Caribbean Literature in Transition, 1970–2020 9781108564274, 9781108474009
The period from the 1970s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing
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CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, –
The period from the s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition – traces the region’s contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative nonfiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms. is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University. His work focuses on representations of marronage and queerness in Caribbean literature. His work has been published in Small Axe, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Transforming Anthropology. He is co-editor of the Literature Encyclopedia volume on Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean (https://www .litencyc.com). He has also edited Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (). is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Caribbean and Black British writings, with a particular emphasis on challenging orthodox literary histories and recovering women’s voices. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature () and Caribbean Queer: Creolized Sexualities and the Literary Imagination in the Anglo-Caribbean (), as well as co-editor (with Michael A. Bucknor) of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (). She leads a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage: recovering the lost past and safeguarding the future’. Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
General Editor Alison Donnell, University of East Anglia
Caribbean Literature in Transition ambitiously redefines received ideas of this region’s literary traditions to present a significantly expanded terrain for critical intervention. By extending the chronology back to , before either the Caribbean or Literature had been imagined in their present currencies, challenging narrow definitions of literary production, and reaching across linguistic divides, the critical interventions that comprise this series deliver a substantially new framework for future study and research. Boldly inclusive, Caribbean Literature in Transition attends to transformations in genre, language, form, and platform as well as to the intricate creative intersections between oral, performative and literary cultures, the intensity of cultural encounters and exchanges that have forged creolized sensibilities, and the complex patterning of local and global diasporas that have remained central to Caribbean experience and have continued to shape the production and reception of its writings. The essays collected here explore how Caribbean literary history is marked by returning creative and critical preoccupations, as well as overlapping local and global connections inscribed by thick histories of oppression and resistance. The series importantly refreshes understandings of this history for the twenty-first century by drawing on the invigorating theoretical insights of Black Atlantic studies, queer studies, eco-criticism and the digital humanities, as well as historical materials newly restored by the archival turn in Caribbean Studies. In sum, Caribbean Literature in Transition both generates fresh approaches to familiar works and brings overlooked and forgotten works into view. Books in the series . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by ’ and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, – RONALD CUMMINGS Brock University
ALISON DONNELL University of East Anglia
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
University Printing House, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Anson Road, #–/, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, –
The period from the s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition – traces the region’s contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative nonfiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms. is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University. His work focuses on representations of marronage and queerness in Caribbean literature. His work has been published in Small Axe, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Transforming Anthropology. He is co-editor of the Literature Encyclopedia volume on Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean (https://www .litencyc.com). He has also edited Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (). is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Caribbean and Black British writings, with a particular emphasis on challenging orthodox literary histories and recovering women’s voices. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature () and Caribbean Queer: Creolized Sexualities and the Literary Imagination in the Anglo-Caribbean (), as well as co-editor (with Michael A. Bucknor) of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (). She leads a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage: recovering the lost past and safeguarding the future’. Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
General Editor Alison Donnell, University of East Anglia
Caribbean Literature in Transition ambitiously redefines received ideas of this region’s literary traditions to present a significantly expanded terrain for critical intervention. By extending the chronology back to , before either the Caribbean or Literature had been imagined in their present currencies, challenging narrow definitions of literary production, and reaching across linguistic divides, the critical interventions that comprise this series deliver a substantially new framework for future study and research. Boldly inclusive, Caribbean Literature in Transition attends to transformations in genre, language, form, and platform as well as to the intricate creative intersections between oral, performative and literary cultures, the intensity of cultural encounters and exchanges that have forged creolized sensibilities, and the complex patterning of local and global diasporas that have remained central to Caribbean experience and have continued to shape the production and reception of its writings. The essays collected here explore how Caribbean literary history is marked by returning creative and critical preoccupations, as well as overlapping local and global connections inscribed by thick histories of oppression and resistance. The series importantly refreshes understandings of this history for the twenty-first century by drawing on the invigorating theoretical insights of Black Atlantic studies, queer studies, eco-criticism and the digital humanities, as well as historical materials newly restored by the archival turn in Caribbean Studies. In sum, Caribbean Literature in Transition both generates fresh approaches to familiar works and brings overlooked and forgotten works into view. Books in the series . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by ’ and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, – RONALD CUMMINGS Brock University
ALISON DONNELL University of East Anglia
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
University Printing House, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Anson Road, #–/, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, –
The period from the s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition – traces the region’s contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative nonfiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms. is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University. His work focuses on representations of marronage and queerness in Caribbean literature. His work has been published in Small Axe, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Transforming Anthropology. He is co-editor of the Literature Encyclopedia volume on Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean (https://www .litencyc.com). He has also edited Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (). is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Caribbean and Black British writings, with a particular emphasis on challenging orthodox literary histories and recovering women’s voices. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature () and Caribbean Queer: Creolized Sexualities and the Literary Imagination in the Anglo-Caribbean (), as well as co-editor (with Michael A. Bucknor) of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (). She leads a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage: recovering the lost past and safeguarding the future’. Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
General Editor Alison Donnell, University of East Anglia
Caribbean Literature in Transition ambitiously redefines received ideas of this region’s literary traditions to present a significantly expanded terrain for critical intervention. By extending the chronology back to , before either the Caribbean or Literature had been imagined in their present currencies, challenging narrow definitions of literary production, and reaching across linguistic divides, the critical interventions that comprise this series deliver a substantially new framework for future study and research. Boldly inclusive, Caribbean Literature in Transition attends to transformations in genre, language, form, and platform as well as to the intricate creative intersections between oral, performative and literary cultures, the intensity of cultural encounters and exchanges that have forged creolized sensibilities, and the complex patterning of local and global diasporas that have remained central to Caribbean experience and have continued to shape the production and reception of its writings. The essays collected here explore how Caribbean literary history is marked by returning creative and critical preoccupations, as well as overlapping local and global connections inscribed by thick histories of oppression and resistance. The series importantly refreshes understandings of this history for the twenty-first century by drawing on the invigorating theoretical insights of Black Atlantic studies, queer studies, eco-criticism and the digital humanities, as well as historical materials newly restored by the archival turn in Caribbean Studies. In sum, Caribbean Literature in Transition both generates fresh approaches to familiar works and brings overlooked and forgotten works into view. Books in the series . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by ’ and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, – RONALD CUMMINGS Brock University
ALISON DONNELL University of East Anglia
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
University Printing House, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Anson Road, #–/, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, –
The period from the s to the present day has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writing that has been widely acclaimed. Caribbean Literature in Transition – traces the region’s contemporary writings across the established genres of prose, poetry, fiction and drama into emerging areas of creative nonfiction, memoir and speculative fiction with a particular attention on challenging the narrow canon of anglophone male writers. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, the changing role and place of the writer, and shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Whilst reaching across language divides and multiple diasporas, it shows how contemporary Caribbean literature has focused its attentions on social complexity and ongoing marginalizations in its continued preoccupations with identity, belonging and freedoms. is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University. His work focuses on representations of marronage and queerness in Caribbean literature. His work has been published in Small Axe, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Transforming Anthropology. He is co-editor of the Literature Encyclopedia volume on Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean (https://www .litencyc.com). He has also edited Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (). is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Caribbean and Black British writings, with a particular emphasis on challenging orthodox literary histories and recovering women’s voices. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature () and Caribbean Queer: Creolized Sexualities and the Literary Imagination in the Anglo-Caribbean (), as well as co-editor (with Michael A. Bucknor) of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (). She leads a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage: recovering the lost past and safeguarding the future’. Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
General Editor Alison Donnell, University of East Anglia
Caribbean Literature in Transition ambitiously redefines received ideas of this region’s literary traditions to present a significantly expanded terrain for critical intervention. By extending the chronology back to , before either the Caribbean or Literature had been imagined in their present currencies, challenging narrow definitions of literary production, and reaching across linguistic divides, the critical interventions that comprise this series deliver a substantially new framework for future study and research. Boldly inclusive, Caribbean Literature in Transition attends to transformations in genre, language, form, and platform as well as to the intricate creative intersections between oral, performative and literary cultures, the intensity of cultural encounters and exchanges that have forged creolized sensibilities, and the complex patterning of local and global diasporas that have remained central to Caribbean experience and have continued to shape the production and reception of its writings. The essays collected here explore how Caribbean literary history is marked by returning creative and critical preoccupations, as well as overlapping local and global connections inscribed by thick histories of oppression and resistance. The series importantly refreshes understandings of this history for the twenty-first century by drawing on the invigorating theoretical insights of Black Atlantic studies, queer studies, eco-criticism and the digital humanities, as well as historical materials newly restored by the archival turn in Caribbean Studies. In sum, Caribbean Literature in Transition both generates fresh approaches to familiar works and brings overlooked and forgotten works into view. Books in the series . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by ’ and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and . Caribbean Literature in Transition, – Edited by and
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
CARIBBEAN LITERATURE IN TRANSITION, – RONALD CUMMINGS Brock University
ALISON DONNELL University of East Anglia
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
University Printing House, Cambridge , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York, , USA Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India Anson Road, #–/, Singapore Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Downloaded from . , on , subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at . https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108564274
Contents
List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements
page viii ix xvi
Introduction: Caribbean Assemblages, s–
Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell
Writing and the Responsibility to Memory: The Role of White Female Planters in Contemporary Caribbean Novels
Tanya L. Shields
Caribbean Identities and Diversifying the Creole Mix
Shivanee Ramlochan
Carnival, Calypso and Dancehall Cultures: Making the Popular Political in Contemporary Caribbean Writing
Emily Zobel Marshall
Life Writing, Gender and Caribbean Narrative –: Itinerant Self-Making in the Postcolonial Caribbean
Denise deCaires Narain
Forwarding Dubpoetry in This Generation: A Grassroots Performance and Neo-Literary Genre in Transition
Susan Gingell
Postcolonial Ruins, Reconstructive Poetics: Caribbean Urban Imaginaries Christopher Winks
v
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Contents
vi
Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction
Rebecca Romdhani
Caribbean Drama and Performance
Here Are the Others: Caribbean Creative Nonfiction
Justine M cConnell Kei Miller
‘Let Every Child Run Wild’: Cultural Identity and the Role of the Child in Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
Aisha Takiyah Spencer
Caribbean Feminist Criticism: Towards a New Canon of Caribbean Feminist Theory and Theorizing
Simone A. James Alexander
Writing of and for a Revolution
Alison Donnell and Nalini Mohabir
Digital Yards: Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms
Kelly Baker Josephs
Developing and Sustaining Literary Publics: Prizes, Festivals and New Writing
Ifeona Fulani
The Caribbean and Britain
Sarah Lawson Welsh
Acts of Trespass and Collapsing Borders: Alternate Landscapes in Contemporary Caribbean-Canadian Literature
Camille A. Isaacs
The Caribbean and the United States Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
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Contents The Caribbean and the Tourist Gaze
vii
Supriya M. Nair
Caribbean Subjects in the World
Kezia A. Page
Dialogic Connections in Caribbean Literature and Visual Art
Marta Fernández Campa
From Countertextuality to Intertextuality: Continuing the Caribbean Canon
Emily L. Taylor
Caribbean Eco-Poetics: The Categorial Imperative and Indifference in the Caribbean Environment
Keja L. Valens
Sexual Subjects
Faizal Deen and Ronald Cummings
Caribbean Literature and Literary Studies: Past, Present and Future
Alison Donnell
Bibliography Index
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List of Illustrations
.. Frankétienne, Untitled (). Oil on canvas. Cover image of Ready to Burst (), English translation of Mûr à crever () by Kaiama L. Glover. Courtesy of Frankétienne and Archipelago Books. page .. Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan, The Red Thread Cycle, Book I (). Artist book. Photo credit: Dominic Duncombe. Courtesy of Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan. .. Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan, The Red Thread Cycle, Book V (). Artist book. Photo credit: Jackson Petit-Homme, The National Gallery of the Bahamas. Courtesy of Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan. .. Christopher Cozier, The Castaway, from the Tropical Night series (-present). Mixed media drawings. Courtesy of Christopher Cozier. .. Christopher Cozier, Hop, Skip, Jump, from the Tropical Night series (-present). Mixed media drawings. Courtesy of Christopher Cozier. .. Kevin A. Browne, Tracey Sankar admonishes the photographer, or whoever she imagines will see the image. Photography. Port of Spain, . Courtesy of Kevin A. Browne. .. Kevin A. Browne, Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales. Photography. Usine-Ste. Madeline Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeline, July . Courtesy of Kevin A. Browne.
viii
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Contributors
. is Professor of English, Africana Studies and Women and Gender Studies, affiliate member of the Russian and East European Studies Program and Latin America and Latino/Latina Studies at Seton Hall University, New Jersey. Alexander is the author of the award-winning book, African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (), which also received an Honourable Mention by the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award. Alexander is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women () and co-editor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (). Her articles have appeared in African American Review, Anglistica: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women’s and Gender Studies, New Mango Season: A Journal of Caribbean Women’s Writing, Revista Review InterAmericana, African Literature Association Bulletin, and various edited collections. Her current book projects include Black Freedom in (Communist) Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions and Bodies of (In)Difference: Gender, Sexuality, and Nationhood. ˊ , PhD, is currently Senior Research Associate at the University of East Anglia. Her research has a comparative and interdisciplinary focus on how contemporary Caribbean writers and visual artists engage critically with historical memory. Her current research examines the role of literary archives and the possibilities of born-digital practice for the future preservation and scholarship of Caribbean writers’ manuscripts. She has published articles, reviews and interviews in Arc Magazine, Anthurium, Callaloo and Small Axe and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Commission and the Center for the Humanities at the University of Miami. ix
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x
List of Contributors
teaches queer and postcolonial literatures in the department of English at Brock University. His work focuses on representations of marronage and queerness in Caribbean literature. His work has been published in Small Axe, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Transforming Anthropology. He is co-editor of the Literature Encyclopedia volume on ‘Anglophone Writing and Culture of Central America and the Caribbean’. He has also edited Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (). was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and immigrated to Canada in the late s. Faizal studied English Literature and Language at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and is working on a new poetry collection, The Waiting Country. In Faizal published what became Guyana’s first LGBTQ poetry collection, Land Without Chocolate: A Memoir, shortlisted by the Quebec Writers Federation for the A. M. Klein Prize in Poetry. Faizal currently lives in Ottawa. is Professor of Modern Literatures in English and Head of School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on Caribbean and black British writings, with a particular emphasis on challenging orthodox literary histories and recovering women’s voices. She is the author of Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary and Critical History () and Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean (), as well as co-editor (with Michael A. Bucknor) of The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (). She is the lead researcher on a major project funded by the Leverhulme Trust: ‘Caribbean Literary Heritage: Recovering the Lost Past and Safeguarding the Future’, www.caribbeanliteraryheritage.com. teaches in the Global Liberal Studies Program at New York University. Her research interests include Caribbean, African, and black British literatures and cultures, and her recent publications include an edited volume of essays, Archipelagos of Sound: Transnational Caribbeanities, Women and Music () as well as scholarly articles published in Atlantic Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Small Axe and Anthurium. She is also a creative writer and author of a collection of short stories titled Ten Days
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List of Contributors
xi
in Jamaica, published in , and a novel, Seasons of Dust () and stories published in the Beacon’s Best anthology series, in Small Axe and in Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in Comparative Literature, both from New York University. is Professor Emerita, University of Saskatchewan, where her teaching and research career focused on decolonizing and diasporic literatures and Women’s and Gender Studies. After early books on the Canadian poet E. J. Pratt, she co-edited with Lesley Biggs and Pamela Downe Gendered Intersections: An Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, nd edition (). Her later work on the oral and written, principally in Canadian and Caribbean contexts, developed concepts of see–hear aesthetics, sound identity and the oral+. This work included co-editing with Wendy Roy Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual (). . is an Associate Professor of English at OCAD University in Toronto, specializing in postcolonial and black diasporic literatures, particularly in the Caribbean and Canada. She has considered the transmission of affect through social media for African women in the diaspora: ‘Mediating Women’s Globalized Existence through Social Media in the Work of Adichie and Bulawayo’ was published in Safundi (). In addition, her edited volume, Austin Clarke: Essays on His Works (), gathered critical essays on Clarke’s work. She is deeply committed to equity work at OCAD University, co-chairing a task force that resulted in a commitment from the university to change the proportion of under-represented faculty and staff. Her current research considers aging and memory in Caribbean literature. is Professor of English at York College, CUNY, and Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Disturbers of the Peace: Representations of Insanity in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (), founder and former editor of sx salon: a small axe literary platform, and manager of The Caribbean Commons website. Her current monograph project, ‘Caribbean Articulations: Storytelling in a Digital Age’, explores the intersections between new technologies and Caribbean cultural production. is a Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Beckett University. Her research
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List of Contributors specialisms are Caribbean literature, Caribbean carnival cultures, trickster studies and folklore. She has published widely in these fields, including the books Anansi’s Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance () and American Tricksters: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit ().
is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Her research focuses on Caribbean and African diaspora literature and performance, and the reception of Graeco-Roman antiquity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She is author of Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since () and, with Fiona Macintosh, Performing Epic or Telling Tales (). She has co-edited four volumes: Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood (); The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (); Ancient Greek Myth and World Fiction since (); and Epic Performances from the Middle Ages into the Twenty-First Century (). is an award-winning Jamaican poet, fiction writer and essayist. He has won numerous awards, including the Forward Prize for Poetry in for The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in for Augustown and the Prix Le Afriques in for its French translation. He was given an Anthony N. Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence in . He is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. is an Assistant Professor in the department of geography, planning and environment at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. She writes, researches and teaches in the fields of feminist and postcolonial geography. . is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She is the author of two monographs, Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History () and Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours (). She is also co-editor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism () and editor of Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature (). Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial, feminist, environmental, diaspora and cultural studies. is a Reader in Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Sussex. She teaches courses on postcolonial, Caribbean
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and women’s writing and on postcolonial feminist discourses. She has published widely on Caribbean women’s writing, including two monographs, Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style and Writers and Their Work: Olive Senior, as well as several essays from her current research on the representation of servants in postcolonial women’s writing. She is reviews editor for Contemporary Women’s Writing and co-editor for Palgrave’s Contemporary Women’s Writing series. . is a Jamaican living in Hamilton, New York, where she is Associate Professor of English and Africana and Latin American Studies at Colgate University. Her work has been published in Small Axe, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Anthurium, and also in edited collections. Her first monograph, Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text was published in . At present she is working on a second book-length manuscript on surveillance in Jamaican literature and culture. is a Trinidadian poet and book blogger. Her first collection of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (), was a finalist for the People’s Choice T&T Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, administered by the Forward Arts Foundation. Shivanee is the Book Review Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine, and writes for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the anglophone Caribbean’s largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad’s sole specialty Caribbean bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Most recently, her creative nonfiction has been anthologized in Brave New Words: The Power of Writing Now (). Shivanee also writes about books at her personal blog, Novel Niche, with emphasis on close readings of Caribbean and queer literatures. is a Lecturer at the University of Liège, Belgium, and is a member of the postcolonial research unit CEREP (Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Etudes Postcoloniales – Centre for Teaching and Research in Postcolonial Studies). Her recent publications include a chapter on Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and an interview with Kei Miller, both in Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature () and an article on Kei Miller’s blog posts and Facebook notes in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing ().
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List of Contributors
. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her book, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging (), examines the ways in which rehearsing historical events and archetypal characters shapes belonging. She is also editor of The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment (), which examines the contributions of Williams as an individual, a leader and a scholar. Dr Shields is currently at work on her second monograph, ‘Gendered Labor: Race, Place and Power on Female-Owned Plantations’, a comparative study of women who owned plantations in the Caribbean and US South. is a Lecturer in Language and Literature Education in the School of Education at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus in Kingston, Jamaica. She specializes in Literature Education, Caribbean female-authored short fiction and Caribbean Children’s Literature. She is the co-editor of Give the Ball to the Poet: A New Caribbean Anthology of Caribbean Poetry (). Her current area of research and publication has been on the Caribbean female child protagonist in Caribbean Children’s Literature and Young Adults’ Fiction between the s and the twenty-first century. is Director of Research Development at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Her research interests include Caribbean and postcolonial literary studies, genre studies, life writing, feminist epistemology and archival studies. Her work has appeared in journals such as Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, Ariel: A Review of International Literature and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She edited Mothers Who Deliver: Feminist Interventions in Public and Interpersonal Discourse () and Before Windrush: Recovering an Asian and Black Literary Heritage within Britain (). Her book Dreams of Archives Unfolded: Absence and Caribbean Life Writing will be published in . The book examines how the unfulfilled promise of postcolonial historical recovery, the archival absence of narratives and records about women’s lives, itself becomes a generative site for feminist epistemologies in contemporary Caribbean women’s autobiographical writing. . is an Associate Professor of World Literature at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and has
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published essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, the Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, and Southern Quarterly. . is Professor of English at Salem State University. She teaches and writes on Caribbean literature, literatures of the Americas, queer theory, and food writing. Her recent publications include Querying Consent: Beyond Permission and Refusal (), ‘Excruciating Improbability and the Transgender Jamaican’ (in Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities, ), and Desire between Women in Caribbean Literature (). She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Culinary Colonialism and Recipes for National Culture in the Caribbean. is Associate Professor and Reader in English and Postcolonial Literatures at York St John University. Sarah has over twenty-five years’ experience of researching and publishing on Caribbean, black British and postcolonial literatures. Her publications include The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature (), co-edited with Alison Donnell, Grace Nichols (), Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for a New Millennium (), co-edited with Janet Wilson and Cristina Sandru, and Food, Text and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (). She is one of the founding editors and an associate editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She is currently working on a new monograph, Caribbean Literature, in the Routledge ‘Twenty-First Century Global Perspectives’ series, to be published in . is Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Queens College/CUNY. He is the author of Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature () and has published articles, reviews and translations from French and Spanish in many journals and edited collections. He is the editor and co-translator with Adriana González Mateos of Los danzantes del tiempo, a bilingual English-Spanish anthology of Kamau Brathwaite’s poems that received the Casa de las Américas Prize. Current translation projects include Labyrinth, a bilingual English–Spanish anthology of the selected writings of Cuban poet Lorenzo García Vega, and the collected poetry of Haitian surrealist Magloire Saint-Aude.
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Acknowledgements
Ronald Cummings would first like to thank all the editors and contributors to this expansive, ambitious three volume project. Many of you have been my teachers and I still continue to learn from you and to think with you and to meditate on your rich, generative and inspiring work. Above all this book reminds me that the work of Caribbean literature and the scholarship about Caribbean literature has always held community as a key value. The collaborative work of thinking with contributors and coeditors has been a wonderfully enriching experience. A special thank you to my co-editor Alison Donnell whose complex yet clear critical insight and deep archival knowledge has helped to make this endeavour a wonderful adventure. My colleagues at Brock University continue to inspire me, see about my wellbeing and make institutional space for me to explore various projects and pursuits. Alison Donnell gives huge thanks her fellow editors on this monumental three-volume work – Ronald Cummings, Rafe Dalleo, Curdella Forbes, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Tim Watson. Their unstinting intellectual generosity, spectacular knowledge of the field and thirst to know yet more has been inspiring and energizing. Caribbean Literatures in Transition has truly been a mountain of a project but the spectacular view from the top makes it all worthwhile. Special thanks go to Ronald Cummings, my co-editor on this volume whose searching and daring eye for connections and impressive inclination towards original thinking have been invaluable in addressing the wealth of writings and writers that comprise the brilliance of Caribbean literature since . I am grateful to all our contributors whose critical talents muster another remarkable Caribbean assemblage. I am also extremely grateful to Ray Ryan and Edgar Mendez at CUP for their commission of this project and straight-talking professional style. The research for this project as a whole was greatly enriched by funding from the Leverhulme Trust that gave me time to study Caribbean xvi
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literary heritage in a much more expansive way, and I am extremely appreciative of their support. Joshua Hey’s careful attention to copyediting and consistency made the production process almost effortless. We would both like to thank Marta Fernández Campa and Senica Maltese for their sharp and detailed editorial assistance and rigour. Without you both we would not have been able to keep track of everything (including deadlines).
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Introduction: Caribbean Assemblages, s– Ronald Cummings and Alison Donnell
The period from the s to the second decade of the twenty-first century has produced an extraordinarily rich and diverse body of Caribbean writings. During this half century, numerous important transitions have taken place in terms of creative opportunities for writers, as well as colossal shifts in reception and recognition. Whereas Caribbean literature was too often dismissed as a peripheral, political and/or exotic subbranch of English/French/Spanish/Dutch Literature, there is now a much fuller recognition of its creative and imaginative brilliance, as writers from the region continue to sweep the major prizes of the twenty-first century literary world. While the scope and scale of Caribbean writings produced in the twenty-first century alone would merit a volume of this kind, tracing the historical arc of Caribbean postcolonial literary cultures from the independence era to the contemporary moment brings its own insights. In particular, it affords an analysis of how transition and change have functioned as a primary ethos of Caribbean literary production and allows this volume to chart multiple Caribbean literary (r)evolutions. We recognize that capturing literary history while it is still in the making can be particularly challenging. Our title, ‘Caribbean Assemblages’, looks to signal a conscious transition away from previously encompassing and incorporating agendas of Caribbean literature aligned with the concerns of national and/or regional citizenship, social progress and cultural authenticity. The work included here moves towards the articulation of a much more nuanced and contingent relationship between writing, politics and historical narratives in which the failure to represent the experience and ongoing struggles of certain Caribbean subjects and places has been a major and preoccupying creative drive. While Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s key concept of the rhizome has proven important for critical discourse about the Caribbean and its literatures, for example in Édouard Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (Le discours antillais), a turn to their theory of assemblages also offers another conceptual lens for attending to
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the Caribbean and its literatures as ‘a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies’. As Jasbir Puar notes ‘assemblages are collections of multiplicities’. The Caribbean inheritances of fluidity, fragments and multiplicities, bequeathed by the many complex histories and narratives of arrivals, adaptations, cultural changes, and innovations, departures, detours and returns, have not resolved into cohesion; rather, we suggest, in this most recent period they have engendered a more sharply focused attention to social complexity and ongoing unevenness. Sitting alongside the term Literature, a disciplinary endeavour which came into being in service of the colonial enterprise and its so-called civilizing mission, Caribbean acts not just as a complex qualifier of location but also of kind. The region’s expressive cultures in which oral and scribal, popular and official, fiction and truth, politics and aesthetics are intrinsically overlapping and mutually informing defy the orthodox conventions of literary description and evaluation. Inevitably, the questions of attachment, belonging and recognition, alongside those of literary voice, artistic practice and cultural knowledge, have undergone multiple transitions as the political and aesthetic demands of postcolonial, neocolonial and decolonial moments and practices have continued to foster Caribbean literary sensibilities. This volume, like the first two in this series, is divided into four sections organized around topics of ‘Literary and Generic Transitions’, ‘Cultural and Political Transitions’, ‘The Caribbean Region in Transition’ and ‘Critical Transitions’. It maps shifts and continuities between late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Caribbean literature in terms of innovations in literary form and style, variations in dominant and emerging genres, the influence of new media, an expansion of thematic questions and narrative focus, the changing role and place of the writer, as well as shifts in our understandings of what constitutes the political terrain of the literary and its sites of struggle. Many of these developments have been prefigured in, and heralded by, earlier moments in the region’s literary history. For example, some of the earliest texts in Caribbean literature were forms of life writing, including planter journals, travel narratives, diaries, slave narratives and epistolary texts. If several of these missives gained literary circulation and currency because of a curiosity and fascination about the Caribbean, which served to fix the region as ‘a lucid dream’ in the Western colonial imagination, the resurgence of life writing as a distinct genre in this most recent period and its related forms of essay, memoir and blog post, might indicate most keenly what we have outlined
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Introduction: Caribbean Assemblages, s–
above as an insistence on the pluralizing and complicating of Caribbean subjectivities and the foregrounding of intersectional identities through a focus on and recounting of individual lives and experiences. A compelling example of this contemporary genre is Guyanese-Canadian Tessa McWatt’s Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging. Opening with glimpses into the imagined histories of her Chinese, Indian, Arawak, Portuguese, French, African and Scottish female ancestors, this work – part memoir, essay, experiment and imagining – responds to the question, ‘what are you?’, asked of her eight-year-old self in an allwhite Canadian classroom. McWatt conjures an assemblage of ancestral, geographical, historical and theoretical multiplicities that are meaningful in their complexity and diversity but still inadequate to narrating her sense of self. Rather, the work asks for, and points the way towards, a ‘new language of politics, social justice, rebellion. Revolution’. It is in this same spirit of reflection, and in seeking to ask meaningful questions as well as find voices and perspectives that tell more intricate and inclusive stories of Caribbean lives and worlds, that both the creative and the critical work of the last half century has unfolded. Caribbean literature has been constantly marked by formal and generic innovations, interventions and inventions. Writing in The Shape of That Hurt, at the end of the s, Gordon Rohlehr raised the question of the ‘identification of the shapes which have emerged out of the apocalyptic process through which the Caribbean has been engendered’. The essays in Part I of this volume, ‘Literary and Generic Transitions’, take up the question of literary and generic transitions not with a view to offering a definitive catalogue but rather with the aim of engaging with the formative and transformative social and political shifts, contexts and relations which have demanded new narrative forms and focus. Beginning with Sylvia Wynter’s important essay, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’ – a landmark essay at the start of this period – and its call to think about the interrelations between history and narratives, the essays included in this section attend to the histories of plantation and indenture, their legacies, and how these inform the question of voice. They also advance calls for amplifying Caribbean difference, whether this is in attending to the question of age (as in children and young adult literatures and life writing), gender (as in women’s life writing), race (as in deepening creolization) or class (as in labour histories of plantation and urban classes). What these essays collectively achieve is a record of different modes and investments in revisiting questions about the conceptual shifts towards multicultural unity articulated in the discourse of creole nationalism.
