cultures” (Harris [1981], 26). For the people who endured it, Harris suggests, Middle Passage “involved a new kind of space … and not simply an unbroken schedule of miles in a logbook” (28). In the limbo, the human body figures both the “interior dislocation of space” during the Middle Passage and the kind of creative “reassembly which issued from a state of cramp to articulate a new growth” (27) in the New World. Syncretism in the Americas is not merely proof of the survival, however transformed, of a cultural form but, more importantly for Harris, the evidence of the New World imagination’s “original” and “recreative response to the violations of slavery and indenture and conquest” (29). Derek Walcott’s statement, in “The Muse of History,” 1974, that “the vision of progress is the rational madness of history seen as sequential time, of a dominated future” (Walcott [1974], 6) owes much to Harris’s critique of the sense of inevitability that the ideology of “progressive realism” entails. For Walcott, such a vision of history reduces the individual to a “creature chained to his past” and consequently limits poetic expression in the Caribbean to “phonetic pain, the groan of suffering, the curse of revenge” (2 and 3). Emphasizing the narrative aspect of history as “fiction,” he stresses the need to write from the position of the “hero” rather than that of the “victim” (3), to view the Caribbean past as one of survival and creativity, not as a long nightmare of unmitigated suffering. While he celebrates the “wonder” of an Antillean “Eden” (27), Walcott, in “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” 1970, adamantly rejects the pastoral vision of “professional romantics” who idealize the poverty of the West Indian “peasant” or “an Africa that was no longer home” (Walcott [1970], 19 and 38). Walcott’s New World neither pretends to, nor longs for, “innocence”; “the apples of its second Eden have the tartness of experience” (Walcott [1974], 5). “History” may be “annihilated,” but the “bitter memory” of migration and a “degraded arrival” remains. The task of the artist in the Caribbean, in Walcott’s view, is to “accept this archipelago of the Americas,” the product of “the monumental groaning and soldering of two great worlds,” without succumbing to cynicism or nostalgia (25). Against a stance of “revenge” or “remorse,” Walcott advocates an artistic and “political philosophy rooted in elation” (5). This sense of “elation” is linked to his vision of man in the New World as “Adamic,” engaged, like the poet, in a “process of renaming, of finding

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new metaphors” (Walcott [1992], 13), of “recreating” the “entire order” of relations. What the “pastoralists of the African revival” do not understand is that “what is needed is not new names for old things, or old names for old things, but the faith of using the old names anew” (Walcott [1970], 10). For Walcott, this “elated” re-creation is the result of a syncretic process accomplished not by “jettisoning ‘culture,’ but by the writer’s making creative use of his schizophrenia, an electric fusion of the old and the new” (17), of the “patois of the street and the language of the classroom” (4). Walcott’s emphasis on English literature has led many critics to oppose him to Brathwaite, an opposition that tends to obscure the relation between the two, as well as to simplify their particular positions. Writing at the height of what Sylvia Wynter has called “the swing of the pendulum toward the myth of Africa” (Wynter [1969], 31), Walcott passionately defends his “love” for English not as a sign of “servitude” or of “playing white” (Walcott [1974], 4), but as a legitimate and significant aspect of his multiple “inheritance” (25). Like Lamming, who uses Prospero’s ambiguous “legacy of language — not to curse our meeting — but to push it further, reminding both sides that what’s done is done” (Lamming [1960], 15), Walcott dismantles a binary opposition of metropolitan possession and colonial appropriation by celebrating the anglophone Caribbean writer’s use of the metropolitan tongue “in defiance of an imperial concept of language” (Walcott [1992], 10). In a sense, the English language can be seen as “the glue … that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments,” the “white scar” that both reminds one of a break and signifies the effort of “restoration” (11). In 1968, Sylvia Wynter published the first part of “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Culture” in Jamaica Journal. Wynter’s occasion for speaking out is the publication of The Islands in Between, 1968, the first book-length collection of critical essays devoted to anglophone Caribbean writing. This volume, edited by Louis James, an Englishman who then taught at the University of the West Indies, is also the subject of a critique by Brathwaite, who takes issue with the “involuntary European norms” of the majority of critics therein (Brathwaite [1993], 126). Unlike Brathwaite, who is interested in creating an alternative paradigm for criticism, one that proves, at times, to be as normative and exclusionary as the “European” model he is attempting to replace, Wynter privileges a relational perspective. Her “concern is not with labels — English or West Indian, writer or critic,” but “with connections” (Wynter [1968], 24). Wynter traces the reliance of most of the critical writing in the anglophone Caribbean on the “perspectives of English criticism” (24) to the fact that it is produced at and disseminated from the University of the West Indies. In Wynter’s view, both the University of the West Indies and the society it serves are parts of a “branch-plant industry of a metropolitan system” in which “the creators of original models … have to cluster at the centre if they are to have the freedom and opportunity to create” (24). As West Indian writers and other emigrants migrated to England to find a market for their labor, so the University of the West Indies, Wynter suggests, is forced to turn to the metropolis to find “skilled personnel.” Thus, “the presence of Louis James in the Caribbean and the absence of the writer in London are part of the same historical process” (26). Drawing on Lamming’s understanding of colonization as a “reciprocal process,” Wynter asserts that decolonization, if it is to be successful, must be equally reciprocal. In her view, there is an urgent need for the metropolis to “begin a ‘painful dialogue’ with itself” about how its own identity and history are products of the “colonial relationship” (26). “With Hawkin’s first raid on Africa,” it is not just

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“the nature of being African,” but “the nature of Englishness” which suffers a change, as Wynter asserts in the second part of her essay (Wynter [1969], 30). It is not enough for postcolonial writers to reassert the margins of empire as creative centers; the metropolis must understand that the spaces and the peoples it has constructed as marginal are in fact integral to its own material existence and self-conception. Both must recognize that the center / margin distinction does not hold. Louis James’s inability to see his position as a British professor of English literature at the University of the West Indies as a function of the history of imperialism is symptomatic of what Wynter calls “acquiescent criticism” (Wynter [1968 ], 26). Such criticism “pretends to objectivity and detachment” (26), refusing to recognize that its criteria are neither universal nor independent but socially and historically determined. “Acquiescent criticism” actively “blinds its horizons in order not to perceive the … connections that would invalidate” its “way of seeing” (26). Wynter relates “acquiescent criticism” and its corollary, the “appeasing arts,” to a larger “process of negation in which culture itself has been dispossessed” (24). Detached from its traditional social function, culture becomes “a mere appendage to the market mechanism”(25), the work of art is fetishized as a commodity, and the human being is reified as a consumer. Opposing reification in all its forms, Wynter advocates an engaged art and a “challenging criticism.” Whereas the acquiescent critic “accepts the status quo” (26), thereby helping to reproduce it, the “challenging” critic must explore the “contradictions of reality” in order to “reinterpret” it. He or she must take part in a “revolutionary assault” against the “unreality” or “inauthenticity” of a society in crisis. “Challenging criticism,” as practiced by Lamming, among others, sees itself as part of a whole; rather than pretending to objectivity, it is aware of the sociohistorical context that has shaped it and which it, in turn, can help to shape. Culture, including criticism, is not a means of escape from “the blind necessity of material existence” but a means of combating it by changing “minds which have for centuries been moulded and preformed to come to terms with the actuality of scarcity” (Wynter [1969], 42). Wynter’s understanding that cultural criticism must be joined to “material praxis” is at the heart of her critique of the University of the West Indies, which she indicts for abdicating its power to function as “a catalyst for change” in anglophone Caribbean society (quoted in Brathwaite [1976], 25). Wynter’s concern with reciprocity is also in evidence in “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un / silencing the ‘Demonic’ Ground of Caliban’s ‘Woman’,” the “After / Word” to Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido’s Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, 1990, the first collection of literary criticism by women in and from the anglophone Caribbean. In this essay, Wynter analyzes a central distinction between Luce Irigaray’s “purely Western assumption of a universal category, ‘woman’
” and the “womanist-feminist” (Wynter [1990], 355) approach that characterizes the project of the essayists in this anthology. In Wynter’s view, the term “womanist,” borrowed from African-American feminist Alice Walker, introduces the variable of race into a Western feminist theory which had heretofore been concerned with gender and class as its sole categories of analysis. Wynter traces the historical construction, in the course of the sixteenth century, of a discourse of power that posits race rather than gender as the ultimate marker of “difference / deference” (360). This new “schema” of domination and subordination is central to the way in which Western Europe “legitimized” its “global expansion” as well as its “expropriation and marginalization of all the other population groups of the globe” (361).

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Returning to Shakespeare’s Tempest, she locates in the relationship of Miranda and Caliban an illustration of the insufficiency of the discourse of patriarchy to account for relations of power which are racialized as well as gendered. “If, before the sixteenth century, what Irigaray terms as ‘patriarchal discourse’ had erected itself on the ‘silenced ground’ of women, from then on, the new primarily silenced ground (which at the same time now enables the partial liberation of Miranda’s hitherto stifled speech), would be that of the majority population-groups of the world — all signified now as the ‘natives’” (363). Miranda’s own access to the word, however limited, is therefore predicated on the virtual silencing of Caliban. Wynter’s primary focus, however, is on the figure who is strikingly absent from Shakespeare’s text, that of “Caliban’s Woman” (360). Through an apprehension of this absence, Wynter asserts, one can begin to understand the significance of the essays that comprise Out of the Kumbla as they are “projected both from the hitherto ‘silenced’ vantage point of the obliterated experiences of most of the world’s peoples and from the vantage point of gender” (359). The essays not only point to the insufficiency of a Western feminist discourse which occludes the racialized identities of the female subjects it claims to account for; they also point to the historical exclusion of gender as a significant category of analysis within the predominantly masculinist discourse of anglophone Caribbean literature and criticism. Recalling Lamming’s discussion of Caliban, Wynter insists that one must move beyond simply “voicing the ‘native’ woman’s hitherto silenced voice” to an interrogation of “the systemic function” of this silencing, “both as women and, more totally, as ‘native’ women,” in order fundamentally to alter the binary oppositions which subtend “our systems of meaning” (365). Though Wynter’s essay breaks ground by “un / silencing” the question of sexuality in Caribbean discourse, the model of desire she posits is specifically heterosexual. Though she addresses the “stigmatization of homoerotic preference,” she only does so in a footnote (see Wynter [1990], 370). In “If I Could Write this in Fire, I Would Write this in Fire,” 1994, Michelle Cliff has addressed the invisibility of homosexuality within a broader analysis of the complexities of power and domination in contemporary postcolonial societies. In a passage concerning a dinner party at which her cousin joined a group of white men in making homophobic remarks, she writes of her own silence: “I can’t say I’m a lesbian — even though I want to believe his alliance with the whitemen at dinner was forced…
. And I have a hard time realizing that … to him — no use pretending — a queer is a queer” (Cliff [1994], 365). In this particular instance, the “primary” ground of differentiation and silencing is neither race, class, or gender, but sexuality. Since the late 1970s, the anglophone Caribbean essay has served as a witness stand for an increasing variety of voices that traditionally have been absent from the narrative of Caribbean literary history, even if they have not been altogether silent. As Wynter and Cliff show, every new testimony admitted will require readers to reconsider and expand their understanding of the complex networks of relationships not only between the metropolis and the Caribbean region, but also within and between social elements in that region. Although people of East Indian descent and women of all ethnic identifications have begun to be heard with greater frequency, much remains to be said. “The case,“ as Lamming wrote in The Pleasures of Exile, “remains open” (Lamming [1960], 11).

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References Adorno, Theodor W. [1958]. 1991. The Essay as Form. Notes to Literature. Volume I. Trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholson, 3–23. New York: Columbia University Press. Baugh, Edward. 1982. Edward Brathwaite as Critic: Some Preliminary Observations. Caribbean Quarterly. 28.1–2: 66–75. Blackman, Peter. 1948. Is There a West Indian Literature? Life and Letters. 59.135: 96–102. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1970. Timehri. Savacou. 2: 35–44. ———. 1971. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. London: Oxford University Press. ———. 1974. Introduction to Brother Man by Roger Mais. v-xxi. London: Heinemann. ———. 1976. The Love Axe (1): Developing a Caribbean Aesthetic, 1962–1974. Reading Black: Essays in the Criticism of African, Caribbean and Black American Literature. Ed. by Houston A. Baker, 20–40. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1984. History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London; Port of Spain: New Beacon Books. ———. [1986]. 1993. Roots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Carr, Ernest A. 1933. Art and Tradition. The Beacon. 3:4 (November): 80–81. Cipriani, A. A. 1931. Federation of the British West Indies. The Beacon. 1.9: 1–2. Cliff, Michelle. 1994. If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This In Fire. If I Could Write This In Fire, I Would Write This in Fire: An Anthology of Literature from the Caribbean. Ed. by Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, 356–70. New York: New Presses. Collymore, Frank. 1944. Editor’s Comeback. Bim. 1.4 (April): 1. ———. 1964. The Story of Bim. Bim. 10.38: 68–72. Cummings, James. 1931. Barrack-Rooms. The Beacon. 1.7: 21. Glissant, Edouard. [1981]. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Gomes, Albert. 1931. Germ Plasm: Some Comments on Dr. Harland’s Articles. The Beacon. 1.7: 22–24. ———. 1932-a. Local Fiction. The Beacon. 1.10: 1–2. ———. 1932-b. Captain Cipriani and Utopia. The Beacon. 1.10: 3. ———. 1932-c. Federation. The Beacon. 2.3: 7–8. ———. 1933-a. A West Indian Literature. The Beacon. 2.12: 3. ———. 1933-b. West Indian Magazines. The Beacon. 3.4: 74–75. ———. 1974. Through a Maze of Color. Port of Spain: Key Caribbean Publications. Hall, Michael L. 1989. The Emergence of the Essay and the Idea of Discovery. Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Ed. by Alexander J. Butrym, 73–91. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Harland, Sidney. 1931. Race Admixture. The Beacon. 1.4 (July): 36–39. Harris, Wilson. 1967. Tradition, the Writer and Society. London: New Beacon Books. ———. 1981. Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles 1966–1981. Ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek. Mundelstrup, Denmark: Dangaroo Press. ———. 1983. The Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ———. 1985. Adversarial Contexts and Creativity. New Left Review. 154: 124–28. James, C. L. R. 1931. The Intelligence of the Negro: A Few Words with Dr. Harland. The Beacon. 1.5: 6–10. ———. 1933. The Case for West Indian Self-Government. London: The Hogarth Press. ———. [1936]. 1992. Abyssinia and the Imperialists. The C. L. R. James Reader. Ed. by Anna K. Grimshaw, 63–66. London: Blackwell. ———. 1963. Beyond A Boundary. London: Hutchinson. Lamming, George. 1960. The Pleasures of Exile. London: Michael Joseph. ———. 1973. The West Indian People. Caribbean Essays: An Anthology. Ed. by Andrew Salkey, 5–16. London: Evans Brothers.

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Mais, Roger. [1940]. 1996. Where the Roots Lie. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 182–84. London; New York: Routledge. Manley, Norman W. [1939]. 1973. National Culture and the Artist. Caribbean Essays: An Anthology. Ed. by Andrew Salkey, 72–73. London: Evans Bros. Marson, Una. [1949]. 1996. We Want Books — But Do We Encourage our Writers? The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 185–86. London; New York: Routledge. McFarlane. J. E. Clare. [1935]. 1996. The Challenge of Our Time. The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. Ed. by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 174–76. London; New York: Routledge. Mendes, Alfred. [1930]. 1978. A Commentary. From Trinidad: An Anthology of West Indian Writing. Ed. by Reinhard W. Sander, 21–26. New York: Africana Publishing Company. ———. 1931. Is the Negro Inferior? The Beacon. 1.6: 6. ———. 1965. Talking About the Thirties. Voices. 1.5: 3–7. Mentor, Ralph. 1932-a. Truth is Mightier than Fiction: A Reply to Dr. Harland and Mr. Mendes. The Beacon. 1.10: 8–12. ———. 1932-b. Facts More Convincing Than Theory. The Beacon. 2.2: 10–11. ———. 1932-c. A Study of Mr. James’ Political Biography. The Beacon. 2.6: 15–17. Mittelholzer, Edgar. 1945. Of Casuarinas and Cliffs: An Essay. Bim. 2.5 (February): 6–7, 53, 55. ———. 1946. Romantic Promenade. Bim. 2.8: 12–13. Naipaul, V. S. [1958]. 1972. London. The Overcrowded Barracoon. 9–16. London: André Deutsch. ———. 1962. The Middle Passage. London: André Deutsch. ———. [1964]. 1972. Jasmine. The Overcrowded Barracoon. 23–29. London: André Deutsch. ———. [1965]. 1972. East Indian. The Overcrowded Barracoon. 30–38. London: André Deutsch. Rohlehr, Gordon. [1971]. 1992. Literature and the Folk. My Strangled City and Other Essays. 53–58. Port of Spain: Longman. Samaroo, Brinsley. 1976. Introduction. The Beacon. i-xiii. Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprints. Sander, Reinhard W. 1975. The Impact of Literary Periodicals on the Development of West Indian Literature and Cultural Independence. Commonwealth Literature and the Modern World. Ed. by Hena-Maes Jelinek, 25–32. Bruxelles: Didier. ———. 1988. The Trinidad Awakening: West Indian Literature of the 1930s. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Schneider, Nathan. 1931. An American on Communism. The Beacon. 1.2: 10. Swanzy, Henry. 1949. Caribbean Voices: Prolegomena to a West Indian Culture. Caribbean Quarterly. 1.2: 21–28. Thomas, John Jacob. [1889]. 1969. Froudacity: Or, West Indian Fables Explained. Port of Spain: New Beacon Books. Walcott, Derek. 1970. What the Twilight Says: An Overture. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. 3–40. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ———. 1974. The Muse of History. Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean. Ed. by Orde Coombes, 1–27. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1992. The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Wynter, Sylvia. 1968. We Must Learn To Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism. Part I. Jamaica Journal. 2.4: 23–32. ———. 1969. We Must Learn To Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism. Part II. Jamaica Journal. 3.1: 27–42. ———. 1990. Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un / silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’. Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature. Ed. by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, 355–72. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

P II The Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and Suriname Subeditor: Ineke Phaf

Prospecting the Field A Contrastive History of Literary Development

Introduction* INEKE PHAF-RHEINBERGER

Berlin, Germany

In comparison with the other Caribbean regions, little attention has been paid to the literary history of Suriname, Aruba, and the Netherlands Antilles. Although these territories were already Dutch by the middle of the seventeenth century, the linguistic map of the area shows that the Dutch language is only one of several idioms spoken and written by the local communities.