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The analysis of popular culture, orality, theatre, and performance and their rich traditions and resources, which have been central to Rohlehr’s critical inquiries, are explored and extended in several of the essays in this section. These discussions also significantly build on and evidence some of the rich critical possibilities signalled in the SAVACOU debates of the s (SAVACOU /, ). These debates, which centred on the uses of Caribbean folk and popular aesthetics for a Caribbean literary tradition and practice are usefully revisited and summarized in Laurence Breiner’s essay ‘How to Behave on Paper’. They began to enact a shift which heralded and prefigured the cultural studies turn of the s and its resulting move beyond the critical focus on the novel, poetry and play as the primary sites of discussion in the Caribbean literary tradition. They propose and enact a move towards the analysis and consideration of ‘multiple and non-traditional texts, to popular music, movies, dress codes, style [. . .] the whole range of the quotidian’. These critical shifts can be traced through the work of important scholars such as Stuart Hall, Carolyn Cooper, Curwin Best and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, which continues to argue for what more can be recognized and mobilized through the refusal of scholarly demarcations of colonialstyle literary as well as linguistic legitimacies. Mervyn Morris’s essay ‘On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously’ remains a landmark critical manoeuvre in this respect. This same sense of a contemporary genre reworking and highlighting longstanding features of Caribbean writings applies to both speculative fiction and creative nonfiction. While the naming of Caribbean works as speculative fiction has enabled the possibility of this regionally specific genre fiction to take shape in the twenty-first century, there has been a long tradition of literary works that represent alternative and multiple realities by fragmenting realist forms and calling on the rich folkloric and spiritual traditions of the region. Although drawing on elements of fantasy, these works are often deeply informed by socio-political concerns and traumatic human events, and arguably transform, rather than bypass, the historic character of Caribbean literature. Similarly, creative nonfiction, including modes of essay, letter, and journal writing, has always been an important genre in Caribbean writing. As a creative space for writers to articulate, expand and reflect on their personal vision alongside the wider function and value of Caribbean writings, this genre has also served as a key site to explore ideas about the changing region and to recontextualize the Caribbean’s, and the Caribbean writer’s, place in the world.
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Since its beginnings, Caribbean literature has addressed itself and been read through movements associated with political autonomy, social justice and equal rights. It has also importantly crafted political literacies. From the early abolitionist narratives and through to the nationalist novels and essays of the mid-century that were integral to imagining a decolonizing subjectivity and fostering a localized literary sensibility, Caribbean writers have narrated and reimagined Caribbean lives on their own terms. Part II of this volume, ‘Cultural and Political Transitions’, explores how in the period since the s the struggles to contest colonial and neocolonial ideologies, structures and representations of the Caribbean have transitioned to take fuller account of differently expressed and experienced modes of oppression, and to challenge the ideals and limit points of liberation established in the nationalist phase of the mid-century. It also looks at transformative changes in terms of building communities of Caribbean writers and readers. The period extending from the late s to the late s witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of Caribbean women’s writing in the anglophone, hispanophone and francophone contexts. Critics began to read works by Erna Brodber, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior, Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Rosario Ferré, Astrid Roemer and Nancy Morejón as a body of Caribbean women’s writing that offered new ways of understanding literary subjectivities, new concerns with mother– daughter relationships and with the politics of domestic and intimate encounters, as well as different literary voices and styles. This body of writing was also supported and shaped during this period by the emergence of transnational feminist publishing houses like Virago, The Women’s Press, Sister Vision Press, Tusquests, Alfaguara and Planeta, and Folio. The growing visibility of work by international Black feminists of Caribbean descent, like Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Barbara Christian, during a time of feminist global activism in the late s and s, fostered an understanding that feminism was strengthened by recognizing the differences among women and listening to previously marginalized voices. The work of Caribbean feminist thinkers in the region, such as Lucille Mathurin Mair, Peggy Antrobus, Andaiye, Jocelyn Massiah, Patricia Mohammed, Nesha Haniff, Honor Ford-Smith and Rhoda Reddock, was hugely significant in terms of setting critical agendas for gender-based analysis that had local bearings. New literary critical frameworks and methodologies developed to respond meaningfully to the extensive body of women’s writing that also addressed Indian- and Chinese-Caribbean women’s perspectives and experiences. As the body of
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Caribbean women’s writings continued to expand into the twenty-first century, critical conversations more searchingly questioned the focus on and meaning of ‘woman’ and explored gender and sexuality more inclusively and fluidly. In many ways the pronounced rebalancing of literary attention from men to women that took place in the s was a revolution of sorts that both demanded and delivered an upheaval of existing norms and perceptions. It also offered an important opportunity to question the male revolutionary subject in Caribbean literature and history. Indeed, while the substantial and yet haunting presence of modern revolutionary thinking and action in the contemporary Caribbean still often clusters around the Cuban Revolution of and the Grenadian Revolution of (with the Haitian Revolution of remaining a powerful beacon of Black political and cultural liberation), literary approaches to these moments have undergone significant transition, with an interrogation of the consequences of the model revolutionary citizen – masculine and heteronormative – for women and queer subjects. In many works seeking to revolt against inherited oppressive regimes of being, a literal speaking out of dissenting voices is central and the genre of testimonio is powerfully associated with a revolutionary perspective, as well as with the political energy and hope to imagine otherwise and break with accepted versions of reality that remain stubbornly unequal and unjust. Across the half century that this volume addresses, a number of major political and cultural transitions have taken place that have been both directly and indirectly influential for Caribbean societies and writings. These include the end of the era of the Cold War and the resulting economic shifts, with a greater investment in tourist economies and development partnerships with China that have changed the economic orientation of the region; the acceleration of major climate events and challenges to sustainable living; and the demands for a more inclusive model of citizenship in which multiple and fluid erotic desires and arrangements can be acknowledged and accommodated. Writers have addressed these issues in their works but also challenged versions of economic development, of citizenship and of sexual accommodation that continue to serve creeping neoliberal and late capitalist structures. While Caribbean writers have remained compellingly engaged with these cultural and political transitions, their place and role as writers has also undergone significant change during this period. The move to online writing and digital literacies seems unremarkable in the twenty-first century, but the value of social media to cultural production remains
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undecided. Kelly Baker Josephs’ discussion in this volume of the arenas of social media as ‘digital yards’ in terms of public exchange and dissemination points to the creative potential (as well as precarity) of virtual collaborations and communities to Caribbean writers and writing. This capacity and toolkit for building readerships and nurturing writers virtually has also been matched by the growth in Caribbean literary festivals and prizes. A substantial discussion of these prizes across the region serves to illustrate their positive impact on writers’ recognition and their career profiles. Likewise, festivals in the Caribbean region also offer a significant boost to engagements with Caribbean literature both locally and globally. They afford an important opportunity for reaching new demographics, nurturing future writers as well as readers, and provide a visible and concrete gathering point for what is now a genuinely worldwide creative community. Many of the debates about place that preoccupied previous generations of Caribbean writers have continued to be significant from the s to today, as belonging to the Caribbean in the twenty-first century remains both an act of imagination and consent as well as an act of settlement and citizenship. The region is both a tangible land to inhabit and an intangible accretion of overlapping histories, languages and knowledges that extends into the ocean, the diaspora and beyond; it is both a collection of politically recognized nations and states and an ongoing people-making project contingent on changing home and diasporic populations and on historical as well as ideological forces. The essays that comprise ‘The Caribbean Region in Transition’ situate Caribbean writings within their histories of place as well as time, demonstrating how crucial and often challenging the projects of place-making have been and also emphasizing that the Caribbean is, on account of its history of forced migrations, colonialism, mass migrations and tourism, a profoundly networked location where multiple attachments and competing affiliations are the norm. Critiques of the colonial gaze and the conquest of Caribbean land and territory have been re-engaged and rearticulated in recent writings about tourism that are incisive on the historically embedded politics of power in the region and the racialized and gendered histories of labour that tourist economies foster. Writers have also explored the impact of tourism on the land and the Caribbean environment in works that articulate a postcolonial environmentalism that links power, human resources, land and the outside/inside gaze in a dynamic ecology of past–present–future possibilities – both for exploitation and for conservation.
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The special status of Britain as the motherland of anglophone Caribbean peoples and writers had already been destroyed by the racist attitudes and poor social conditions that faced expectant migrants of the Windrush era – a scandal that rumbles shamelessly on even today. For second-generation Caribbean-British writers in the s un/belonging to the national project was evident in an era of police brutality and race riots. Caribbean-British writings have provided a vital voice of resistant and revisionary history through hard-hitting dub poetry, the multivocal epic of multicultural urban life in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth () and the fictional assertion of entangled genealogies and futures in Andrea Levy’s Small Island (), to the historical reassessment of Jay Bernard’s Surge () and the claim to a wide horizon of cultural knowledge rooted in a Caribbean sensibility of linguistic freedom and facility in the work of Vahni Capildeo. Despite Canada’s self-identification as a space of inclusion and multiculturalism where hyphenated identities, lives and writings can be sustained and acknowledged, Caribbean writers in Canada such as Austin Clarke and Neil Bissoondath have critiqued its processes of homogenization, and Dionne Brand, David Chariandy and M. NourbeSe Philip have challenged Canadian racism in their fictions, poetry and essays. All the same, Canada has been home to a cluster of highly successful Caribbean women writers. This same contradiction of literary success and fraught, incomplete belongings applies to the United States. Like an earlier generation of Caribbean writers in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, contemporary Caribbean-American writers continue to interrogate the American dream and to critique US imperialism – both historical and current. While accounts of movement to the US, Canada and the UK constitute significant narratives in anglophone Caribbean literatures, writerly accounts of migration and travel to other geographic spaces and paths within the spread of colonial histories deliver fresh perspectives. Against the backdrop of globalization and late capitalism, writings that engage with being in the world often occasion a rethinking of Caribbean narratives of migration to explore possibilities for new solidarities and coalitions. In the writings of both canonical and established writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Caryl Phillips and newer voices such as Angela Barry, we encounter less familiar spaces and places that provoke new questions about Caribbean identity and belonging in the world. At the present time, the thematics of cultural distinctiveness, belonging, community and diaspora/exile that have comfortably been at the centre of
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Caribbean literary studies need to be revisited and expanded under the pressure of critical and theoretical frameworks as wide-ranging as Black Atlantic studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, queer studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, and digital humanities, as well as the material turn. Part IV of this volume, ‘Critical Transitions’, examines the impact that critical and theoretical transitions exert on the literary histories they describe and examine. It aims to reinvigorate and expand the terrain for intellectual intervention. Many of the critical footholds that the agendas of decoloniality and cultural nationalism advanced in the period from the s to the s were already beginning to be challenged and complicated from the s onwards, as the flaws and compromises of the postcolonial Caribbean showed themselves. An increasing restlessness with ideas of narrating the nation and with identities excluded from model citizenship means that writings from this period present both departures from and contestations with the work of previous generations. We might note how the developing engagements between Caribbean literature, visual arts, films and music were heralded in the interdisciplinary gatherings of a previous generation, most notably in the composition of important institutions such as the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). The development of new sites for critical and creative engagement with periodical publications such as The Caribbean Writer, MaComère, Pree and Small Axe, and its digital platform sx salon, were also prefigured in the experimental publishing enterprises of magazines such as SAVACOU. In this revisionary dialogue with the institutions of the past, the recent literary podcast ‘New Caribbean Voices’ at once celebrates but also differently restages the BBC programme Caribbean Voices with its literary remittances from London broadcast to the Caribbean region. One of the more understated critical shifts has been the move from countertextual practices – through which writers critique the ideologies of heterocolonial canonical works to both reimagine and rehumanize Caribbean subjects – to literary intertextuality, which connects and consolidates a Caribbean worldview and a localized literary genealogy. A much more radical transition has taken place in approaches to gender and sexuality as sites of critical intervention with a move away from the assertion of woman-centred approaches to the questioning of ‘woman’ as stable identity and a move towards non-binary and trans identities through a creolization of sexuality and erotic lives. This shift has impacted on the critical purchase of sexuality within literary studies and created opportunities for recovering neglected earlier works as well as for reading contemporary writings.
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Since the turn of the century, there has also emerged a significant field of Caribbean writings and scholarship which has foregrounded the question of masculinity as a site of interrogation. The work of A. James Arnold, Michael A. Bucknor, Ronald Cummings, Belinda Edmondson Conrad James and Linden Lewis has been foremost in this regard. Their work has been marked by two key and interrelated interventions. First, they have asked us to look again at canonical Caribbean texts and explore their gender politics and in particular their representation of masculinities. In doing so they have also traced how these writings of gender were bound up with ideologies of nation and patriarchy, as well as anxieties about race and sexuality. Second, they have explored and highlighted shifts in representations of masculinities in Caribbean writing in the most recent period, including the queering of masculinities, and have raised questions and challenged what critics such as Errol Miller, in his now infamous study Men at Risk, have framed as the ‘crisis’ of hegemonic masculinity in relation to ‘women’s liberation to patriarchy’, or what Kenneth Ramchand has termed ‘The Crumbling of Caribbean Masculinity’. These texts call up for attention the changing representations of and investments in heroic masculinity (often inscribed in Caribbean narratives through the figures such as the family patriarch, the gun man, the Bad John, the Maroon) and have traced the rewriting of gender norms through strategies of ‘ambiguity, excess and fluidity’. One of the most timely theoretical transitions has come with increased attention to Caribbean eco-poetics as a vital critical intervention in an age of climate anxiety and catastrophe. Again, the shift is one of critical perspective and priority. There exists a long tradition of Caribbean literary works which have been mined for their visioning of alternative ecologies that provoke vital re-examinations of the delineations between human and nature and the injuries to both caused by transactional and exploitative relations. In this regard, the Caribbean has proven once again to be a key site for political literacies, and Caribbean cultural criticism can be seen as being at the vanguard of ideological and critical developments. Contemporary theorizings of the Plantationocene, for example, owe much to the critical visions and theorizations of the plantation seen in the work of Caribbean writers and scholars, including the New World Group, George Beckford, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Kamau Brathwaite and Édouard Glissant. The shifts and transitions mapped in this volume are therefore not to be understood as linear itineraries. There are, of course, no straight lines or direct trajectories between past, present and future in these ‘Repeating
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Islands’ of the Caribbean. Rather, as we have suggested, these historiographical articulations should be understood in terms of assemblages, ‘a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks, [that] draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces’. As the past overlays the future and the future returns to the past, the tidelectics of memory, desire, prophecy, imagination and interpretation in our critical ecologies will continue to generate complexly pluralized, inevitably partial and valuably mobile versions of Caribbean literatures.
The Then and There of Caribbean Literary Futurity If writing about Caribbean literatures has been preoccupied with its histories and historiographies as part of a longstanding concern with erasures and silences, how might we also think about literary futures as horizons? One site of this horizonal thinking can be glimpsed in a number of recent anthologies of Caribbean writing. Anthologies have largely served as summative moments for the field, such as the publication of The Peepal Tree Book of Caribbean Short Stories that offers an impressive selection of short stories published by that press since its founding in – a book that will no doubt earn a place alongside earlier volumes such as The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (), which has functioned not just as an introductory primer to Caribbean prose writing but also as an invaluable teaching tool. Anthologies also propose to bring forward ‘new’ writings, signalling horizons of what is to come and introducing audiences to new writers. New Caribbean Poetry (), edited by Kei Miller; Coming Up Hot: Eight New Poets from the Caribbean (), prefaced by Kwame Dawes; Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean (), edited by Erika J Waters and David Edgecombe; Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean (), prefaced by Olive Senior; and Thicker Than Water: New Writing from the Caribbean (), edited by Funso Ayejina, each announce themselves as new. These publications also have important precursors in the volumes of SAVACOU that appeared at the start of the decade of the s (SAVACOU /, New Writing ) and at the end in (SAVACOU /, New Poets from Jamaica ) that also forwarded new writing. Although it might be tempting to simply understand the marker of “new” writing as a marketing ploy, we seek to note and underline the ongoing investment in the possibilities and potential of anthologies to mark and open new directions in our discursive fields. Additionally, anthologies have also provided space
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for increased visibility for popular fiction which has been often overlooked and understudied. Anthologies of speculative fiction such as New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean (), edited by Karen Lord, and the popular Akashic Noir series of books have urged a revisiting of popular and genre fiction as a serious part of Caribbean literary studies. Alongside works organized by genres – prose, poetry and drama – there have also been key anthologies that have aimed at rethinking frameworks such as those based on gender and ethnicity, with collections of women’s writings and Indo-Caribbean writings. In , So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterrean, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, edited by Nicholas Laughlin and Nailah Folami Imoja, beckoned outwards towards the comparative archipelagic turn. In this volume, we have also begun to raise questions about what recent transitions in creative technologies and writing platforms suggest about potential futures for Caribbean literary production and how critics are equipped to respond to text as a living medium that is both written and verbal, published and performed, offline and online or accessible in many different languages. There have been relatively few experiments with Caribbean writing and digital resources and/or gaming, but Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys moves in this direction. A bold and ambitious historical prose fiction that dismisses generic and formal boundaries in its published form, it tells the story of Antoni’s mother’s family, the Tuckers, who travelled from London to Trinidad in as part of the extraordinary Tropical Emigration Society. In this story, pieced together from historical archives, maps, emails and endnotes that comprise its recovery, there is also a subtle trail to a companion website that hosts digital resources including a film and a fake playscript. While the form and content of Antoni’s work synchronize cleverly in this comic and adventurous work, critical responses to the novel have largely ignored the website, which possibly points to the still limited literacy around online literary platforms. Indeed, while the multi- and interdisciplinary character of Caribbean writings has been acknowledged since its critical vocabularies began to take shape, it remains a genuine challenge for literary scholars to keep up with formal and platformal innovations and to give sensitive critical attention to a range or blend of artistic elements. Interventions such as Kwame Dawes reggae aesthetics and Stuart Hall’s essays on cinema and identity, often used by literary critics, have helped to pave the way. The combination of words and music has a long history that precedes written forms in the Caribbean and has also shaped their distinctive articulations – from
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calypso to dub. But the advent of music streaming has led to a more recent phenomenon of the literary soundtrack. These may be significant songs compiled by the author, as with Roger Robinson’s soundtrack to his collection A Portable Paradise, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize, or a soundtrack of songs featured in the literary work compiled by fans, such as the Spotify soundtrack to A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (). For writers who are also vocalists, like Robinson and the earlier Linton Kwesi Johnson, the crossover lyricism is an important dimension to their poetry. Anthony Joseph’s Kitch (), a prose work that blends biographical research on the famous calypsonian Lord Kitchener with fiction, provides another salient example of the creative interface between music and literature. Joseph’s account of Kitch is clearly informed by his work as a musician, which has also enabled a fuller creative context for the published work – including a live show that headlined CARIFESTA XIV. The exciting creative intersections between literary and visual cultures during this period are addressed by Marta Fernández Campa in this volume, but there is a growing body of work connecting Caribbean film and television to the literary which also merits further discussion. The subject of film itself has informed and infused Caribbean novels from Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home to Earl Lovelace’s It’s Just a Movie, as well as poetry texts such as Anthony McNeill’s Reel from ‘The Life Movie’ and Guyanese-Canadian Faizal Deen’s long poem The Greatest Films. Films have also inspired literary writings. The film script for The Harder They Come, co-written by Jamaicans Perry Henzel and Trevor D. Rhone, inspired a literary adaptation from the film; and a novel of the same title was published in by Jamaican-American writer Michael Thelwell. Similarly, many Caribbean writings have been adapted to film, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (), Joseph Zobel’s Rue Cases-Nègres (Black Shack Alley), Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls (), Dany Laferrière’s Heading South () and Senel Paz’s El bosque, el lobo y el hombre Nuevo (The Wolf, the Forest and the New Man) (), the last of which was adapted into the immensely popular film Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) (). Caribbean literary inspiration has also extended to TV serializations of contemporary novels, with the BBC making acclaimed adaptations of best-selling novels by two Jamaican-British novelists: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth () and Andrea Levy’s Small Island (). Recent reports suggest that Marlon James’s Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings () will be serialized by Amazon, indicating a new scale
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of global distribution and the potential for a significant second-wave readership. In a collaboration between writer and filmmaker, Frances-Anne Solomon celebrates Caribbean women’s survival and spiritual agency in her film I is a Long Memoried Woman with commentary by Grace Nichols, on whose poetry collection of the same title the film is based. An intriguing if less direct relation is established between Trinidadian Monique Roffey’s novel The White Woman on the Green Bicycle and the short film After Mas by Trinidadian-British Karen Martinez, which both explore the different codes demarcating racial and social boundaries and inequality in Trinidad and Tobago and which share a romance narrative. In After Mas, the white female character appears reading a copy of Roffey’s novel, making the intertextuality clear. Jamaican Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda () and Cuban Cristina Garcia’s Monkey Hunting () are two novels that bring insight into the performativity of Chinese identities in societies where they are a minority. These same issues in the lives of Caribbean-Chinese women are explored by Trinidadian artist Natalie Wei in her documentary Chinee Girl () and in the work of Surinamese artist Kit-Ling Tjon Pian Gi. Richard Fung’s culinary documentary Dal Puri Diaspora () also opens an interesting space of dialogue with the food writings and memoirs of Caribbean writers such as Austin Clarke and others. The Caribbean writer as documentary filmmaker is an area in which women have excelled. Independent filmmaker Esther Figueroa is well recognized for her political documentaries that advance the same environmental activist commitments expressed in her novel Limbo – most notably Jamaica for Sale (), which focuses on the neocolonial consequences of tourism, but also Fly Me to the Moon (), which explores the geopolitics of the space industry and its reliance on the ruinous extraction of bauxite in the Caribbean. Dionne Brand, recognized as one of the most influential and industrious Caribbean writers of the contemporary moment for her novels, poetry and essays, is also an accomplished documentary-maker whose works about Black women’s and lesbian lives in Canada counter the nation’s official story of a plural society. Shani Mootoo also works in this vein and made an important series of shorts in the s that explore similar issues to her novels, with striking interrogations of sexuality, race and belonging. Edwidge Danticat’s work as writer and narrator on the documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy () exposes the lived reality and everyday subjection of women textile industry workers in Haiti, as well as their capacity for
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resistance and endurance. In these documentaries, Caribbean women writers find a different mode of expression for their passionate sense of different possible futures that also informs their published works. In terms of expanded global horizons for Caribbean writings, genre publishing also marks an important new direction that opens up possibilities for new readerships who will connect to Caribbean writers through their love of crime-writing or speculative fiction. Karen Lord and Nalo Hopkinson both have entries in the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but there is no contradiction between Lord’s standing in this community and her growing reputation as a Caribbean writer. Indeed, as Lord points out, there is a rich Barbadian creative context for her speculative writings: Matthew Clarke and Jason Waithe have produced engaging graphic-novel work, and the paintings of Arthur Atkinson and Patrick Foster come to mind in visual arts. Award-winning writer James Carmichael is still a familiar name when discussing contemporary speculative fiction. In his only ‘conventional’ novel, Timothy Callender gave us the mythical How Music Came to the Ainchan People.
A similar crossover readership can be observed around crime fiction. The first title in Jacob Ross’s crime trilogy, The Bone Readers (), was an instant success with readers of Caribbean literature and of crime novels alike. Under the rubric of the global Akashic Noir series, significant numbers of Caribbean writers have seen their work, which might well be framed as social critique or folktale in a Caribbean tradition, published and read with fresh eyes as Noir. These expanded literary contexts and readerships for Caribbean writers also point to extended opportunities for scholarly intervention and an increased visibility for Caribbean writings beyond their often narrowly orchestrated presence in courses and programmes devoted to Caribbean, African-Diasporic, Postcolonial, and World Literatures – which all jostle at slightly different institutional angles to bring writers of colour and questions of writing, histories of the global South, and global justice agendas into the academy. Recognizing and opening the multiple pathways to and from an appreciation of Caribbean writings in all their variety and fullness seems much more possible in than in . Then, during a period of revolutionary thought and action across the region in which the struggle for voices speaking for non-Eurocentric cultures, aesthetics and politics was fierce, the storm that would erupt at the Conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies conference around legitimate forms of West Indian writing was already brewing.
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Kamau Brathwaite’s keynote address argued for the oral, folk nexus of African-Caribbean cultures that have subsequently become touchstones in Caribbean literary history, but in they were greeted with ‘deep deep disquiet & anxiety’. While the contemporary moment can celebrate its embrace of this tradition of work, it should not be complacent about its own exclusions. Focused critical efforts and scholarly vigilance remain essential as the half century addressed in this volume also, if often invisibly, chronicles the loss of many significant writers who passed out of circulation and favour (particularly women writers, as discussed in Alison Donnell’s closing essay to this volume), as well as the more active silencing of writers marginalized on account of their minority ethnicity and/or ‘dissenting’ sexuality. The persistence of a male, anglophone twentiethcentury canon and the barriers to a properly comparative model of criticism that can catch the developing and distinguishing features of panCaribbean writings remain. To read across the extraordinary multiplicity and fluidity of ethnicities, languages, forms, popular cultures, contested histories and life-stories that Caribbean writers have brought into writing is a continuing challenge, but it is also an ongoing pleasure.
Notes Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Lyndon K. Gill, Erotic Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), xxi. Tessa McWatt, Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging (London: Scribe UK, ), . Gordon Rohlehr, The Shape of That Hurt (Port of Spain: Longman Trinidad Limited, ), vii. Sylvia Wynter, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, SAVACOU, (), –. Laurence Breiner, ‘How to Behave on Paper’, Journal of West Indian Literature, . (), –. Nadia Ellis, ‘The Eclectic Generation: Caribbean Literary Criticism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Literature (London and New York: Routledge, ), –, . Mervyn Morris, ‘On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously’, Jamaica Journal, . (), –, reprinted from Sunday Gleaner serialization (, , , June ).
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Errol Miller, Men at Risk (Kingston: Jamaica Publishing House, ), . Kenneth Ramchand, ‘Calling All Dragons: The Crumbling of Caribbean Masculinity’, in Rhoda E. Reddock (ed.), Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, ), –, . Michael A. Bucknor, ‘Dangerous Crossings: Caribbean Masculinities and the Politics of Challenging Gendered Borderlines’, Journal of West Indian Literature, ./ (/), vii–xxx, xxvii. Mimi Sheller, Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene (Durham: Duke University Press, ). See for instance Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), which draws on the work of Dionne Brand, Édouard Glissant and Audre Lorde. Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, (), –. For one account of the work of the New World Group founded by Lloyd Best, see Brian Meeks and Norman Girvan, The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonization (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, ). For Caribbean theorizations of the Plantation, see Lloyd Best and Kari Polanyi Levitt, Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy (Kingston: UWI Press, ); George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, ); Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, , trans. James E. Maraniss, nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Edward [Kamau] Brathwaite, ‘Caribbean Man in Space and Time’, SAVACOU, / (), –; Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais, (Paris: Gallimard, ), translated as Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ). Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, . The title of this section echoes Jose Estaban Munoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, ). See for instance Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson (eds.), Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean (Oxford: Heinemann Publishers, ) and Frank Birbalsingh (ed.), Jahaji Bhai: An Anthology of Indo-Caribbean Literature (Toronto: Mawenzi House, ). For a further exploration of the archipelagic turn, see also Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens, Archipelagic American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). See Robert Antoni, ‘Claiming a Hybrid Language, Seeking a Hybrid Form: From the Vernacular to Digital Media in Robert Antoni’s As Flies to Whatless Boys ()’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, . (), –. Kwame Dawes, Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ); Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume : Foundations
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of Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley (Durham: Duke University Press, ). For a sense of this musical/literary fusion event, see ‘Anthony Joseph: Kitch – Trouble in Arima’, YouTube video (), www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=&v=ldAvckVLBc&feature= emb_logo. With thanks to Marta Fernández Campa for her advice on these multi- and cross-disciplinary works. Austin Clarke, Pig Tails and Breadfruit: A Culinary Memoir (Toronto: Random House of Canada Ltd, ). Robert Edison Sandiford, ‘Karen Lord: Author of a Very Barbadian Book’, Caribbean Beat, (January/February ), www.caribbean-beat.com/ issue-/karen-lord-author-very-barbadian-book#ixzzBkurGwNO. Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems (New York: Savacou North, ), .
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Literary and Generic Transitions
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Writing and the Responsibility to Memory: The Role of White Female Planters in Contemporary Caribbean Novels Tanya L. Shields Sylvia Wynter’s prescient observation in her essay that Caribbean societies ‘are caught in a collision and a clash that was inherent and inbuilt, and still is, between the plantation system, a system, owned and dominated by external forces, and what we shall call the plot system, the indigenous, autochtonous [sic] system’ remains relevant to readings of Caribbean histories and writings. The built-in conflict between plot (a self-sustaining place for enslaved people, internally oriented) and plantation (a profit driven space, externally oriented) continues to govern political, economic, social and even creative life in the region. Exploring this fundamental conflict between plot and plantation, this essay deploys the figure of the white female planter to discuss the responsibility to memory. Before analysing literary works, I consider how quarrels with history and the investments in remembering have been central to major projects of Caribbean literary and cultural criticism across the region. My readings are also framed by the decolonial methodology of feminist rehearsal that enables an engagement with the past through multiple retellings from differing perspectives. In Herbert G. de Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall (), Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge () and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (), I show how plantation ownership, though important, is not central, as these novels interrogate the deferred power of ownership. Reading Kevyn Alan Arthur’s The View from Belmont (), Andrea Levy’s The Long Song () and Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora (), I draw attention to the ways in which these novels consciously play with history, to rewrite it, to write erased experiences into being, or to write versions of the past from multiple perspectives. Such writing back counters historical depictions of the plantation proprietor as solely a lascivious white man; instead, these efforts expand collective memory by showing women’s ability to reproduce colonial mandates. Remembering the female ‘master’ troubles a singular unified narrative of the nature of
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power. By engaging with unofficial and official repositories of memory, the novels rehearse contingent power through multiple voices, timelines and versions of the same incident, and they are intertextual (utilizing letters, diaries, travelogues and plantation documents) so that they remember what has been forgotten. These texts reveal that responsibility to memory is a gendered historical project in which ideological fractures emerge based on whether one is maintaining or challenging plantation structures. Ownership allowed elites to create memories that solidified their right to rule. Such control of the economic and ideological landscape produced power layered with contingencies. The figure and place of the white woman in the Caribbean is part of an ongoing and larger debate on the role of history and the function of the regional writer. Jamaican Edward Baugh’s ‘The West Indian Writer and his Quarrel with History’ explored this quarrel as an existential dispute. Interrogating the work of several male writers, Baugh argues that the ‘blight of history’ () underscores a sense of ‘historylessness’ that emerges from a quest for the grand narratives that characterize European history (). When history is ‘alien’ or ‘disconnected’, it produces an ‘ideological conspiracy of silence’ in which West Indian communities are unable to ‘make sense of their world’ (–). I argue that Baugh is talking not simply about history-making but also about ownership – those who owned had voice, owned voices, and owned the machinery to make their voices official. Martinican Édouard Glissant’s ‘The Quarrel with History’ extends Baugh’s observations in a francophone tradition by expostulating that the function of the Caribbean writer is to close the gap between history and non-history, and the lacunae in self-understanding that emerged because of the dislocations of the Middle Passage and the plantation. Glissant maintains that engaging with those collisions is the only way to confront the bloody and terrifying past. To produce a liberatory and holistic worldview, the Caribbean person needs access to the collective memory that resides in the ruptures of the ‘tormented chronology’ of official history (). Similarly, Cuban Antonio Benítez-Rojo grapples with the past through his exploration of the repeating nature of the rapacious plantation machine. Like the arms of an octopus, this organism is composed of many parts – military, bureaucratic, legal, educational and religious instruments – that together create an overarching tool, the plantation machine, which shapes the ideological contours of memory. In this pan-Caribbean context of historical dispute, the white female figure, as writer, historical actor and fictional character, exposes anxieties
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around race and gender as well as those around reconciling plot and plantation that have played a significant role in regional imaginative and critical works. The white woman as fictional character and factual subject has haunted the region for a long time. The publication of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea () spotlighted fictional Antoinette and factual Rhys as conduits for this controversy. Caribbean literary critics argued about whether Rhys and her work could be considered West Indian, how West Indian, and whether her whiteness and location in England mitigated her belonging to the region and her works’ belonging to its canon. Rhys’s Caribbean bona fides are now largely undisputed, but she remains central to the recurring discussion about gender, race, class and belonging. A brief overview reveals how manifestations of this conversation between literary critics and creative writers remains alive today. The s Peter Hulme and Kamau Brathwaite debate about where and to whom Rhys belongs questions categories of place, race and value. In his essay, ‘The Place of Wide Sargasso Sea’, Hulme tackles terminology (West Indian and creole), emphasizing the disconcerting combination ‘of privilege and estrangement’ when relating these terms to the planter class. He contends that Brathwaite weaponizes race against nonblack writers and critics, while ‘conflating heroine and author’. The ideological underpinnings and investments between plot, plantation and novel come into focus with such slippage. Brathwaite responds poetically and, in an unconventional essay ‘A Post-Cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars’, uses symbols, shortened forms of words, atypical spacing and the Creole language to critique Hulme’s ‘blind mishandling of my work’. Moving on from earlier claims against nonblack critics, which he attributes to a post-independence and Black power era, Brathwaite acknowledges Rhys’s Caribbeanness while positing that she remained constrained by ‘her gilded plantation environment’ (). He claims that Rhys and Wide Sargasso Sea are tools, a ‘wishful metaphor’ employed by those interested in the continued suppression of Black voices (). Racial and ethnic identities entangle historical roles, and Rhys, unlike others, is ‘honest in her guilt’ (). Elaine Savory, Evelyn O’Callaghan and Denise deCaires Narain write into the space between Brathwaite and Hulme to comment on the gendered aspects of the debate as white women and literary scholars. Their differing perspectives negotiate gaps between fictional Mirandas and factual women and highlight how placement in the plantocracy determines access to ownership, official memory and value.
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Vladimir Lucien’s blogpost, ‘Monique Roffey’s Discovery of Caribbean Literature’ (), and Kei Miller’s ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ () reignited the firestorm regarding the gendered and racialized singularity of white Creole women and characters. Lucien objects to Roffey’s designation as a Caribbean literary expert on account of her metropolitan interests. Roffey’s value emerges despite her ignorance of the region’s historical and literary legacies and her ‘staccato type of unnalysis [. . .] separate[s] Caribbean society and Caribbean literature [. . .] to simplify them both’. Lucien does not question Roffey’s Caribbeanness, but he ponders, ‘Does being a Caribbean writer merely mean that you were born, or even born and grew up in the region?’ Answering himself, Lucien articulates that a writer’s task is to take himself and his subject seriously and to investigate both honestly. The inherent conflicts of plot, plantation and insider/outsider orientation are enmeshed in Lucien’s rebuke. Likewise, Miller explores how writerly bodies carry the weight of history by juxtaposing his Black male body with those of white women, including Roffey. The familiar injunction that writers reflect the people and extend them emerges from the mainly Black and white origins of the plantation machine. Those origins make speaking across history and its agonies difficult. Silence and stereotypes become both a withholding of belonging and a misremembering. In silence we cannot or do not engage; and with stereotypes, the familiar tropes of the Black male savage and the white woman Creole repeat plot and plantation clashes. Roffey characterizes Miller’s essay as a ‘divisive’ gendered attack that ‘attempt[s] to police white women’ while remaining silent on ‘white male Caribbean writers [who] boast [of being plantation] born’. Indeed, the value, context and place of white male writers has not been interrogated similarly, though their voices are represented in both historical and literary repositories. This essay interrogates plantation legacies by examining the ideological function of the white woman planter and the gendered nature of memory by using the methodology of feminist rehearsal, which revisits key events and ideas from multiple perspectives to grasp their magnitude. Rehearsing female proprietorship is a vehicle for remembering elite white women’s colonial degeneracy that stresses the constancy of hierarchical relations despite gendered differences: ‘By making the past tangible through repetition and revision, [feminist rehearsal] invites readers into its sociopolitical project which makes visible and legible the realities of Caribbean bodies.’ Thus, rehearsing plot and plantation interests assembles a complicated awareness of the past.
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By narrating the lives of widows or women whose patriarchs are absent, the writers I examine reimagine economic and gendered relations. Female characters don the mantle of masculinity to exercise authority that turns on their erotic interactions to secure power. In depicting female owners as agents invested in plantation success, the novelists draw attention to the corrupting force of slavery as well as to the official narratives that redeem masters and mitigate their atrocities. These writers fulfil Wynter’s call to illustrate the in-built antagonisms between plot and plantation, which help readers reimagine stories lost in the ruptures of the past. Like their historical counterparts, female planters emerge in fictional works in dichotomous guises – as helpless belles and as controlling figures. Herbert G. de Lisser’s infamous portrayal of the real Annie Palmer, in The White Witch of Rosehall (), is one of the earliest representations of the female planter in Caribbean literature written by a regional author. De Lisser’s example of remembering (and reinventing) the female estate owner in the restless pre-emancipation s animates Jamaican collective memory since he reformulates rumours of an unremarkable life into a sensational articulation of female authority. Other versions of this story include Harold Underhill’s Jamaica White (), Barry Reckord’s play White Witch of Rose Hall () and Mike Henry’s Rosehall’s White Witch: The Legend of Annie Palmer (). These intertextual forays rewrite the ideological focus and details in de Lisser’s work. Yet the historical Annie Palmer remains an insignificant figure in all versions. Arguably, de Lisser’s fictional Annie shapes memories of the white female planter – as radical, libidinous and too outside the codes of ideal feminine behaviour to thrive. As white witch and female planter, Haitian-born with Irish ancestry, Annie Palmer corrupts colonial ideals, and in the novel her death at the hands of an African man both contains her ideological danger and signals the cusp of a new historical order. Depictions of white women and the plantocracy continue in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women. Phillips’s and James’s novels feature women who perform titular dominion while the owner is away. In Cambridge, Emily Cartwright inspects her father’s plantation, but the overseer, Mr Brown, mitigates her authority. She is relegated to the house, mainly her bedroom, and, is, in effect, dependent on Stella, her enslaved housekeeper, for information and protection. In The Book of Night Women, Mistress Wilson, widow of the former owner and mother of the current one, is an envoy of patriarchal strength and deploys white male authority (her husband’s and son’s) during the planter’s absence. Both novels reveal white women’s investment
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in imperial economic, political, racial and gender discourses. Yet, even as colonial structures allow the women degrees of power, the social order maintains their powerlessness, and their proximity to white male power mainly solidifies them as mouthpieces for empire. Both writers use archival research to rewrite the narratives of white women Creoles and insert enslaved voices to give a more complete memory of the plantation. Cartwright fits representations of the mistress in the historical and literary repertoire, and Phillips’s intertextual prose draws on white women’s travelogues and diaries to provide his character with a historically inflected voice. James, too, plumbs the historical archive for the details, particularly punishments, such as packing the slave’s mouth and anus with gunpowder. Plantation discipline was a mechanism of control, but – as James’s main character, Lilith, illustrates – those born of plantation violence become transmitters of its barbarity. Lilith scalds and dismembers the enslaved collaborator, Paris, for attempted rape; and she kills and then burns the entire family of Isobel Roget, the white Creole who hopes to ensnare Humphrey, master of the Montpelier sugar plantation and Mistress Wilson’s son. Power and powerlessness are explored intricately in both novels, and, unlike in de Lisser’s work, enslaved voices counter the narratives of colonial elites. De Lisser’s Black characters endorse colonial justifications because they are depicted as pathological. While de Lisser portrays obeah man, Takoo, as the ever-looming black savage, Phillips’s Stella and Cambridge challenge earlier representations of enslaved people in colonial texts, and the night women in James’s book combat stereotypes about slave passivity. These novels primarily show the white woman as a woman having nominal power. In Phillips’s work, the female figure is quiescent to society’s strictures. Only her diary reveals her strong emotions and opinions. In the world outside her journal, Emily lacks the ability to demand deference, despite her sexual relationship with Mr Brown. Emily’s power, simultaneously provided and undermined by her proximity to white men, places her in constant negotiation to achieve her will. In James’s text, the corrosive aspects of slavery visit all characters, particularly Mistress Wilson and Isobel Roget, neighbour and lover to Wilson’s son. Isobel’s derangement after her family’s death culminates in her addiction to drugs and sex. In the end, Isobel, pregnant and abandoned, remains in Jamaica. She lives with the consequences of the debauched plantocracy, while white men flee. Phillips’s and James’s representations embody the use value of art as creation that ‘responds to human need’. Showing the white woman planter as one with token but nonetheless brutal power provides a more honest accounting of our memory of slavery.
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Writing and the Responsibility to Memory
In other contemporary fiction, rehearsing female plantation ownership reveals the paradoxes of memory. In Kevyn Alan Arthur’s The View from Belmont () set in Trinidad, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song () which takes place in Jamaica, and Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora () which has Puerto Rico as its primary locale, women plantation owners are sexually empowered widows who act as willing sexual partners of white and Black men. The widows’ relationship to violence and children offer other manifestations of their ability to wield control. In usurping the myths of white womanhood, these novels explore the ways belief systems are naturalized and made legitimate by questioning unitary narratives and the comprehensive fallacy of official stories. Although The View from Belmont utilizes two timelines – a late twentieth-century one set shortly after Abu Bakr’s attempted Muslimeen coup in Trinidad and Tobago, and a nineteenth-century chronology, which unfolds over the course of two years (–), the bulk of the novel, presented from a first-person perspective, is Clara Bayley’s story told through recently uncovered letters. Clara’s story offers an account of a white female plantation owner who participates in patriarchal and white supremacist practices. Widowed at thirty-one, after a year of an unconsummated marriage, she remains in Trinidad to manage Weymouth Estate, the cocoa and coffee plantation her late husband bequeathed to her. The letters she sends to her best friend Alice in England reveal Clara’s thoughts on abolition, slave management and her sexual desire for her enslaved cook, Kano. This epistolary relationship recovers the memory of the female planter as their letters document their most intimate thoughts and do not enter an official archive until the twentieth-century characters bestow them to a bureaucratic repository. Though there are gaps in the correspondence, the epistles become a valuable tool to rehearse planter ideology. Their chronological discontinuity disrupts the textbook narrative of ideal feminine behaviour by exposing sexual exploitation by women. Arthur reimagines gendered control through Clara’s chronicle of her amatory adventures with free and enslaved men. Before her marriage to Henry, she had lovers and was quite prepared ‘to convince him, by the subtlest of subterfuge [. . .] of [her] virginity, but [. . .] he made no attempt at consummating [their] marriage’. Within a year, Clara is widowed and longing for physical intimacy. She ends her sexual drought with a young naval officer, and, after witnessing Kano having ‘vigorous’ intercourse with another slave, she determines he will be her next lover:
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. Kano [. . .] is [. . .] my chattel, my property! The man is mine to do with as I will! Here is an unexpected benefit of slavery I had not thought ever to experience! – tho’ the presence of the numerous mulattoes in our society [. . .] is proof enough of many male proprietors and managers, &c., having long invoked Le droit du Seigneur. ()
Clara’s rehearsal imparts how female titleholders used the social scripts of colonial masculinity that exploited power, labour and erotic relations. For Clara and the women she represents, the script of colonial masculinity was not solely the property of men. While she believes that her slaves are savages, she rationalizes her desire for Kano because ‘were he white’, he could have made something of himself. Conscious of the supposed feudal right of the lord to have congress with his vassal’s bride, Clara likens herself to other masters who have populated the island with mixed-race children. The inability to see white women’s colonial profligacy renders the past incomplete and the present partially understood. In rehearsing masculinity, Clara writes her own codes, which she refers to as ‘Le droit de la Madame’ (): I have had Kano in my bed! [. . .] I had him remove his hands [which had cupped his genitals]. [. . .] but there discovered before me a little fellow, disappoint in its size, and in its shyness. It [. . .] requir’d [. . .] coercing [. . .] to have him [. . .] overcome his reticence over taking the requisite liberties with the body of his Missus [. . .] Imagine [me] being tupp’d by a black ram! His performance was restrained [. . .] but it [. . .] provide[d] me release, more than once, and serve[d] well as an augury of things to come. (–, emphasis in the original)
Notwithstanding her humorous depiction for Alice as recipient of her letters, the historian Thomas Foster asserts the historical reality that ‘enslaved black men were sexually assaulted by both white men and white women [. . .] and this assault took a variety of forms, but included: penetrative assault, forced reproduction, sexual coercion and manipulation and psychic and mental abuse’. Though Clara claims to feel inhibited at being naked before a ‘negro’, she arouses Kano so she can fulfil her desires. Kano’s restrained performance and his lack of climax, quickly gathering his clothes and leaving Clara to her post-coital bliss, communicate his unease with his new role as her lover. Clara’s invocation of the word ‘right’ underscores the absolute legal access owners had over enslaved bodies. Her sexual exploitation of Kano fractures the collective memory of the plantation. Black men’s historical vulnerability under slavery in terms of sex and sexuality is rarely considered. In the controlling image of Black men as predators and white women as prey, Black men are
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remembered as breeders, their sexual exploitation fetishized instead of contextualized. Clara grows fat, her indulgences in food visibly telling, while her coital exploits seem discrete. However, the island’s governor, Sir Ralph Woodford, and others are aware of Clara’s use of Kano. In addition to Bonner, her enslaved coachman, knowing of her exploitation of Kano, the prosy Sir Ralph admonishes Clara and insists she attend church to serve as a moral example to less elite settlers and her slaves. Sir Ralph’s policing of her behaviour and her church attendance underscores the constraints placed on her as a white woman. Clara uses the power provided her by race and class to indulge in behaviour that undermines feminine codes; however her compliance with Sir Ralph’s wishes highlights the limits of her power. Clara’s sexual transgressions align her with masters who prey on enslaved people. Clara satisfies her desires, restrained only by her wish for a good reputation among ruling-class whites. She indulges her longing for a black ‘ram’, Kano, and a mixed-race estate owner, André de Boissière, even as she passes judgement on the ‘savage’ nature of Black people. By the novel’s end, Clara indicates a preference for mixed-race society. Though the coloured population is as invested in respectability as the colonial elite, as a white woman Clara has more independence among the mixed-race gentry. She enjoys deference to her whiteness, which combined with her widowed status grants her degrees of freedom and influence not allotted to most white women of her class. Similar to Clara, Caroline Mortimer in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song negotiates the codes of ideal feminine behaviour with the authority of ownership. This novel also features two nineteenth-century timelines that act as counterpoints to the white woman’s story. Levy uses a frame structure that allows the emancipated protagonist, July, to recount her life story while relating enslaved experiences on Amity Plantation. Daughter of field hand Kitty and overseer Tam Dewar, July is taken from her mother to be trained as a lady’s maid for Caroline, widowed sister of John Howarth, proprietor of the Jamaican estate. Amidst the ten-day Baptist War, John’s suicide makes Caroline a plantation owner. Writing in the late s, July demonstrates her responsibility to memory by chronicling some events in which her experiences were officially marginalized. The outer frame of the novel features July’s direct address to readers and conversations with her son, Thomas Kinsman, a publisher. Tensions arise between mother and son on how to tell the story of July’s eponymous ‘character’. The Long Song’s gendered writing back to empire recounts these narrative fault lines and explores how enslaved people and white women brokered power
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during slavery and apprenticeship. The rehearsals of the female planter communicate Caroline’s dependence on the discourse of white women’s Christian rectitude, which July disrupts. In Caroline’s case, she moves from a reclining hysterical lady shouting orders, invested in a performance of virtue, to one who persecutes July for her uneven stitches by pricking her hand with a needle. Vacillating between virtuous and torturous, Caroline convinces herself that she knows best how to manage Amity, she ‘grew [. . .] so enamoured by her oftconjured boldness, and persuaded by her imaginary competence, that [. . .] she declared, “so help me, God, I will see the plantation of Amity prosper!”’ Caroline personifies the helpless belle and the callous landowner. Her rehearsal of gendered memory is at once ordinary and uncommon. She is ignorant of the place and processes she seeks to command but is persuaded by her own oft-repeated account of her ability to succeed and her ceaseless consumption, in newspapers, letters and imperial policy, of the rightness of white might. Caroline’s overseer and eventual husband, Robert Goodwin, fulfils the familiar representation of the owner. Full of religious vigour, Goodwin is corrupted by slavery. Robert weds Caroline as part of an elaborate plot to have sex with July, but their ‘love’ falls apart during the four-year interregnum of ‘false freedom’ between the end of slavery and full emancipation, known as apprenticeship, when inflamed tensions between plot and plantation arose as newly freed people contested racialized power dynamics by asserting rights to their labour. Robert has a mental breakdown when free Blacks reject his paternalism. His love for Emily, the daughter he sired with July, and his now hatred of all things black forge his return to sanity. Caroline and Robert kidnap Emily when they flee to England. Caroline manipulates the legal and social mechanisms available to her to usurp the enslaved mother through her legal status as wife and owner. With Black women denied the opportunity to nurture their children and represented as breeders, Levy narrates how their offspring were valued only when they supported the plantation machine’s externally driven aims. Manipulating the statutory and social authority given to men through her sexual relationship with twins is one example of Ana’s control of the patriarchal structures found in Esmeralda Santiago’s Conquistadora. Similar to the previous two novels, Conquistadora’s location is the nineteenth-century still-Spanish colony of Puerto Rico. It is in this extensive Spanish Empire that the fictional Gloriosa Ana Maria de los Ángeles Larragoity Cubillas Nieves de Donostia functions as an aristocratic lady with imperial dreams. Ana wants to be a conqueror. After reading the
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diaries of her maternal ancestor who colonized Puerto Rico in the sixteenth-century, she longs for similar glory and ‘identified with the audacity of the conquistadores, with the confidence that, if they turned their backs on their country, family, and custom, they could make fortunes’. But as an aristocratic Spanish lady, Ana’s options are curtailed by rigid class and gender expectations, so she cultivates the desire of the twins, Inocente and Ramón Argoso, to express conquistador masculinity. She marries Ramón, but since the twins share everything, she is wife and, initially, unwitting sexual companion to them both. Ana wields the power of ownership through men and uses them to her own ends, even as the twins take advantage of her as an object of desire. The birth of her son Miguel emasculates the brothers who cannot determine his paternity; it upends their ménage à trois, and the brothers blame Ana for ‘not stopping them’ (). Ana’s rehearsal of masculinity denies the twins a traditional heir, which makes them interchangeable, dispensable and ultimately disempowered. Ana’s attempts to control the men in her life through sex fails. Her inability to rehearse her power through sexual intercourse because of the mandated post-birth forty-day quarantine arrests her influence over the twins and thus the plantation (–). Without coital control, Ana’s position as a plantation patrona is jeopardized. While sex and marriage are tools that she employs to acquire and maintain Hacienda los Gemelos, her carnal governance is contested by the expectations of ladyhood. She resists social pressure to be submissive despite the wishes of clergy and her parents, in-laws, ‘husbands’ and friends. Ana complains about the strictures women endure, even as she ‘disregarded her wifely roles of hostess and social consort to focus on the needs of the hacienda. In the process [. . .] wound[ing] male pride by being a more capable manager’ (). Unlike de Lisser, Arthur, Levy and Santiago master their narratives by producing work in which readers have to resist the text to rectify the gaps in history and to analyse the system in which white women acquire and deploy power through a performance of white male supremacist practices. By focusing on white women’s participation in these hegemonic stories, the writers disrupt a totalizing notion of the past and expose the complex legacies of white women’s relation to power in the Caribbean that the Hulme/Brathwaite and Lucien/Roffey/Miller debates continue to illustrate. In The Long Song, July not only writes back to Caroline’s and the colonizers’ version of the past, but through multiple timelines rehearses pivotal events including the burning of the ‘negro village’ and child
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kidnapping. The Black village burns twice – first as a byproduct of the Baptist Rebellion and the hunt for Nimrod, the proposed killer of Caroline’s brother. The second time, Caroline’s husband terrorizes the village as a tactic to force newly freed people to work. His scheme fails because ‘all agreed [. . .] [that] none would raise even a forged penny to the massa for the renting of their provision grounds, none’ (). The burning of the village echoes the earlier conflagration while illuminating historical changes that maintained externally oriented plantation structures. The first fire is a manifestation of plantation discipline, an attempt to force compliance and punish the slaves who hid Nimrod (). In the second fire, a white mob burns the village to force Black workers to cut cane (–). Levy’s emphasis on Black self-determination against plantation forces informs her project of historical redress. Her motivation for writing the novel was to contest the shame carried by descendants regarding slavery, but she also highlights the consequences of white self-delusion. Conquistadora is clear in its critique of gender hierarchies but less assured about racial ones. The text acknowledges that Ana’s ambitions are outside the bounds of nineteenth-century elite Spanish womanhood, while those of Severo, her overseer and second husband, are rendered as justly ambitious. Readers work harder to resist the trope of the kindly plantation mistress, which is a ubiquitous reference to Ana. Her desire to tend to enslaved cholera victims is a demonstration of her goodness despite her father-in-law’s observation that her kindness makes her unable to see Black people’s humanity. At times, the narration allows the reader and Ana to see her self-delusions, particularly when she employs phrases such as ‘nuestra gente’, our people, to include the enslaved, quickly followed by a description of how well she treats her slaves. The work of the good mistress trope multiplies when enslaved characters are referred to as ‘servants’ and ‘workers’. Yet, the text clearly marks Inocente’s murderers as ‘slaves’. Santiago’s narrative choices create an unevenness that suggests the difficulty of reimagining a woman as conqueror. Even when the stories of enslaved people are shared, as in Flora’s case, with the brutality she endured faithfully rendered, the weight and reality of slavery is lost in the romance of Ana’s quest. Santiago supplies background on settlers, colonial policy and women’s roles such that at times the narrator breaks the surface reality of her text with historical intrusions: ‘A well-raised senorita in mid-nineteenth-century Spain didn’t challenge her parents’ (). These extra-diegetic interruptions and the impersonal, textbook-like retelling of history distance the narrator and are suggestive of official narratives that reflect the worldview of those who rule. Even as she explores
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a counter history, Santiago enters imperial discourses when mimicking the authoritative textbook format. Arthur’s and Levy’s novels are much more assured in their critique of imperial violence and the noxious forces of the plantocracy. While working with the romance genre, A View from Belmont offers a serious critique of the debauchery of slavery, highlighting the corruption of a white woman. Arthur’s Clara discloses white women’s support for the plantation machine beyond their roles as mothers, wives and housekeepers. The contemporary narrator, his family and his friends read Clara’s epistles, often a vehicle for recovering female narratives, and judge her collaboration even as Arthur recuperates the little-known story of the female planter. Trusted narrators influence readers’ interpretations, while unreliable narrators allow readers to question the story and the underlying logic of the world presented. Representing the woman landholder exercising power exactly as white men employed their authority is one way of comprehending hierarchies of control. In these works, the responsibility to memory is centrally enacted through form and the intentional links these novels forge to historical documents (e.g. legal and pecuniary records) to produce one account of the past. Diaries and memoirs provide a second narrative, more inflected by a subjective consciousness and more engaged with domestic and intimate histories, while literature, especially novels, is a third version that deploys the imagination as a means of noting and filling the gaps absent in the historical record. Fourth, creative rehearsals of the gaps in official plantation memory are another mode of account that aims to restore memories of unrecorded lives and allow a generative cacophony of voices to discern plot and plantation legacies. In counterpoint to those narratives that explore the white woman planter, Simone Schwarz-Bart’s The Bridge of Beyond (), Dionne Brand’s At the Full Change of the Moon () and Margaret CezairThompson’s The True History of Paradise () are distinguished within a Caribbean literary tradition for their different and significant responsibility to memory through their narrative counter histories that reclaim the genealogies of enslaved women. These multivocal novels narrate the ‘I and I’ and extend the region’s literary reimaginations of unrecorded historical lives. The novels discussed in this piece demonstrate that the responsibility to memory is a concern shared across linguistic boundaries and one that is lodged in Caribbean psyches. Rehearsing this quarrel with history helps to reanimate and negate our delusions of the past as we fashion an equitable future.