Geography Suriname The largest country of the Dutch Caribbean region is Suriname, which proclaimed itself an independent republic on 25 November 1975. Suriname is located two to six degrees north of the Equator and has a tropical climate with wet and dry seasons. The Atlantic Ocean and Brazil form the northern and southern frontiers, whereas two rivers, the Courantyne and the Maroni, are the boundaries with Guyana, a former British colony, and French Guiana, to the West and East, respectively. In 1992 the population was estimated at nearly 404,000 inhabitants rather densely concentrated in the coastal area (Tenenbaum [1996], 189). A variety of dispersed communities with quite different traditions lives in the rainforest interior. The capital, Paramaribo, has an extremely heterogeneous population composed of numerous ethnic groups, languages, and religions. Netherlands Antilles Until 1986, the Netherlands Antilles consisted of six islands in the Caribbean Sea, divided between the Leeward Islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao — the so-called ABC islands), and

* Research and contacts for this project were made possible by travel grants from STICUSA, in 1987, and the OKSNA, in 1989 and 1990. The president of the UNA, Alex Reinders, supervised the possibility of offering a course on Caribbean literature in 1987; the director of CARAF, Gert Oostindie, was helpful in organizing a first meeting with the contributors of the project in Leiden, in 1988. From 1989 through 1998 the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of the University of Maryland in College Park provided valuable logistical support for our project through the Latin American Studies Center and the Africa in the Americas program. Because of the unexpectedly long preparation time of this project it has become impossible to thank personally all of those who have helped in its realization. Therefore I want to express my gratitude to every one of the contributors, and especially to Frank Martinus Arion and Trudi Guda who have been such good hosts during my stays in Curaçao. Last but not least, I would like to thank the editor-in-chief, James Arnold, and his wife, Jo, for their patience, attention, and continued interest.

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the Windward Islands (Saba, St. Maarten, and St. Eustatius). In contrast with the designation in the French and English Caribbean, according to which the islands to the East of Puerto Rico and North of Guadeloupe are called Leeward and to the South of Guadeloupe to Grenada, the Windward Islands, the Dutch-speaking areas use these terms differently. In local tradition as well as in standard Dutch maps Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles are marked as the Leeward (benedenwindse), whereas Saba, St. Maarten, and St. Eustatius belong to the Windward (bovenwindse) Islands. For reasons of coherence, in this section on the Dutch Caribbean we will follow regional historical usage. The Leeward Islands are relatively close to the coast of Venezuela and have a larger surface and population than do the Windward Islands, which are situated approximately 900 miles to the Northeast. During the nineteenth century commercial and cultural contacts with the Spanish-speaking mainland flourished, especially in Aruba and Curaçao. Beginning in 1871, however, the protectionist politics of Venezuela discouraged commercial exchange, and these contacts diminished rapidly. They never regained a status of importance, even after the establishment of multinational enterprises such as Royal Shell in Curaçao, 1915, and the Lago Oil and Transport Company in Aruba, in 1924. The dry climate and the lack of rivers severely restrict agriculture and enhance leisure pastimes. Although the climate of the Leeward Islands is slightly different from that of the Windward Islands, agriculture remains poor and the main source of income is the tourist industry, especially in St. Maarten (the Dutch side of an island called St. Martin on the French side).

History Dutch Expansion The indigenous populations were invaded by Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century, as they were in the rest of the Americas. Alonso de Ojeda, the leader of the first Spanish expedition into the region, set foot on Curaçao in 1499. The Dutch were not involved until 1527, when they began to take an interest in the area. Rivalries with other European countries — Spain, France, and England — dominated the settlement of the islands as well as of Suriname, the “Wild Coast” of the Americas as it was called in those days. Cornelis Ch. Goslinga in his important study The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1971, describes this process and its political implications in great detail. He outlines the situation of the Seven Dutch Provinces in Europe, their trading centers on the African coast, and especially the salt trade through the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands. This trade policy anticipated the colonization. From 1568 to 1648 the eighty-years-war between the United Provinces and Spain promoted Dutch interests in the Americas. The foundation of the West India Company (WIC) in 1621 led first to plans for throwing the Portuguese out of Brazil, which the sugar plantation economy had rendered prosperous. Three years later Salvador da Bahia was conquered, and until 1641 half of the Portuguese possessions in northeast Brazil were in Dutch hands. Johan Maurits van Nassau’s highly erudite expedition of 1637 was accompanied by cartographers, architects, zoologists, astronomers, and painters such as Albert Eckhout and Frans Post (Boogaart [1979]).

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The prince returned to The Netherlands in 1644 carrying with him scientific and artistic documentation that highlighted the important role of sugar in Brazil, in considerable contrast with the fallow Spanish possessions in the Caribbean Sea. Dutch involvement in the Caribbean concentrated initially on capturing the silver and gold fleet, which provided the Spanish crown with the necessary capital for building up its empire. Piet Hein’s successful assault on the silver fleet in the Bay of Matanzas, off the northern coast of Cuba, in 1628, for instance, enabled the West India Company to increase their efforts to conquer Brazil. Piet Hein still lives in popular tradition. To this day Dutch children can sing from memory this song composed to celebrate his historic triumph: “Piet Hein, Piet Hein / Piet Hein, his name is small / His deeds are big / His deeds are big / He won the silver fleet.”1 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, Suriname — the official name of the republic at independence — had become a prosperous plantation society, and Curaçao was an established slave-trading center during the War of the Spanish Succession. In addition, Curaçao and St. Eustatius in particular played a significant strategic role. According to Derek Walcott in Omeros, 1990, Dutch merchantmen shipped arms to St. Eustatius “in reserve / to American colonies … an island bristling with contraband” (Walcott [1990], 79). This contraband activity peaked during the U. S. War of Independence, when St. Eustatius was nicknamed the Golden or Diamond Rock because of its favorable location on the sea lanes between North America and Europe. The island’s merchants grew rich trading consumer goods, gunpowder, and weapons. St. Eustatius became such an irritant that the English admiral Sir Walter Brydges Rodney plundered the Golden Rock on 2 February 1781 (Hartog [1976]). This fact is also recalled by Walcott, who uses the framework of the Dutch and English rivalries to introduce the forefather of a retired British officer living on St. Lucia. During the period of the so-called Old WIC (1621–74), the Dutch flag flew constantly over the islands. This was also true in the period of the New WIC (1674–1792), except for French and English occupations; but from 1795 onward the West Indies confronted a period of profound political unrest due to the European wars that followed upon the French Revolution. In the course of those events the Netherlands became a “satellite state of France and consequently the French sent administrative commissaries and troops from Guadeloupe ‘to take us under their wing’ as it was then termed and still is” (Hartog [1976], 102). The British did not hesitate to react. Between 1800 and 1816 the Dutch West Indies were several times converted into British protectorates or interim administrations, a situation that only came to an end when peace had been negociated in Europe after the battle of Waterloo. After World War II The West India Company, from its administrative center in Amsterdam, negotiated relations with these islands and territories until 1 January 1792 when the Dutch government took over. Despite the brief interruptions mentioned above, the Dutch West Indies primarily remained subject to the decision-making process of the parliament in The Hague until after World War II. During the German occupation of the Netherlands, Queen Wilhelmina spoke in a radio broadcast from London on 7 December 1942 about the future autonomy of the Dutch colonies in the East (Indonesia) and in the West Indies. After 1945, however, any move to accomplish this promise

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was surrounded by conflict. In his article on “De geforceerde onafhankelijkheid” (The forced independence), 1993, Hans Ramsoedh outlines the different steps taken, especially with regard to Suriname. The most important step was the preparation of an Imperial Conference (Rijks Conferentie) in order to discuss the different aspects of increased governmental autonomy. A delegation with representatives from Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles was sent to the Netherlands in 1946. This official exchange resulted in a First Round Table Conference (Ronde Tafel Conferentie), held between 27 January and 18 March 1948. In the same year, the political status of the Dutch colonies was also discussed at the Pan-American Conference in Bogota, which was attended by the Latin-American countries. This conference resulted in declarations favoring independence or integration into one of the Latin-American republics. An interim island rule (Eilandsregeling) functioned from 1950 until the Second Round Table Conference, held in April-May 1952, which discussed the conditions for a different political infrastructure. In June 1954 the Dutch government officially approved a new statute, as follows: 1) equality of all parts of the Empire; 2) autonomy in local affairs; and 3) mutual support. Military defense and international relations continued unchanged under Dutch supervision. The statute provided the former colonies with a different status. They now controlled the development of political parties, elections, and the expansion of the educational system in order to provide the necessary functionaries capable of dealing with local affairs. This process led to the independence of Suriname in 1975. In the Netherlands Antilles the situation was also in transition. In Aruba, a separatist movement had emerged that led to the foundation of the MEP (Movimiento Electoral di Pueblo / The People’s Electoral Movement) in 1971, under the leadership of the legendary Gilberto François (Betico) Croes. This political party has been very successful in negotiating a status aparte, which became effective on 1 January 1986. The separate status of Aruba can also be interpreted as a consequence of the internal rivalries inside the Netherlands Antilles, and in opposition to the dominant position of Curaçao, the traditionally stronger commercial center where business and governmental institutions are concentrated. The 1994 census estimated the total population of the Federation of the Netherlands Antilles at 196,000 inhabitants (Tenenbaum [1996], 189), and of Aruba at 69,000 inhabitants. Aruba negotiated its status aparte on the condition that it would accept independence on 1 January 1996. This decision reflected the general opinion of the Dutch government that the Netherlands Antilles, in the long run, would not remain a part of the Dutch Kingdom. But things have changed since then. The present Dutch minister for the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba argues otherwise, however, because of serious conflicts with Suriname, and drug and financial scandals, among other reasons (Alofs [1990], Dip [1990]). As a result, political debate over Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles is particularly intense at the present time and many different opinions are expressed on the subject (Martinus Arion [1993]).

Language Confrontations The legal aspects of this situation were documented in the Politieke geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen en Aruba (Political history of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba), 1993, by Alex Reinders. Within this context it is relevant to focus on the increasingly important

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dialogue over the role of the Dutch language. On the Leeward Islands, there exists a distinction concerning the use of Papiamento or Papiamentu. In accordance with the official rules of their standardization programs, Papiamento in Aruba and Papiamentu in Bonaire and Curaçao provide the means for daily communication. These Creole languages were considered for a long time to be lower-status languages, not adequate for abstractions or generalizations as standard Dutch is supposed to be. Notwithstanding, the local population perceives them as their primary tool for expressing personal opinions or experiences dealing with different cultural backgrounds and political goals. This was already mentioned by John de Pool, in Del Curaçao que se va (On vanishing Curaçao), in 1935. De Pool recorded his memories of his homeland as it was at the turn of the century. In a chapter on “Het papiamentoe” (Pool [1982], 129–32), he explicitly emphasized the uniting force of Papiamentu as a source of identification between islanders meeting each other outside Curaçao in other countries of the Americas. During those same years the Dutch language, until then generally used in an administrative setting, began to play a role in the educational system through the schools run by the Dutch nuns and friars. In the Windward Islands, English has been for the most part the main vehicular language, whereas Dutch was important only in the colonial bureaucracy and in education. Due to the current expansion of the tourism industry and the migration of labor from the Leeward Islands, Papiamentu has also become a factor in daily life on St. Maarten. The situation of the Dutch language in Suriname is even more complex. The extremely heterogeneous composition of its population presents a panorama of such different languages as Trio, Carib, Arawak, among other indigenous tongues, as well as Javanese, Hindi, Arabic, and Chinese. Saramaccan, Djukan, Aucan, and Sranan occupy a special position. Like Papiamentu and Papiamento, they belong to the so-called Creole languages, which are intimately related to the slave trade and plantation society, whereas Sarnami results from the influx of East Indian labor and is a composite of Sranan and Hindi. Against this background of multiple languages, the impetus for a literacy campaign in Dutch, conducted in 1984, becomes clear. It should not surprise us that the results were not particularly successful. Language problems in a period of decolonization were discussed in an international colloquium on Nederlands in de wereld (The Dutch language in the world) on 11 and 12 October, 1991 in Brussels. Delegates from Belgium, South Africa, Namibia, Indonesia, Northern France, the Netherlands Antilles, Aruba, and Suriname presented their detailed findings. Rob Morroy, the director of the Institute for Language Research and Development in Paramaribo, characterized the current position of Dutch as a neutral linguistic medium among the multiple competing language communities. He explained: “Although Dutch has been used for a long time by all ethnic groups as a contact language, it is often identified with the creole sector of the population for political reasons. Sranan is mostly emphasized for being [the Creoles’] innergroup language, an issue favorable to the position of Dutch. Due to the fact that the national languages, including Sranan, are not standardized and have lower prestige than Dutch, the future of Dutch in Suriname is positive” (Nederlands [1991], 36).2 Morroy distinguishes between General Dutch — instead of using the standard term General Civilized Dutch (Algemeen Beschaafd Nederlands) — and the Surinamese Dutch language, adding the possibility that Sranan and English eventually could play an equally important role. Frank Martinus Arion from Curaçao, who collaborated in the foundation of the Antillean

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Linguistic Institute (Instituto Lingwistiko Antiano) and of the Kolegio Erasmo, the first elementary school in which Papiamentu functions as the language of instruction, develops this point further. He places more emphasis on the relevance of Dutch in the near future, together with English. Martinus Arion suggests that primary schools begin to use Papiamentu and then, in the fourth grade, Dutch in order to improve the retention rate in secondary and higher education. He also articulates a problem with the Dutch language itself and argues that it should be standardized anew and enlarged with current expressions from other Dutch-speaking regions of the world. These actions would ostensibly result in a more modern portrait of Dutch, which could in turn cast a favorable light on the language in its contemporary setting. Martinus Arion maintains that although only one out of two families in the Netherlands Antilles speaks standard Dutch properly, it is not a dead language. Rather, it is an administrative language, which means that much attention should be paid to its teaching and its overall importance for social mobility. The third speaker, D. Kock, the director of Education on Aruba, fully subscribed to the remarks of his colleague; he delineated the special position of Aruba since 1986. Because of the rapidly deteriorating financial situation, tourism has been promoted and a high number of laborers from neighboring countries have come to the island. This migration affects the Dutch language whereas Papiamento, English, and Spanish dominate daily communication. Therefore, school children are increasingly confronted with an entirely unfamiliar instructional language. Kock pleaded for support “to develop Papiamento into a complete language that can also be applied in primary and secondary schools, and even at the higher professional education level. We certainly need technical help for the development of material and additional instruction of the teachers. We also need financial help because this will cost an enormous amount of money” (Nederlands [1991], 41).3 It is clear that this linguistic complexity is relevant to the interpretation of literary history in the Dutch Caribbean. Geert Koefoed, in his article “Surinaamse schrijvers en dichters als taalpolitici” (Surinamese writers and poets as language politicians), 1987, counts Dutch, Sranan, Hindi, Sarnami, and Surinamese Javanese as the written languages. This mapping of the flexible framework of linguistic differences is conceived as a fundamental issue in Suriname as well as in Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. In view of this reality, it is impossible to outline only one version of the literary tradition in a region where every language implies another set of cultural perceptions. The danger of using the “imperial eye” (Pratt [1992]) not to mention the “imperial tongue” is always present when one classifies a local situation without considering its own interpretative logic.

Cultural Landmarks Due to the importance of this linguistic interplay, we have chosen to call the first part of our division of volume two “Prospecting the Field: A Contrastive History of Literary Development.” This title, as well as the one for the second part, “A Mosaic Setting”, follows a suggestion by the late Jaap Oversteegen. He was a specialist on the work and life of Cola Debrot, born in Bonaire. Together with Albert Helman, born in Paramaribo, Debrot is the nestor of Dutch language promotion in the literature of the former Dutch West Indies. Because

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of their familial, academic, and professional background, both authors spoke and wrote Dutch as their native tongue and were familiar with other idioms as well. Debrot was very well acquainted with Spanish, Papiamentu, and English, whereas Helman spoke Spanish, Sranan, and English fluently. These authors were polyglots who participated closely in the activities of STICUSA, the foundation for cultural cooperation (Stichting voor culturele samenwerking), founded on 26 February 1948 in Amsterdam. In his booklet Groot geld tegen klein geld (Big money against small money), 1988, Helman and Jos de Roo described the development of STICUSA from its beginnings to its dissolution in 1988. Originally STICUSA had been conceived as an independent institution subsidized by the Dutch government and as a foundation for cultural cooperation between the Netherlands, Indonesia, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. Special attention was paid to the cultural contacts with Indonesia, in which reciprocity was to have been the governing principle. However, because of the independence of Indonesia on 27 December 1949, the West Indies became unexpectedly relevant. From 28 December 1955 STICUSA worked exclusively with Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles. Helman, who had been in contact with many Indonesians in the resistance during World War II in Holland, was one of the first persons to actively participate in the work of STICUSA. After his term as Minister of Education and Public Health in Suriname, from 1949 to 1951, he continued organizing contacts between the Cultural Center of Suriname, founded in June 1947, and STICUSA. In 1948, the director of STICUSA invited Debrot to return to Curaçao in order to stimulate STICUSA’s activities in the Netherlands Antilles. Debrot seems to have stipulated three conditions before accepting this offer: 1) the inventory of cultural achievements in the Netherlands Antilles; 2) the stimulation of cultural activities in the Netherlands Antilles; and 3) the promotion of contacts between the Netherlands and other European countries concerning their involvement in the Caribbean. After the independence of Suriname in 1975, STICUSA retained its responsibility for the Netherlands Antilles, although even here its influence was changing. In 1976, as a result of an initiative of the nationalist MEP, SOCURNA (Sociaal-culturele raad van de Nederlandse Antillen / Social-cultural council of the Netherlands Antilles) was founded as a counterpoint to STICUSA in the Netherlands Antilles. In accordance with the status aparte, instituted in 1986, UNOCA (Union di Organisasionnan Cultural Arubano / Union of cultural organizations on Aruba) replaced SOCURNA in Aruba. Since 1984, the OKSNA (Overlegorgaan kulturele samenwerking Nederlandse Antillen / Deliberative committee for cultural collaboration in the Netherlands Antilles) has replaced SOCURNA, which had been dissolved in 1985. OKSNA regulates the contacts among the other islands. We can conclude, therefore, that the cultural history of Suriname, Aruba, and the Netherlands Antilles, insofar as it concerns the function of the Dutch language, has been particularly influenced by this institutional background. Until recently, neither in the universities of Suriname, Aruba, or the Netherlands Antilles was the literature of these countries taught or researched as an academic specialty. Several participants in this project, meanwhile, have obtained a doctoral degree on their research in this field in a Dutch university; they now teach and do research in the Dutch Caribbean or in the Netherlands.

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Prospecting the Field The three sections of “Prospecting the Field” conform to the general outline adopted for all four major language groups in volumes one and two of the present history. In “Emergence of Literature” Maritza Coomans-Eustatia, born in Curaçao and until 1987 the librarian of the University of the Netherlands Antilles, presents the results of her work on the beginnings of printing in the Netherlands Antilles, which was closely intertwined with the Spanish and English languages. Aart G. Broek, a resident of Curaçao, is a specialist on comparative Caribbean literature with emphasis on the role of Papiamentu. He analyzes the conflicts in Curaçao that emerged after Cola Debrot published the first Antillean novel written in Dutch, Mijn zuster de negerin (My sister the Negro) in 1935. Michiel van Kempen, who has been a most active promoter of Surinamese literature in the past decade, describes some general aspects of publishing in Suriname, primarily since the 1950s. In the second section, devoted to “Language and Popular Culture,” the important results of very recent research on language and orature are foregrounded. Pieter Muysken, a specialist in linguistic research on Creole languages, lays out the general situation as regards the formation of Creoles in the Dutch West Indies and throughout the Caribbean region. His findings should be taken as the general linguistic substrate upon which successive articles elaborate. Frank Martinus Arion calls attention to the role of Guene, a secret language of the Antillean slaves from the seventeenth century onward. Martinus Arion has elaborated upon the findings presented here in his doctoral dissertation entitled The Kiss of a Slave: Papiamentu’s West-African Connections, 1996. He is not only an outstanding researcher on Guene, Papiamentu, and educational problems; he is also one of the best-known writers of Curaçao with four novels written in Dutch. (See the essay by Oversteegen in “A Mosaic Setting.”) His main thesis is that Guene may have influenced not only Papiamentu but also other Caribbean languages, as well as Dutch and English. In addition, Rose Mary Allen, an anthropologist from Curaçao, interprets several songs that were collected on the Leeward and Windward Islands in order to look at their specific portrayal of the past. It is striking that the presence of Guene in these songs often renders translation impossible. The presence of Guene returns in the third section on “Islands and Territories,” in which Joceline Clemencia uncovers the camouflage strategies incorporated in recent Papiamentu literature in Curaçao. Alida Albus, a specialist on oral history in St. Maarten, discusses perspectives on the literary development of the Dutch Windward Islands, where the notion of culture becomes increasingly connected to its functioning as performance art. Wim Rutgers, a long-time teacher and researcher in Aruba, concludes with an overview of the written tradition in Aruba.

Notes 1. Piet Hein, Piet Hein / Piet Hein zijn naam is klein / Zijn daden benne groot / Zijn daden benne groot / Hij heeft gewonnen de zilvervloot.

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2. Hoewel het Nederlands in de praktijk reeds lang door alle ethnische groepen als contacttaal wordt gebruikt, wordt het om politieke redenen vaak geïdentificeerd met de Creoolse bevolkingsgroep. De nadruk wordt gelegd op Sranan als groepstaal, wat de positie van het Nederlands ten goede komt. Omdat de nationale talen, inclusief het Sranan, geen gestandaardiseerde talen zijn, met een lager prestige dan het Nederlands, is de toekomst van het Nederlands in Suriname positief (Nederlands [1991], 36). 3. om het Papiamento uit te bouwen tot een volwaardige taal die ook kan worden gehanteerd in de basisschool, het voortgezet onderwijs en zelfs het hoger beroepsonderwijs. Daarbij hebben wij zeer zeker technische hulp nodig voor de ontwikkeling van materiaal en de bijscholing van de leerkrachten. Wij hebben ook financiële hulp nodig want dit gaat natuurlijk ontzettend veel geld kosten (Nederlands [1991], 41).

References Alofs, Luc. 1990. Van Separación tot Status Aparte. Geschiedenis en de achtergronden van de status apartebeweging op Aruba. De Gids. 153.7–8:518–26. Boogaart, E. van den, ed. 1979. Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604–1679. A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil. In collaboration with H. R. Hoetink and P. J. P. Whitehead. The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting. Dip, C. E. 1990. De politieke structuur van de Nederlandse Antillen. De Gids. 153.7–8: 509–17. Goslinga, Cornelis Ch. 1971. The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1520–1680. Assen: Van Gorcum. ———. 1977. Curaçao as a Slave Trading Center during the War of the Spanish Succession, 1702–14. New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids. 52: 1–50. Hartog, Dr. J. 1976. History of St. Eustatius. Aruba: VAD. Helman, Albert. 1988. Groot geld tegen klein geld. With Jos de Roo. Amsterdam: STICUSA. Kempen, Michiel van. 1987. De Surinaamse literatuur 1970–1985. Paramaribo: Uitgeverij De Volksboekwinkel. Koefoed, Geert. 1987. Surinaamse schrijvers and dichters als taalpolitici. Oso. 6.2:147–64. (Special issue on Language Politics and Social Mobility). Martinus Arion, Frank. 1992. Het bandeloze koninkrijk. Curaçao: F. Martinus Arion. ———. [Efraim Frank Martinus]. [1996]. 1997. The Kiss of a Slave: Papiamentu’s West-African Connections. Willemstad: Drukkerij de Curaçaosche Krant. Nederlands. 1991. Nederlands in de wereld: Een internationaal colloquium. Brussel: De Vlaamse Raad. Pool, John de. [1935]. 1982. Del Curaçao que se va. Curaçao: Servicio di Cultura. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Ramsoedh, Hans. 1993. De geforceerde onafhankelijkheid. Oso. 12.1: 43–62. Reinders, Alex. 1993. Politieke geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Antillen. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers. Tenenbaum, Barbara A., ed. 1996. Latin American History and Culture. Volume 5. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Walcott, Derek. 1990. Omeros. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Emergence of Language and Literature

Notes on Early Printing in the Dutch Caribbean Islands MARITZA COOMANS-EUSTATIA

Stichting Libri Antilliani

There are few available records for studying early printing in the Dutch West Indies. These islands owe their colonization variously to Spain, Britain, France, and Holland: during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St. Eustatius was conquered and reconquered twenty-two times by different nations. Consequently, the archival sources are scattered among several countries, making the study of this printing history very time-consuming and difficult. In addition, many plantation and church archives have been lost through damage by termites, bookworms, cockroaches, or weather circumstances. Discovering useful records is often a matter of chance or good luck. Not much has been written on printing activities in this area of the Caribbean, though some research has been carried out by Euwens, ([1922]), Hartog ([1944; 1984]), and certain Dominican priests (Dahlhaus [1924]; Wahlen [1920]). Interesting material can be found in the Centraal Historisch Archief in Curaçao and the Algemeen Rijksarchief in The Hague, as well as in church archives in Curaçao and Holland. The Public Record Office in London also contains useful data, and its archives need to be consulted for further investigation. New data have also been discovered in Venezuelan archives, a circumstance owing to the closely interconnected histories of Curaçao and Venezuela over many centuries. Compared to Europe, where by the beginning of the eighteenth century a printing press was to be found in nearly every city, Latin-American and Caribbean countries came rather late to the use of printing as a tool of democracy. After 1492, printing presses, disseminators of humanity’s ideas and aspirations, were to help Spain expand her power and bring the Catholic faith to the Americas. The first books in the Americas were printed in Mexico. The Dominican Fathers published El rezo del Santo Rosario in 1532-34 (Vindel [1953]). It was followed by Juan Gromberger, Escala espiritual de San Juan Climaco (The spiritual ladder of Saint John Climaco) in 1537. Almost fifty years later, in 1584, the first book in Peru was published. Guatemala followed in 1667, Paraguay in 1705, Jamaica in 1718, and Hispaniola in 1723. The strategic use of pamphlets and published polemical views played a vital role in the American Revolution. As a result, the British authorities were reluctant to introduce printing presses into their colonies, and the Spanish authorities even more so. Printing is regarded as the mother of civilization, the ideal medium for self-education, and a precondition for the cultural and material progress of the average man. The Spanish colonizers neglected this aspect of cultural education, and King Carlos IV, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, even declared that there was no need to educate the Americas (Rojas [1874]). [Julio Rodríguez-Luis treated “Education in the Hispanic Antilles” in the first volume of this series (Rodríguez-Luis [1994], 27–34). Ed.]

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The Spaniards, who first considered the islands of Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire islas inútiles (useless islands), because of their lack of precious minerals, later on recognized the important location of the harbor of Curaçao. As its strategic role in the area became clear, there were many attempts to recapture the island from the Dutch.

St. Eustatius Of the six Dutch Caribbean islands, it was on St. Eustatius, one of the smallest, that printing was first introduced. During the eighteenth century St. Eustatius was known as the “Golden Rock.” This was the richest period in Statian history, and the island played an important role in the American Revolution. As a consequence, it was captured and plundered by the British Admiral Rodney in 1781. However, the islanders were able to restore its wealth after the British troops had left. It certainly needed printed documents for trade, but we have no proof of their existence. Rodney’s men either burned the books or used them as toilet paper (Hartog [1964], 192). Moreover, the hurricane of 1772 had already destroyed much of the island’s archives. By 1790 trade was flourishing again and St. Eustatius had become an important commercial center, with 600 warehouses and a population of 8,000 people. Meanwhile, many Caribbean islands suffered economic stagnation after the independence of the United States. In a letter written in 1790 Samuel Mozes Frank, a Jewish merchant who had gone to St. Barths to avoid paying his debts, begs the Statian government to allow him to return, since he considered that island as the only place in the entire Caribbean in which to do business (Frank [1790]). Zimmermann the Elder, in a letter to his friend in 1792, even describes St. Eustatius as little Amsterdam (Hullu [1919]). It is likely that the nearby island of St. Christopher or St. Kitts did printing work for St. Eustatius, as St. Kitts had by then already been an active printing center for three decades (Swan [1970]). But in 1790 the King’s Printer in St. Kitts, Edward Luther Low, offered his services officially to the St. Eustatius government. Low also did business on the island, because merchants of any nationality could obtain the status of citizen after a residence of only eighteen months (Spiney [1969]). In April 1790 Low started a weekly journal called the St. Eustatius Gazette, which continued until 1794. The Gazette was also used by the government for official announcements. General news from abroad was copied from other newspapers brought in on ships, although they provided very little information about the local situation. Such news had been spread more quickly in the tavern in the Lower Town by the many passengers from the ships that arrived weekly. A few copies of the St. Eustatius Gazette still exist, giving some idea of the type of mercantile activity on this small island during the period. From its advertisements we learn that Low was also involved in the salt business with the Turks Islands, selling ship’s articles, household utensils and stationery, and running a well-equipped bookstore. Its stocks contained, for instance, bibles, books on Roman civilization in sixteen volumes, Pope’s Iliad in three volumes 1715–20, Gordon’s Tacitus in five volumes, the letters of Voltaire, and Churchill’s poems in three volumes. The rapid progress of literacy in Europe and North America had stimulated book production, for which the Caribbean islands provided a promising potential

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market. Owners of bookshops in the Antilles increased their stock with many items from Europe that had been remaindered because of new editions. This was still the case until recently. However, the potential readership for classical works must have been limited. The readers centered mainly around the private libraries. Johannes de Graaff, Governor of St. Eustatius, for instance, is known to have had a library of six hundred volumes, a very large collection for that time. Edward Luther Low’s printing office was located near St. Eustatia’s commercial center at the foot of the New Path. This office was only a branch of the family business on St. Kitts where, in 1791, Low’s Pocket Almanack for the Year 1791 and the Law of the Island of St. Christopher 1711 to the Year 1791 were published. In 1793 Low printed on St. Eustatius the first book made in the Netherlands Antilles, The Lying Hero, or an Answer to J. B. Moreton’s Manners and Customs in the West Indies. Only a few copies have survived to the present day. Its author, Samuel Augustus Mathews, a Creole (Koning [1990], 213–14) and native of St. Kitts, came to St. Eustatius in 1792, but he must have left the island again when the French occupied it in 1795, moving to St. Barth’s, then a Swedish colony, where he became a well-to-do tradesman (Cave [1985]). Mathews seems to have specialized in black English speech. He produced another book nearly thirty years later, The Willshire Squeeze: A Ballad to which are added Specimens of the Negro Familiar Dialect and Proverbial Sayings with Songs, published in Georgetown, Demerara, in 1822 (Brit. Mus. Catalogue). His first book gave little information about St. Eustatius, as most of the descriptions and anecdotes referred to the author’s home island of St. Kitts. As an authority on the black speech of his community, Mathews was the ideal person to counter the arguments of the abolitionists. Low certainly asked him to criticize the views of opponents of the slave trade such as Moreton. Moreton’s book on this issue had come out in a second edition in London in 1793. A German translation was published in Prague the same year (Sabin [1962]). In The Lying Hero, Mathews severely attacks Moreton, who had called the Jewish planter Joshua Peterkin, one of Low’s authors, a “cowskin hero.” The debates on abolition aroused widespread interest in the Caribbean islands, together with their history, plantation society, and tropical agriculture. An unprecedented number of works were read avidly (Ragatz [1963], 259). Bryan Edwards’s The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 1793, for instance, was also translated into Dutch and came out in six volumes between 1794 and 1799 in Haarlem. Today the greatest value of these works that arose out of the abolition movement lies in their presentation of the views that prevailed in the West Indies at the time. In 1794, when the economy on St. Eustatius declined, Low sold his printing business and left the island. In the St. Eustatius Gazette of October 1794 the new editor, Benjamin Watson, informs his readership that because of financial difficulties he will be unable to continue its publication beyond 14 November 1794, the day on which the current subscription period came to an end. Recent research has uncovered evidence that a second newspaper was printed on St. Eustatius. Since the end of the eighteenth century, St. Eustatius has never again had a bookshop or printing facilities.