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Notes Sylvia Wynter, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, SAVACOU, (), –, . Kevin Yelvington, Producing Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ), . Edward Baugh, ‘The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History’, Small Axe, (), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. In , Small Axe reprinted Baugh’s essay (cited here) as well as his reflections thirty-five years later (–). In addition to Baugh’s thoughts are a collection of relevant essays by Alison Donnell (‘All Friends Now? Critical Conversations, West Indian Literature, and the “Quarrel with History”’, –), Nadi Edwards (‘Contexts, Criticism, and Quarrels: A Reflection on Edward Baugh’s “The West Indian Writer and His Quarrel with History”’, –) and Laurence A. Breiner (‘Too Much History, or Not Enough’, –). Before Baugh’s essay, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite both contributed work on history and the region in, respectively, ‘The Muse of History’ and ‘Timehri’, in Orde Coombs, ed., Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, ), – and –, respectively, as did Brathwaite in Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona: Savacou Publications, ). Édouard Glissant, ‘The Quarrel with History’, in Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Glissant’s essay, inspired by Baugh’s piece, initially was presented at the Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) in . Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, , trans. James E. Maraniss, nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. Peter Hulme, ‘The Place of Wide Sargasso Sea’, Wasafiri, . (), –, . Ibid., . Christophine, a character from Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, narrates Brathwaite’s poem, ‘Days & Nights of Jean Rhys & Cynthia Wilson’ (Wasafiri, . [], –). The poem, divided into day and night, features two girls: nine-year-old Betty Jackson, a white Creole, and twelve-year-old Ann, whose ‘skin strike up & down like a razor/ she belly & tie all welt up & silver / like she fright in a cage wid a tyger’ (). Ann gives birth to Jack Johnson, ‘Jack Johnson gon breed and born from she waist’ (). The poem amplifies one of Brathwaite’s points from the essay that white Antoinette and enslaved Tia, characters from Rhys’s novel, could not be friends given their historical roles and the deeply held racial divides on the plantation. In this poem, Betty, even as a child, has the power to torment Ann, and does. This typographical arrangement is perhaps a precursor to his Sycorax script.
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Writing and the Responsibility to Memory
Kamau Brathwaite, ‘A Post-Cautionary Tale of the Helen of Our Wars’, Wasafiri, . (), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Elaine Savory, ‘Jean Rhys, Race and Caribbean/English Criticism’, Wasafiri, . (), –; Evelyn O’Callaghan, ‘“Jumping into the Big Ups’ Quarrels”: The Hulme/Brathwaite Exchange’, Wasafiri, . (), –; Denise deCaires Narain, ‘English Gardens and West Indian Yards: The Politics of Location (One More Time)’, Wasafiri, . (), –. Savory reminds readers of place and context, while O’Callaghan challenges the invisibility of white women in the emerging Caribbean canon, and deCaires Narain chastises each man, whether speaking from yard or garden, to use more measured language. She also articulates the idea of strategic deployments of race, nationalism and gender for people marginalized by history. Vladimir Lucien, ‘Monique Roffey’s Discovery of Caribbean Literature’, Caribbean Lit Lime blog, July , https://caribbeanlitlime.wordpress .com////monique-roffeys-discovery-of-caribbean-literature/. Miller acknowledges that his body has access to spaces and experiences that white bodies do not have as well; Kei Miller, ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’, Pree, (), https://preelit.com////the-whitewomen-and-the-language-of-bees/. See Wynter, Baugh, Glissant, Brathwaite and Lucien, to name a few. Miller, ‘The White Women’. Joshua Surtees and Alison Flood, ‘Kei Miller Essay About White Women Sparks Tensions Among Caribbean Writers’, The Guardian, May , www.theguardian.com/books//may//kei-miller-essay-about-whitewomen-sparks-tensions-among-caribbean-writers?CMP=share_btn_fb. Tanya L. Shields, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Caribbean Belonging (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), , . Wynter, ‘Novel and History’, . Glissant, ‘The Quarrel with History’, –. De Lisser’s text is infamous because he shows the licentiousness of the white female planter when the overriding discourses of white women are as respectable imperial vectors. Furthermore, de Lisser’s depiction contradicts the apparently quiet life lived by the historical Annie Palmer; see Glory Robertson, ‘The Rose Hall Legend’, Jamaica Journal, . (), –. John Castello first shared the myth of Annie Palmer as the white witch in an pamphlet. The white witch story circulated in magazines, newspapers and tourist guides into the early twentieth century. Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (New York: Riverhead Books, ), , –. Wynter, ‘Novel and History’, . Kevyn Alan Arthur, The View from Belmont (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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Thomas A. Foster, ‘The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under Slavery’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, . (), –. Andrea Levy, The Long Song (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), . To maintain the upper hand in labour disputes, Caribbean planters who received reparations at the end of slavery brought indentured labourers from China and Portugal, but mainly India, to undercut the demands of newly emancipated people. Esmeralda Santiago, Conquistadora (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Levy, The Long Song, –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Gary Younge, ‘Interview with Andrea Levy’, The Guardian, January , www.theguardian.com/books//jan//andrea-levy-long-song-interview. Hilary Beckles observes that white women in the Caribbean never resisted slavery and instead were active participants in empire; Hilary Beckles, Centering Woman (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, ), , . ‘I and I’, from the Rastafarian dialect of Dread-talk, means ‘we’ and ‘at one with Jah (God)’.
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Caribbean Identities and Diversifying the Creole Mix Shivanee Ramlochan
‘The Caribbean can be many things to many people.’ This seemingly simple, even innocuous premise, which opens Anton Allahar’s essay, ‘Identity and Erasure: Finding the Elusive Caribbean’, is a useful reminder of how Caribbean space has transitioned from the denotative strictures of empire prescribed by the British, Spanish, French and Dutch – the region’s four principal colonizers. Waves of nationalism have sought to bind territories together, and the people of multiple origins who inhabit these spaces have often, vigorously, been prompted to consider themselves as evenly bound/bonded under the aspirational equalizing force of nationalism on account of their shared participation in the long historical process of creolization, which had shown the collective potential to create new inherently pluralized and non-originary cultures. Shona Jackson’s critique of the intended panaceas of nationalism echoes with significance here. Her argument in Ethnicity, Class, and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions qualifies a distinct impossibility in yoking experiences of Indo-Creolization and Afro-Creolization under the same mantle. Plainly, Jackson’s assertion is that even within a broad banner of creolization, no two ethnic or racial groups can experience that creole identity in the same way. Using Guyana as her main nation of reference, she points to geopolitical relationships to the land, Christian proselytization and prior senses of belonging based on dates of arrival, among other meaningful differences governing Afro-Guyanese and IndoGuyanese culture, community behaviour and thought. In this context, attempts to discern examples of Caribbean literatures mounted in history as unique examinations of Indianness or Caribbeanness might well have been perceived as segregationist acts. Yet to consider the role of IndianCaribbean and Chinese-Caribbean literatures in both confronting challenges of documentation and highlighting racial tensions and unease serves to map what Derek Walcott referred to in his Nobel Laureate speech as ‘the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments, these echoes,
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these shards of a huge tribal vocabulary, these partially remembered customs’. The texts explored in this essay are not sole-issue specializations on the creole experience(s) in literature. While they confront, consider and dialogue with the hybrid dislocations and dilemmas of what it means to be scrutinized within the boundaries of racial identity, they also shape their concerns in response to poverty, class stratification, feminism and gender practice, and the protracted, convoluted economic and cultural legacies of slavery and indentured labour. They make multiple and sustained gestures towards documenting a wide-scale ledger of the region’s human experience: that they carry out this function while also enshrining critical debate on race relations solidifies their positions as indispensable to the canon of writing emerging from the Caribbean since the s. Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, published in , does not seek to dismantle the archive of Indo-Caribbean migration and occupation in the British West Indies, so much as it quests within a reshaping of the archive through a combination of reportage and imagination. Using her own family as ancestral map, Bahadur poses questions about the lived reality of Sujaria, her great-grandmother, a lone pregnant traveller from India to British Guiana in . The memoirist’s paternal grandfather, Lal Bahadur, was born on the ship Sujaria boarded. Where the archive fails, through its factual deficits, Bahadur supplies speculation: ‘My search for the answers shifted from potholed roads and mustard fields in Bihar to archives in England. What I found there was a revelation. I once thought that my great-grandmother must have been an exception. As it turns out, mystery darkened the lives of many women who left India as coolies.’ Chief among Bahadur’s accomplishments in Coolie Woman is in recentring the process, history and emotional impact of indenture, as a studiously feminist, female-oriented reshaping and telling. Sujaria’s journey is proof: the journey across the kala pani (the dark waters, literally black water) was gendered, was class-striated, was sexualized. A hybridization of form enables a creative confrontation between the ruptures of indenture and the data lost in the margins. Annie Paul, discussing Bahadur’s work in The Margins, for the Asian American Writers Workshop, denotes the multiple forms Coolie Woman dialogues within, describing the text as ‘an innovative narrative combining archival research, personal memoir, oral testimonies, folk songs and compelling storytelling’. Entitled ‘A Coolie Woman’s Work Is Never Done’, Paul’s essay further points to the nearindistinguishable nature of indentured labourers from their work. Paul’s
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focus, on how this enduring association with the relocated Indo-Caribbean self’s position to labour has been specifically damaging to women and children, serves as a fresh lens for the feminist, progressive rhetoric that animates Bahadur’s findings, her spirit of archival inquiry and her data presentation. A profound exploration of the indenture experience as fragmented – and so experienced with sharp distinctions between the two conventionally accepted genders – is the work of Bahadur’s final two chapters, ‘. Every Ancestor’ and ‘. Surviving History’. In bleak and uncontestable lists, gleaned from Guyanese newspaper headlines, the author presents an unrelenting curation of women’s pain, trauma and efforts towards surviving assault. Violence, meted out by men to their women and children, characterized life on the other side of crossing the kala pani. Women as possessions, subject to a multiplicity of indentures – domestic servitudes at home, nestled within social structures of colonial rule – typified the coolie woman’s lot. ‘Every Ancestor’ catalogues generations of sexual coercion, secret liaisons and physical abuse by George W. Sutherland Sr and Jr, carried out upon Indian women and the children they bore to father and son. Sutherland Sr, an overseer at Guyana’s Rose Hall Plantation, concealed an illicit relationship with Guiana-born Indian woman Sukhri, fathering two children: Dukhri () and George W. Sutherland Jr (). The junior would go on to become a rumshop owner, proprietor of ‘The Canje Pheasant’, and a man intimately yoked to Bahadur herself: ‘He walked the same roads that my parents did – that, in fact, I did, at the same time I did’ (). Coolie Woman’s recounting of the violences of men does not pretend impartiality, nor does it cleave to an interpretation of these facts that indicts no one though its foundations are firmly affixed in nonfiction. Consider Bahadur’s framing of the narrative surrounding Sutherland Jr, who beat his second wife, Bhanmat, regularly and without mercy. In the testimony of Bhanmat’s daughter, Murenia, Bahadur details Sutherland Jr’s drunken murder of her mother, a crime for which he was convicted of manslaughter and spent six years in prison. Bahadur fixes the reader’s attention to notions of male culpability positioned in oppositional directness against women’s capacity to remove indictments. The last lines of ‘Every Ancestor’ are proof: ‘Many years later when [Murenia] was an adult, she visited him there, and he told her how sorry he was, how much he wished he could retract that day. And Murenia forgave him’ (). The ironies of historical documentation are unavoidable in Coolie Woman: the reader, and Bahadur herself as ultimate ‘reader’ of her own
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subject matter through sustained archival inquiry, best understand the lives of coolie women through their dispossession, abuse and death. Speculation is required most when striving for an articulation of the coolie woman as distinct from her relationships and histories of subservience to men, either the white men of the plantocracy or the Indian men of their caste. In ‘Surviving History’, readings of Coolie Woman acquire their most gravid and dispassionate contemporary urgency. In these records of cutlassinflicted choppings, there is almost a disturbing poetry at play: ‘He broadsided her with the cutlass, leaving her black-and-blue and dismembered. He chopped three fingers off her left hand, wrapped white-knuckle tight around the bed. Then, there was silence’ (). The objects of indenture, which continue to be closely associated with the evolving image of IndoCaribbeans in the region and its diaspora, are not innocuous. As Bahadur notes in this chapter, many households in Guyana still feature cutlasses as everyday kitchen tools; the same cutlasses are still used to bludgeon, broadside and dismember women. A one-dimensional reading of Coolie Woman might suggest that Bahadur’s quest to map Sujaria’s existence is constrained by the caesuras of the archive: the reader ends the text with very little concrete information on Sujaria’s motivations for travel, her life during indenture as a young woman or, indeed, some details surrounding her physical features: her grandchildren dispute the exact colour of her eyes. Beyond such an opaque assessment of the text resides the real narrative vitality of Bahadur’s debut in nonfiction: a comprehensive, genre-progressive meditation on what history has kept for Indo-Caribbean women of the twenty-first century, versus what it has neglected to render in fact. Out of this imbalance, works in the vein of Coolie Woman will, it is hoped, substantially and critically confront the underreported spaces where women and children’s narratives reside, with or without the ‘evidence’ of their reality. It is impossible to consider how this Indo-Caribbeanness has grown in the literatures of the region without simultaneously scrutinizing the largely oppositional discourses between Indo-Caribbean bodies alongside other major and minor ethnic groups. While some narratives do point towards overarching harmonies among all races, and specifically between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians, it is instructive to analyse how racial and cultural fissures are developed in fiction that deeply concerns itself with diverse (and sometimes divergent) facets of identity politics. Two fictional works published by the same house, Peepal Tree Press, provide avenues towards discerning the roots of Indo-Caribbean pride, and the pressures placed on strivings towards any kind of cultural certainty. In Lakshmi Persaud’s first
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novel, Butterfly in the Wind (), a gifted and precocious young Indian girl seeks, and is thrust into, the elite clutches of a Catholic school education at St Joseph’s Convent, Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the s. The character-altering and paradigm-widening results on the child protagonist – whom the reader understands to be reflective of Persaud’s own experiences – form the body of this narrative. The major conflict, the principal clash of cultures, is between Brahmin-instilled values and Western ideologies: optimistically, the narrator says, channelling a modern sense of inclusion and holistic development, ‘I want to learn from both sides.’ In this clear binary, however, what feels most instructive is what is left out of the frame: Afro-Trinidadianness does not significantly feature in Butterfly in the Wind. Mention is made of ‘a few black people’ who also inhabit the predominantly Indian settlement of Pasea, Tunapuna’ (). In Standard Two, our narrator’s schoolmistress, Miss Mills, is described as ‘high coloured and very pleased with her red African hair; she was always touching it and looking at it in a small mirror’ (). Outside of this, the most repeated incursions of blackness in Persaud’s novels are from the American South: our girl narrator is moved on more than one occasion by ‘sad, slow-moving Negro spirituals’ (). These spirituals, she remarks, formed more of her pedagogy than did the songs of her own culture. The establishment and ascent of the Maha Sabha allowed the narrator to have ‘the opportunity to learn a little more about [her] ancient and rich cultural heritage’: ‘I soon grew to love the solemn Sanskrit hymns and tranquil chants, and added them to my repertoire of beautiful Latin chants I had unconsciously absorbed’ (). Is Persaud’s chronicle of the life of a young Indian girl’s growth towards womanhood in s Trinidad race-specific, or race-exclusionary? A novel-as-diagram, in which the Afro-Trinidadians who comprise around half of the island’s population are alluded to only in passing, feels in our current age a discrete oversight, but it is important to consider Butterfly in the Wind contextually, as a product of era-specific activism and selfmapping, too. In an April interview with Anita Baksh for sx salon, Persaud summons another writer who made no apologies about focusing on a specific race in her fiction writing: ‘When someone criticized Toni Morrison, saying that she did not have many white people in her books, Morrison said that she writes her books the way she wants to. I do the same with my books.’ The effort to comprehensively, assiduously catalogue and chronicle – particularly in the absence of the still-spotty archive that writers like Bahadur would grapple against, more than twenty years
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later – feels more like the work of corrective visibility in Persaud’s debut, rather than deliberate Black Caribbean erasure. Compare this solid, optimistic construction of a response to the effacement of Indianness (specifically Indo-Caribbean women’s stories) to Rhoda Bharath’s The Ten Days Executive (), and the distinctions of/ around Indianness are not only divergent, but deliberately reinforced. In ‘Before I Dead’, an Afro-Trinidadian Muslim student, Saleem Mustapha, is targeted and fatally assaulted by an Indo-Trinidadian security guard, referred to only as ‘Singh’ in the narrative. Bharath implodes worlds of genteel politesse in this short story, forcing the reader to confront clashing, non-harmonious states of school brutality; youth criminality; a faltering education system that is not made equally for all academic and social tiers of students; religious bigotry; and male-on-male sexual assault as inextricably linked to homophobia. Singh’s words are his own indictment. Singh taunts and goads Saleem, in the middle of ostensibly restraining him, while applying the pressure of a baton to Saleem’s testicles: ‘All you niggers is real hell you know.’ He breath was hot, hot by my ears. ‘You smelling of weed, boy. So you smoking and you have weapon on you? Boy, today you out of school, boy. Is only allyuh niggers in this kind of slackness, yes.’ He carrying on with he nigger talk and squeezing my balls and I trying to get away.
Though it would be easy enough to cast the Indian man as the villain and the African boy as the prey in ‘Before I Dead’, Bharath’s narrative resists this opacity of interpretation. Reviewing The Ten Days Executive for The Caribbean Review of Books, Ayanna Gillian Lloyd underscores the immediacy of Bharath’s literary tensions, of Trinidad’s unignorable realities, in this story: ‘Bharath really shines when she gets right up close to her protagonists and lets them speak in their own voices, with little to no intrusion.’ If we take Lloyd’s assertion of Bharath’s prowess as a societally reflective storyteller, then the conclusion seems inescapable: the world of ‘learning from both sides’ – African and Indian Trinidadian identities – is fraught with hyperviolence, racist ideology and sexual predation. A Trinidad and Tobago wherein ‘the Ganges has met the Nile’ is far from the mirror Bharath holds up to her reader, asking for sustained attention on the unvarnished rawness of Saleem, and Singh, not as archetypes, but as a youth and a security guard that numerous citizens of Trinidad and Tobago have known in their lifetimes. A juxtaposition of Butterfly in the Wind and The Ten Days Executive points to the impossibility of writing Indianness, or any other racial group, as monolithic in Caribbean space. There is no ‘outside world’ against
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which the contemporary writer, assembling work for the century of literature to come, need defend themselves. The outside world is within, infused into the region’s multiple frameworks, both physical and psychic, and the centre of Caribbean identity is undeniably polyvocal. In this vein, it may become increasingly difficult, for example, to discuss IndoCaribbean identities in anglophone literature without discussing Dougla (mixed African-Indian) identities, as the work of Bharath does. Multiple hybridizations and ancestral intersections are the antidote against any ‘amorphous’ continental-designating tropes in literatures of the region: this is a destination and a designation not to be avoided but embraced. Having mapped the Caribbean basin in literatures that denoted, in the time they sought to capture, ground-breaking chronicles of specific experience, as in Persaud’s Butterfly in the Wind, the future lies in varying it, probing its differences through cultural, gender and sexual interweaving, as in Bharath’s The Ten Days Executive. It is instructive to remember that Persaud’s debut, though depicting the Indian female experience of the s, was published in . Little substantially suggests that books focusing on a single racial/cultural perspective in the Caribbean were solely published in decades past. Rather, an assessment of the canon that has shaped itself from onwards points to a plurality of experience not hemmed by race as a sole demographic signifier, as the works under scrutiny in this essay all signal in various foci. Beyond the limitations of this essay, racial mixing, and the effects of that commingling, have provided generative pathways in fiction works, as can be seen in the short fiction of Barbara Jenkins (Sic Transit Wagon, ) and the novels of Nalo Hopkinson (notably The Salt Roads, ). As Bharath’s short fiction animates interpersonal hatred at the notion of racial intermingling, Shiva Naipaul’s The Chip Chip Gatherers () tackles internalized self-hatred for Dougla designations. Singh, the illegitimate son of the novel’s ruthless protagonist Egbert Ramsaran, bemoans his mixed ancestry, denoting it as the principal reason for his lower lot in life: His head swivelled slowly around the room. ‘You think is my fault I have nigger blood running in my veins? You think is I who put it there? You believe was me who was responsible for that?’ He spoke with mounting, importunate excitement; with a sense of relief. ‘Whatever happen to my nigger mother? I never see she face.’
This scene, one of the most emotively vulnerable interpersonal engagements in Naipaul’s narrative, acquires its ironic gravitas when the reader
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considers that Singh is addressing this rant to Egbert Ramsaran’s legitimate, younger son, of maternal Indian ancestry, Wilbert. If ‘racist’ does not serve as the most useful word to denote the opportunity-hungry, hardscrabble villagers of Shiva Naipaul’s Victoria in The Chip Chip Gatherers, they certainly do not exist in a world where African ancestry is desirable, or where racial mixing is applauded. One of Egbert’s less prosperous brothers is described as having discredited the family name by taking up with a Chinese woman: because of this sexual affiliation, he earns the nickname ‘Chinese’ himself. The aforementioned Singh’s favourite object to whittle is a ‘human face, elongated out of all proportion, with thick Negroid lips and round, black holes for eyes. Executed without charm, it was, in its odd way, rather frightening’ (–). Singh’s fascination with the exaggeration of these ‘Negroid’ features, as linked inextricably to his use of these carved objects in terrorizing his half-brother, indicates a revulsion-enthrallment complex: a self-hatred of African ancestry coupled with the desire to replicate, even on a level of parody, the physical features of that very Africanness. Though Egbert displays a protracted awkwardness when confronted with the physical undeniability of Singh, he tidily keeps his bastard son at great geographical remove, dispatching Singh to man Egbert’s overgrown, financially neglected Chaguanas estate. Singh, while notably surly and diffident in his communication with Egbert, is nonetheless Egbert’s extended property: when the estate is sold and a beach house purchased in its stead, Singh ‘was duly transferred from one to the other without consultation’ (). No chance of upward mobility exists for Singh, hemmed in as he is by the fact of his illegitimacy, compounded by what he perceives as his unfortunate miscegenation: He was generally silent – except when he drank. Then he could be ravening: full of a howling sense of the myriad injustices that had been perpetrated on him. This sense of injustice was all that he had. It was his most constant and faithful companion with whom he communed hourly; as constant and faithful as the roar of the sea. ()
In examining the role of Chinese Caribbean literature in demarcating notions of Chineseness, it is worth considering the psychological reaches of Caribbean space, identity and parentage. While Guyanese writer Meiling Jin explores the invisibility of Chinese Caribbean identities in the UK in her story ‘Short Fuse’, Hannah Lowe’s first book of poems, Chick (), offers a very different perspective. Its complicated, complicating portrait in linked poems is named after and about the poet’s
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father, a Jamaican-Chinese gambler who migrated to London in the s. A veteran card sharp, Chick’s motto was ‘If you can’t win it straight, win it crooked.’ These poems chase the dreams and dejections of the Windrush generation and are set in Brixton and Essex homes filled with the scents of Caribbean cooking, of parents upbraiding or praising their children in the strange yet carefully curated enclaves of a British-Caribbean community. Almost all the poems hybridize experiences and gradients of emotional impact; they are themselves careful curations of a father figure, of his relationship to his Chineseness, of his daughter, of her relationship to her own Chinese-Jamaican ancestry. Lowe works deliberately, compressing sights, sounds and tactile memories in verse. It cannot be ascertained how much of the work derives chiefly from lived experience, but that is a secondary concern to the convincing cultural hybridities the poems explore. Chick’s relationship to his Chineseness is the hefty central matter of several poems. In ‘Three Treasures’, which begins darkly with an invocation of ‘Jamaica in the attic in a dark blue trunk’, Chick’s relationship to China brings up the poem’s open-ended coda: China in the Cantonese he knew but wouldn’t speak, in letters stuffed in show-boxes, ink – stick calligraphy China in his slender bones, in coral birds of stitched bamboo, China in an origami butterfly, that flew.