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Aruba and Curaçao It is clear that printing and business on St. Eustatius at the end of the eighteenth century was intimately related to the history of the United States. For Aruba and Curaçao, Venezuela has played an equivalent role. Aruba’s first experience of printing dates from 1806, the year in which Francisco de Miranda occupied the island. This occupation heralded the arrival of thousands of Latin-American refugees to the Netherlands Antilles, where they could enjoy the freedom not only of life, but also of speech and press. Miranda, also known as El Precursor, was among the first to pave the way for the liberation of South America from the Spanish colonial authorities. In order to spread his revolutionary ideas he bought a printing press and hired some printers in New York, including one Henry Ingersoll (Ingersoll [1809]). The group sailed to the Caribbean on the Leander and two small brigantines. Printing of pamphlets had to be carried out on board while the Leander was anchored in different harbors. She docked twice in Aruba, printing on the second occasion a pamphlet entitled A los Habitantes de Aruba (To the inhabitants of Aruba). The pamphlet announces to the constituted authorities the formal possession of this island and promises that no damage will be done to any property (Sánchez [1924]; Grases [1982]). Venezuelan sources also mention this peaceful occupation of Aruba between 14 and 27 August 1806. Dutch sources (Gaay Fortman [1931]) do not mention the Leander’s printing activities, but according to Grases a number of printed documents give sufficient proof to confirm their existence. The Leander’s expedition is one of the most exciting events in the history of the clandestine press in the Caribbean, in which the Netherlands Antilles played an important role. During Venezuela’s war of independence the printing press did more damage to the Spanish Empire than had ever been expected. Before 1808 there had never been a printing press in Venezuela. As Bolívar himself remarked, “Send me the printing press, as useful as bullets” (Lecuna [1947], 258). On the island of Curaçao the first statement about printing can be found in the inventory of Josuah Gideon Mendes, who died in 1797. The inventory of his estate mentioned among other belongings a small printing press (Emmanuel [1970], 464). Mendes was a real estate broker and probably used his “imprenta de camino” (portable press) for his business activities. During the English occupation of the island, from 1807 to 1816, the Deputy Governor, Robert Nicolas, suggested to the new Governor, James Cockburn, in a letter dated 16 February 1808 (Swan [1970]), that he bring not only household goods from England, but also a printing press for his official bulletins. Unfortunately we have no proof that Cockburn brought the press with him. By 1810 there must have been an increasing interest in printing facilities in Curaçao. There also exists another letter on this matter, this one by the Venezuelan consul, Miguel José Sanz. During his stay on the island he wrote on 10 July 1810 to his government in Caracas offering a fully equipped press, since its owner was willing to move with his press to Venezuela (Chuecos [1957], 150–57). The Venezuelan government must have accepted this offer immediately, as their original printing press from 1808 was not sufficient to do all the work. During October 1810 the transfer from Curaçao to Caracas took place. The printer Juan Baillio from Haiti, who because of his close friendship with Simón Bolívar is called el impresor de la revolución (the printer of the revolution, Verna [1966]), started the second print shop in Caracas. The first official printer on Curaçao was William Lee, born in Edinburgh, who arrived

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from Caracas during the English occupation in 1812. There were quite a number of Scottish citizens in Venezuela at the time. They somehow seemed to be involved in the liberation movement in South America, although the reasons why Lee came to Curaçao are not well known. De Curaçaosche Courant of 1839 (sixteen years after Lee’s death) stated that he arrived from Caracas because of the revolution in Venezuela. But later, in De Curaçaosche Courant of 1862, it is mentioned that he came to Curaçao because of the earthquake in Caracas in March 1812. This earthquake was a disaster that left many people dead and the city in ruins. Another suggestion claimed that Lee had no good opportunities in Venezuela, as he did not speak Spanish at all. Venezuela’s first printer, Lamb, who stayed in Caracas, also had this problem, and the famous author and editor of the Gazetta de Caracas, Andrés Bello, had to do a great deal of translating for him. However, it is noteworthy that not a single Venezuelan source mentions the name of William Lee, and it is therefore not very believable that he arrived on Curaçao from Caracas with a printing press, since these machines were very rare in Venezuela and under strict control. Even Simón Bolívar had to buy his printing press in Jamaica in 1817, in order to establish printing facilities in the city of Angostura. Because Curaçao was in British hands at the time of his arrival, William Lee had no trouble entering the island, where no official printing tradition existed. So he had a great opportunity to start publishing The Curaçao Gazette and Commercial Advertiser of which the first issue was dated 11 December 1812. At that time Lee was twenty-six years old. The Gazette opened with a long introductory editorial; only a year later, however, Lee was in financial trouble such that he intended to stop publishing his newspaper. In an island community like Curaçao, circulation was very limited because of the small number of educated people. In addition, trading was slight so there was little need for an advertising medium. Politics, therefore, turned out to be more attractive. In 1813, Lee printed some pamphlets for the refugee surgeon José Domingo Díaz, addressed against Simón Bolívar (some copies can be found in the Public Record Office in London), as Díaz was Bolívar’s most passionate opponent in the war for independence. And in September 1814, the British government granted Lee a fixed annual allowance of 300 pesos, to assure that he would print whatever the government wanted him to publish. In 1814 Díaz started a newspaper, printed by Lee, El Telégrafo de Curaçao, of which only one issue was published before publication was stopped by Governor John Hodgson (Díaz [1929], 264–66). In that same year, Lee also printed a book on the political events in Venezuela: Memoria crítica sobre las convulsiones de Venezuela (Critical memoire of the convulsions in Venezuela), by José de Achutegui (Medina [1904]). After the take-over by the Dutch in 1816 Lee remained on the island. Foreigners who wanted to do business were allowed to stay, and the new Governor, Kikkert, reappointed William Lee as the King’s Printer on 29 March 1816. The newspaper then received a Dutch name, De Curaçaosche Courant; it is still published today. Business was expanding and in 1821 Lee moved from the Herenstraat 30 to Scharlooweg 17, where he had bought a large house. In 1822 he married the Curaçaoan Margarita Engelborn, a marriage that did not last long; Lee died one year later of pleurisy and was buried in the graveyard at Pietermaai. With the help of two employees, A. L. Statius Muller and J. P. E. Neuman, who had worked for Lee since 1818, his wife continued the business until 1833, the year of her death. She was the only woman on the list of public officials in Curaçao (Curaçaosche Courant, 1826).

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During the nineteenth century printing created links between Curaçao and Venezuela. Until the end of the century, the Venezuelans stimulated printing activities on the island, and some refugees even owned their own printing presses. Despite their personal sympathies, the Curaçaoans always remained formally neutral during the many wars in Venezuela in order to benefit from the complex situation on the mainland. Curaçao offered shelter and help to the refugees who were preparing a revolutionary campaign and, at the same time, maintained good relations with the current government in power in Venezuela (Soest [1980], 10). There were so many Venezuelans on Curaçao that Statius Muller, together with J. F. Neuman, published a Spaansche spraakkunst (Spanish grammar) for Dutch speakers in 1839. In order to highlight the role of the Spanish language at that time, it is worthwhile to mention that only in 1849 a Hollandsche Spraakkunst (Dutch grammar) by J. J. Putman was published for teaching native Papiamentu speakers. A third newspaper was produced in Curaçao by Antonio José de Irrissari, another refugee from Venezuela. El revisor de la política y literatura americana appeared between February 1849 and January 1850. Irrissari was born in Guatemala and was a restless traveler throughout South America. In Venezuela he defended the first elected president, José Antonio Páez, after Páez had been overthrown by a coup d’état. The first issue of El revisor sold out very quickly, and a second edition was announced. The newspaper had such an impact in Venezuela that the new government intended to declare war against the island if Irrissari were to continue his subversive activities. Irrissari had to leave Curaçao in February 1850, but he continued to publish El revisor in New York until May 1850. This newspaper was only recently discovered by the present author in Venezuela, as its existence was unknown on the island (Coomans-Eustatia [1995]). From the information mentioned above, we can assume that the Jewish gazette Shemah Israel, dedicated to the interest of the Hebrew community, was the fourth to be printed in Curaçao from 1864 to 1865, although it has always been thought to have been the second. The assumption that De Curaçaosche Courant was the only newspaper on the island for sixty years turns out to be incorrect as well. In 1825 the Roman Catholic clergy, headed by Monsignor Niewindt, began to promote the Catholic faith and to educate the black population. Father Johannes J. Putman, the author of the Hollandsche Spraakkunst mentioned above, owned his own printing press, and from 1848 to 1853 he published a number of educational and religious booklets in Papiamentu. The influence of the omnipresent Spanish language in Curaçao, however, would be important for the rest of his career. When Putman left Curaçao in 1853 and returned to Holland, he specialized in Spanish and translated the works of Cervantes and Calderón into Dutch. For his promotion of Spanish authors Putman was even decorated by the King of Spain. The early history of printing ends in 1860, when Augustín Bethencourt, born in the Canary Islands, arrived on Curaçao. Bethencourt established himself solidly in the printing trade. The diary of his voyage is kept in the Central Historical Archive. He started an important publishing house in 1867 that not only supplied the local market, but operated primarily on the South American continent, printing and distributing hundreds of books covering a wide variety of issues. The Biblioteca Nacional in Caracas has a six-volume catalogue of the works printed by Bethencourt in Curaçao. His sons continued the printing business until well into the twentieth century.

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References Cave, Roderik. 1987. Printing and the Book Trade in the West Indies. London: Pindar Press. (Cave is the best source for an introduction to printing in the British Caribbean). Coomans-Eustatia, Maritza. 1995. Curaçao als vluchthaven voor de Gevolmachtigde Minister A. J. de Irrissari: Emigrados en hun drukkersaktiviteiten in de eerste helft van de negentiende eeuw. Caraïbische Cadens. Ed. by Henry E. Coomans, Maritza Coomans-Eustatia, and Peter Prins, 284–303. Bloemendaal: Stichting Libri Antilliani. Chuecos, Hector García. 1957. Relatos y comentarios sobre temas de historia Venezolana. Caracas: Imprenta Nacional. Dahlhaus, G. J. M. 1924. Monseigneur Martinus Joannes Niewindt, eerste Apostolisch vicarus van Curaçao: een levensschets, 27 aug. 1824–12 januari 1860. Baarsrode: Bracke-van Geert. Díaz, José Domingo. [1829]. 1961. Recuerdos sobre la rebelión de Caracas. Madrid: Academia Nacional de la Historia. Edwards, Bryan. 1793. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies. London: Printed for John Stockdale. Emmanuel, I. and S. 1970. History of the Jews of the Netherlands Antilles. 2 vols. Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives. Eustatius Gazette, Sint. The following numbers are still available: vol.1 no.12, Saturday 19 June 1790; vol. 3 no. 171, Friday 17 August 1790; vol. 3 no. 190, Friday 28 December 1790; vol. 4 no. 218, Friday 5 July 1793; vol. 5 no. 285, Friday 17 October 1794. No. 190 is in the Curaçao Museum; the others are in private hands. Euwens, P. A. 1922. Lijst van bladen, uitgegeven in Curaçao. De West-Indische Gids. 4:59–61. Frank, Samuel Mozes. 1790. Oud Archief St. Eustatius, inv. no. 3. Folio 348–49. The Hague: Algemeen Rijksarchief. Gaay Fortman, B. de. 1931. Urbina-Miranda: een bladzijde uit de geschiedenis van het eiland Aruba. De WestIndische Gids. January, 1–15. Grases, Pedro. 1982. La imprenta en Venezuela. 2 vols. Caracas: Seix Barral. (Grases is the most extensive and up-to-date source about the printing history of Venezuela). Hartog, J. 1944. Journalistiek leven op Curaçao. Willemstad: Paulus Drukkerij. ———. 1956. Van 1625–1816 viel St. Eustatius 22 maal in andere handen. Beurs- en Nieuwsberichten. 7 December: 9. ———. 1964. Geschiedenis van de Bovenwinden. Aruba: De Wit. ———. 1984. Life on St. Eustatius 1790–1794, as Portrayed by Recently Discovered Local Newspapers. Gazette. 34:137–58. Hullu, J. de. 1919. Het leven op St. Eustatius omstreeks 1792. De West-Indische Gids. 1.2:144–50. Ingersoll, Henry. 1809. Diary and Letters of Henry Ingersoll. The American Historical Review. 3.4. Koning, Marijke. 1990. Eighteenth Century Interiors of Whites on St. Eustatius. Building up the Future from the Past. Ed. by H. E. Coomans et al., 203–14. Zutphen: Walburg Pers. Lecuna, Vicente. 1947. Bolívar: Obras completas. 2 vols. Havana: Lex. Mathews, Samuel Augustus. 1793. The Lying Hero; or An Answer to J. B. Moreton’s Manners and Customs in the West Indies. St. Eustatius: E. L. Low. Medina, José Toribio. 1904. Notas bibliográficas referentes a las primeras producciones de la imprenta en algunas ciudades de la América española. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana. Moreton, J. B. 1790. Manners and Customs in the West India Islands. Containing various particulars respecting the soil, cultivation, produce, trade, officers, inhabitants, &c. With the method of establishing and conducting a sugar-plantation; in which the ill-practices of superintendants are pointed out. Also the treatment of slaves; and the slave-trade. London: W. Richardson.

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Peterkin, Joshua. 1790. Treatise on Planting from the Original of the Semen to Ebullution: with a correct mode of distillation, and a melioration on the whole process progressively dedicated to the planters of the Leeward Charibbee Islands. St. Christopher’s: Edward Luther and R. Low. Cayon Street, Basseterre. (Dennis Low passed the letter of authority to the new owner of the St. Eustatius Gazette, Benjamin Watson). Putman, J. J. 1849. Proeve eener Hollandsche Spraakkunst. Curaçao: Santa Rosa. Ragatz, Lowell J. 1963. The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean 1763–1833: a Study in Social and Economic History. 2 vols. New York: Octagon Books. Robertson, William Spence. 1929. Life of Miranda. 2 vols. New York: Cooper Squirer. Rodríguez-Luis, Julio. 1994. Education in the Hispanic Antilles. Hispanic and Francophone Regions. Vol. 1 of A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Ed. by A. James Arnold et al., 27–34. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Rojas, Aristides. 1874. La imprenta en Venezuela durante la colonia y la revolución. Documentos para la historia de la vida política del libertador. Ed. by José F. Blanco and R. Azpurua. Vol. 2, 342–61. N.p.: n.p. Sabin, Joseph. 1962. Biblioteca Americana: a Dictionary of Books relating to America from its Discovery to the Present Time. 24 vols. Amsterdam: N. Israel. Sánchez, Manuel Segundo. 1924. La imprenta de la empresa Mirandina. Boletín de la Biblioteca Nacional. 2–3. Soest, Jaap van. 1980. De betrekking tussen Curaçao en Venezuela — een historische analyse. No. 11. N.p.: Uitgaven Universiteit Nederlandse Antillen. Spiney, David. 1969. Rodney. London: George Allen. Swan, Bradford F. 1970. The Spread of Printing in the Western Hemisphere. Amsterdam: van Gendt en Co. Statius Muller, A. L. 1839. Spaansche spraakkunst, zamengesteld door August Leberegt Statius Muller. Curaçao: Muller & Neuman. Verna, Paul. 1966. Tras las huellas de Juan Baillio, el impresor de la independencia. Boletín Histórico. Caracas: Fundación John Boulton, 10: 5–33. Vindel, F. 1953. El primer libro impreso en América. Madrid: Facsimile México 1532–34. Franciso Vindel Bibliógrafo. Wahlen, P. Fr. Raym J. C. 1920. Gouden Jubileum der Dominikaner Missie op Curaçao 1870–1920. Nijmegen: Centrale Drukkerij.

Ideological Controversies in Curaçaoan Publishing Strategies (1900–1945)* AART G. BROEK

Fundashon Pierre Lauffer

Currently the official literary canon of Curaçao is comprised of but a few texts published locally in the prewar years, if by canon we understand “a collection of literary works which is recognized as valuable in a society, and which serves as a point of reference in the considerations on literature (particularly in literary criticism) and in education (and is actually being taught in school)” (Mooij [1986–87], 23).1 Cola Debrot’s short novel Mijn zuster de negerin (My sister the Negro), 1935, is, strictly speaking, the only text published before the war that belongs to this canon of standard works. The application of the historiographical principles that govern this volume would lead us to place Mijn zuster de negerin alongside John de Pool’s memoirs, written in Spanish, Del Curaçao que se va (On vanishing Curaçao), 1935, Joseph Sickman Corsen’s Papiamentu poem “Atardi” (Before dark), 1905, and a few poems by Shon Wein Hoyer also in Papiamentu. The fact that little or no attention is paid to these other texts in school is due to the educational system rather than to any lack of quality in the works themselves. As a matter of policy, works published in Papiamentu still do not appear in secondary-school curricula. From a specific prewar point of view, we have to consider this collection of canonical texts differently. Debrot’s narrative was not then regarded as having the qualifications to figure in any local canon of literary texts, and de Pool’s memoirs were not meant to be read as literature at all. The canonization of texts had little, if anything, to do with whether or not a text functioned as a point of reference in literary criticism or education. In the prewar years literary communication was guided by a different code from that now current on the island. This particular code of literary communication will be the subject of the present essay. Cola Debrot was a member of the relatively small white Creole elite group who were, in general, either Jewish or Protestant. Out of this group came a considerable amount of literature written in Spanish in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a trend that had practically ceased by the 1920s. (See Liesbeth Echteld’s essay on this point.) In the same year that saw John de Pool mourning in Spanish the disappearance of the nineteenth-century cultural grandeur of his social group (Broek [1989-b],[1990-a]), Debrot heralded with Mijn zuster de negerin the beginning of a literary production in Dutch that was to be realized progressively from the 1940s onward. From the 1920s through the early 1950s hardly any narrative fiction had been written by the members of the local elite. Furthermore, Debrot’s short novel fell outside the concept of literature that prevailed within the relatively large group of urban, Roman Catholic Afro-Curaçaoans.

* Research for this article was made possible by a grant from The Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO), The Hague, and travel grants from the OKSNA, Willemstad, Curaçao. To these I would like to express my gratitude.