Physical talismans of China, Jamaica and England are presented on the poem’s mantelpiece of significations, with no attempt by the poem’s omniscient speaker to harmonize their contents. This is no beatific melting pot in which Chick’s Chineseness is a reassured and foregone cultural conclusion. In fact, Chick, as a then-largely undesirable Black Jamaican-Chinese migrant, and his Chineseness are skewered into an amorphous blackness, even by those linked closely to him. In the poem ‘Sausages’, Chick’s mother-in-law admonishes her daughter in her choice of man: Her mother told her not to marry a foreigner. You always wanted to be different she hissed. Now this. He’s black and old enough to be your father. ()
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It feels a deliberate act of lineation that ‘black’ occupies its own, indemnifying, italicized line: Lowe forces the reader to confront this designation as a slur, as obvious a marker of Chick’s domestic unwelcomeness as the eponymous sausages he hangs out to dry on the washing line, ‘Chinese dragon red, / the red of a chili, or a shamed face’ (). The poems’ speaker also identifies Chick as primarily Black, or primarily perceived as Black, in other poems: ‘Dance Class’ sees the father arriving to collect the child speaker from a ballet lesson in which her big-footedness and ill ease already shames her in the eyes of her more lissome, poodle-esque peers. Compounding the speaker’s sense of isolation and discomfiting social singularity is ‘in the foyer, dad, / a black man, stood among the Essex / mothers’ (). The poem ends with the speaker denouncing her father to the other girls at the end of class, claiming that Chick is merely the hired driver her mother has employed. Later in the collection, Lowe maps generations of this family (a reading would support a wholesale interpretation of the poems’ data as Lowe’s family, but this cannot be uncontestably proven) in its dynamic with place-based identity: ‘A child you’ve never met takes your photograph to school. / The others pin you to the classroom wall / beside Jamaica stitched in green and turquoise felt’ (). As Bahadur addresses Sujaria, her coolie ancestress, directly and by name in Coolie Woman, so too Lowe speaks to Chick in first person singular point of view. The register across nonfiction and poetry in each text is intimate, familiar even while still in consternation at a lack of access to certain facts owing to discrepancies or voids in the archive. Both books, divided in genre, are united in the direct and indelible foci they train on a sustained reading of the archive. Both sets of archives, notably, are not principally located in the physical Caribbean; archives with physical housing in Great Britain are, and have been, crucial to both writers’ processing of their ancestors’ journeys. Both journeys are characterized by the necessity of migration, for Sujaria and Chick alike: there seemed little option to remain in either the motherland of India or the Caribbean home of Jamaica. The act of journey, into territories where both bodies would be characterized through a principal lens of race, indelibly altered their histories, and the subsequent versionings of those histories that would come to be captured by Bahadur and Lowe. Mayra Montero’s The Messenger () casts a sympathetic and expressive slant on Afro-Chinese spiritualities and feminisms as they were enacted in Cuba’s early to mid-twentieth century. Aida Cheng, the Chinese-Cuban mixed-race woman who captures the heart of famed Italian tenor Enrico Caruso, is the principal lens through which we view
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racial and cultural hybridity’s exoticized interplay in this novel. Thirty years after Aida and Enrico’s ill-fated romance, their daughter Enriqueta pieces together their thwarted love story through an archival enquiry that is subject to the flaws of memory and the paucity of recorded truths. Chineseness is no less complex as a key in the construction of a racial identity here, in Montero’s novel translated from the original Spanish, as it is in Lowe’s poems. Of her self-perception and her assessment in the eyes of others, Aida remarks that she has always existed with two names, straddling two sides of cultural obligation and parental preference. She describes the difference in her names thusly: Aida, which is what she wanted to call me, and Petrirena, the name she had to give me because my grandmother asked her to. My father wanted me to have a different name, maybe a Chinese one, but my mother refused. From Noro Cheng, that was his name, I got my eyes and hair, and that’s why people called me ‘Chinita’.
Aida’s reckoning with her cultural and racial hybridity gives rise to early shame, comparable to Singh’s sense of his own miscegenation in The Chip Chip Gatherers, though animated with more inward curiosity and less vitriol. Aida’s regard towards her ‘Chinaman’ father is similarly complicated and complicating: she professes to love him despite the ‘flaws’ that render him a product of his Chineseness and designate him as ‘other’ even within the permission of her love. She says, ‘When I was little I was very attached to my father. I didn’t care that he was a Chinaman, or would spit against the walls, or smelled the way they all smell: like some vegetable they eat’ (). Despite her youthful fatherly love, Aida struggles to find accommodation for her embarrassment over her mother’s continued affairs with other Chinamen following the death of her father. Yet Aida does not deny the advantages her Chineseness has inculcated in her life, whether she speaks of her spiritual upbringing or the canny advantages a ‘mulatta’ identity plays in securing sexual and romantic attentions. As an adult, Aida cleaves to the Afro-Caribbean orisha goddess Yemayá; yet her prayerful motivations in times of crossroads and crisis also move towards the Chinese-Cuban saint-deity, Sanfancón: ‘We were two women: Yemayá and the horse she had mounted, the two of us against the will of the other orishas. On the way to Pueblo Grifo I put myself in the hands of God [. . .] and finally I had a thought for Sanfancón, the Changó of the Chinamen’ (). Aida credits her actual birth father, Yuan Pei Fu (another Chinaman, not Noro Cheng, as she had been raised to believe)
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and his allegiance to Sanfancón as the reason for his heightened powers of divination: ‘my father, being so close to Sanfancón, had a clearer vision, he saw all the possible roads and knew exactly which one would be mine. In the end, I decided to stay inside, stay with Enrico and be like water, be his current, a tide that rose and fell: Yemayá bowing in reverence to King Changó’ (). Aida’s awareness of her ethnic mixing as central to her sexual attractiveness is critical in both how she perceives herself and how she is filtered as ‘desirable’ yet still ‘other’ in the reports of others. Violeta Anido, who was present at Aida and Enrico’s meeting, explicitly tells Enriqueta that Aida’s mixed-race furnished Aida with power over men, particularly the power to seduce and woo Caruso: ‘She didn’t even have to fix herself up, she was very tall and stood out wherever she went. And she was mixed: nothing excites men more than that mix: Chinese eyes and hair and that great mulatta body – it stopped them in their tracks. No wonder Caruso took one look and fell in love’ (). Aida’s mixed beauty exists in the memories of several who knew her, including those eager to reassure Enriqueta that Aida’s eventual physical enfeeblement was not how her mother ought to be remembered. Enriqueta is vigorously instructed by Amable Casanova, one of Aida’s lifelong friends, ‘Write this down, Enriqueta, that worn-out Chinese woman lying in bed isn’t your mother. Your mother was a beauty; she didn’t look Cuban but she wasn’t an ordinary Chinese either. She was like a picture, just as if somebody came and painted her’ (). When Aida refers to her own mixing, she does not strongly advocate for its inherent desirability, so much as she catalogues its decisive erotic power: in dispassionately comparing herself to the mother of Enrico’s two older children, Ada Giachetti, Aida says, He said I had teeth like Ada’s. That was the only way I could be like her, because I was a mulatta who had her father’s Chinese eyes and a nose that came from the Lucumi part. I was a combination, as mixed as Neapolitan fever. My life was made of different kinds of heat, and I tried to warm Enrico with that heat. ()
Aida’s qualifying of her life’s purpose as hinged to her desirability hearkens to the patriarchal strictures governing women’s bodies, sexualities and functions. It is the self-same patriarchy against which Bahadur’s Coolie Woman points a contrary line of study, which Mahadai Das’s iconoclastic excavations of the feminine self in her poetry of the s and s, published later as A Leaf in His Ear, also strive to challenge and circumvent where possible, in Guyanese politics as much as domestic life.
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Caribbean Identities and Diversifying the Creole Mix
Identity in the Caribbean cannot be spoken of, rhetoricized or made allegorical in any overarching substantive terms, including the umbrella ethnic groupings made popular under political nationalism. To denote and discuss the differences, fissures and idiosyncrasies in Indian and Chinese Caribbean literatures is to enable literary conversations within the widest reach imaginable of Caribbean scholars and readers, not merely the ethnocultural groups being written into deeper, more nuanced agency. If a collective regional seeking to describe the region as a site of ‘oneness’ inadvertently or deliberately masked creolized complexities from being explored, the work of these examined texts, in full-length fiction, short fiction, poetry and nonfiction countermands one simple and simplifying understanding of this fragmented, reassembled basin. It is encouraging and enriching to witness, within these texts and in other works across multiple genres in the time period under review, that Indianness and Chineseness as chief concerns in creolized literatures dealt as much with internal conflict as with the societal confrontations that could, and did, arise from cultural clashes in Caribbean space. It is important, too, to think about the circumference of this review, of the books it encompasses and seeks to delineate and amplify. The process of designating texts of racial and cultural hybridity, identifiable by author heritage, book subject matter, or both, is not immune to its own challenges. Writing for sx salon, Anne-Marie Lee-Loy identifies numerous Chinese-oriented additions to the Caribbean literary canon that are not written by authors of Chinese or mixed Chinese descent, namely ‘short stories such as Michael Anthony’s “Many Things” and V. S. Naipaul’s “The Baker’s Story”, and novels such as Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda and Elizabeth Nunez’s Bruised Hibiscus’. Lee-Loy positions inclusivity as a new and welcome yardstick, asking whether it is possible to discard racial provenance as a necessary badge to write ‘authentically’ of specific racial and mixed racial experiences. Applying Lee-Loy’s proposed metric as an unsettling of a denotative binary would not only broaden the catalogues of racial and cultural writing in an ever-expanding plane of potential classifications, but it would arguably deepen each racially driven or racially informed text emerging in future literatures to be coded and connoted under a multiplicity of new, radically energetic banners, ones that elide determinism and a hierarchy of pure absolutes. The way forward can only be through further, fearless specificity: room for a frank and unapologetic ability to discourse in all erstwhile-minor literatures, i.e. queer, genderfluid and non-binary Caribbean writing; disability literatures; environmental and extinction regional writings; etc.
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This basis of broad intersectionality feeds and perhaps amplifies a precolonial view expressed by Ravindra K. Jain: ‘Destructuration and restructuration, as contemporary sociology tells us, are simultaneous (coeval) processes.’ The essay from which Jain’s rubric for social development is taken is a reflection on the limitations experienced by Indo-Trinidadians in modernizing themselves into wider Trinidadian society. Its ‘destructuration’ points to a relinquishing of rigidity and ‘purity’ concepts, and its restructuration points to expressions of Caribbean modernity in multiple facets. An application of that formula to the creolization discussed in this essay could argue along similar lines: destabilizing old tropes; celebrating the intricacies of racial identity made manifest in the canon; recalibrating lines defining creole literatures to allow a new multiplicity of interpretations to flourish. Conclusively, neo-creolization in Caribbean literatures cannot but be coeval, building its rubric of identities from multiple platforms of ethnic, cultural, religious, societal and philosophical nuance. The literary way forward is in amplifying difference, the better to make comprehensive study of the unities that reside therein.
Notes Anton Allahar, ‘Identity and Erasure: Finding the Elusive Caribbean’, European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, (), –, . Shona Jackson, ‘The Contemporary Crisis in Guyanese National Identification’, in Anton Allahar (ed.), Ethnicity, Class, and Nationalism: Caribbean and Extra-Caribbean Dimensions (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, ), –. Derek Walcott, ‘Nobel Lecture’, nobelprize.org, December , www .nobelprize.org/prizes/literature//walcott/lecture/. Nonetheless, limitations exist within the hierarchy of this selection, particularly as they relate to regional polyvocality: almost all the texts were written in English and English Creole, with the exception of one work translated from Spanish. French, Spanish and Dutch texts for suggested amplified reading include Frankétienne’s Dezafi () and Les Affres d’un défi (); Rosario Ferré’s La muñeca menor (); and Frank Martinus Arion’s De laatste vrijheid (). Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Annie Paul, ‘A Coolie Woman’s Work Is Never Done’, The Margins: Asian American Writers Workshop, March , https://aaww.org/cooliewomans-work-gaiutra-bahadur/.
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Merle Hodge’s novels, Crick Crack, Monkey () and For the Life of Laetitia () engaged in ground-breaking work in mapping Indian–African relations in Trinidadian society, with an emphasis on exploring Dougla (mixed African-Indian) identities. For a more extensive discussion, see Sheila Rampersad, ‘Authorial Reckoning with the Dougla in Trinidad Literature, -’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, ), –. Lakshmi Persaud, Butterfly in the Wind (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. The Maha Sabha, a not for profit institution focused on holistic religious and cultural Hindu education, was established by an act of parliament (Act of ) in Trinidad and Tobago. Anita Baksh, ‘“Compelled to Write”: An Interview with Lakshmi Persaud’, sx salon, (April ), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/interviews/compelled-writeinterview-lakshmi-persaud. Rhoda Bharath, The Ten Days Executive (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Ayanna Gillian Lloyd, ‘Funny as Hell’, The Caribbean Review of Books, August . http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/crb-archive/reviews/funny-as-hell/. Trinidadian and Tobagonian calypsonian David Rudder’s ‘The Ganges and the Nile’ () contained lyrics that prized cultural and religious harmony between Indo- (Ganges) and Afro- (Nile) Trinidadians, as symbolized by two major rivers associated with each group. Shiva Naipaul, The Chip Chip Gatherers (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Eloise Unerman and Hive Young Writers at Arvon Lumb Bank, ‘Interview with Hannah Lowe’, Hive South Yorkshire, April , www .hivesouthyorkshire.com/interview-writer-hannah-lowe.html. Hannah Lowe, Chick (Hexham: Bloodaxe Books, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Mayra Montero, The Messenger (New York: Harper Flamingo, ), –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, ‘Identifying a Chinese Caribbean Literature: Pitfalls and Possibilities’, sx salon, (February ), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/ discussions/identifying-chinese-caribbean-literature. Ravindra K. Jain, ‘The East Indian Culture in a Caribbean Context: Crisis and Creativity’, India International Centre Quarterly, (), –, .
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Carnival, Calypso and Dancehall Cultures: Making the Popular Political in Contemporary Caribbean Writing Emily Zobel Marshall The intermixing of literary, oral and performance cultures has long been the bedrock of Caribbean writing. Through an analysis of contemporary writing by Anthony Joseph, Nalo Hopkinson, Monique Roffey, Marcia Douglas, Robert Antoni, Nicolás Guillén and Tanya Shirley, this essay demonstrates how contemporary Caribbean writing embraces popular culture to challenge Euro- and American-centric ideologies and destabilize the perceived boundaries between oral and scribal cultures. Popular culture in these texts challenges the writer to experiment with form, language and rhythm rooted in call-and-response, folklore traditions, and Caribbean musical forms such as reggae, calypso, dancehall, mento, zouk, bélé and Afro-Cuban drumming. Drawing from conceptualizations of Caribbean culture in the work of critics Gerard Aching (), Antonio Benítez-Rojo (), Kevin Adonis Browne (), Carolyn Cooper (, ) and Kwame Dawes (), this essay demonstrates how the oral is always whispering below the surface of the written text as Caribbean authors permeate their writings with soundscapes of Caribbean languages and music. Importantly too, drawing from the rich cultural traditions of the region also becomes a means through which the poetic and literary become explicitly political. These writers fulfil Kamau Brathwaite’s celebrated call in ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’ () for the Caribbean artist to draw from and acclaim their indigenous, local cultural forms and community; yet they also adapt and adopt popular culture with a critical eye, particularly in relation to the misogyny and sexism often performed within dancehall and carnival cultures.
Serious Mas: The Caribbean Novel and Carnival Cultures Carnival forms the bedrock of numerous Caribbean novels, amongst them Wilson Harris’s Carnival (), Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom () and Willi Chen’s short story collection King of Carnival and Other Stories
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(). However, no Caribbean author has done more to foreground the centrality of carnival and masquerade (mas) in the Caribbean than Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace. Although best known for his novels, his collection of plays Jestina’s Calypso and Other Plays also demonstrates, as Errol Hill convincingly outlines in his study The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (), that carnival can provide a key directive and site for Caribbean theatre practice. In Trinidad, traditional mas continues to provide a creative medium for scrutinizing an oppressive and traumatic past as well as highlighting flaws in contemporary society. Masquerades keep creative traditions of carnival alive, and, at a deeply personal and psychological level, playing mas is also transformative. Kevin Adonis Browne outlines a form of ‘carnival poetics’ in High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (). Browne argues, in his self-reflexive and inventive text, which straddles academic, poetic, polemic and visual registers and directly addresses the reader (insisting on their active participation), that carnival poetics is the recognition that you don’t just ‘play’ mas – you live it. Mas, Browne insists, like Lovelace’s protagonist Aldrick Prospect in The Dragon Can’t Dance (), is never only symbolic. Each performer brings themselves to the role and decides how they want to be viewed; there is a deeply individual motive at work in each mas performance (). Like the generation of influential Caribbean writers that preceded him, including Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Errol Hill and Wilson Harris, Browne sees Caribbean culture as fragmented. The gathering of these fragments is a creative Caribbean process epitomized by carnival. The past, he concludes, is not reclaimable, but we (the people of the Caribbean and its diaspora) must embrace fragmentation. Carnival allows us to piece ourselves back together, like sticking feathers on a carnival costume, while celebrating the cracks and seams still on show (–, ). Cracking and repair are part of the history of the Caribbean and should not be disguised. As Walcott asserts, ‘Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.’ Cuban poet and author Antonio Benítez-Rojo also uses carnival as a central discourse of Caribbean cultural dynamics in the closing chapter of The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (). Here he conceptualizes ‘Caribbeanness’ through carnival as a complex sociocultural interplay: ‘A system full of noise and opacity, a nonlinear system, an unpredictable system, in short a chaotic system beyond the total reach of any specific kind of knowledge or interpretation of the world.’
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Benítez-Rojo argues that the analysis of Caribbean culture has been too strongly focused on either African cultural retentions or ‘New World’ cultural clashes. Critics have missed something fundamental about the complexity of the varied, multifaceted nature and ‘chaotic coexistence’ () of Caribbean culture and identity, a ‘cultural sea without frontiers’ () whose flows criss-cross and connect the cultures of Africa to the diaspora and beyond. Benítez-Rojo turns to the strong Hispanic cultural influences in the Caribbean and closely examines a poem by Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén entitled ‘Sensemaya: Canto para matar una culebra’ (Sensemaya: chant for killing a snake), which he demonstrates is steeped in Afro-Cuban rhythms and ideology. The rhythmic structure and themes of the poem draw from African religious traditions and snake killing rituals performed during slave pantomimes and in post-emancipation Cuban carnivals (). BenítezRojo concludes that the sounds of the poem allow the listener/reader into the secrets of its cultural history: ‘The sounds “Mayombebombemayombé”, “Sángala culembe”, “Sángala muleque”, “Sanga lamulé”, and “Calabasón-són-són”, oscillate between Africa and Cuba and give a sacrificial meaning to anthropological terms such as “Afro-Cuban” and “transculturation”’ (). Like Browne, Benítez-Rojo sees carnival as an expression of the attempt to unify that which ultimately cannot be unified and as the most representative cultural expression of the multiplicity of Caribbeanness: ‘Of all possible sociocultural practices, the carnival – or any other equivalent festival – is the one that best expresses the strategies that the people of the Caribbean have for speaking at once of themselves and their relation with the world, with history, with tradition, with nature, with God’ (). Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance () also articulates this keen appreciation for the self-defining power of carnival and the emancipatory and spiritual force of mas through the story of Aldrick Prospect, who lives for nothing else but to work on his exquisite Dragon costume and play Dragon mas. Aldrick’s dragon dance through the streets shows how Trinidad carnival becomes a vehicle through which the poor and dispossessed inhabitants of Calvary Hill can assert their strength and humanity: ‘He danced to say, “You are beautiful, Calvary Hill and John John and Laventille and Shanty Town. Listen to your steelbands how they playing! Look at the colours of your costumes in the sunshine! [. . .] You is people.”’ Poverty pervades Lovelace’s stories, and central to the motivations of his protagonists is the desire to be seen, to be recognized and to be made visible
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Carnival, Calypso and Dancehall Cultures
in a world in which they are overlooked as a result of racial and socioeconomic status. The myth of carnival as a hedonistic ritual fuelled by rum and bikini-clad bodies is challenged by the seriousness of mas in Lovelace’s writings. Aldrick doesn’t just play but becomes the Dragon: all-powerful, beautiful, fierce, and mesmerizing in the carnival moment. Indeed, we might read this not only in Benítez-Rojo’s cultural terms of ‘transculturation’ but in relation to the performative power of transformation. Gerard Aching argues in Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean () that Lovelace’s financially (but not culturally) impoverished community on the ‘Hill’ embraces an ideology of non-possession. The Hill’s inhabitants cultivate a culture of antimaterialism as they hold onto ‘their poverty as a possession’. While the acquisition of expensive possessions breeds the wrong sort of visibility and is considered a threat to the community, Aldrick’s beautiful dragon mask releases him from the pain of social invisibility without the need for money. Through his skills in costume construction and masquerade, he grows in power and prestige; on the road he transcends his earthly form and joins the family of formidable carnival beasts and devils. Milla Riggio and Rawle Gibbons argue in their chapter ‘Pay the Devil, Jab Jab: Festive Devils in Trinidad Carnival’ in Festive Devils of the Americas () that negative colonial associations between blackness and beastliness were destabilized and inverted by Black Caribbeans playing the devil and beast characters at carnival: Co-opted by those whom it stigmatized [. . .] the mythic notion of blackness became a potent source both of power and festive danger, embodied in the often-forbidden practices of music, drumming and collective festivity – and in the emergence of a variety of devil characters.’ It is little wonder therefore that Black Power forms part of the backdrop for Lovelace’s narrative. Devil, dragon and beast carnival masquerades draw directly from histories of enslavement, symbolized by the beast in chains who lunges at the crowd and must be restrained by his keeper, and a variety of devil characters including Jab Molassie. The climax of Trinidadian Monique Roffey’s novel Archipelago () also pivots on a carnival scene. The plot centres on a father named Gavin who must protect his quick-witted daughter, Ocean, and help her recover from the trauma of losing her baby brother in a house flood in Port of Spain. Ocean’s mother is devastated by the death and is unable to communicate, so Gavin takes his daughter (and their beloved dog) on an epic and often dangerous sailing adventure around the Caribbean archipelago and, eventually, through the Panama Canal. The novel’s moment of resolution is a carnivalesque outpouring that serves as a hopeful climax
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and heralds Gavin’s metaphorical rebirth and transition out of trauma. Gavin finds peace in the carnival moment of jouvay, at daybreak, on the streets. He is also, in this moment, a white man painted black, which suggests a transformation (for Gavin) of his racial and historical positioning in Trinidad and perhaps signals a deeper sense of belonging: This is Jouvay, jour overt, the opening of the day, of carnival, two days of celebration – and he is black, slick with mud and paint and wearing a cowboy hat with winking lights. There is his punch of rum slung around his neck. He is Bacchus, he is Dionysus, he is a drunken sailor man, a wild man, a lover man, he is home, back, a person from this particular island, lush and green and fertile, Trinidad, the end link in the chain of this long and dazzling archipelago.
Trinidadian Robert Antoni’s white protagonist in Carnival () also loses his way in life but finds himself through immersion in the carnival moment. Here too carnival is a route to transition from earthy worries and concerns. The protagonist, a privileged young boy named William, struggles with sexual intimacy and returns to Trinidad for carnival. He remembers ‘a solid mass of humanity, indistinguishable, embracing each other. Covered, head to toe, in every imaginable nastiness: axle grease, baby oil, flour, Quaker Oats, tar, mustard, peanut butter, Hershey’s chocolate syrup in addition to the paint, mud’. For William this signals the ultimate moment of liberation: ‘This – I told myself, I proclaimed it every year, every jouvert morning – this could save the world. / Standing in the middle of the mainstage, my head thrown back, staring up at the blinding sun’ (). The protagonist is ‘swallowed up’ by the crowds ‘like a hot seawave of energy – of soca, naked limbs, whistles, smoke, diesel fumes, sweat’ (). In this moment he is overwhelmed by the feeling of belonging to the Trinidadian ‘mas’. The connection felt by these white Trinidadians to the island and its people is complicated by centuries of colonialism and enslavement and while they are enraptured by their sense of being at one with the ‘mas’, as Roffey highlights in The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (), the ‘mas’ may not be as keen to overlook profound and persistent racial and economic divides. In The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, Roffey’s protagonist Sabine, a naïve, wealthy white woman living in Trinidad, around the time of independence, becomes obsessed with soon-to-be prime minster, Eric Williams. She sneaks out to hear one of his famous, rousing political speeches in the centre of Port of Spain and finds herself engulfed by carnival street crowds. The carnival moment here is not euphoric but rather forces the protagonist to confront the reality of her presence as a
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white colonial in a decolonizing Trinidad. Sabine hides behind her fan, a family heirloom, watching the spectacle with trepidation of an ‘ol’ mas band’ arriving on a donkey cart with men with faces blackened with coal. A Midnight Robber makes his way through the streets and carnival bands scatter as he walks towards her; his whistle has an ‘ear splitting screech’: ‘Eh, whitey. You here by yourself? Eh, eh, she pretty like pretty self’, the robber taunts (). He asks her how she likes it in Trinidad and a crowd gathers to watch him as he prepares to make a speech: ‘Well, Miss, lemme tell yuh somptin: yuh days numbered. / Go back to where you came from. De Doc go put allyuh on a boat. / Send you home pack up head to foot, pack you tight, in chains’ (). Whites, the Robber says, will have a ‘taste of their own treat-ment’: ‘Maybe we go bury you up to your neck near redant nest! Paste your pretty mout wid honey!’ (). The crowd jeer and erupt as he describes the plantation punishments he could mete out on her; then ‘The Robber Man lower[s] his head; we [are] eye to eye. “Or wossssss. Fill dat lovely ass of yours wid gunpowder”’ (). The Robber Man, through his mas, is able to speak the truth to power, but his gendered speech also makes Sabine acutely aware of her vulnerability as a white woman alone on the streets during carnival time. This carnival confrontation enables Sabine to develop an understanding of her precarious historical position as a rich white colonial living in a newly independent country. Jamaican author Nalo Hopkinson’s science fiction novel The Midnight Robber () draws from the Midnight Robber’s revolutionary energy and linguistic prowess to create an alternative vision of the Caribbean future that steers the Midnight Robber away from his traditional role as emblem of masculine potency. Hopkinson’s protagonist Tan-Tan lives on a futuristic Caribbean planet named ‘Toussaint’ (after Toussaint Louverture) controlled by an all-seeing, omnipotent ‘Granny Nanny’, named after the historical figure, Nanny of the Maroons. Tan-Tan is kidnapped by her abusive father to another dimension, New Half Way Tree, during carnival, wearing her beloved Midnight Robber costume. Here Hopkinson uses Half Way Tree, a Kingston location, to depict a liminal portal to other worlds, a motif also employed in Marcia Douglas’s The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim (). In New Half Way Tree, Tan-Tan must learn to become the trickster rather than the dupe in order to survive. Following the brutal trauma of being raped by her father and falling pregnant, she metamorphoses into both an Anansi figure and the ‘Robber Queen’. Hopkinson recasts the traditional male Midnight Robber placing a young Black pregnant woman
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at the centre of the mas. Tan-Tan’s greatest weapon, her robber-talk, centres around stories of the injustices she has suffered, and through storytelling she is freed: ‘Her voice swelled with power as the Robber Queen persona came upon her’ and ‘power coursed through Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen’s power – the power of words’ (). Through her Robber Queen speeches, Tan-Tan cements ancestral bonds to the powerful African, Taíno and Caribbean women who came before her, transcending her human form to become her mas character: ‘Not wo-man; I name Tan-Tan, a “T” and an “AN”; I is the AN-acaona, Taíno redeemer; the AN-nie Christmas, keel boat steamer; the Yaa As-ANtewa; Ashanti warrior queen; the NAN-ny, Maroon Granny; meaning Nanna, mother, caretaker to a nation. You won’t confound these people with your massive fib-ulation!’ And Tan-Tan the Midnight Robber stood tall, guns crossed at her chest. Let her opponent match that. ()
Hopkinson, Roffey, and Antoni draw from carnival and the Midnight Robber figure to signal moments of epiphany and awakenings in their texts. Carnival also functions as a medium though which the protagonists are confronted by or attempt to transcend their gendered and racial positioning in relation to the island’s history and culture. Carnival here is rapture and enlightenment but also often signals the impossibility of true escape from the fractured and racialized histories of the Caribbean.
Calypso Poetics Like carnival, the presence of popular music and song in Caribbean writings offers a means through which scribal, oral and performance cultures can be fused to create new literary forms that express the multifaceted, mercurial and ever-changing shape of Caribbean culture. Calypso, reggae, dub and dancehall aesthetics have shaped the literary output of Caribbean writers and been important in the theoretical work of key Caribbean literary and cultural scholars. Kitch () by Trinidadian-born author Anthony Joseph traces the life of Trinidadian calypso singer Lord Kitchener, who was famously filmed singing ‘London is the Place for Me’ from the deck of the Empire Windrush in . Joseph combines the factual and fictional to carefully plot ‘Kitch’s’ evolution from a country-boy (nicknamed ‘Bean’) to a global star. Kitch is both thematically and stylistically intermingled with Caribbean calypso cultures; drawing from the calypso aesthetics of Earl Lovelace and Samuel Selvon, Joseph is part of a new generation of
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Caribbean writers whose work is infused with calypso rhythms and lyricism. Joseph makes frequent use of double-entendre, which he calls ‘a calypso motif’ and draws from the humour and politics of calypso. According to Joseph, ‘what inspired me to write was listening to people like the Mighty Sparrow who would use language is such a profound way’. Several of Joseph’s chapters begin with lyrics or refrains from Kitch’s calypsos. The well-known calypso refrain Sans Humanité frames the chapter ‘Coronation Calypso’, fragmenting the main body of the text and creating a repetitive, call-and-response rhythm and a tempo alongside the vivid descriptions of the mighty calypsonians gathering in the calypso tent. This refrain is one of the most popular extempo (improvised) calypso refrains that requires an audience response. Sans Humanité translates from French as ‘no mercy’, or ‘without humanity’, a reflection of the brutality of Trinidadian history and contemporary poverty, which also asserts the lack of mercy the calypsonian has for his opponent. While Joseph highlights the consciously political nature of Kitch’s calypsos, which draw attention to social injustice and the abuse of power, he also examines the gendered nature of power in the life of Kitch. A very short chapter is dedicated to a first-person narrative from the perspective of Marjorie, Kitch’s long-suffering white British wife, and her friend Martha as they narrate their early sexual adventures with Black men and introduction onto the Caribbean calypso scene in Manchester. While he had a string of affairs, Kitch was notoriously jealous, and his suspicion over his wife’s involvement with Black American soldiers forms the basis of his calypso entitled ‘Marjorie’s Flirtation’, which Joseph incorporates into the novel: Marjorie I am tired of you For you are not really true. For every time I walk the stand I can hear you were loving up some Yankee man I can hear you were loving up some Yankee man. Ah going to bet you – he was a big Yankee man Ah going to beat you – he was a rough Yankee man.
In the chapter narrated by Sonny Greene in , Joseph reflects dominant attitudes towards women during the period of Kitch’s rise to fame. In this way we might mark connections between Joseph’s text and Sam Selvon’s earlier works that narrate the sexual adventures of Caribbean migrants in s London. Describing Kitch as a hustler and a pimp, Greene excuses his role by pointing out that many Caribbean men were
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‘poncing’ (prostituting) white women. However, given that women were deeply involved in Kitch’s scene and were a part of his everyday entourage, by returning to a male narrative perspective, Joseph misses an opportunity to properly counterbalance and undercut the misogynistic male voice through the incorporation of reimagined women’s narratives in his novel. If the use of the voice of the calypsonian proves important to Joseph’s writing, along with the earlier work of Selvon and Lovelace, we can also note how the calypsonian’s voice has also been important for theorizing the Caribbean. In a discussion with Kamau Brathwaite, the critic Gordon Rohlehr has argued that ‘calypso provides us with living examples of a very complex metric organization of language. It is not simply a matter of using WI speech rhythms and idioms, but of being conscious of the syncopated drum-rhythms in the background’. Both Rohlehr and Brathwaite have explored the power and poetry of the Mighty Sparrow’s songs as well as talked about the use of rhythm and language of calypso as a resource for the Caribbean poet. Their work has been complemented by Maureen Warner-Lewis’s keen examination of calypso aesthetics in the novels of Selvon and Lovelace. However, in Rohlehr’s work, we might additionally note that calypso functions both as subject and style in his politics of response, use of picong and his engagement with the voice and figure of the ‘bookman’ in Perfected Fables Now: A Bookman Signs Off on Seven Decades ().
Reggae and Dub Aesthetics The politics of reggae and dancehall culture has also been theorized by a number of key Caribbean literary critics, amongst them Kwame Dawes and Carolyn Cooper. Both have simultaneously argued that we must take seriously the poetics of the popular while also mapping ways in which Caribbean literary production has been in conversation with, and drawn on, popular aesthetics and cultural forms. Carolyn Cooper has, for instance, examined what she has termed ‘Bob Marley’s literary legacy’ through close readings of the poetics of his songs while also pointing to a wider body of ‘Lit/orature’ and examining the multiple sound resources and verbal creativity employed in a number of folk, popular, performance and written texts. Kwame Dawes’s book Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic () begins with an exploration of the influence of Bob Marley’s music on Jamaican literature. Pointing to the poetry and influence of Marley’s verse, Dawes examines connections, for instance, between
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Carnival, Calypso and Dancehall Cultures
Marley’s music and Colin Channer’s novels, which take titles from Marley’s songs (Waiting in Vain [], Satisfy My Soul []). Dawes even titles his own novel, She’s Gone, after a Marley song. While offering a theoretical argument, it is significant that Dawes resists the academic mode of critical definition in articulating his ‘reggae aesthetic’ and moves towards a lyrical, poetic mode of characterization by opening several of the book’s chapters with poems (several of which are titled ‘Some Tentative Definitions’). Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings () might also be belatedly situated in relation to Dawes’s attempt at a reggae aesthetic. In James’s novel, the figure of the Singer, a character who has been discussed by critics as a representation of Marley himself, is central to the story as the novel recounts his attempted assassination. Marcia Douglas’s The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim () firmly locates contemporary Caribbean writing in a musical milieu. Her work, a ‘novel in bass riddim’, is embedded in dub music and Rastafari religious thought. Multiple spiritual domains exist side by side as Bob Marley and Haile Selassie converse on the ‘dub side’ and Marley returns, in the shape of a homeless fallen angel, on a spiritual quest to Half Way Tree in Kingston – a landmark also used by Hopkinson to suggest a liminal space and the crossroads of different dimensions. This non-linear novel embraces the music, mysticism and magic of Rastafari through a collage-like dub narrative, which zig-zags through time and space. Critic Njelle W. Hamilton tracks the depiction of ‘Caribbean spacetime’ in Douglas’s novel, demonstrating how her privileging of the reengineering technologies of dub music creates new spatial and temporal dimensions for her readers to explore. The famous clock tower in Kingston’s Halfway Tree is a portal in Marvellous Equations, which never keeps the ‘correct’ time and connects the world of the living with the ‘dub side’. Hamilton argues that the ‘quantum temporality’ of the echo and reverb effects in dub music, which underpin the narrative theme and form of the novel, create a soundscape text crafted around the sonic tremors of historical trauma. These are ‘anti-clock’ forms of storytelling, narrative movement and memory, which push the reader to work both forwards and backwards through the narrative, rocked by the (historical) vibrations of dub embedded in the text. Isis Semaj-Hall has argued that dub music, often based on well-known reggae tunes remastered and reworked, was a musical form born out of the hopes and frustrations of a newly independent Jamaica in the s. Like Hamilton’s focus on ‘historical trauma’, Semaj-Hall insists that the dub bassline is a ‘historical echo’ that forces the listener to engage with a type of
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re-memory; like the sound of a mother’s heartbeat experienced in the womb or the call of the African drum, dub takes the listener into an ‘archive of memory’. While this memory archive forms the basis of both reggae and dub music, it is dub that ‘opens up’ and complicates the memory archive for critical examination. Outlining what she terms ‘dub aesthetics’, Semaj-Hall notes that B-side dub vinyl recordings were traditionally remastered versions of A-side reggae tunes: ‘In more literary terms, one could say that the B-side dub is derivative, a reconstruction of the deconstructed A-side recording that adds to and emphasizes some production elements and mutes others.’ According to Semaj-Hall, using the dub aesthetic in literature, as Douglas does, forces the reader and critic of the dub text to engage with key critical questions: ‘What is being reverberated? What is being mixed? Whose voice is providing the talk-over? And whose voice is being muted or amplified?’ Compelled to scrutinize the literary soundscape of reverberation and mixing, and to hear the narrative ‘talkover’, the reader engages with the archive of Caribbean historical memory. While also turning to a sound-archive, like previous reggae literary scholarship, the dub aesthetic is a new way of entwining memory and community with the business of literary criticism.
Dancehall Erotics The focus on reggae poetics has not only influenced this dub aesthetic but has also been important in the critical engagement with dancehall erotics as a creative cultural force. Carolyn Cooper’s Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture () has been a key text in exploring issues of gender, ‘slackness’, and women’s sexuality and agency within dancehall cultures, suggesting that a tension exists between the official scribal, ‘literary’ culture of Jamaica and the ‘rude’, ‘slack’ oral culture of dancehall which she reads as a form ‘of verbal maroonage’. Cooper traces this tension in the work of Caribbean writers publishing from the s onwards: Louise Bennett, Vic Reid and, later, Erna Brodber. To this list, we can add the post-millennial authors Marcia Douglas and Tanya Shirley, who both command what Cooper describes as the full breadth of the ‘scribal/oral literary continuum’ (). In her close analysis of dancehall lyrics, Cooper demonstrates their intertextuality – sitting at the intersection between oral and scribal culture and drawing from ‘traditional’ Caribbean cultural forms such as revival, folksongs, ring tunes and mento songs (–). These often deeply subversive lyrics, deemed as vulgar and violent by officialdom, are firmly at odds with the
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‘pious morality of fundamentalist Jamaican society’ (). Lyrics not only express a rebellion against law and order but, similarly to the role of carnival in Lovelace’s texts, are also a form of social commentary on ghetto violence, sexual violence and poverty (). According to Cooper, the Christian suppression of female sexuality is challenged in a dancehall culture that both celebrates and devalues female sexual agency through ‘vulgarity’ (). In Merchant of Feathers (), Jamaican poet Tanya Shirley tackles the misogyny of Caribbean popular culture head-on while locating dancehall as a space for female erotic expression. In ‘How Dreams Grow Fat and Die’, Shirley contrasts the rigidity of ballet classes to the ‘looseness’ and freedom of dancehall. Ballet is described in terms of practising walking, in agony, all summer on wooden-tip shoes. In the autumn, her dreams are thwarted when her ballet teacher tells her mother she is ‘too fat to be a ballerina’. The teacher with her ‘faux British accent and hollowed / collar bones [the girl] imagined were tea cups’ () withers the little girl’s dreams as her young Black body will not adhere to the rules and contours of classical ballet: You, who illustrated to my mother My incompetence by drawing a circle In the air. I was the round nightmare Landing heavy in the melody of grand jetés. ()
Here ballet, with all its Eurocentricity, contrasts starkly with dancehall. In Shirley’s poems, dancehall and reggae are mediums through which female sexuality is both celebrated and denigrated. While Cooper’s celebration of dancehall lyrics as a radical means through which to challenge the restrictions of the church and state on female sexuality are echoed here, Shirley’s poems also draw our attention to the devastating misogyny inherent in the dancehall DJ’s lyrics and patter. In ‘Montego Bay’, Shirley’s protagonist describes dancing barefoot on the beach and wining to Bob Marley at an open-air sound system in an effort to gain the admiration of the man she loves. When a friend points out ‘You don’t wine to Bob’, she retorts: ‘But Bob would understand / What a woman has to do to hold a man / In this one room of sea and sky (). The music becomes the vehicle for her seduction routine, and she rolls her hips, moves her breasts in ‘slow/small circles, marking time with Marley’ (). She starts to speed up her ‘gyration’ to quench the thirst in his eyes, and the language becomes sensual and erotic. A reggae rhythm
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pushes through the text as she moves seductively to the beat: ‘push back, roll and press forward’, ‘sideways rock and slither’ this ‘slow skank backwards / and forwards’ (). The object of her affections, however, remembers the ‘obligations’ to his wife, the need to pay school fees for his daughter, his ‘ailing father / the overgrown lawn, church on Sunday’ (). The poem ends: ‘You’ll turn your back and I’ll continue to dance’ (). Here Shirley infuses her writing with the reggae beat of Marley’s music and brings the woman centre stage in the act of seduction. The music and dancing here are sensual and alive – unlike the restricted ballet form and ‘kukumkum orchestra’ overseen by the sexless ballet teacher. In comparison to the faux British pomposity and failure to embrace life in all its diversity, epitomized by the ballet teacher, Marley’s music provides a backdrop to a – thwarted – form of erotic expression. Perhaps you just can’t properly ‘wine to Bob’, after all. Elsewhere in her collection, Shirley is scathing of the misogynistic values that underpin elements of dancehall culture in Jamaica. In the poem ‘SAID BY A DJ AT AN UPTOWN DANCE’, the poem starts with the DJ’s offensive utterance; ‘Bruk off yuh head, mi buy it back a mawnin’ (italics in original) and asks: ‘And what is a woman’s head, but dispensable / A dutty wining machine, a hypnotist’s string. / A windmill’ (). The poetic (and outraged) female voice is full of bitter sarcasm; she must, she concludes, have a man ‘so rich’ that he will go to the store and buy her a new head when she loses her own. While her new head undergoes a period ‘of adjustment’, she imagines her rich man will ‘settle for deep discussions / with my breasts and marvel at the acquiescing nature / of my tender parts’ (). She continues: ‘Matter of fact, which woman really needs a head / Unless she is proficient in giving head, / And keeping her mouth shut when she’s not?’ (). Shirley suddenly brutally undercuts this mocking voice in her closing lines, which call attention to the actual violence regularly meted out on Jamaican women: ‘Mr DJ, two headless women were found in Spanish Town; / Kindly give their families some money and directions to the store’ (). In a sister poem, ‘SAID BY A DJ AT A DOWNTOWN DANCE’, Shirley compares a working-class downtown Kingston dance to an uptown middle-class dance and insists that the sexism and misogyny are equal in both locations. Again, Shirley pulls our attention towards the violence of the DJ’s language and the casual sexism that can underpin dancehall culture: ‘Big up yuhself if yuh pump um tight like mosquito coffin’ (; italics
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in original). By dissecting this seemingly throwaway comment she focuses the lens sharply on the absurdity and damaging impact of these words. She imagines her ‘pum pum’ coffin ‘lined with purple velvet’ () and proclaims: ‘I want the men I have killed to rise up again, to sing halleluiahs in praise of this sweet spot’ (). The ‘sweet spot’ is smaller than ‘a melon seed, a discarded tooth, a dew drop’; it is tighter than an ‘eye socket’, ‘a screw, the space between seconds’, than ‘starched linen’, ‘a single mother’s budget’ or a ‘stranglers hand on the throat’ (). The imagining of women as sexual objects is again undercut with the everyday realities of gendered violence and the challenges of motherhood and domesticity: ‘Oh how we pray for resilience/ to bounce back in the face of dicks and pricks and bigheaded babies’: And in the dance, surrounded by men, we flash up our lighters, point our fingers in gun salute, shout ‘RAAEEE’ in case we are mistaken for women whose pums pums could hold the coffin, the congregation, the choir, the hearse. ()
Here we find a rallying cry to women who try and align themselves to the image of the mosquito-tight ‘pum pum’, and a provocation to the men on the dancehall scene, to call out the normalization of sexism. Shirley lays bare the tensions between Jamaican dancehall cultures as sites of emancipation for women to wine freely and celebrate their bodies and spaces underpinned by chauvinism and controlled by the male gaze. Conversely, the poem ‘Night Nurse’ is a love song to dancehall. Named after the famous song by lover’s rock reggae star Gregory Isaacs, it describes a dancehall at three in the morning. A couple, tired of ‘dodging [their] intentions’, become enveloped in one another, ‘forgetting’ themselves and the routines and annoyances of mundane daily life: ‘children, blemishes, spouses / bosses, leaky faucets’ (). As in ‘Montego Bay’, their coupling is illicit and signals an affair. They ‘press against each other’, and the rhythms of dancehall permeate as the text becomes, rather than responds to, the music: I singe my backside Into the swell of you groin We are not moving to rhythm We do not care for the deejay’s gimmicks. We are sound system enough – Each circle of our waists, a low-lying bass. An insistent pounding. ()
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Similar to the carnival climax in Roffey’s, Hopkinson’s and Antoni’s works, in this moment the music has a profoundly transformative effect. The couple, unable to come together in ‘Montego Bay’, fall into a self-made rhythm. Refusing to be led by the ‘gimmicks’ of the DJ, dancehall here becomes conduit to self-expression – but only when translated into something meaningful by two individuals. Their yearning creates its own music and dance; it is not born in the dancehall, yet the dancehall space allows them to set free their pent-up desires and escape the banality of their lives in a temporary flash of passion and transcendence. Like the carnival revellers on Jouvay morning, they are liberated from the binds of social hierarchies and daily drudgery. Contemporary Caribbean writers embrace the aesthetics of popular culture as a positive inheritance, yet their engagement with popular cultural forms has also been critical. They draw inspiration from calypso, dancehall, reggae and carnival cultures while challenging the patriarchal and heteronormative cultural politics embedded within them. Their literary works recentre questions of class, gender and power to examine the autonomy of women’s voices and bodies and challenge misogyny, patriarchy and social injustice in the Caribbean and beyond.
Notes Gerard Aching, Masking and Power: Carnival and Popular Culture in the Caribbean (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), Kevin Adonis Browne, High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), Carolyn Cooper, Sound Clash (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), Kwame Dawes, Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ). Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Jazz and the West Indian Novel’, Bim, No. (), –; No. . (), –; No. (), –. Errol Hill, The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre (Austin: University of Texas Press, ) and idem, Jestina’s Calypso and Other Plays (London: Heinemann, ). Browne, High Mas, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Derek Walcott, ‘Nobel Lecture’, nobelprize.org, December , www .nobelprize.org/prizes/literature//walcott/lecture/.
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Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, , trans. James E. Maraniss, nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (London: Faber and Faber, ), . Aching, Masking and Power, ; Lovelace, The Dragon, . Milla Riggio, Paolo Vignolo, Rachel Bowditch and Rawle Gibbons, eds., Festive Devils of the Americas (Kolkata: Seagull Books, ), . Jab is the French patois for Diable (Devil) and Molassie is the French patois for Mélasse (Molasses). In this devil mas the performer smears themselves with tar, grease, lard or engine oil. The ‘molasses’ is symbolic of burnt sugar cane and the Jab Molassie is said to represent the ghost of a slave burnt to death in the cane fields or in a fire in the cane factory, or a slave who has fallen to his death in a vat of molasses. Monique Roffey, Archipelago (London: Simon and Schuster, ), . Robert Antoni, Carnival (New York: Black Cat, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Monique Roffey, The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (New York: Simon and Schuster, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (New York: Warner Books, ), –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Hannah Silva, ‘A Bit of Talk with Anthony Joseph’, Interview with Hannah Silva, April , http://hannahsilva.co.uk/a-bit-of-talk-with-anthonyjoseph/. Ibid. Anthony Joseph, Kitch (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Italics in original. Edward Brathwaite, ‘Gordon Rohlehr’s “Sparrow and the Language of the Calypso”’, Caribbean Quarterly, . (), –, . Maureen Warner-Lewis, ‘Samuel Selvon’s Linguistic Extravaganza: Moses Ascending’, Caribbean Quarterly, . (), –. Picong, or ‘Piquant’, is a Caribbean term for teasing, mocking or heckling others in a friendly verbal exchange – a type of Signifyin’; see Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, ). Carolyn Cooper, ‘Bob Marley’s Literary Legacy’, The Sunday Gleaner, February , http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner//cleisure/cleisure.html. Cooper, Sound Clash, . Njelle W. Hamilton, ‘Jamaican String Theory: Quantum Sounds and Postcolonial Spacetime in Marcia Douglas’s The Marvellous Equations of the Dread’, Journal of West Indian Literature, . (), –, . Ibid.
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Isis Semaj-Hall, ‘Re-membering our Caribbean through Dub Aesthetic’, sx salon, (February ), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/re-member ing-our-caribbean-through-dub-aesthetic. Cooper, Noises in the Blood, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Tanya Shirley, The Merchant of Feathers (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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Life Writing, Gender and Caribbean Narrative –: Itinerant Self-Making in the Postcolonial Caribbean Denise deCaires Narain We might best approach life narrative, then, as a moving target, a set of shifting self-referential practices that, in engaging the past, reflect on identity in the present.
Sidone Smith and Julia Watson
The radical instability of the Caribbean as a cultural domain coincides with the radical instability of autobiography as a genre.
Sandra Pouchet Paquet
Caribbean writing has a well-established association with autobiographical and life writing forms; indeed, as Paquet argues, the instability of the genre resonates well with the ‘radical instability’ of the region as a whole. With its volatile and violent history of enslavement and indentureship, this ‘radical instability’ has profoundly determined the possibilities for selfhood, self-making, life-making and life writing in the Caribbean. But lifestories by or about the enslaved are scant; in Saidiya Hartman’s words, they are ‘an asterisk in the grand narrative of history’. Caribbean writing is haunted by this palpable absence. In Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip mines the transcript of a claim for compensation against the loss of the Zong’s ‘cargo’, over enslaved people who were ordered to be thrown overboard by Captain Luke Collingwood in (Gregson v. Gilbert, ). Zong! is a painstaking, poetic piecing together of the ‘impossible’ story of the Zong massacre in which the author bemoans the impossibility and necessity of its telling: ‘There is no telling this story; it must be told.’ The text that unfolds is epic in scale and scope and composed of fragmented syllables, sounds and words – all from the legal ruling – that require an immersive, open reading. The title page invokes an amanuensis, ‘As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng’, and the Notanda outlines the twists and turns of her research and formal experiments, and the many affective and intellectual challenges encountered. Attempting to tell this story, then, compels the writer to implicate herself explicitly in the text while, in the
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radical fragmentation of language and form, make a similar demand of the reader. My point here is not to suggest that Zong! is a ‘life narrative’ but to argue for the complex ways that the history of enslavement has shaped this genre. To quote Hartman, ‘narrative may be the only available form of redress for the monumental crime that was the transatlantic slave trade and the terror of enslavement and racism’. Given this perilous history, the appeal of life writing in the Caribbean is obvious: with its associations of ‘coming to voice’ to express marginalized identities and lives, the autobiographical has been important in establishing a distinctly Caribbean presence in writing, particularly for women. But life writing is also a slippery genre and one that can’t be relied on for any simple, truthful expression of ‘self’ or ‘life’. In a special issue of Biography, ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics’, assumptions about life story as personal (and therefore truthful) are reassessed in light of Lauren Berlant’s comprehensive critique of the public–private binary. Berlant’s ‘intimate public’ refers to the ways that intimate attachments and ‘private sentiments’ have been mobilized by public institutions (on behalf of the nation state) to produce an ideal of the citizen and ‘the good life’ that coheres around the heterosexual couple and family, for whom ‘having a (good) life’ includes material success and the privilege of intimacy. Versions of this colonial narrative about the civilizing potential of ‘good family life’ and ‘appropriate sexual behaviour’ continue to shape postcolonial Caribbean states so that, as M. Jacqui Alexander argues, ‘Not just any(body) can be a citizen’: Thus we can identify a certain trajectory in the establishment of nationalism which is grounded in notions of respectability which like eighteenthcentury European nationalism came to rely heavily upon sexual gestures that involved the symbolic triumph of the nuclear family over the extended family and other family forms.
What can it mean to ‘have a life’ or to write a story of that life in a context where the ‘public’ and ‘private’ are imbricated in such an over-determined and instrumental way? In her introduction to ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics’, Margaretta Jolly, while accepting Berlant’s questioning of life story as truth-telling, acknowledges that many readers (including herself ) ‘remain impossibly attached to the magical promises of life story’. Berlant suggests that we redefine ‘intimate publics’ as ‘laboratories for imagining and cobbling together alternative construals about how life has appeared and how legitimately it could be better shaped’. This reimagining also requires rethinking familiar notions of emotions as private, personal
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property, anterior and interior to us, things women naturally have. Emotions, as Sara Ahmed argues, ‘do things, and they align individuals with communities [. . .] we need to consider how they work, in concrete and particular ways, to mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, the individual and the collective’. Like Philip, for many Caribbean women writers, the after-effects of slavery pulse in the present as a pervasively affective, melancholic haunting force, however variously parsed.