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Among them a quite different literature was produced in this period (see also the essay by Broek below). Research on their particular concept of literature should result in a “description of the opinions of a (group of) author(s) or a (group of) reader(s) with reference to the nature and function of literature, expanded with a description of the strategies if these have a programmatic character” (Oversteegen [1982], 66).2 It is possible to identify from a substantial number of articles in various newspapers that the following notions are essential to this prewar concept of literature. Three basic ideas are fundamental to the nature of these narrative texts: 1. Literature is a perlocutionary speech act: literary texts (in Papiamentu) are meant to have consequential effects on the feelings and thoughts of local readers, and ultimately and most importantly, on their actions. Literary (prose) texts in Papiamentu were thought to make readers feel, think, and act in accordance with Roman Catholic ideology; 2. Literature is mimetic, a truthful representation of human reality, or shows an extreme likeness to reality, and therefore has the appearance of being true or real even when fantastic; 3. Literature has a specific linguistic structure when written in Papiamentu. Closely related to these ideas on the nature of literature is the plea for an overtly didactic function of literary texts in relationship to their specific linguistic strategies. As for the latter, a more or less conscious hispanization of Papiamentu was meant to improve both the Creole vernacular and its readers’ linguistic abilities. Readers’ ability to cope with social reality was expected to improve as well. As very little was said explicitly about literary devices, in reality the characteristics of those texts in Papiamentu are comparable with romans à thèse and didactic poetry. In light of this concept, it should not come as a surprise that Debrot’s Mijn zuster de negerin was dismissed in a brief review in the Roman Catholic weekly Amigoe di Curaçao, dated 27 July 1935. It would be hard to see in this narrative the realization of any one of the notions mentioned above. Debrot once suggested that Curaçaoans even denied the existence of particular incestuous relations such as he had discussed in his novel, namely the budding love affair between a white man and a dark-skinned woman who turns out to be an illegitimate child of the young man’s father. Debrot implied that ignorance or, possibly, hypocrisy were responsable for the book’s initial rejection (Debrot [1975]). Since the incest taboo plays a fairly important role in Papiamentu narratives of the same period — Ernesto Petronia’s “Venganza di un amigo” (A friend’s vengeance), printed in La Cruz in 1932 (Broek [1992]); Willem Kroon’s, “Castigo di un abuso” (Punishment of an abuse), also printed in La Cruz in 1929–30; and “Mientras tanto anochi n’sera, careda n’caba” (As long as the day has not ended, the road continues), printed in La Cruz, 1925–26–Debrot’s explanation was probably not the reason for the negative reception of his book. Mijn zuster de negerin was unacceptable because it lacked the didactic tone that was expected by the Roman Catholic establishment in descriptions of moral taboos. Jules de Palm corroborated this theory in his memoirs when he recalled that in 1937, his final year at St. Thomas College, he had suggested reading Debrot’s novel in class. He was severely rebuked by the friar who taught him Dutch (Palm ([1986], 182–83). Mijn zuster de negerin also transgressed the dominant code in literary communication within the Afro-Curaçaoan group in other ways. It was published in Dutch, in book form, and in the Netherlands by an independent publisher, i.e., in a world completely outside the group’s

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immediate field of communication. Since specific local results were expected of literature, the choice of language was of paramount importance. Given the tendency to hispanize the local vernacular, it may be inferred that most prewar Afro-Curaçaoan authors were not satisfied with their native language as it was. A common element of their discontent was the assumption that the vernacular did not supply all the words necessary to convey what they wanted to say. As Willem Kroon, one of the most prolific authors writing in Papiamentu, once phrased it: “Who can deliver a speech, write a letter, compose a verse, or converse with educated people, without adorning and beautifying his Papiamentu with Spanish brush-strokes?” (Kroon [1 February 1924] La Union).3 Kroon, as well as other writers such as Miguel Suriel and J. S. Panneflek, might have preferred to write in Spanish (or even perhaps in Dutch), but authors who chose a hispanized Papiamentu were in all probability prompted by ideas similar to those expressed by the Dominican Father P. J. Poiesz in a discussion with fellow missionaries in 1915 about the use of language in education. The missionaries, generally from the Netherlands, were thinking in the first place of the choice between Dutch and Papiamentu. Poiesz argued: Papiamentu was chosen by the Roman Catholic Mission as the basic linguistic medium of the culture that the Mission has given to the people. She did not hold out her hand to the people from the height of an unknown language. She followed the wise habit: Ad notis ad ignota procedere. To raise the people from the known to the unknown. To raise the people with the help of their own familiar language to a language, to a level of development, unknown to them. And this is also the way we would like it to be. To do one thing without dismissing the other. To keep the Dutch language, develop it, improve it. However, not neglecting Papiamentu, in particular, since it is such a powerful medium to educate the child, to convince it and thus raise its level of education. Ten words in Papiamentu spoken well and fluently will have a greater impact on the heart and thus on the character of the child than a hundred words in Dutch, which it may understand but does not feel (Poiesz [23 October 1915] Amigoe di Curaçao).4

Poiesz’s words leave no doubt that the educational task of the Roman Catholic mission was considered successful only if carried out in Papiamentu. It followed logically from this principle that a didactic literature intended for the Afro-Curaçaoan people, whose vernacular was Papiamentu, had to be in that vernacular in order to have any effect at all. At least as far back as 1881, the year in which Ciento cuenta cortico: boeki di leza pa uso di school (One hundred short stories: a school reader) was published by the mission, the Dominican Fathers concerned themselves with the publication of edifying narrative texts in Papiamentu, generally translations from Spanish, French, Dutch, and English. By the 1920s and 1930s Curaçaoan authors themselves supplied such necessary texts in Papiamentu. This marked tendency to use Papiamentu exclusively to “civilize” the Afro-Curaçaoans often met with severe criticism. Some of this came from the Brothers of Zwijsen, fellow missionaries responsible for various schools in Willemstad. Dutch was the official language of instruction, and the Brothers strictly adhered to this rule, denouncing any use of Papiamentu: “Why should one descend to the lower regions of an uncivilized language in order to raise the people to a higher level if one can stretch out one’s hand from above?” (Brother W. J. Walboomers [16 October 1915] Amigoe di Curaçao).5 The answer from Father Poiesz, cited above, demonstrates that the Dominican Fathers continued to use Papiamentu for religious services in Church, for the many hours of catechism

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in school, and for news as well as literature in La Cruz and La Union, newspapers under ecclesiastical control. The tensions between the Dominicans and the Brothers were concealed from the public as much as possible and would not again become as public as they had been in the last months of 1915 in the Amigoe di Curaçao (Smeulders [1987]). However, throughout the prewar decades the use of Papiamentu would continually be criticized by members of the local elite and, among them, by Freemasons in particular. Their own native language was usually Papiamentu, but they were equally fluent in one or more other languages: Spanish, English, Dutch, and / or French. Their criticism comes not so much from a depreciation of Papiamentu as from the conviction that its use by the Mission was directed simply at enlarging its own power: because when our people here [i.e., the Afro-Curaçaoans] learn to read Spanish, they will be able to read and understand every book, which will lead them to lose their faith. That’s the way it is. So when our people from the countryside learn Spanish instead of Papiamentu, they will soon understand that everything the Fathers tell them is untrue. They will learn to think and to use their own brains, their eyes will be opened. The light of civilization will replace the darkness that is at present filling their heads. But this will not suit the Fathers. Their task is to keep them in ignorance and superstition so that they may yield them more profit (Max [21 April 1917] Pa Moralidad, Voz di Pueblo, 1: 34).6

Papiamentu became a strong weapon in the further consolidation and expansion of the power of the Roman Catholic Church. It is evident that for the mission and the Curaçaoan authors they guided, Papiamentu was a necessary means to achieve something else, namely the religious and sociomoral education of the Afro-Curaçaoan people. In order to attain this goal, relatively cheap and easily accessible publications were necessary. From the early years of this century onward, the weekly papers La Cruz, reaching those living outside town, and La Union, addressed to urban dwellers, served this goal. Each and every Roman Catholic family had to be educated, so the mission also published a newspaper-like magazine for schoolchildren, Ala Blanca (White wing), from 1912 to 1929. This magazine was to prepare schoolchildren for other church-sponsored weeklies later in life. Priests visiting the homes of their “flock” would demand and determine the presence of one or another of these publications. To what extent they were actually read remains obscure. Illiteracy remained a serious problem throughout the prewar decades, although decreasingly so. It is, however, known that stories were often read aloud by one member of the family. Various novels published in La Union are said to have been quite popular: people would actually wait outside the printing office for the next installment to appear. Successful or not as educational tools, the weeklies were the obvious medium in which to publish narrative and poetic texts in Papiamentu in order to reach the intended readership. These same weeklies would also designate specific texts as “literature,” or else as “poetry,” a particular realization of literature. Although the publication of a text in one of the Roman Catholic weeklies in Papiamentu guaranteed it to be virtuous reading matter, publication as such was hardly sufficient grounds on which to evaluate a narrative or poetic text (or any other type of discourse) as literature. For example, the weeklies printed poetry in one or two columns, rarely more, and more often than not divided the texts into stanzas headed by the words literature or poetry. These pieces were occasionally reprinted and would be discussed or referred to as literature in a critical article in these or other weeklies.

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To this small body of poetry — in contrast with non-literary verse, especially occasional verse and religious hymns — belong the present-day canonical texts of Joseph Sickman Corsen and Shon Wein Hoyer. Most of these poems date back to the first two decades of this century and were reprinted in later issues. Corsen’s “Atardi” was first published in La Cruz on 27 September 1905; his Papiamentu poems “Roeman di Caridad” (Brother in charity) and “Un Kehador” (A complainer) appeared in La Cruz on 21 October and 29 November 1911, respectively. Hoyer’s “Nos Papiamentu” (Our Papiamentu), “I despues?” (And then?) and “Klok di nos Parroquia” (The clock of our parish) also appeared there, in the issues dated 4 April 1906, 1 August 1906, and 23 June 1909. Hoyer’s “Balor di un Cent” (The value of a cent) was first published in Ala Blanca (vol. 1), 1912–13. Narrative texts generally took up too much space to be published in one issue and may also have been too long to read at a stretch, so they were published in installments. The installment would take up the lower half of the front page and would sometimes be continued on the lower halves of the second and even the third page. This was also common in Roman Catholic weeklies in the Netherlands (Boon-de Gouw [1984]); it constituted a practice already familiar to the missionaries. There is a remarkable dearth of plays in the weeklies. Certainly a considerable number, either in translation or in the Papiamentu original, were performed with the sanction or even under the auspices of a missionary or Roman Catholic organization such as the Club Saint Joseph (for ex-pupils of the St. Joseph school). The plays were probably intended to be as didactic and persuasive as the novels and stories, and indeed seem to have been considered as art. In his column “Curaçaosche Ditjes en Datjes” (Curaçaoan tidbits) in the Amigoe di Curaçao of 24 October 1925, a newspaper addressed to the small local elite, Father Jan Paul Delgeur tells them what art does and should do. In the following quotation, which reflects certain aspects of the dominant concept of literature, Father Delgeur responds to Rudolf Boskaljon, secretary of the “Curaçaosche Schouwburg Maatschappij” (Curaçaoan Theater Society), who was trying to raise funds for the construction of a new theater in Willemstad: And for Heaven’s sake, don’t come up with the sledgehammer argument of l’art pour l’art, shallow words that don’t mean anything. Hear this: art should improve people, elevate them. One intends to reach beauty through art. Beauty is in harmony, in equilibrium. That harmony is perfect only in God. And the absolute beauty is God. A performance such as that held at the Jubilee of the St. Joseph Gezellen Vereniging [Club Saint Joseph] last week, Triunfo di Cruz [The triumph of the cross], ennobles, elevates, does a world of good. With a razor blade you can titivate your cheeks, which is good, and cut off your neighbour’s head, which is bad (Delgeur [24 October 1924] Amigoe di Curaçao).7

In his characteristic light-hearted style, this Dominican priest expressed his conviction that art, of which plays are a particular manifestation, should improve a person’s character. However, it may have been thought that the plays lost too much of their didactic character and persuasiveness in print. The omniscient narrator continually states what or who is right and what or who is wrong, an important element in prose; but this function has to be dispensed with in plays,

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where mimicry, gesticulation, modulation of voice and the like compensate for the lack of explicitness and didacticism of the text. We may note here, alongside the stricture that Papiamentu was not meant to be cultivated as an end in itself, that its oral tradition of kuentanan (storytelling) was also excluded from the Catholic weeklies. With the exception of one Kuenta di Nanzi (Anancy story) — on which, see Broek, 1988 and 1993 – stories about the spider Anancy, so widespread in the local Papiamentu oral tradition, did not appear in Roman Catholic weeklies until the end of the 1930s. Anancy was shunned because: “One does not learn Christian mores from the Kuenta di Nanzi. On the contrary, the stories often betray the inferior morality of the group that produced them” (Latour [1948], 84).8 However much the Papiamentu weeklies may have needed texts in the vernacular in order to fill their columns, this literature still had to be edifying from the Roman Catholic point of view. The Kuenta di Nanzi, so often heard at social gatherings, and in older or even contemporary popular songs (some quoted in de Gaay Fortman [1936–37]) were to remain proscribed on moral grounds. This moral proscription would change gradually after the second world war (see Broek [1995], [1998]). The papers, and thus the literary texts they contained, were primarily read at home, or possibly sometimes during a break at work. In school no attention was ever paid to Papiamentu literary texts, since the language itself was not studied. Some of the occasional poetry in Papiamentu published in La Cruz or La Union may have been learned by heart in school in order to be sung or recited on the particular occasion for which it was intended; but generally the texts themselves would vanish with the newspaper when that was thrown away. People would not spend money on a serialized Papiamentu novel in book form. There was no tradition of buying books, which quite a number of the intended readers may not have been able to afford anyway. On the few occasions when prewar authors tried to publish their narrative texts in book form after they had already been serialized, self-publication was the only recourse. This was made possible partly by the inclusion of commercial advertisements and possibly by reductions in the prices normally charged by the printing office, which was supervised by the Roman Catholic mission. Little is known about the number of copies printed, but the print runs of Kroon’s Giambo bieuw a bolbe na wea (Old love lies deep), 1928, and Fray’s Un Sacrificio (A sacrifice), 1925, would not have exceeded five hundred copies each. The authors had to sell their books themselves, although existing booksellers such as Librería A. Bethencourt e Hijos and De Hollandsche Boekhandel may have stocked a few copies. With a limited number of potential buyers, literary publication in book form was a risky enterprise that was hardly ever undertaken prior to World War II. The risk was probably so great that not even the Roman Catholic mission was prepared to support publication in book form financially, despite its own conviction about the utility of such texts. After “Mijn zuster de negerin” had been published in the well-known Dutch literary magazine Forum in 1934–35, Debrot’s novel was published as a book by the publishing house Nijgh en Van Ditmar in Rotterdam in 1935. The publishing history shows that Debrot had opted to be included in a literary communication network that was quite different from that existing within the Roman Catholic Afro-Curaçaoan group on the island. By doing so he also indicated that the readers he intended to reach were not primarily the Afro-Curaçaoans but those who belonged to a particular sociocultural group in the Netherlands and also on his native island.

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This is not to say that the publication of Debrot’s short novel did not affect — intentionally or otherwise — the literary communication code controlled by the Roman Catholic Church on the island. Although Van de Walle argues that Mijn zuster de negerin “aroused hardly any interest on the island”9 (Walle [1974], 83), the Amigoe di Curaçao indirectly denounced the book again on 8 January 1936. This denunciation appeared immediately after the daily Beurs- en Nieuwsberichten had commented, in its issue dated 6 January 1936, how regrettable it was that this short novel had not been included in a recently published volume of notable prose that had appeared the previous year in the Netherlands. Debrot’s novel must therefore have met with some interest on the island. The first time the Amigoe di Curaçao spoke out against Debrot’s book it did so because De Curaçaosche Courant had reviewed it quite favorably a week earlier, on 20 July 1935. Apparently the Roman Catholic weekly felt forced to react, even though: “We did not want to focus attention on this book, in order to avoid making publicity for it.” (Anon. [27 July 1935] Amigoe di Curaçao).10 The church’s irritation over the publication of Debrot’s novel was also demonstrated by de Palm’s reference to the incident at St. Thomas College when Brother Franciscus scolded him for wanting to read Mijn zuster de negerin, although “he must have known that by doing so he increased the number of its readers by fifteen [i.e., the number of pupils in the class]” (Palm [1986], 182–83).11 At the time Debrot’s book reached the island, the status and significance of Dutch were rapidly increasing in Curaçao: [Dutch] was the language of the socioeconomically dominant group, so any person who, generally speaking, wanted to improve his position on the island, especially in the oil industry, would at least have to be able to speak Dutch. In some cases a job as a servant or as a maid would depend on one’s knowledge of Dutch. “An inhabitant from Curaçao knows by now from experience that wherever he applies for a job, the first stereotyped question will be: Do you know Dutch,” also wrote [Father] Latour [in 1935]. This [was] quite different from the opinion of Zwijsen, in 1905, who argued that Dutch was of no use to his pupils after school, in their struggle for existence; Latour’s opinion about the next generation turned out to be diametrically opposed to his: “out of necessity, for his everyday bread, [a pupil] will dedicate himself more to learning Dutch than in former days” (Smeulders [1987], 203–04).12

Debrot’s Mijn zuster de negerin both fit in with and contributed to the increasing importance of Dutch but, what is more, the book brought a relatively new and attractive literary code into the limelight. Literary publications in Dutch were in the hands of a Dutch publisher; and if the text was to be serialized, then it should be appropriately serialized in a literary magazine rather than a newspaper. Literary texts would then reach a more educated reading public. Most literary texts published in Dutch by Antillean authors since 1940 have indeed fulfilled these requirements. But, however attractive the aspects of this circuit of literary communication may have been for the younger generations of Papiamentu writers that followed Kroon, Fray, Suriel, and others, it was difficult to realize it. There was no chance of finding a publisher or a literary magazine in the Netherlands that would accept texts in Papiamentu, whatever their length. Nor were the editors of De Stoep, the literary magazine founded on the island of Curaçao in 1940, very willing to publish Papiamentu texts, since it was a “Nederlands Periodiek” (a Dutch magazine). (See Broek [1997].) For a long time the island lacked any other literary publisher, whether in Dutch

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or in Papiamentu. The island had, however, ample printing facilities throughout the first decades of this century. By the mid-1930s Gorsira’s De Curaçaosche Courant (on which see CoomansEustatia above), the Roman Catholic mission’s Drukkerij Apostolisch Vicariaat (Apostolic vicarate’s press), founded in 1883, Otto Cras’s Tipografia Mercantil (Merchant printshop), founded in 1925, Suárez and Zalm’s Tipografia Electrica (Electric printshop), founded in 1928, and M. M. Pinedo’s printing house, founded in 1933, provided at least the technical means for book production (Verslag 1936: 138–40). The Papiamentu narrative and poetic texts of those who followed Kroon and his fellow writers — Amador Nita, Pierre Lauffer, Guillermo Rosario, and Julio Perrenal — would indeed be published thanks to private initiative, thus contributing to the status of these texts as literature. But the support for their distribution was not significant. The potential number of buyers of books in Papiamentu had not grown substantially, and there was no prepublication in any newspaper for Amador Nita’s Un drama na fiesta di San Juan (A dramatic party at San Juan), 1944, and Un drama na seru di Pietermaai (A drama at Pietermaai), 1945, nor for Pierre Lauffer’s Carmen Molina, 1942, Martirio di Amor (Martyr of Love), 1943, and Patria (Fatherland), 1944, Julio Perrenal’s Cancionero Papiamentu (Papiamentu Songbook), 1943, or Guillermo Rosario’s Un drama den Hanchi Punda (A drama in Hanchi Punda), 1944, and Su Rival (His rival), 1944. This change of medium is an indication of a change in the concept of literature that prevailed among a particular group of Afro-Curaçaoan authors who began writing in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A closer examination of any of these texts would corroborate this change, which might be characterized as “the secularization of Papiamentu literature” (Broek [1989-a], [1990-c], [1998]). In the narrative texts of the 1920s and 1930s virtuous deeds would be rewarded, vicious deeds punished. In the 1940s, Papiamentu texts make room for various shades of gray, pushing aside the neat Roman Catholic dichotomy between good and evil. The new literary paradigm inevitably lacked the strong didacticism characteristic of prewar Papiamentu prose and poetry. Instead, a constituent element in this new concept of literature is a reevaluation of oral tradition in the vernacular in the form of kuentanan (such as the Anancy stories) and kantikanan (songs). Although it does not seem correct to suggest that this oral tradition was actually valued as literature (Broek [1990-b], [1995]), it had evidently gained in appeal and was to influence poetic texts such as Lauffer’s Patria, 1944, an unpublished collection of songs / poems by Medardo de Marchena, and Perrenal’s Cancionero Papiamentu, 1944 (on which see Broek [1990-d]; [1993]). Collections of songs and stories like Bam Canta (Let’s sing), 1946, and Corsouw ta conta (Storytelling Curaçao), 1944, also signaled the reappraisal of the oral tradition for the coming decades. Of course, authors like Lauffer and Perrenal wrote for a different audience, which also contributed to their choice of another medium. Prewar authors aimed at the highest stratum of the lower class and the lower strata of the middle class of Afro-Curaçaoans; the younger generation inevitably addressed those who were willing to participate in literary communication in Papiamentu through books: educated, (lower) middle-class Afro-Curaçaoan people who were willing to resist the temptations of Antillean Literature in Dutch. The temptation was indeed hard to resist, and these authors would all, at various times, also use Dutch — not least in order to expand their readership (Broek [1992]).

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The appeal for publications in book form is illustrated further by the following. When, in the mid-1930s, Kroon and other Curaçaoan authors ceased writing fiction for serialization in the weeklies, the editors at first resorted to translations as a substitute. The not-so-successful reception of these narratives in translation seems to have been attributed to this very serialization, judging from the discontinuation of serials as such in La Union. Two relatively long romans à thèse translated from Dutch by Jos Kroon, the editor of La Union, were published as books in 1938 and 1939, namely Secreto di un noche buena (Secret of a beautiful night) and Un casita den splendor di solo (A house in bright sunlight). In 1940, Father Henriquez began the publication of a series of short books under the title Mi Biblioteca Papiamento (My Papiamentu library) and within two years he had published twenty small volumes with translations of narrative texts, including stories by the Latin-American priest Louis Coloma (volumes 1, 2, 5, and 9). These, as well as other stories by Coloma, had already figured in the columns of La Cruz some thirty-five to forty years earlier. The project failed. This failure has been attributed to paper shortages during the war; but Henriquez himself explained in a personal interview that people just took the books from their place of sale at the entrance of his and other parish churches without paying for them. As a result, by the end of 1941 he was no longer able to make ends meet. Henriquez’s and Jos Kroon’s enterprises are indications of a trend toward publishing literary or otherwise valuable texts in book form and the apparent necessity of doing so. But their publications also mark the end of a period in which Roman Catholic ideology dominated the form and content of literary texts. Readers interested in literature in Papiamentu had gradually begun to require literary publications in book form that distanced themselves from Roman Catholicism. This development contributed to the further secularization of Papiamentu literature. However, the production of literary texts in Papiamentu still faced the lack of those elements that have usually been regarded as invaluable prerequisites for the texts to function successfully: literary education, literary criticism, literary magazines, local publishers, and a well-organized distribution system. As to the latter, Henriquez “sold” his copies in his church, while his fellow priests did the same elsewhere on the island. Pierre Lauffer, Amador Nita, Guillermo Rosario, and Julio Perrenal were no better off: just as authors had done in the 1920s and 1930s, despite two or three booksellers — or rather “stationers” — they went around selling their literary work themselves. They would have to wait until 1950 for the first literary magazine in Papiamentu, Simadan, to be published, while other requirements would take even longer or are still waiting to be realized.

Notes 1. een verzameling van literaire werken, die in een samenleving als waardevol erkend worden, en die dienen als referentiepunten in de literatuurbeschouwing (met name de literaire kritiek) en in het onderwijs (en daar dan ook onderwezen worden) (Mooij [1986–87], 23). 2. beschrijving van de denkbeelden van een (groep) auteur(s) of een (groep) lezer(s) omtrent aard en funktie van de literatuur, uitgebreid met een beschrijving van de strategieën als deze een programmatisch karakter hebben (Oversteegen [1982], 66).

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3. Quen por papia un discurso, scribi un carta, compone un verso, combersa cu gente educá, sin adorna i realsa su papiamento, cu retoquenan espanol? (Kroon [1 February 1924] La Union). 4. Het Papiamentsch is door de Katholieke Missie tot voertaal gekozen van de cultuur, die zij aan het volk gegeven heeft. Zij heeft niet de hand gereikt uit de hoogte van een onbekende taal. Zij volgde de wijze gewoonte: Ad notis ad ignota procedere. Van het bekende het volk omhoog voeren tot het onbekende. Met behulp van de eigen bekende taal het volk opvoeren tot een taal, tot een ontwikkeling die het niet kende. En zoo zouden ook wij het wenschen. Het eene doen en het andere niet laten. Het Hollandsch behouden, ontwikkelen, vervolmaken. Doch daarbij het Papiamentsch niet verwaarlozen, wijl juist het Papiamentsch zulk een machtig middel is om het kind op te voeden, te overtuigen en zoo op te voeren tot hoogere ontwikkeling. Met tien woorden in vlot en vloeiend Papiamentsch gesproken zal men meer invloed oefenen op het hart, en dus op de karaktervorming van het kind, dan met honderd Hollandsche woorden, die het misschien wel begrijpt maar niet voelt (Poiesz [23 October 1915] Amigoe di Curaçao). 5. Waarom moet men afdalen tot de lagere sfeer van een onbeschaafde taal om menschen op te heffen tot hoogere regionen, als men de hand kan reiken uit de hoogte? (Brother W. J. Walboomers [16 October 1915] Amigoe di Curaçao). 6. pues si e hendenan aji sinja leza spanjó, anto nan lo leza i comprende tur e bukinan ku lo haci nan perde nan fe. I asina ta berde, pues si nos hendenan di cunucu sinja Spanjó lugá di papiamento anto pronto nan lo comprende ku tur cos ku pastor ta bisa nan no ta berdad. Nan lo sinja pensa cu nan mes sintir, nan wowo lo abri. Luz di civilizacion lo reemplaza e tiniebla ku awor ta reina den nan cerebro. Pero esaki ta lo ke no ta combini pastor. Mantene nan den ignorancia i superticion ta tarea di pader afin ku por saca mas tantu lana for di nan. (Max [21 April 1917] Pa Moralidad, Voz di Pueblo, 1: 34). 7. En kom nu, in Godsnaam, weer niet aanzetten met de dooddoener, l’art pour l’art, holklinkende woorden die niets zeggen. Luister ’ns: Kunst dient om den mensch te verbeteren, omhoog te heffen. Door de kunst tracht men ’t schoone te bereiken. Het schoone bestaat in de harmonie, in ’t evenwicht. Die harmonie bevindt zich volmaakt alleen in God. En ’t Volstrekte Schoone is God. Zoo’n opvoering b.v. als de vorige week bij ’t jubilé v / d St. Josephgezellen vereniging “Triunfo di Cruz” werkt veredelend, opbouwend, doet ’n wereld van goed. Met ’n scheermes kunt ge uw konenstelstel adoniseren, wat goed is, en ook je buurman den nek afsnijden, wat slecht is (Delgeur [24 October 1924] Amigoe di Curaçao). 8. De kuenta di Nanzi zijn er niet om er christelijke zeden uit te leren. Integendeel, zij verraden vaak de laagstaande morele opvattingen van het milieu, waarin zij ontstaan zijn (Latour [1948], 84). 9. had op Curaçao nauwelijks belangstelling gewekt (Walle [1974], 83). 10. We hebben op dit boek niet de aandacht willen vestigen om geen reclame ervoor te maken (Anon. [27 July 1935] Amigoe di Curaçao). 11. hij hiermee het aantal lezers met tenminste vijftien deed toenemen, moet hij geweten hebben (Palm [1986], 182–83). 12. [Nederlands] was de taal van de sociaal-economische prominenten. Wie dus, over het algemeen, op het eiland, en met name, “in de olie” promotie wilde maken, moest minstens Nederlands kunnen spreken. In sommige gevallen was zelfs het verkrijgen van een baan als bediende of als dienstmeisje afhankelijk van kennis van het Nederlands. “De Curaçaoënaar weet langzamerhand bij ondervinding, dat overal waar hij zich nu aanbiedt voor werk, de eerste vraag stereotiep luidt: Kent U Hollands?,” schreef ook [Pater] Latour [in 1935]. In 1905 [was] Zwijsen van mening dat de leerling na zijn schooltijd, in de strijd om het bestaan, niets had aan het Nederlands; in 1935 stond de mening van Latour over de volgende generatie daar vierkant tegenover: “Uit noodzaak, ter wille van het dagelijkse brood, legt hij zich nu meer toe op het Hollands dan vroeger” (Smeulders [1987], 203–04).

References Anon. 1882. Ciento cuenta corticoe; boeki di leza pa uso di school. Curaçao: n.p. Anon. 1936. Verslag van de Kamer van Koophandel en Nijverheid. Curaçao: Kamer van Koophandel en Nijverheid.

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Boon-de Gouw, Ankie. 1984. Feuilletons in de Rotterdamse pers in jaren 1880–1920. Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis. 35: 291–314. Broek, Aart G. 1988. Cuenta popular: Over Antilliaanse spinvertellingen. Volkscultuur, Tijdschrift over Tradities en Tijdsverschijnselen. 5.3: 7–29. ———. 1989-a. De secularisering van de Papiamentstalige literatuur. Letterkundig Tijdschrift. 4.1–2: 25–32. ———. 1989-b. John de Pool’s ‘Del Curaçao que se va’: An Attempt at Re-establishing Cultural Grandeur. Journal of Caribbean Studies. 7.2–3: 141–50. ———. 1990-a. The Rise of a Caribbean Island’s Literature: The Case of Curaçao and Its Writing in Papiamentu. Amsterdam: Haveka. (Ph.D. Thesis, Free University of Amsterdam). ———. 1990-b. The Literary Canonization of the Papiamentu Oral Tradition: Defining Concepts. Curaçao (Unpublished Paper from the 3rd Seminario di Folklore di Latino-America i di Karibe. Curaçao, 22-29 July 1990). ———. 1990-c. De beginjaren van de geschreven Papiamentstalige literatuur: ‘birtud ta haja su recompensa, i picar su castigoe‘. De Gids. 153.7-8: 618-26. ———. 1990-d. De deugd wordt gestrafd en de zonde beloond. De secularisering van de Papiamentstalige poezie. Op de bres voor eigenheid. Afhankelijkheid en dominantie in de Antillen. Ed. by R. M. Allen, P. v. Gelder, M. Jacobs, and I. Witteveen, 190–208. Amsterdam: Caraïbische Werkgroep AWIC, University of Amsterdam. ———. 1992. Ernesto Petronia: Papiamentstalig prozaïst van het eerste uur. Black Flash. 2.2: 4–9. ———. 1993. Mondeling overgeleverde teksten in het Papiamentu: omtrent de herwaardering van een eeuwenoude traditie. Curaçao: Fundashon Pierre Lauffer (Ensayonan/Occasional Papers, no. 1). ———. 1995. From an Oral Tradition to an Oral Literature: Vicissitudes of Texts in Papiamentu (Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao). Journal of Caribbean Studies. 10.3: 261–282. ———. 1998. Pa saka kara: Historia di literatura papiamentu. 3 vols. Willemstad: Fundashon Pierre Lauffer. Debrot, Nicolaas (Cola). [1935]. 1986. Mijn zuster de negerin. Verzameld werk. Vol. 3, 49–88. Verhalen. Ed. by Pierre Dubois. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. ———. 1958. My Sister the Negro. Antilliaanse Cahiers. 3.2: 3-46. (Translation by Estelle Debrot-Reed). ———. 1975. Brief aan een Neerlandicus op Curaçao. Tirade. 19.202: 96–104. ———. 1985–89. Verzameld Werk. 7 vols. Amsterdam: Meulenhoff. Gaay Fortman, B. de. 1936–37. Pamfletten over Curaçao. De West Indische Gids. 18: 353–72. Jesurun Pinto, Nilda Maria. 1944. Corsouw ta conta. Curaçao: n.p. ——— and R. Th. Palm. 1946. Bam canta. Willemstad: n.p. Latour O. P., M. D. 1948. Folklore. Oranje en de zes Caraibische Parelen. Ed. by P. A. Kasteel et. al., 83–92. Amsterdam: J. H. de Bussy. Mooij, J. J. A. 1986–87. Noodzaak en mogelijkheden van canonvorming. Spektator. 15.1: 23–31. Oversteegen, J. J. A. 1982. Beperkingen: Methodologische recepten en andere vooronderstellingen en vooroordelen in de moderne literatuurwetenschap. Utrecht: H & S. Palm, Jules de. 1979. Julio Perrenal: Dichters van het Papiamentse Lied. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. ———. 1986. Kinderen van de Fraters. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Perrenal, Julio (= Pierre Lauffer, Jules de Palm, and René de Rooy). 1943. Cancionero papiamento dedicá na Corsou. Curaçao: n.p. (privately published; fascimile in de Palm, 1979). Pool, John de. 1935. Del Curaçao que se va. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Ercilla. ———. 1961. Zo was Curaçao. Antilliaanse Cahiers. 4.1–4. Preface by Debrot. Transl. by J. A. van Praag and Henk Dennert. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. ———. 1982. Del Curaçao que se va (Photographic reprint by Servicio di Cultura, Curaçao, of De Pool [1935]). ———. [1960]. 1985. Zo was Curaçao. Amsterdam: S. Emmering. (Edited reprint in book form of De Pool [1961]). With a register by J. W. Bennebroek Gravenhorst. Smeulders, T. F. 1987. Papiamentu en onderwijs. Utrecht: n.p. (Ph. D. Thesis, University of Utrecht). Walle, J. van de. 1974. Beneden de Wind; Herinneringen aan Curaçao. Amsterdam: Querido.

The Literary Infrastructure of Suriname Problems and Changes MICHIEL VAN KEMPEN

University of Amsterdam

The first question facing every Surinamese writer is: “In what language am I going to write?” In principle there are twenty-two languages at one’s disposal, but for literary purposes the possibilities are more restricted (Kempen [1987-b], 23–26 and [1989], 15–23, 145–53). Dutch or Surinamese-Dutch is far and away the literary language most used in Suriname; it is the republic’s official language and the only Surinamese language taught in schools. Sranan Tongo, or, in its common abbreviation, Sranan, is the lingua franca. Traditionally the language of people of African descent, it is accepted nowadays by three-quarters of the population as the language of everyday life. As a literary language Sranan has been important in the rise of AfroSurinamese poetry and theater since the 1950s, but in prose its importance has been less, as the public has problems in reading it. (On this question, see also my chapters in part II.) Sarnami is the language of the largest ethnic group, the East Indians. Only in 1977 did Sarnami become significant as a literary language, with the rise of the movement for its recognition in Holland; somewhat later it became significant in Suriname proper. (See Theo Damsteegt’s contribution in part II). There have been very few contributions to written literature in the other vernaculars, which are mainly used in oral communication, namely Surinamese-Javanese, the Hakka dialect of Chinese, Amerindian vernaculars such as Carib, Arawak, Trio, Wayana and Akulyo, and Maroon languages such as Saramaccan, Matuari, Ndyukan and Paramaccan. Furthermore, many poets also work in English, and some in Spanish. Choosing one of the vernaculars as one’s medium of communication demonstrates in most cases a commitment to a specific cultural community or to nationalism in general. Because the public at large has great difficulty in reading literary work in languages other than Dutch (Kempen [1987-b], 60–61), writing in vernacular languages is restricted to poetry, theater, and short fiction (Roemer [1976]; [1982]; see also Kempen in part II). The vast majority of literary works are published under the direct control of the author, without the involvement of a publishing house. However, writers are supported in many cases by financial concessions from printers. Poetry printings normally consist of no more than five hundred copies; prose and juvenile reading matter have print runs of up to two thousand, in some cases even more. Many writers not only write their books, they sometimes print them, and mostly distribute and sell them too. For them, distribution means taking their own books to customers and bookshops, even selling them from door to door. Books printed for the publishing houses are distributed via bookshops, all but one of which, like the publishing houses themselves, are situated in Paramaribo, the capital. The vast majority of books published under authors’ control are also brought out in the capital, where practically all the printers are located.