Writing for a Life and Writing Life Published in , Mary Prince is considered a foundational figure as the first Black West Indian woman writer. Prince didn’t write her History but narrated it to Susanna Strickland who, with Thomas Pringle as editor, then published it. Given the over-determining mediation of both her interlocutor and scribe, it is impossible to determine just how much of Prince’s phrasing, framing or feeling is hers, or the extent to which she may have self-censored her story. But it is striking that even as her story catalogues her inhuman treatment as property and her exhausting labours, the narrative voice is persistently ladylike. Such narrative decorum was required for it to be readable for her target audience of English abolitionists. At the same time, the horrors that Prince recounts (including the ones related to sexual abuse that she only hints at) puts such pressure on that ‘ladylike’ narration that she was required to expose her scarred back for inspection by Margaret Pringle (Thomas’s wife) as ‘evidence’ that the beatings she described really happened. That such proof was required by the public, and that it was obtained in such brutally intimate and inequitable circumstances, complicates contemporary readings of Prince’s life-story. Perhaps, too, it intensifies our (impossibly hopeful) desire to hear Prince’s own voice, especially when she appears to be speaking most directly: ‘I have been a slave – I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.’ How can we quibble with this appeal? And what to make of such horrors as a life story, and of the shifting registers and filters of its narration? Perhaps Prince’s text is intelligible only if we give up on it as a singular, expressive life story and settle for ‘imagining and cobbling together’, to echo Berlant, fractured and fugitive glimpses of Prince’s agency. Reading this life story requires a piecemeal piecing together that puts the reader on the line, demanding strenuous interpretation.
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A Composite Woman’s Life Story: Activist Testimony Published over years later, Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women () was propelled, like Prince’s account, by testimonial impulses and was also a collaborative production, though the terms of this collaboration were radically activist: ‘The stories chart the terms of resistance in women’s daily lives and illustrate the ways in which women can move from the apparent powerlessness of exploitation to the creative power of rebel consciousness.’ The Sistren Theatre Collective, under Honor Ford-Smith’s Directorship from to , was funded by Michael Manley’s social welfare programme and, through theatre workshops, aimed to raise awareness of the particular challenges facing working class Jamaican women. The publication of the fifteen stories in consolidated the impact that the collective had already established via their performances in Jamaica, the Caribbean and beyond and was welcomed widely as an important Caribbean-feminist contribution to subaltern women’s studies. The published stories were elicited by a series of questions focused on their perception of their gendered oppression, which were then recorded, transcribed and edited for publication. Unsurprisingly, given the focus of the questions, similar themes and concerns are evident: the demands of motherhood; disruption to education caused by early or frequent pregnancies; embattled or violent relationships with itinerant men; the difficulty of finding paid work; and nostalgia for childhood, particularly those spent in rural areas. All the stories demonstrate awareness of the intersection of gender and race in limiting opportunities and ambitions in life. Most were narrated in Jamaican Creole with equal verve, whether articulating fear – ‘All my life me live in fear’ () – a strong sense of autonomy – ‘From me very young me decide seh me nah go do no farm wuk’ (); ‘From me small, nobody no tell me notten’ () – or a more reflective approach – ‘From me born till now, me never really understand Mama’ (). As indicated in these brief examples, many accounts were presented self-consciously as life story: ‘All my life’, ‘From me small/born’; another, ‘Ava’s Diary’, was prompted by a contributor’s detailed statement for the police about domestic violence. Two ‘middlestrata’ contributors, including the editor, found the shift from the formalities of Standard English ‘and the conventions of academic expression’ too jarring, so presented their accounts in a more formally scripted style (xxviii). To protect them and their families, none of the contributors were named, apart from the editor.
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While for many feminists, the collection provided a welcome challenge to complacent assumptions about ‘universal sisterhood’, Carolyn Cooper argued that Ford-Smith’s pristine editorial in Standard English compromised its ‘impeccably subversive credentials’ and reinscribed divisions between white middle-class and Black working-class women. Cooper’s argument was compelling, and, thinking back to Margaret Pringle’s role in mediating Prince’s story, we might say there are historical continuities here. But there are crucial differences. Ford-Smith carefully catalogued her role as participant, editor, and curator, and her own story, ‘Grandma’s Estate’, offered a candid account of family-life shaped by toxic racist values. When reissued in , Ford-Smith included an afterword reflecting on the initial reception of Lionheart Gal, including Cooper’s critique; she conceded that they gave her pause for thought about her relative power, privilege and editorial role but concluded that ‘social movements and the cultural work they produce are never pure spaces of resistance, and that they do not produce pure ruptures with domination’ (). I share this sense of thinking about feminist solidarities as necessarily ongoing, daily skirmishes and would argue that Sistren remains a rare example of a collaborative life-writing project in which the gathering of individual stories amounts to something more, even if not quite ‘a composite woman’s story’ (xiii).
Writing as a Way of Being Writing well after Prince and before Sistren, in entirely different sociocultural circumstances, Jean Rhys’s life story clearly does not echo the extreme perilousness of either. As a white Creole woman writing in the first half of the twentieth century, with direct familial connections on the ‘other side’ of the plantation, introducing Rhys here may seem incongruous, or just plain wrong. My argument is not that they represent opposite poles of the Caribbean experience or that a reconciliatory comparative reading is possible, but to note continuities in the motivations, shape and reception of life writing. Where Prince and Sistren bear witness to their perilous lives with some urgency, Rhys reluctantly and belatedly agreed to write an autobiography after her success as a novelist. Where Prince was literally writing for her life, Rhys was invited to write about her writing life. But Rhys, too, had to rely on a scribe as, by the time she got round to it, she was eighty-six and unable to write herself. Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, published posthumously (), was written by David Plante, to whom Rhys dictated episodes of her life which he then
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transcribed and read back to her for approval. That David Plante, a novelist himself, would go on to write, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three: Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer, somewhat compromises his involvement as ‘ghost writer’. Erica Johnson argues that although Plante is not a reliable amanuensis, Rhys escapes his control by narrating vignettes of her life that were memorized, sometimes verbatim, from her fiction to ‘ghost’ her own life story. Where readers can also evade Plante’s control by reading Rhys’s fiction alongside the autobiography to gauge truth-values on Rhys’s terms, the Pringles’s framing of Prince’s narrative leaves no room for such calibrations. Rhys’s published writing haunts Smile Please; coming to it after the fiction, a feeling of déjà vu is pervasive, especially as it relates to the melancholic affective atmosphere that characterizes the fiction. One resonant example appears when Rhys describes her reading habits as a child and ends with a terrifying story (of cockroaches eating her eyes) that Meta, her nurse, tells her to scare her away from books. Another vignette elaborates on Meta’s terrifying power: her stories of zombies, soucriants and loups-garoux; her merciless teasing and rough handling of Rhys. Forbidden by Rhys’s parents to slap her, Meta shakes her violently by the shoulders instead; Rhys recalls ‘hair flying’: ‘While I still had any breath to speak I would yell, “Black Devil, Black Devil, Black Devil!”’ Rhys concludes, ‘Meta had shown me a world of fear and distrust, and I am still in that world.’ Paquet reads this as Rhys blaming Meta for ‘generating an enduring fear and distrust of black people’ which finds its way into the fiction as ‘ambivalence about race’. Johnson also reads this experience through parallels in the fiction, pointing to the original ending of Voyage in the Dark (), when the dying Anna Morgan recalls being dragged roughly from her hiding place by her nurse and shaken so hard her teeth, hair and flesh ‘shook’, prompting her to shout ‘black devil black devil’. Johnson argues that where the novel demonstrates how experience shapes Anna’s worldview, the autobiography suggests that ‘Rhys’s fear is based on an irrational and immature adult response to Meta’s childhood stories’ (). While there is ample evidence of anxiety and ‘ambivalence about race’ across Rhys’s oeuvre, I don’t share Paquet’s view that Rhys blames Meta for this, or Johnson’s suggestion that fears absorbed in childhood are presented in Smile Please as ‘irrational and immature’ (). Rather than ‘irrational and immature’, the text conveys the affective force of the abrasive intimacy between nurse and child, registering indelibly it seems, on the child’s body. Rhys notes that Meta ‘always seemed to
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be brooding over some terrible, unforgettable wrong’, and then recalls ‘the feel of her hard hand as she hauled me along to the Botanical Gardens’. Through her frightening stories and ‘hard hand[s]’ hauling her along or shaking her by the shoulders, the child is imaginatively and affectively marked by, and inducted into, Meta’s life-world. This encounter, then, is suggestive of precisely those intensities of emotion that Sara Ahmed argues have a binding force. The sticky affects of a shared, but differently experienced, history lock Meta and Rhys together in ways that resist familiar taxonomies of intimacy. In Smile Please, rage flares and ricochets between the nurse and child as an unsettlingly embodied after-effect of history. Like Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid persistently mines her own life across a range of genres (memoir, serial autobiography, essay, short story), generating a similar sense of déja vu. Her life-stories are forged in the violent history following Columbus’s arrival in that culminated in the horrors of plantation slavery that Prince evokes so powerfully, and continues in the servitude Kincaid associates with the contemporary tourist industry. Her work poses hard questions about the conditions of possibility for life itself, and for writing about that life: What to call the thing that happened to me and all who look like me? Should I call it history? If so, what should history mean to someone like me? Should it be an idea, should it be an open wound and each breath I take in and expel healing and opening the wound again and again, over and over, or is it a moment that began in and has come to no end yet? [. . .] What should I do, how should I feel, where should I place myself?
This graphic image recalls Prince’s wounded back, but where the shared depredation of enslavement allows her to speak with certainty – ‘I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows’ – Kincaid speaks as one outraged and non-plussed by the everyday, ongoing legacy of violence. By referring to ‘people who look like me’, she identifies, but does not identify with the presumptions of the prevailing optic of race. Where Prince claims to know, Kincaid articulates ontological uncertainty: ‘How should I feel, where should I place myself?’ For both Rhys and Kincaid, writing and living are closely entangled modes of being; as Kincaid states: ‘Writing isn’t a way of being public or private; it’s just a way of being.’ The broad trajectories of Kincaid’s life story (migration to America, becoming a writer, her relationship with her mother, the death of her brother, the end of her marriage) are easily verifiable in many published interviews; indeed, the interview as life story is itself a fascinating form in
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relation to Kincaid. These all confirm that for ‘people who look like her’, life writing is not a simple matter of ‘expression’ but involves strenuous questions about the conditions in which it might be possible to author a self who writes in the first place. Alongside details of her own life, she frequently engages with canonical English texts, particularly novels such as Jane Eyre () that are integral to ideas of ‘character’ and self-making. Kincaid has spoken as often about her love of Jane Eyre as she has of her fury at being forced to imbibe the cultural values and ‘civil’ sensibility associated with novels by Charlotte Brontë and others. Kincaid’s See Now Then () is instructive. It catalogues the end of a marriage between a West Indian writer named ‘Jamaica’ and an American composer (‘Mr and Mrs Sweet’) who live in Vermont with their two children; Kincaid’s marriage to the American composer Allen Shawn, with whom she had two children, had recently ended. Although clearly drawn from life and offering searing insights into the extremities of emotion prompted by the demise of a marriage, its most compelling arguments relate to her writing life, in the room ‘just off the kitchen’ where she ‘kept her true self’. The narrator presents her family as deeply resentful of the writing and remembering that keep her in the room, from where she catalogues people, events, places and histories familiar from her publications. As the details accumulate, the room becomes both family burial plot and archive of Mrs Sweet’s writing life, a place of intense emotional labour and struggle. By contrast, Mr Sweet’s studio is a space of composed civility, buttressed by the full weight of a western classical music tradition, which is unequivocally his. Mrs Sweet does not have such cultural ease or entitlement; her study is configured as a room that can barely contain the rage and affective turbulence its occupant generates in engaging with her past. See Now Then closes with the narrator imagining her family’s fury at her withdrawal, yet again, into the ‘room in which she would commune with the vast world that began in ’, finally erupting: ‘that room, that room: burn it down, cried her children, burn it with her in it, cried Mr Sweet, but Mrs Sweet knew of no other way to be’ (). The scene, with its obvious echoes of Brontë’s Bertha in the burning attic, connects the ‘mad woman’ in one text to another. In this echo, Kincaid invites us to gauge these distinct registers of rage/madness against each other. If Bertha, with her ‘pigmy intellect’ and ‘giant propensities’ poses a threat to Jane’s achievement of ‘ladyhood’, then Kincaid excoriates the terms on which this hierarchy of self-hood continues to determine the possibilities for selfmaking, putting herself on the line in the process. As a result, Kincaid’s
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fictions are necessarily autobiographical; and novel writing becomes necessarily life writing.
Writing, Family, Community Rhys and Kincaid share an idea of ‘self’ as precariously positioned in history and self-consciously tethered to the highly individuated subjectivity associated with literature; family provides little sustenance for either and ‘community’ is absent. Writers such as Lorna Goodison and Edwidge Danticat, by comparison, focus their life-narratives on family to expand out into the Jamaican and Haitian communities respectively. In both, extended familial connections are vital lifelines. Goodison’s Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island () documents the shifting fortunes of her parents, forced from their middle-class country life to a tenement yard in Kingston, when her father’s garage business collapsed following the Second World War. The family is large, stays together, and keeps in touch over the years and across parishes and countries via a shared ancestral connection to Harvey River. Readers of Goodison’s poetry and short fiction will be familiar with the loving exuberance with which she records the everyday labours and loves of ordinary Jamaicans. While the history of slavery is referenced, Goodison’s approach in Harvey River is to generously celebrate the cultural practices, loving relationships and sheer style that enable ordinary people, like her family, to survive and thrive despite that history. In Goodison’s account, despite hardships, illnesses, and infidelities, family is a vitally sustaining structure, not the chaotically dysfunctional one that dominates Caribbean writing; indeed, Donette Francis quibbles ‘this memoir feels almost too wholesome’. But Goodison’s emphasis on the extended family as a powerfully sustaining force in post-plantation Jamaica implicitly refuses the norm of the nuclear unit. She also persistently recognizes the resourceful labour of family and community (sewing, gardening, cooking, keeping house), to which we might add Goodison’s labour, across the two decades it took to complete Harvey River, a manoeuvre that neatly affiliates life writing with her community’s resources for ‘making life’. Danticat similarly engages life-narrative as a form of witnessing to the resilience of her family and community, arguing in Brother, I’m Dying () that she is ‘writing this only because they can’t’. Like Goodison, she was a well-established writer before publishing a memoir, so readers of her fiction will recognize the Haitian and diasporic contexts with which
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she engages. Brother, I’m Dying is structured around her ‘two papas’, her biological father and the uncle with whom she lived in Haiti for several years. It charts their close attachments to each other, to the narrator, to the family and to Haiti, and it recounts their deaths. The text navigates across several registers of prose, from the literary-novelistic, to factual recounting, to personal reflection and testimonial as it embeds the personal narratives of beloved family members in the wider geopolitical circumstances that shape their lives and deaths. In several chapters, Danticat imaginatively conveys her uncle’s dramatic flight from Haiti in a first-person narrative of experiences that are not her own but which she compellingly conveys, using her skills as novelist. In ‘Alien ’, she uses her uncle’s medical records and immigration interviews at KROME detention centre in Miami to piece together the dire circumstances in which the eighty-one-year-old died. Here, the facts are presented with little embellishment and only seldom is outrage expressed directly, as when she asks: ‘Was my uncle going to jail because he was Haitian? [. . .] because he was black?’ (–). In shifting boldly between factual and imaginative registers of prose, and between literary memoir and testimonial, Danticat exploits the hybrid possibilities of the form, offering, as Gillian Whitlock argues, ‘a critical reshaping of what life writing is, and what it can do’. Danticat’s text also notably inscribes male figures as loving and enabling, rather than troublingly controlling as in Prince and Rhys’s texts. She opens the text with the twinned news of her father’s terminal illness and her pregnancy and closes it with his death, shortly after meeting her newborn daughter. In so doing, the memoirist entangles her life structurally with those she writes about.
Going Public with the Private: The Lives of Writers Like Rhys, Kincaid, Goodison, and Danticat, Paule Marshall was well established as a prose writer before publishing Triangular Road: A Memoir () but, unlike them, her memoir intersects less intimately with her fiction. Organized around a series of lectures, ‘Bodies of Water’, delivered at Harvard in , Marshall frames her experiences around three personally pivotal positions on the Atlantic: the USA, Barbados and Africa. The text reveals little of her everyday, lived life, and offers sparse detail of her relationships with her mother, father, siblings, husband or son. Instead, it charts her development as a writer and activist in the American civil rights movement; rather than biological family, she adds to her ‘gene pool’ by adopting alternative ‘kinfolk’: fellow writers, and historical figures, such as
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Olaudah Equiano and Sam Burke and all of those thrown overboard of the Zong. Her affiliations are articulated in the language of political and intellectual, rather than emotional, solidarity, and her memoir consolidates her role as writer, reader, activist and public intellectual. By comparison, Julia Alvarez’s Something to Declare (), although bearing the subtitle, ‘Essays’ offers a wide range of intimate details and personal reflections about a writer’s life. Siblings, parents, husbands, students and friends all make appearances as she offers insights into her own writing practices, routines and inspirations. The writing life Alvarez describes includes the readings, book signings, interviews and other activities that writers, particularly ‘bestselling’ ones, are increasingly expected to participate in to publicize their work. Of the texts considered here, Something to Declare engages most directly with the peculiar interface of public–private as it manifests in the figure of ‘the contemporary writer’.
Itinerancy, Diaspora and Self-Making The life writing discussed thus far clearly indicates the significance of diaspora to the Caribbean. Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return () also thematizes diaspora but in ways that implicate form and structure as profoundly hybridized by experiences of diaspora. A Map bears a discrete label, ‘Autobiography’, on its inner jacket, but its subtitle, ‘Notes to Belonging’, perhaps describes it more accurately. The book is composed of a series of fragmented reflections on diverse topics, many of them composed while Brand is travelling to and from places, literally or imaginatively, or momentarily in a strange place. All journeys pivot in relation to the wider narrative of the Middle Passage and the infamous door on Goree Island, which Brand spools back to again and again. The door is an, ‘absent presence’ () that ‘makes the word door impossible’ (), haunting the text and gathering a sense of collective melancholy that passing through the door signalled for countless numbers of enslaved subjects. A Map is eclectic in range and register and includes fragments of poetry, aphorisms, anecdotes, critical reflections and quotations from a wide range of texts, many of Caribbean provenance. Eschewing chronology and geography, the text maps the shifting affective landscapes of her reflections: rage, sorrow, unbelonging, melancholy, incredulity. Johnson describes it as ‘a lush work of memories, fragments, and poetry’, but notes, as ‘autobiography’, that it provides few details about family or formative years. The text opens with an ‘explanation’ of sorts for this: ‘My grandfather said
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he knew what people we came from’ (); but when he can’t recall the name and refuses to provide a guessed substitute, Brand recognizes the shared significance of this forgetting: ‘Forgotten. But the rupture this exchange with my grandfather revealed was greater than the need for familial bonds. It was a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography’ (). In the absence of a reliable archive, she suggests that ‘any act of recollection is important, even looks of dismay or discomfort. Any wisp of a dream is evidence’ (). We might read the frequent dispersal of quotations from Caribbean-authored texts in A Map as ‘wisps of evidence’ that accumulate to form what Johnson calls a ‘neo-archive [. . .] fiction that creates history in the face of its absence’. The ethereal quality of the archival traces (‘real’ and invented) that punctuate Brand’s work speaks to Berlant’s arguments for a more mutable, mobile understanding of agentive selves. It suggests the embodied and affective, as well as intellectual, solidarities and ‘counter-intimacies’ that are possible, if a relational sense of ‘selves’, plural, is embraced. The complicated, faltering narrations of self that characterize A Map speak to an idea of self-making through life/self-writing that is fractious and piecemeal and where assumptions about private and public are questioned: ‘This self which is unobservable is a mystery. It is imprisoned in the observed. It is constantly struggling to wrest itself from the warp of its public ownerships. Its own language is plain yet secret. Rather, obscured’ (). In other words, in struggling to ‘wrest itself from the warp of its public ownerships’, other modes of intimate publics can be realized, however fleetingly. One of the many brief examples of such counterintimacies is when Brand recounts a brief exchange with an Ethiopian parking attendant when she is en route to a reading; he announces that he comes from ‘the oldest civilization’: ‘They build a parking lot and they think that is a civilization’ (). The shared laughter that follows fleetingly transforms this encounter into a ‘sticky’ moment of diasporic intimacy, one of many that accumulate in the text to provide provisional spaces of belonging. Autobiographical details feature prominently in Michelle Cliff’s work, and hers, too, is generically hybrid and uses itineraries of travel as prompts for self-reflection. ‘If I Could Write This in Fire’ () shifts whimsically between various reflections, often prompted by car journeys in the United States, or her travels further afield as writer, teacher or tourist. Cliff’s historical perspective pivots around the legacy of empire and slavery, and its violently distorting continued impacts. Where Brand’s mood is often plangent and melancholic, Cliff’s is sharply ironic or angry, focused with
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particular intensity on her own family’s denial of their Black ancestry. Cliff’s text reflects on the force needed to refuse the ‘insane’ system of ‘colourism’ and the privilege that accompanied it. Where Brand embraces a dispersal of self-making possibilities, Cliff suggests a focused, muscular approach; it is a ‘question of grasping more of myself’ (). The title of the collection itself, of course, signals the ferocious agency needed, as does the quotation from Andrew Salkey’s Jamaica, that prefaces it, ‘grab weself like we know weself’ (). This anger is anticipated in Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise () and similarly indicates the energetic anger required to begin authoring a self at all. That both Brand and Cliff self-identify as lesbian is significant; clearly in the Caribbean where, as Alexander argues, ‘not anybody can be a citizen’, coming out in writing may be palpably perilous. What is most striking about Brand’s and Cliff’s queer life writing is that while sexual identity is crucial, it does not provide obvious anchorage or a stable point of reference; it becomes a (significant) piece in a shifting kaleidoscopic lens in which life experiences and senses of the self oscillate, settle and shift again.
Performative Life Story Staceyann Chin describes herself as a memoirist and performs her lifestories on stage and via YouTube, blogs and poetry-slam websites. Her memoir, The Other Side of Paradise () is unapologetically a firstperson coming-out narrative, asserting her own singular, hard-fought struggle for selfhood in the context of relentless disregard and abuse. The prologue establishes her survival from birth as heroic: having kept her pregnancy secret, her mother delivers her prematurely en route to the outhouse early on Christmas morning. Significantly underweight, and pronounced ‘a miracle or a mistake’, Chin comments, ‘It tickles me to think that from my very first breath, everyone expected me to stop breathing.’ When her mother leaves Jamaica, Chin is left with her grandmother, who is forced by circumstances to send her first to one and then another aunt. Both are stern, God-fearing disciplinarians who expel her because she refuses to conform to their rules. Staceyann establishes herself as outspoken and full of ‘back chat’, qualities that anticipate the manner of her public coming out, and her career as a performance artist. The bulk of the memoir focuses on her dogged pursuit of education as a means of escape. Although hinted at in various episodes, same-sex desire is not articulated directly until the final chapters when she announces her lesbian identity
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boldly and often. So powerful is socially sanctioned hostility, that when she finally connects with the gay community in Jamaica, they will only recognize her as kindred in designated queer spaces – and never in public at the University of the West Indies. Inevitably, she flouts this public code and is punished by six fellow male students who corner and threaten her with ‘corrective rape’ to ‘curb this lesbian business we hear ’bout’ (). Chin escapes and immediately plans to leave Jamaica and not return, ‘until it is safe for Jamaicans to be openly gay’ (). In ending with her departure for the relative safety of New York, migration is presented unequivocally as an escape from the homophobic nation-space. As Chin notes in the brief epilogue to the text, since leaving Jamaica she has established a career as a performance poet and playwright (notably ‘Borderclash’ and ‘Otherside’) and she vlogs regularly, as in her ‘Living Room Protests’ series, where she debates abortion rights, smoking and feminist issues with her young daughter, Zuri. Her considerable following includes Cynthia Nixon, who directed ‘Motherstruck’, Chin’s play about her pregnancy and motherhood. Of all the Caribbean women writers discussed here, Chin has disseminated her ‘private’ life most publicly and widely, amplified by the variety of online platforms with which she engages. Although there are some continuities with Sistren’s feminist-activist theatrical productions, Chin’s work more resolutely refuses the heteronormative assumptions of ‘family’ and ‘the good life’ and signals the urgent need for alternative intimate publics. While few of the other writers discussed here make such strident use of a public, performative persona as Chin, there is a powerful sense in their texts that life writing gives shape and form to an idea of ‘self’, however precarious and provisional. In other words, life writing performs – or, more accurately, rehearses – possibilities for selfhood. Across the diverse range of life-experiences discussed above, Caribbean women fully exploit the pliability and ‘radical instability’ of life-narrative as a genre. The stories, from Prince through to Chin, map an arc of life/self-making shaped by the violent history of the Caribbean but not reducible to it, one that is critically and creatively self-reflective and necessarily multi-voiced.
Notes Sidone Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), .
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Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and SelfRepresentation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), . Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, (), –, . M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ), . Saidiya Hartman, ‘On Working with Archives: An Interview with Thora Siemsen’, April , https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/saidiyahartman-on-working-with-archives/. Jay Prosser, ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant’, Biography, . (), –. M. Jacqui Alexander, ‘Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas’, Feminist Review, (Autumn ), –, . Margaretta Jolly, ‘Introduction: Life Writing as Intimate Publics’, Biography, . (), v–xi, x. Prosser, ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics’, . Sara Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’, Social Text, . (), –, , emphasis in the original. Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, , ed. Sara Salih (London and New York: Penguin Classics, ), . Sistren with Honor Ford-Smith, Lionheart Gal: Life Stories of Jamaican Women, (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, ), xiii. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, (London: Macmillan Caribbean, ), . See Honor Ford-Smith’s collection of poetry My Mother’s Last Dance (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, ) for a more varied and sustained articulation of her own life-stories. Erica L. Johnson, ‘Auto-Ghostwriting Smile, Please: An Unfinished Autobiography’, Biography, . (), –, . Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography, (London and New York: Penguin, ), –. Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography, . Johnson, ‘Auto-Ghostwriting’, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Rhys, Smile Please, . Ahmed, ‘Affective Economies’. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Vintage, ), . Lauren K. Alleyne, ‘Jamaica Kincaid: Does Truth Have a Tone?’, Guernica, (June ), www.guernicamag.com/does-truth-have-a-tone/. See, for example, Jamaica Kincaid’s essay, ‘On Seeing England for the First Time’, Transition, (), –. The narrator offers deliciously vitriolic descriptions of the cliché with which the marriage ends: her husband leaves her for a young, female violinist.