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This concentration of publishing activities is found in other Caribbean countries too (Poynting [1984], chapter V). Except for some stray works belonging to Dutch-Surinamese colonial literature (Lichtveld and Voorhoeve [1958]), the first books of literary importance in Suriname date from the beginning of the twentieth century. The respective contributions of publisher, printer, and writer in the production of books like the historical novel Codjo, de brandstichter (Cudjo, the firebrand) by H. F. Rikken, published in 1904 by J. Timmerman, or the Amerindian myths collected by Frederik Paul Penard and Arthur Philip Penard, De menschetende aanbidders der zonneslang (The man-eating worshippers of the sunsnake), published in three volumes in 1907–08 by H. B. Heyde, is not always clear. The St. Rafael bookshop sponsored a “Surinamese Series” that in 1947 published Schetsen en typen uit Suriname (Sketches and characters of Suriname) by Jacques Samuels, a book not insignificant in the history of Surinamese prose. The first genuine publishing house emerged in the 1950s. In 1954 Radhakishun & Co. published Albert Helman’s Surinamese-Dutch adapted translation of Green Pastures by Marc Connelly. This was also the publisher of Suriname’s first literary periodical, Tongoni, from 1958 to 1959. A new initiative was started when, after publishing for a time in Amsterdam, W. L. Salm settled in Paramaribo. One of his few literary publications there was the first collection of poetry in Sranan ever printed in Suriname, Moesoedé (Day-break), 1959, by Eugene Rellum. Also important was Salm’s publication of the periodical Soela, which had seven issues during the years 1962–64. In the 1950s Varekamp (later: VACO), a Surinamese-Dutch publishing firm, printer, and bookshop, began publishing non-fiction as well as fiction with some regularity, including some deluxe editions. Fiction has never formed a substantial part of Varekamp’s list, although starting in 1958 with the folktales of A. de Groot and A. Donicie, they have also published interesting work by Thea Doelwijt, R. Dobru, Albert Helman, Noni Lichtveld and Cynthia McLeod, including the latter’s historical novel Hoe duur was de suiker? (How expensive was the sugar?), 1987. This novel sold more than 12,000 copies in Suriname and eight years later it had an unexpected success in The Netherlands where it had gone through ten printings at this writing (Hoefte [1996], 307). In 1974 Pressag, a publishing house for Surinamese writers, was started in The Hague and brought out some books by Astrid Roemer and others, but it folded after a few months. It made a new start in 1977 in Paramaribo under the name of Bolívar Editions and was again active for a short period, publishing books by Ané Doorson, Frits Wols, Ruud Mungroo, and others. The politically hectic 1970s saw birth of the Volksboekwinkel, or people’s bookshop, founded in Paramaribo in 1972 with the intention of breaking the Dutch monopoly over the supply of books in Suriname. It offered, at reasonable prices, books on Suriname, the Caribbean region, and Latin America, as well as books by Surinamese authors and books for the young. In 1977 it became a publishing house issuing important books with some regularity, including an essay by the Aucan Maroon André Pakosie; several books for young people; the novel Proefkonijn (Guinea pig), 1985 (translation published in 1990 by Karnak Books, London) by Paul Marlee; the collection Nieuwe Surinaamse Verhalen (New Surinamese short stories), 1986, edited by the present author; and the collection of poetry, Getuige à decharge (Witness for the defense), 1987, by Orlando Emanuels.

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In the years leading up to political independence in 1975, Pressag / Bolívar Editions and the Volksboekwinkel both helped to provide a basis for Surinamese cultural independence. It was the Volksboekwinkel that turned out to have the greater stability. In 1958 the colonial government had founded the Bureau Volkslectuur to produce cheap books, and it published two series, “Our Great Examples” and “Suriname’s Cultural Backgrounds,” mainly on historical subjects. The Bureau Volkslectuur also did important work in publishing linguistic material such as: a Sranan lexicon, books for the young, anthologies of Surinamese poetry edited by Shriniva¯si, and of Surinamese prose edited by Thea Doelwijt; as well as literary works by Edgar Cairo, M. Th. Hijlaard, Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout, and Trefossa. Other departments of the Ministry of Education and Culture published interesting work, mainly in the fields of literature for the young and oral literature. Thanks to the efforts of Leonore de Vries, several excellent books for young people were published in the late 1970s by the Youth Reading Project, which was set up to respond to the needs of the newly independent republic. Much work was done on oral literature in the 1980s by the Department of Cultural Studies in publishing Javanese and Creole folktales. Finally, the Summer Institute of Linguistics published in stencilled form many booklets in nearly all Surinamese languages with the aim of creating material for literacy courses, at the same time discovering and recording much oral literature. However, most of the publications undertaken by the government have lacked any clear policy: over the years there have been several initiatives for developing a cultural strategy, but with little continuity between them (Kempen [1987-b], 63). From 1982 onward the situation in Suriname progressively deteriorated. Dutch development aid was stopped, the civil war began in 1986, the economic machinery came to a halt, and scarcity affected people, industry, and trade alike. Newspapers, printers, and the two publishing houses, VACO and the Volksboekwinkel, experienced enormous problems. This is the most serious threat, now and in the near future, to literary production on Surinamese soil. Producing literary books other than under the direct control of the author has never been easy in Suriname. The number of copies printed can never be high, as the public is not very large; costs are high, profits are low; there is no continuity in the supply of manuscripts; and many writers find it financially more advantageous to produce under their own control (Kempen [1987-b], 66–67; [1991]). If the current situation does not improve dramatically, it is quite possible that, even when books are produced, they will be so expensive that they will reach only the happy few, or will have to be produced with state aid. Nowadays many books are published thanks to business sponsorship. Either course may entail deleterious consequences for the contents of books produced in this way. Several cases are known to me of direct interference by the government with regard to material being published, of its refusal to give aid toward publishing texts for the young in Sranan, as well as reluctance in industrial circles to subsidize politically “dangerous” or “suspect” work (Kempen [1989], 145–53). Of course, an author can always publish on his own, but this will inevitably mean that the more expensive sorts of printing work, such as novels and prose in general, will disappear. Clearly there is little money to be earned in Suriname from writing or publishing books: although one or two authors have succeeded in earning a living from their literary production for short periods of time (for instance, Thea Doelwijt in writing plays for the theater), these are very exceptional cases. The situation in Holland is quite different. It is hardly surprising that many Surinamese

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authors have settled in a country where conditions for writers are far better. The boom in publishing in Suriname in the 1960s produced many poets but few prose writers, most of whom made their appearance in the late 1960s in Holland. Excellent novels like Atman (in Hindu philosophy, knowledge of the inner self leading to total personal harmony), 1968, by Leo Ferrier or Sarnami, hai (Suriname, I am), 1969, by Bea Vianen were released by well-respected Dutch publishers. In the 1970s and 1980s, authors like Edgar Cairo and Astrid Roemer were given the opportunity to publish their books with one of the few Dutch publishing houses specializing in non-Western fiction, In de Knipscheer. This house has done an excellent job in publishing not only several other Surinamese authors like Hugo Pos, Shriniva¯si, and Bea Vianen, but also Netherlands Antillean writers like Boelie van Leeuwen, and translations of recognized Caribbean authors such as Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Miguel Barnet. It is clear that without the support of this publishing house Edgar Cairo’s novels in Surinamese-Dutch would never have been printed. De Geus is another house that has introduced several Surinamese authors, including Paul Middellijn and Astrid Roemer. The search for a publisher is one reason for Surinamese authors to emigrate to Holland, other factors being the larger potential readership (there being about 200,000 Surinamese in Holland), a cultural climate that challenges authors’ literary abilities, the existence of scholarship funds, and the possibility of working for the theater. Apart from those books published by established houses, many small books have been published privately by their authors. Because material conditions in Holland are in general far better than in Suriname, and since literary themes have changed because of immigration, the gap has widened between writers living in Suriname and those living in The Netherlands (Kempen [1990-a]). Some of the former charge that their colleagues who are doing well in Holland no longer belong to Surinamese literature. The first to be confronted with this accusation was Albert Helman, who migrated to Holland as early as 1921. Irritation grew after 1982, when the situation worsened, partly as a result of Dutch government policies following the killings carried out by the Surinamese military in December 1982. As military repression in Suriname continued, the whole question of bilateral relations became more complicated: many Surinamese writers fled to Holland and, like those already living there, they condemned the military regime in their literary works, thus blocking the possibility of a return to their homeland (Kempen [1989], chapter 9). It is difficult to say much about the composition of the Surinamese literary readership, since very little research has been done on the matter. Only one article, based on research into students’ reading lists and restricted to just one high school, has been written on the popularity of Surinamese books (Kempen [1988]). The number of adults who read literature by Surinamese authors is estimated at around five hundred persons; clearly the brain drain to Holland cannot have enlarged it. A second and far larger group of readers is made up of students who read such literature as part of their studies; in most cases they rely on libraries. The Surinamese writers most popular with them have proved to be Bea Vianen, Albert Helman, Astrid Roemer, and Thea Doelwijt (Kempen [1988]). Poetry recitals by authors are quite popular, and there are many such occasions; the late R. Dobru, S. Sombra and Soerdjan Parohi should be mentioned here. Otherwise there are no data on the reading of Surinamese poetry. It is dangerous to draw any conclusions from the fact that numerous collections of poetry are sold out, because many buy such collections primarily to support the poet, whether or not they actually read the poetry.

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By the end of the eighteenth century a library had already been established in Paramaribo, mainly for scientific purposes. Another was established at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the Society for Public Welfare. In 1857 the Surinamese Colonial Library, later called the Landsboekerij, was founded; it existed until 1957. These libraries and other, smaller ones were used only by a small elite, mainly members of Dutch colonial literary societies (Lont [1973]). In 1949 the Cultural Center of Suriname was founded, its library becoming perhaps the most important in the country. Other important collections are those of the Public Education Library and the Surinamese Museum, both situated in the Paramaribo suburb of Zorg en Hoop. In its first year the Suriname Cultural Center’s library registered 10,000 loans, in 1956 74,000, and in 1976 400,500 (De Ziel [1957], Carrilho-Fazal Alikhan [1989]). Such data suggest that the remark made by the poet Trefossa in 1957, that “the role of the book in Suriname is not very considerable” (de funktie van het boek is in Suriname niet erg groot, Ziel [1957], 122), no longer applies. The view that there is no reading tradition in Suriname can only be sustained if such categories as youth literature, mass media, and cartoons are ignored. Nonetheless, the tradition of reading belles lettres exists for only a small group of people. For many readers there is evidently one important obstacle to reading literature, namely that Dutch is not the mother tongue of most people, although many prefer to read it, since other Surinamese languages are not taught in school. G. Kanhai reports that out of a sample of 150 persons, 128 preferred to read Dutch, 5 Sranan, 6 Hindi, 8 English, and 3 other languages (Kempen [1987-b], 61). Illiteracy is not widespread compared to other so-called Third World countries, but it is still estimated at twenty per cent. Perhaps the main problem for those who are already literate is that there is very little material available in different languages to develop their skills (Helman [1978]). On the other hand, the most recent extensive literacy campaign in Dutch, in 1984, ended in disaster (Rensch [1985]). One of the main obstacles to writing in Suriname is the lack of any literary periodical to function as a stimulus or laboratory. This has not always been the case. Several literary periodicals have existed, and although none of them has had a very long life, they have been important as a gauge of the literary life of their time. Tongoni (1958–59; 2 issues) presented work by several of the most important poets in Suriname’s rising nationalism, such as Trefossa, Marcel de Bruin, Michaël Slory, Shriniva¯si, and Eugene Rellum. It included quite a number of contributions in Sranan, including short stories by Trefossa, Aleks de Drie, Johannes King, and Eddy Bruma (see van Kempen’s article below). Contributions in Dutch included a short story by René de Rooy, essays by Jan Voorhoeve, and much poetry. In general the quality of the contributions to Tongoni was surprisingly high, and several of them can now be regarded as modern classics. Soela (1962–64; 7 issues) continued the tradition started by Tongoni. It hosted the same writers, as well as several others who were to be among the most important in the years to come: for example, poets like Corly Verlooghen, Johanna Schouten-Elsenhout, Thea Doelwijt, Jozef Slagveer, and Ané Doorson. Writers of East Indian descent made numerous contributions, some in Hindi, namely Bhai, Shriniva¯si, Bea Vianen, and Sad Darshi / Nan Adhin. More than Tongoni, therefore, Soela acquired the character of an anthology by providing a spectrum of several of Suriname’s cultures. Most of the short stories show the influence of Western ways of writing. More significant was “Na dede foe Andris Porjon” (The death of Andris Porjon), by Ané Doorson, written in Sranan and stylistically a small jewel.

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The periodical Mamio (1962–63) was published in Holland by the Surinamese Students Union during the same period. Though not purely literary, it contained much prose and poetry by, for instance, such poets as Vene (a pseudonym for R. R. Venetiaan) and John Leefmans. It was in Mamio that Leefmans crossed swords with Rudi Kross, who was later to become one of Suriname’s leading journalists and a writer of important essays. Kross was also editor-in-chief of Fri, a literary, cultural, and political annual that appeared from 1963 to 1971 under the auspices of the Our Surinam Society. Both periodicals consisted almost exclusively of work by Creole Surinamese writers, in both Dutch and Sranan. Very few new names appeared in the only two issues of Moetete, published in Paramaribo in 1968 and 1969. It printed contributions by all the major names of the 1960s, including Michaël Slory, Shriniva¯si, R. Dobru, Paul Marlee, and Thea Doelwijt. Several poems were taken from previously published collections, heightening the overall impression of an anthology. All the contributions were in Dutch or Sranan, including an article by Benny Ooft on writing in Sranan. Two writers who were to become important in later years, Edgar Cairo and Ruud Mungroo, appeared here for the first time. Moetete published several short stories on life in Paramaribo’s yards that stressed, perhaps more strongly than did the prose fiction in Soela, the role of literature as the mirror of nationalism. The only Surinamese literary journal without the character of an anthology but with a more or less clearly defined program was Kolibri (1971; 3 issues), edited by Paul Nijbroek (the writer Paul Marlee). A short editorial introduction tells the reader what to expect: critical analysis enlivened with humor as a guarantee of true creativity and progress. It was Rodney Russel, especially, who realized this program: he sneers at several reputed writers, for example, at Thea Doelwijt, or at Albert Helman, whose Mijn aap huilt (My monkey weeps) he changes into Mijn aap poept (My monkey shits). Paul Marlee wrote about politics and feudalism in the civil service; he also contributed odd pieces like Mémoires van de Yogi Beer (Memoirs of Yogi Bear). It is clear that Kolibri in no way fit into the tradition of literary reviews up to 1971. With one exception, all its contributions were written in Dutch. In June 1983 the periodical Bro was launched. Publication was interrupted almost immediately, only to resume in 1990. Nevertheless, this first number can be characterized as an anthology of the writing of its time — some of the contributions having been published previously — although some of the best poets, such as Michaël Slory and Shriniva¯si, are absent. Bro had a strongly Creole stamp, with contributions in Dutch and Sranan. It belongs to a number of periodicals which, in the years following Suriname’s political independence in 1975, began to draw attention, through both reviews and fiction, to different Surinamese cultural traditions. Dharm-Prakash (1975–81) and Bha¯sa¯ (1983–87) represented the history and culture of the East Indians, as did Sarnami (1982–86) in Holland, although the latter had the more clearly defined aim of bringing the value of Sarnami into the picture as the East Indian language of everyday life. Cikal (1982–84) and Riwayat (from 1987 onward) focused on Javanese culture in Suriname. In 1988 a periodical devoted to Amerindian or Carib culture appeared under the title Sirito nepakai tera (The Pleiades are already coming out). Besides these periodicals, most of which disappeared because of financial problems, writers could also contribute to newspapers, since the dailies Suriname and De Ware Tijd have their own literary pages. Poems were printed in newspapers quite frequently; but since 1982, when paper

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first became scarce, newspapers have been printed irregularly and space available for literature has been limited. Many periodicals in Holland offer space to poets and prose writers, although getting access to them remains quite difficult for Surinamese writers (Kempen [1989], chapter 2). Nonetheless some, such as Bea Vianen, Hugo Pos, and Rabin Gangadin, have succeeded, thanks to the high level of their writing, in a style of Dutch that is easy to understand for Dutch readers. Dutch literary magazines have often published special numbers on Suriname, for example De Tsjerne (a Frisian periodical) in 1952, Contour in 1966, De Gids in 1970, Tirade in 1973, Bzzlletin in 1975, Bulkboek in 1976, Deus ex Machina (a Belgian periodical in Flemish) in 1987, Preludium in 1988, and De Gids again in 1990. These special issues provided good publicity for Surinamese literature. Four periodicals that have occasionally published valuable contributions concerning Surinamese literature are worth mentioning: in Suriname SWI-Forum since 1984 and Kalá since 1986: in The Netherlands Oso from 1982 and Sarnami Akademie from 1988 (Kempen [1987-b], 69–70; Rutgers [1989]; [1990]). As regards publishing opportunities and difficulties, little changed between the years 1957 and 1983, and certainly not as a result of political independence in 1975. Some of the worst problems have been mentioned already. There was no official orthography for languages other than Dutch until 1987, nor any dictionaries of vernacular languages. A Hindi-Dutch dictionary was published by Jnan Adhin in 1953 (Paramaribo: Vidya Pustak-Sadan), but the first dictionary of Sarnami is only now being prepared by Rabin Baldewsingh. Several wordlists of Sranan exist, all in different orthographies, those of the Bureau Volkslectuur (1961, reprinted 1980) and of Max Sordam and Hein Eersel, 1985, being the most important. There is no dictionary of Sranan. A word index of Saramaccan was published in 1977–81 by A. de Groot, one of Aucan by the same author in 1984. A dictionary of Surinamese-Javanese is being prepared by Hein Vruggink and Johan Sarmo. Yet despite all these activities education is still modelled on the Dutch system (Nijbroek [1985]). Writers in Suriname cannot live exclusively by their pen. Some who have tried succeeded for a short while but have eventually had to look for alternative sources of income. There is no proper organization to represent them. Although a writers’ group has existed since 1977, it has never grown into anything like a trade union and has never shown much initiative. The reading public is very limited. Since 1975 libraries have experienced difficulty in obtaining new books. Literary criticism cannot develop freely in a society the size of Suriname’s, and reviews often degenerate into mere advertisements, giving no attention to style or structure, the emphasis being on providing biographical information. Critics who have written with some regularity include Thea Doelwijt, A. J. Morpurgo and Ewald Sluisdom, and outside Suriname Wim Rutgers and Hugo Pos (Kempen [1987-a]; [1987-b], 71–73; [1990-b]). Although contacts with the Caribbean region have provided some stimulus, for Shriniva¯si and Dobru (Robin Ravales) in particular, writing in Suriname has become oriented toward The Netherlands. Since 1980, the year of the Surinamese revolution, there have been some changes as a result of the military repression and the political and economical crises that followed. Life has become still more difficult, writing even less financially rewarding, and travelling abroad even more expensive and complicated. By 1989 bookshops were hardly able to stock any books at all. Libraries are now dependent on the donations of Dutch institutions or private persons (CarilhoFazal Alikhan [1989]). Publishing has become extremely expensive, due to the scarcity of all

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printing material, especially from 1986 onward. Even school textbooks cannot be printed, though De Volksboekwinkel and VACO have managed to publish some interesting texts. Censorship has greatly restricted freedom of speech, and after the killings of December 1982, in which five journalists and writers died, several authors have been forced to leave the country. Exchange of information of all kinds, including books and magazines, has been severely restricted, and education in general has not improved, since many teachers have left the country. Nevertheless some initiatives have survived, such as the newly instituted State Prize for Literature (won in 1980–82 by Michaël Slory, in 1983–85 by Bhai and in 1986–88 by Orlando Emanuels), and the Academy for Communication Sciences, set up in 1981. Orthographies for Sranan, Sarnami, Surinamese-Javanese, and Carib were established in 1986–87, and literary reviews continued to be published by Elvira Rijsdijk with some regularity in De West, and by the author of this article in De Ware Tijd weekly from 1985 onward.

References Carrilho-Fazal Alikhan, C. 1989. CCS-Bibliotheek 40 jaar. De Ware Tijd, 24 April. (Reviews the history of the CCS Library with considerable information). Doorson, Ané. 1964. Na dede foe Andris Porjon. Soela. 6–7. Helman, Albert, ed. 1978. Het lezerspubliek. Cultureel Mozaiek van Suriname. Ed. by Albert Helman, 426–29. Zutphen: Walburg Pers. (On Surinamese readers, illiteracy, and the reader’s expectations.) Hoefte, Rosemarijn. 1996. A Commercial Eldorado. New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids. 70.384: 301–08. Kempen, Michiel van. 1987-a. De knuppel in het doksenhok. Leven in de Surinaamse letteren. Paramaribo: Uitgeverij De Volksboekwinkel. (Anecdotal account of literary life in Suriname as observed by a critic.) ———. 1987-b. De Surinaamse literatuur 1970–1985. Een documentatie. Paramaribo: Uitgeverij De Volksboekwinkel. (Extensive documentation on Surinamese literature and its social infrastructure. Useful bibliographies.) ———. 1988. De populariteit van Surinaamse literatuur. NUCS Koerier, 1 April, 25–31. (Article on the popularity of Surinamese literature, based on a limited survey of reading lists for high school students.) ———. 1989. Surinaamse schrijvers en dichters. Amsterdam: De Arbeiderspers. (Introduction to Surinamese literature, with four chapters on oral literature and attention to the connections between literature and history. Includes one hundred profiles of Surinamese writers.) ———. 1990-a. De binnenkamer en de open vensters. Ontwikkelingen in de Surinaamse literatuur 1975–1988. De Gids. 153.1: 17–28. (On the gap between writers living in Suriname and in the Netherlands.) ———. 1990-b. Op zoek te gaan naar een nieuwe bron. Schrijven en literatuurkritiek als ontmoeting der culturen. De Gids. 153.10–11: 921–32. (On literary criticism as a meeting point of cultures and the reception of Surinamese fiction by Dutch critics.) ———. 1991. Ik wil mijn vrouw ruilen voor een pen en een stuk papier. De Volkskrant. 10 May. (On book production, writers, and readers in Suriname.) Lichtveld, Ursy M., and Jan Voorhoeve, eds. 1958. Suriname: spiegel der vaderlandse kooplieden. Zwolle: W. E. J. Tjeenk Willink. (Interesting anthology of work written mainly by the Dutch in Suriname’s colonial period. Also contains fragments in Sranan from the work of the Maroon Johannes King.) Lont, Ch. R. W. 1973. Ontwikkeling van het bibliotheekwezen. 100 jaar Suriname. Gedenkboek i.v.m. een eeuw immigratie (1873–5 juni 1973). Ed. by J. H. Adhin, 158–66. Paramaribo: Nationale Stichting Hindoestaanse Immigratie. (Interesting article on the development of Surinamese libraries.) McLeod, Cynthia. 1987. Hoe duur was de suiker. Paramaribo: VACO / Schoorl: Conserve.

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Nijbroek, Paul. 1985. Literatuurontwikkeling en literatuurwaardering in Suriname tegen een bredere achtergrond. De West. 13–18 June. Poynting, Jeremy. 1984. The Mirror of Malicious Eyes. Imaginative Literature in the Ethnically Plural Societies of the Caribbean. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds. Preface and synopsis of a dissertation containing several important theses on Caribbean literature. Rensch, Stanley. 1985. De nationale alfabetiseringscampagne een mislukking. Brandpunt. 1.3 (1–12 July): 6–7. (On the literacy campaign of 1984). Roemer, Astrid. 1976. Een karikatuur van de Surinaamse literatuur of hoe Surinaamse auteurs overleven. Bzzlletin. 40 (November): 19–21. ———. 1982. Een karikatuur van de Surinaamse literatuur of hoe Surinaamse auteurs overleven. Oso. 1.1 (May): 32–37. Rutgers, Wim. 1990. Tijdschriften over Surinaamse literatuur; een lange traditie. De Gids. 153.10–11: 943–47. (A Survey of all foreign [mainly Dutch] special issues on Surinamese literature in literary periodicals.) Ziel, H. F. de. 1957. De functie van het boek ten opzichte van de lezer. Culturele activiteiten in Suriname. Beginselen, feiten en problemen. Gedenkboek 1947. Paramaribo: Stichting Cultureel Centrum Suriname. (On the function of the book in Suriname, with some historical information concerning libraries.)

Language and Popular Culture

The Creole Languages of the Caribbean PIETER MUYSKEN

Leiden University

According to some accounts, over fifty Creole languages are spoken in the Caribbean. They share this sociolinguistic space with Amerindian languages such as Arawak, Miskito, and Yucatec Maya, with the Caribbean varieties of various European languages — Spanish, French, Dutch and English — and with the transplanted language varieties of the descendants of Asian indentured laborers: various Indic languages, Chinese, and Javanese. There is enormous variation in the status of the different Creoles. Some Caribbean Creole languages are well-known, such as Jamaican Creole and Papiamentu, others much less so, such as Providence Island Creole and Skepi Dutch. Some are spoken by millions, such as Haitian Creole, others are either extinct (Negerhollands of the U. S. Virgin Islands) or moribund (Berbice Dutch of the Berbice River in Guyana). Finally, some are clearly recognized as distinct languages, and others often classed together with the European languages of the region, such as Bahamian Creole English or the Afro-Spanish varieties of the Dominican Republic. Often the Creoles have gone or still go by different names, reflecting evolving perceptions of their nature and origin. For example, the language now called Sranan Tongo (language of Suriname) has also been called Sranan (or Sranang, a spelling that reflects the tendency to pronounce final n as ng), Taki-Taki (talk-talk, reduplication being a very productive process in Suriname), and Neger-Engels (Negro-English). Jamaican Creole has been called Creole English (stressing its Englishness), English Creole, patwa (a term used in many parts of the Caribbean, reflecting the “popular” and “regional” character of the language), Jamaican Creole English, and Jamaican (stressing its national status). Often a name indicating the “popular” or informal status of a Creole has been used: Trini Talk for Trinidadian Creole English, Mek-ay-tel-yu for Limon Creole English. In Africa colonialist terms like Petit Nègre were in vogue. In contrast, a language like Papiamentu has always been refered to by that name. Furthermore, we find geographical terms such as Palenquero (spoken in Palenque, near Cartagena, Colombia) and Martiniquais. Linguists often talked (and continue to talk) about English-based, French-based, etc. Creole languages, or English, French Creole languages, suggesting an essentially Europederived identity. At present often the more accurate term French-lexifier, English-lexifier, etc. Creoles is employed as a descriptive term, reflecting the fact that what is most European about the Creole languages is their vocabulary. The main purpose of this article will be to review a number of typological properties of Creole languages: Lexicon, categories, word order, serial verbs and prepositions, question words and reflexives, and finally the absence of inflection, passives, and the subject. First, however, I discuss the question of delimitation of the notion of “Creole languages” and the main processes of Creole genesis. I then embark on the task of outlining some of the typological features of Creoles in general, aware of the limitations and risks of the task. One of the problems lies in the

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definition of “Creole.” Languages called “Creoles” are spoken all over the world, and the field of Creole studies has arisen because similarities have been observed between these different Creoles (Bickerton [1980], [1984]). Indeed a number of similarities exist. However, it is not clear how superficial or fundamental such similarities are and whether they are so general that they can be taken to be a typologically defining characteristic of the Creole languages. In earlier work, I have denied the existence of a Creole linguistic “type” (Muysken [1988]). There are a number of prototypical Creoles in the Caribbean, including plantation Creoles like Haitian, Jamaican Creole, Negerhollands, and the Suriname Creole language Sranan. Also recognized as focal members of the set of Creole languages are Maroon Creoles such as Saramaccan (again Suriname) and Palenquero. All these languages emerged fairly rapidly, in the context of the African slave trade, associated with European plantation agriculture, in the period 1650–1750, and in areas with a large proportion of non-target language speakers in the overall population. Recruitment areas were mostly Kwa- (Akan, Fongbe) and Bantu- (Kikongo) speaking. Next to the core group of prototypical Creoles, we find other sets of languages that differ in one or more of these features: there are plantation Creole languages that emerged in West Africa, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific, rather than in the Caribbean. Some of these involved African slaves with the same language backgrounds as those of the core Creoles; others, such as Hawaiian Creole English (HCE), involved speakers of very different languages and were, of course, far removed from the Caribbean. Tok Pisin emerged in the nineteenth century on islands in the Pacific and eventually gelled as a Creole in Papua New Guinea. Berbice Dutch Creole, to mention another case that conforms to all these criteria, differs from the other Caribbean Creoles, in that only one African language appears to have played a major role: Kalabari Ijaw. Papiamentu arose fairly rapidly in a Caribbean setting among an African slave population, but whether this was primarily in a plantation setting and with a large proportion of non-target speakers is not so clear. São Tomé Portuguese Creole shares most of its features with the Caribbean Creoles but emerged in an African rather than Caribbean setting. Seselwa, finally, shares some of its background with the Atlantic Creoles and had demographic input from Atlantic slaves, but the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean also had a large influx of slaves from eastern Africa and Madagascar, as well as from South Asia in the later period.

Delimitation of Creole Languages (1)

fairly rapidly Sranan + HCE + Tok Pisin ± Berbice + Papiamentu + Sao Tomé + Seselwa +

African slave + − − +* + + ±

European plant. + + ± + ± + +

16501750 + − − + + + ±

nontarget + + + + ± + +

Car setting + − − + + − −

The Creole Languages of the Caribbean

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The delimitation issue is a vexed one. We simply do not know which features of the Creoles are due to universal processes of creolization and which to specific properties of all the languages involved. A great deal has been written about the genesis of Creole languages, some of it on the mark, some of it off the wall, some of it in part on the right track (Arends et al. [1996], Mühlhäusler [1986]; Romaine [1987]; Sebba [1997]). It is clear that we need a multidimensional model for Creole genesis, in which at least the following specific processes interact with general properties of the human language faculty, and different linguistic traditions, African and European, were continued to different degrees. In the genesis of different Creoles the contribution of these various processes and components differs considerably. Also, the different processes frequently interact, either countering or reinforcing each other. The first process is the simplification of the European target language input, due to accommodation by native speakers of these languages in contact settings but most of all to second language-learning strategies on the part of the slaves. This simplification is apparent in several ways. There is selective adoption of target language material: content words and phonetically strong forms are taken over, most morphological endings and (unstressed) preverbal clitics - small words that cannot be pronounced separately from a longer neighbouring word disappear. Syntactically, simplification is manifest in the loss of ordering possibilities. Creoles generally have much less variable word order than their European lexifier languages. A second process concerns relexification of the structural patterns of the first language with words from the European colonial languages. This process is also referred to as intertwining (Bakker [1997]), and is similar in its results to what is often termed native language transfer, conservation of L1 patterns, and insertion or embedding of new vocabulary in a native matrix language structure (Myers-Scotton [1993]). The third major process involved in at least some cases of Creole genesis is convergence between the patterns of the languages in contact. This process was referred to in terms of multi-level generative systems by Silverstein ([1972-a], [1972-b]) when he discussed the mutual adaptation of English and Chinook in the emergence of Chinook Jargon. It has recently been taken up again by Kouwenberg (1992) in an analysis of the mutual adaptations of Kalabari Ijaw and Dutch to produce Berbice Dutch, a Creole spoken in Guyana. The surface convergence is assumed to be based on compromises between the categories of the different languages as well as between their word order patterns. A final issue to be discussed in this context is the nature of pidgins, contact languages without native speakers. Often pidgins are taken to be unstructured and more simplified precursors of Creoles, following the idea that pidgins and Creoles are stages of the same “cycle” of language genesis. In fact, only a few of the pidgins actually documented fit into this scheme, particularly pidgins spoken in the Pacific. Most pidgins do not resemble prototypical Creoles at all, but rather form a category of their own, with vocabulary and structural features taken from various languages involved in the contact. Prototypical Creoles generally have most vocabulary items from one single source. By the same token, most Caribbean Creoles have no documented pidgin source. Due to space limitations, I will not delve farther into the typological features of pidgins.

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Lexicon Although a number of African and Amerindian etyma have survived in the Caribbean Creole languages, the majority of the vocabulary items in the Caribbean Creoles have a European source. Originally, this may have been quite a limited set. Norval Smith, in a personal communication, has estimated the number of English roots in Sranan at around 700. (English was Sranan’s original lexifier language.) Of course, this implies that there must have been rapid lexical expansion (Hancock [1980]) in the early Creoles to serve the needs of a full-fledged community language. In addition to borrowing, reduplication, and limited derivational affixation, two processes play a particularly important role in lexical expansion: multifunctional use of roots (also termed zero derivation) and phrasal compounding. Voorhoeve, 1981, gives a number of striking examples of multifunctional use in Sranan: (2)

siki siki siki siki

“sick” “sickness” “be sick” “make sick”

doti doti doti doti

“dirty” “dirt” “be dirty” “make dirty”

Although here the etymological root is an adjective, there are also cases where a verb or noun is the etymological base, such as bosro “brush” which can be both a noun and a transitive or intransitive verb. Dijkhoff, 1993, contains an extensive analysis of phrasal compounding in Papiamentu, with examples such as: (3)

palu di garganta kabes di boto barba di yonkuman

“neck bone” [stick of neck] “lift” [head of boat] “herb” [beard of a young man]

Whereas these forms contain a di “of” linking preposition, there is a different type of phrasal compound in Saramaccan involving an agentive element ma (