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Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, (London: Penguin, ), . Donette Francis, ‘The Last Stitch’, Small Axe, (), –, . Lorna Goodison, Controlling the Silver (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, ), . Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (New York: Vintage, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Gillian Whitlock, Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Paule Marshall, Triangular Road: A Memoir (New York: Basic Civitas Books, ), . Julia Alvarez, Something to Declare: Essays (London and New York: Penguin, ). This is not to ignore the ways that from Virginia Woolf onwards, the essay form has long been inflected by ‘the personal’ to dislodge presumptions of masculinist ‘objectivity’. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, ). Subsequent references given parenthetically. Erica L. Johnson, ‘Building the Neo-Archive in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return’, Meridians, . (), –, . Ibid., . Michele Cliff, If I Could Write This in Fire, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Staceyann Chin, The Other Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. See for example, ‘Hi there, Kendra, I know you know I’m Staceyann, But I don’t think it’s been confirmed that I eat pussy and not dick’ (). Going public with her debates with her daughter has attracted the attention of a newspaper in the UK not usually associated with queer debates; see the Daily Mail, October , for a predictably moralistic review of ‘Living Room Protests’, www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-/Precocious-three-yearold-girl-speaks-defend-Planned-Parenthood-alongside-mother-controversialvideo-clip.html.
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Forwarding Dubpoetry in this Generation: A Grassroots Performance and Neo-Literary Genre in Transition Susan Gingell A sizeable stone currently blocks the path for forwarding an argument about dubpoetry in transition: Kei Miller’s grave-marker set up in ‘A Smaller Sound, A Lesser Fury: A Eulogy for Dub Poetry’ (). Miller alleges that dub began ‘dying away’ () when the genre took on the character of minstrel show because dubpoets failed to adapt dub’s discourse to new circumstances, and when audiences increasingly received as entertainment the ‘revolution [. . .] being announced from the podium of dub’ (). Dancehall music’s popularity surpassing that of reggae, a key precursor to dub, may also have played a role, Miller suggests. He ends his eulogy by conjuring up dub’s ghost – ‘Rest in peace, dub poetry. Walk good, and mek good duppy follow you’ () – but gives no sense that that duppy could represent a generative afterlife for dub. A eulogy is, of course, an expression of praise, and Miller’s acknowledges both dub’s importance and the ongoing need for social change. However, he makes intensity of sound and anger definitive measures of dub’s vitality rather than looking for more reliable indicators of life such as transition and growth. Pace Miller, dub continues to noise abroad its declaration of sonic sovereignty in contexts where poetry was held to speak with the generally subdued voice of European tradition arising from indoor culture, and where, according to Petal Samuel, claims for the right to quiet and to ‘aural privacy’ are part of rhetorical strategies for black and brown dispossession. Yet sonic sovereignty may not always be enacted through loud noise. Those familiar with the efficacy of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution know that revolutions do not continually have to be full of sound and fury, which may in the end signify nothing liberating. In contrast to Miller’s position, Lillian Allen’s is that the spirit and potency of original dub has passed into the poetry of dub’s inheritors, not all of whom are dubpoets proper. Allen identifies dub as ‘godmother [to] rap and hip hop’, and having ‘given birth to and helped the spoken word form take root’.
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Miller’s eulogy in fact reopened a ‘die-alogue’ about dub that Christian Habekost, in the final chapter of Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of African-Caribbean Dub Poetry (), argues was, by the early s, occuring alongside more positive articulations of dub’s future. One chapter of Habekost’s book,‘The Changing Conditions of Dub Poetry’s Political Discourse’, argues that dub ‘refined its aesthetic base and incorporated a wider range of topics, targets and functions’ after emerging from the Kingston ghettos, and in relation to Pan-Africanist, Black Power, antiimperialist, anti-apartheid and grassroots socialist movements in the Caribbean and elsewhere. But if dub has been authoritatively pronounced dead, how can anyone now write about its post- changes while acknowledging that not all published dub is well crafted and that all literary movements eventually come to an end? Using the lens of transition enables a ‘live-alogue’ about the highly political grassroots performance-cum-neo-literary genre of dub and encourages both a tracing of continuities with early dub and attention to multidimensional growth. Dub’s original concerns with sonic, somatic and psychic sovereignty persist in newer dub, as does dub’s founding perception formulated in the motto WORD SOUND POWER. Riddim remains a broadly but not universally employed structural characteristic, and dub’s inheritors mostly share the understanding that dubpoets’ accountability entails speaking first to the community from which dub arises and only then to others. In the diaspora, however, being the voice of the people becomes more complex as the voice itself changes and the community to which dub speaks diversifies. Commitment to demotic voice also attenuates among the more literary poets. Forms of dub’s transitions include expanding ‘conscious’ dub-related thematics while addressing new urgencies that arise; developing new subgenres and contributing to the formation of new genres altogether; unifying dubpoets’ and musicians’ performance functions; using new media for broadening creative processes and expanding audiences; and employing Afrofuturistic aesthetics and philosophy to imagine new spaces of possibility for Black futures. Moreover, talented young poet-performers continue to produce work that refutes Miller’s charge that contemporary dubpoets who stand up for their for(u)m lack ‘the poetic arsenal to insist on the thriving power of the art form in which they work’ (). Thus they create more powerful reasons why, when Miller claims to ‘perform a sort of autopsy [on dub] and figure out why and when its life began to ebb’ (), his operation must be challenged. To adapt the words of Derek Walcott’s provocateur poet Spoiler, dub nuh ‘decompose, [. . . it] composing still’.
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Forwarding Dubpoetry in this Generation
One kind of evidence that dub remains lively is that, unlike Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose Selected Poems end with ‘Nineties Verse’ and whose career arc arguably significantly informs Miller’s view of dubpoetry, most of the older generation of dubpoets continue to create, and to perform and otherwise publish. They have, since the s, developed new kinds of dub mid-career, as did Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze with ‘domestic dub’ and Benjamin Zephaniah with his lively children’s and vegan dub. Sometimes older dubbers collaborate with artists in other media or styles. For example, Mutabaruka contributed ‘Life and Debt’ (from the s section of The Next Poems) to the soundtrack of Stephanie Black’s documentary of the same name; and Zephaniah collaborated with the British folk music group The Imagined Village for his award-winning dub version of the classic ‘Tam Lyn’, ‘Tam Lyn Retold’ (). No small part of dub’s ongoing vitality results from the vigorous work of what Ronald Cummings calls dub pedagogies, work that includes passing dub skills and knowledge down family lines, as in the cases of Anita Stewart to d’bi.young anitafrika, and of Keith Shepherd to Sheldon Shepherd of The No-Maddz, a ‘Jamaican Art Collective and Roots Reggae Dub Poetry band’. Dub professionals are also community teachers, as evidenced in ahdri zhina mandiela’s founding and running of the theatre company b current, and anitafrika’s developing and teaching her evolving performance methods, such as the SORPLUSI Method in her anitafrika dub theatre program (incorporated as The Watah School in ) and her Anitafrika Method in international artist retreats. Sheldon Shepherd’s In the Morning Yah () and Cherry Natural’s The Lyrical Contortionist () make book publication an opportunity to teach aspiring dubpoets the principles and practices of writing and reciting dub. Furthermore, individual dub poems are often openly didactic, a quality most academics would depreciate in poetry, but given Cherry Natural’s reporting ‘Di colonizers curriculum / Intoxicate wi cranium[sic]’ and what social media teach, dub’s counterdiscursive role in popular education is important. Indeed, too much is at stake to mildly accept a premature burial of dub in the service of Miller’s ‘hypothesis about diasporas and how they work – about how things which die a certain kind of death within the “home” society are sometimes preserved in the diaspora’ (). Burying dub alive threatens the continuation of the social work that dubpoetry has been put to, and to which it is arguably uniquely suited. Broox’s engaging with the mentally ill in Hamilton, Ontario; anitafrika’s Black & Diverse Wimmin Sacred Health Project, an arts-based health intervention at Women’s
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College Hospital; and Michael St George’s leading Jamaican youth development in the integrated arts Turn Around Project are examples. Indeed, Miller’s eulogy arguably misrecognizes what dubpoetry is, at least for some artists. In Allen’s lecture, ‘Black Voice: Context and Subtext’, the matriarch of dubpoetry in Canada urges, ‘Let’s begin by understanding that dub poetry was never intended to compete with traditional European-derived poetry, just as reggae music was never intended to compete with European classical music.’ In an interview, she added, ‘as an artist [. . .]. I am not working on my art or a book, I am working on my life’. Though she prioritizes dub’s concern with fostering individuals’ voices and emerging talent, she includes ‘aesthetic satisfaction’ among ‘justice, equality, redress, unity [. . .] and accountability’ in her list of what dub simultaneously calls for. Moreover, she states, ‘Dub poetry is a call to action and, along with spoken word, integral to connecting with the so-called illiterates and the great masses of the “unwashed” – don’t they, too, deserve poetry? What of their possibility of one day making a poem?’ We might additionally ask: has any other poetry genre enabled criminalized and sometimes minimally formally educated people the opportunity to come to voice, prominence and influence as dub poetry has for Jamaican dubpoet Oku Onuora and the dyslexic Zephaniah? Identifying younger talented poets from Jamaica and of Jamaican ancestry in Britain like The No-Maddz and Raymond Antrobus is facilitated by their YouTube dissemination of their work. The No-Maddz further renew the potential for dubpoetry’s broad popularity in Jamaica by collapsing the distinction between dubpoets and backing bands that typifies firstgeneration dubbers’ relationship to musicians. In ‘Shotta’ and ‘Nuh Guh Deh’ they move so fluidly between reggae-riddimed sung and spoken words that the distinction between genres blurs into insignificance while the poems’ lyrics and the visual aspects of their videos urgently address, respectively, the gun violence that so compromises the quality of life in contemporary Jamaica and the prevalence of child sexual abuse there. Co-written with Keith Shepherd, ‘Shotta’ counters dancehall’s glorification of the shooter by calling out a generic ‘shotta’ whose mundane and self-gratifying impulse to violence and need for assertion of an insecure hyper-masculinity is emphasized through the refrain ‘From him get up in the morning, haffi pop it off.’ ‘Shotta’ exploits the dual meaning of ‘pop it off’: fire a gun and ejaculate, and the video highlights performance of two kinds of Jamaican masculinity. The first is the shotta’s thin veneer of toughness over his spiritually empty and emotionally bankrupt version of being a man. The second is that of No-Maddz’s members who exhibit
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Forwarding Dubpoetry in this Generation
bravado in aggressively predicting the shotta’s downfall – ‘Mister bad to the bone / Say yuh gonna eat rock stone’ – yet balance that manly display by valorizing good reputation, family and community. ‘Shotta’ also shows one member meditating, another lying in bed with In the Morning Yah near his head as a signifier of connection to reading culture and justiceseeking dubpoetry, and band-members pulling a microphone and guitars rather than guns out of hiding places so they can fight the community’s enemy through performance. They thus reactivate but modify the common dubpoetry trope of word as weapon and the less common one of microphone replacing gun. The collaborative videopoem ‘Nuh Guh Deh’ embodies and foregrounds community participation in addressing child sexual abuse. Joy Crawford, founder of the Jamaican charity Eve for Life, co-wrote the lyrics with The No-Maddz, and ‘Nuh Guh Deh’ early on asserts, ‘The village mus grow the children.’ What follows are scenes of Jamaicans of various ages, genders, and classes, who chide child sexual abusers, ‘NUH GUH DEH’ while The No-Maddz’s voiceover drives home the message. The foursome seek to drive child stalkers from the community by chanting, ‘Come, mek wi taunt dem / we ago haunt dem’, and in four successive frames, an otherwise blank screen admonishes, ‘DON’T TURN YOUR BACK, OPEN YOUR EYES, LIFT YOUR VOICE, and SAVE OUR CHILDREN.’ Child-stalking scenes are compellingly juxtaposed with the recurring shot of a girl sitting on her bed playing with a doll to emphasize the proper innocence of a child in that location. Meanwhile The NoMaddz, expertly made-up to look like dolls, perform from rooms in the dollhouse on the floor, thereby defusing the otherwise troubling adult male presence in the bedroom. Antrobus’s connection to dub arises from his Afro-Jamaican paternal side. Antrobus told Eleanor Wachtel that his father used to play him recorded performances of poems ‘by poets like Linton Kwesi Johnson and Miss Lou’, and he blogposted Imogen Reed’s article on Linton Kwesi Johnson that testifies that ‘the power and lyricism of [Johnson’s] poetry in the ’s and ’s [. . .] led many to an interest in spoken word art forms’. Antrobus’s ‘Jamaican British’ and ‘Dear Hearing World’ arise from problematic receptions of his racially mixed parentage and his deafness, respectively, and the urgencies energizing those poems are the need to change, correspondingly, the social exclusions of assigning or withholding national belonging and the hearing-world oppressions of the deaf. Antrobus’s own work rarely re-sounds dub riddims. Nevertheless, in video versions of ‘Jamaican British’, after revealing that features inherited
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from his white English mother mean that ‘Some people would deny that I’m Jamaican British. / Nose Anglo. Hair straight. No way I’m Jamaican British’ and that ‘the English kids at school made me choose: Jamaican, British?’, he lets his relish for Jamaican foods animate the dubchanting he does to reveal his schoolmates’ view of him and the history behind it: ‘Eat the callaloo, jerk chicken – I’m Jamaican. / British don’t know how to serve our dishes; they enslaved us.’ Because the word British had previously to this passage both reliably followed after Jamaican to act as the main signifier of Antrobus’s identity, the poet makes painfully clear the alienating effect that losing British as a marker of his identity would have, while the unmodified English, signifying a purity contrasting with the hybrid British, is attached to the other students. Antrobus skilfully demonstrates the contradictions of his intersubjective identity formation. His father’s taking Raymond ‘straight to Jamaica’ in response to his son’s learning at school to revile his Jamaicanness – ‘told Dad that I hate them / All them Jamaicans. / I’m British’ – entails travelling to Jamaica on a British passport. His Kingston cousins calling him ‘Jah-English, / proud to have someone in their family – British’ reinforces his ambivalence about his Jamaicanness because he is given the Jamaican honorific Jah, but being seen as British in that context activates both associations with ‘Plantation lineage, World War services’, and the question ‘how do I serve / [. . .] / When knowing how to war is Jamaican British?’ The pause Antrobus inserts between the final iterations of Jamaican and British reveals the gap between the dual parts of his identity that remains for him after the experiences he recounts. He clearly wants others to think about their own relationship to national identity, because in the Muddy Feet Poetry video performance of ‘Jamaican British’, he cues audience members to respond ‘British’ when he points to them after saying ‘Jamaican’, and comments, ‘That’s really interesting seeing how people respond to that word. How do you express that word?’ As a spoken-word poet whose access to sound is mediated by a hearing aid and extensive speech therapy, he expands dub-related political work to contesting ideas of the deaf as disabled and of disability itself. His performance letter ‘Dear Hearing World’ foregrounds instead the disabling practice of focusing on what a person cannot do instead of what they can. Perhaps the most revolutionary counterdiscursive verbal moment in the poem occurs when Antrobus refers to the ‘tongue tied’ hands of those who, lacking deafness, have not learnt sign language. That deaf people are cruelly disabled by hearing people is further communicated by his sharing the experience of having a speech therapist tell him that he
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was ‘a broken speaker’ rather than recognizing any possibility of ‘a broken interpreter’. Antrobus employs language modelled on anti-racist discourses when he objects to those ‘glad to benefit / from Audio Supremacy’ and protests to his speech therapist, ‘you / taught me I was inferior to “standard English expression”’. Furthermore, he specifically addresses discrimination against the deaf in contemporary Britain by pointing to the closing of schools for deaf children, the destruction of such children’s confidence by failing to recognize sign language in classrooms and the annihilation of British Sign Language. Despite his palpable anger at these injustices, the revolution he seeks to effect in the treatment of the deaf is necessarily a quieter one than Miller looks for. Towards its fomenting, Antrobus recasts the Afrofuturism of Danez Smith’s ‘Dear White America’ in a deaf-centred way. Antrobus’s alienation from the hearing-normative world makes him leave earth in search of ‘sounder orbits’ – the witty semantic shift to the health-related meaning of sound is part of his counter-discursive strategy here – a God that would be audible to him, and deaf voices gone missing ‘like sound in space’. ‘Dear Hearing World’ is impelled, then, by imagining outer space as site for a healthy, deaf-centred community and spirituality. Despite the strength of the young Jamaican and British performers, Canadian dub may provide the most broad-based evidence for the for(u)m continuing to thrive and animate new poetics. Allen’s list of seven dub inheritors in Canada, who, she says, ‘move easily between spoken word and dub and experimental poetics’, includes Klyde Broox, D’bi Young (d’bi.young anitafrika), Kaie Kellough, Naila Keleta-Mae, Anthony Bansfield, Dwayne Morgan, Motion and Andrea Thompson. The work of the first three alone provides ample evidence of the genre’s vitality in contemporary Canada. Broox proudly claims the title dubpoet and characterizes dub as ‘wordsound-and-shape-systemsengineering’. His most innovative writing is in the subgenre of meta-dub, but Broox advances his insider-naming ‘dubpoetriology’ to expand dub’s taxonomy. His meta-dub poems are nonetheless continuous with first-generation meta-dub like Mutabaruka’s ‘Dis Poem’, Breeze’s ‘Dubbed Out’, and Allen’s ‘Dis Word’ and ‘PO E ’. Dubpoetry’s leading theorist is par excellence the ‘informal public intellectual’ he suggests every dubpoet is, but his enthusiasm for ‘academese’ as a way of legitimating dub sometimes leads him to infelicitous-sounding coinages like dubpoetriology. At other times, his command of academic discourse allows him effective description of dub as ‘Voice signature, live literature / Altercultural capital / Ancestral oracular revival’, and witty
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representation of dub’s ‘Voices of decolonization’ as ‘Reloading the can(n)on / With homemade ammunition / Weapons of mass liberation’ (italics in original). Such language practice departs from dub’s demotic voice, but using a more acrolectal English post-migration serves his ‘strategic initiat[ive] to further engage white people in the black discourse on race’. Still, his project includes ‘Southernoising the North’ as part of his two-way sound-bridging between old and new homes. Broox also packs the dub and Canadian can(n)ons with ammunition from the wired world. He early-on explored the potentialities of digital media for the dissemination of dub poetry, which he thematized in poems like ‘Going Dot Com’ and ‘Soulscape Online’. Though Miller declared over the revolution of which dub was part (), Broox announces, My revolution has changed Because r/evolution is change ... The revolution is now digitized.
Recently, Broox has been developing a new meta-dub genre, the performance essay, ‘a “voice-written” performable article [. . .] specifically designed for multimodal delivery via page, stage, or screen’ that ‘illustrates as well as articulates dubpoetry as a neoliterary genre and a particularly potent form of personally politicised “public art”’. The performance essay ‘Metanarrating Dubpoetry as WorldWideWordsounds of Global Communal Soul’ opens with dubpoetry’s characteristic looping sound, here manifested in intensive rhyme and alliteration, while simultaneously, through somatic references, calling attention to dub as embodied creation: ‘Street-beat I repeat resonating words concrete pounding out pavement statement in flub-dub of heartbeat radiating temperature of body heat’ (bold in original). When Broox looks for what he wittily calls ‘unlimited broadbonding frequencies’ (italics in original), he suggests dub can create bonds beyond those among people of African ancestry that dub has previously recognized, and he finds in his take on WORD SOUND POWER a global bridge between differently located individuals: ‘Positing “wordsound” as the rhizome of multilingual common ground; [sic] dubpoetry highlights the globality of vocality under the canopy of our single sky’ (bold in original). Despite declaring dub techniques ‘globally portable’, he is nonetheless careful to acknowledge ‘the cultural specificity of dubpoetry’s originating mystique’. Convening his global village around ‘virtual campfires of computerscreened social interfaces via keyboards,
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microphones, and digital cameras’ (bold in original), Broox carves out a unique place for himself as digital dubpoet. Moreover, he does so with touches of humour that often spring from his delight in puns. So, for example, seizing on the global networking power that he sees in wordsound, he morphs URLs, or Universal Resource Locators, into ‘Universal Resonance Locators’ and RAM, or Random Access Memory, into ‘Reciprocal Access Memory’ (italics in original in both instances). The erstwhile Debbie Young moved from a Jamaican childhood and youth immersed in dubpoetry and dancehall music to building a Canadian and international professional life in dub performance art. d’bi.young/ d’bi.young.anitafrika/d’bi.young anitafrika has dubbed and queered hxr identity in multiple ways through a complex ‘winin’ of strands of hxr experience and political commitments, and under the influence of Afrocentrism, feminism, and queer- and cyberculture, shx has moved through the multiple versions of hxr name recorded above, to the latest as I write: d’bi.young anitafrika. Seeming to anticipate the need to speak to Miller’s suggestion in ‘A Smaller Sound’ that the revolutionary era of which dub was part is over, anitafrika exhibits in ‘revolushun (i)’ determination to keep a revolutionary spirit alive in hxr work. Shx directly addresses the Linton Kwesi Johnson of ‘Mi Revalueshanary Fren’, moving between disheartened versions of ‘bwoy mi friend / it look like revolushun come to an end’, through protestations like ‘what kindah helpless hopeless state / dem have we di people inna / saying we have no power to affect change’, to the final assertion that the revolution can’t be done ‘cuz we di people / are di revolushun’. However in ‘revolushun (iii)’, from the subject position of queer revolutionary, shx examines the contradictions of a hate-filled revolution, and in the later poems ‘joyful rebellions’ and ‘love-o-lution’, hxr take on revolution shifts toward the erotic and the loving. Like hxr dub forebears, anitafrika dubs passionately against oppression based on race, class and gender, but hxr transmutation of hxr experience of sexual molestation lends a special urgency to the moving dubpoem ‘Children of a Lesser God’, especially in the Def Poetry Jam version, and to the dubtheatre representation of such molestation in blood.claat (). Hxr Canadian location likely facilitated hxr passionate challenges to rigid sexual identities other dubpoets have been slow to address. In the dubbin poetry version of ‘gendah bendah’, hxr literary simulation of Jamaican nation language and replacing a vowel in gendered nouns and pronouns with an x to signify non-binary gender confront the virulent homophobia of hxr birthplace and elsewhere: ‘gendah bendah / schooling
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pretendahs / defendahs a di box/trap called mxn’. anitafrika’s understanding of gender socialization, the disempowering of womxn by the beauty myth, and the colonizing effects of homophobia in Black and other communities generates intense anger, culminating in hxr calling out of ‘gendah lines / [. . .] the status quo / the institutionalized shit’ (dubbin ). However, the full measure of the rage and courage that fire hxr push for social change is best taken from the videopoem version in hxr Vimeo archive. Filmed in South Africa, this version of ‘gendah bendah’ Africanizes the poem through some performers’ clothing and the loud, rapid drumming that creates an insistent beat to match anitafrika’s vocal volume. Repeatedly, an unsmiling head-and-shoulders shot shows hxr forcefully recounting assertions like ‘yuh not beautiful / yuh look like a man / bettah still a lesbian’. The video presents anitafrika flaunting hxr Afra-queerness in flamboyant outfits, including one that features a warrior’s breastplate and another that suggests an African medicine womxn with a spiky-horned headress and large snake twined around hxr body as shx stirs the pot of medicine for those who would police gender. anitafrika’s presentation of hxr body here and elsewhere is illuminated by Allen’s comments that ‘d’bi’s [. . .] Blackness [is. . .] performed as a symbol of liberation’ and hxr ‘celebration of her Black female body came from growing up with Jamaican Dancehall culture [. . .] [which exhibited] no confusion about the beauty of the Black female body [. . .] in its varied and juicy essence’. Viewing the videopoem through the lens of Audre Lorde’s take on the erotic as a ‘source of power and information within [women’s] lives’ that Phanuel Antwi foregrounds as a resource for dub’s ‘assertion of lifeforce’ and liberatory power is further instructive. The joyful cavorting of featured performers Ngozi Paul and Lesede Moche in various video segments further evidences that, when their health is not assaulted by homophobia, people of non-hegemonic sexualities can enjoy wellbeing and freedom, and create empowered communities. The sole mxle in the video, who has a slightly androgynous look in some shots and in another performs a more aggressive masculinity through high-kicking at the camera, is a reminder that the message of queer empowerment is inclusive of mxles. The poem’s queering force extends even to the divine with the assertions ‘gxddxss. always androgynous. gxd always androgynous’. Word-sound systematizer Kaie Kellough is less revolutionary than experimentalist. His relationship to dub is more oblique than anitafrika’s but unique in its breadth for one who has not written a single dubpoem. Of Guyanese ancestry and born in Vancouver, Kellough grew up in
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Calgary, a Canadian city that lacked a substantial Caribbean community but had no dearth of racism. He thus turned to reggae as a source of consolation, community and inspiration. His first book, Lettricity (), draws on dubpoetry and deejaying for its epigraphs – Michael Smith’s ‘lawwwwwwd / An dem a roots [. . .]’ and Big Yout’s ‘love we a deal with’. After accepting the invitation of Toronto’s Dub Poets Collective to be its first poet/writer-in-residence and participate in its dub poetry festival, Kellough wrote the poems of Maple Leaf Rag () such as ‘Word Sound System #’, ‘Boyhood Dub’, and a host of others whose titles suggest entry into the dubworld but whose bodies often pull in other directions. Despite the title ‘Word Sound System #’, the poem, when scored on the page or performed, looks or sounds much more like the work of the Euro-Canadian poet bpNichol. In performance, Kellough individually vocalizes the letters d, o, y, o, u, r, e, a, d, m, and e, doing so with varying speeds and accent patterns until the question ‘Do you read me?’ emerges. The poem bridges literariness and performativity, and its question raises critical issues of social and cultural legibility familiar to dubpoets. Even the two poems Kellough names as dubs are not reggae or otherwise musically riddimed, and in that respect are like the trenchant ‘Illegalese: Floodgate Dub’ that Black British Columbia poet and turntablist Wayde Compton wrote for those undocumented migrants he calls ‘the Chinese maroons’. However, Kellough’s ‘Boyhood Dub’ being further characterized as ‘self portrait’ suggests a coming to terms with his childhood experiences of racism and alienation through the techniques of dub. While Kellough acknowledges an intimacy with Caribbean speech patterns and music – ‘I have a connection. I make a connection’ – he also recognizes that ‘Dub is a tradition that I don’t have full access to for a variety of reasons, including place of birth, culture, class. I have learned a lot from that tradition, but it isn’t mine to practice; it isn’t my voice.’ On the matter of whether his work is informed by a reggae aesthetic, Kellough replied, Informed by, curious about, on somewhat friendly terms, yes. But dub/ reggae is one stream among many. My work issues from my experience in this (Canadian) place. It is not a subset of Jamaican traditions. It stands on its own native ground. I also say this as a bilingual person who lives in Montréal, and who engages deeply with French speaking Black cultures.
‘Boyhood Dub’ thematizes a youth of Afro-Caribbean ancestry trying, in a middleclass (sub?)urban winter environment, to connect with his Afro-
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Caribbeanness through sound. By referring to a ‘tom’s steel roll / hi-hat’s chainlink clink’, and ‘slow breathing bass seething’, Kellough sets up the pun steel/steal to record the stengthening but soul-captivating effects that the drum and bass had on him. In the following passage the syncopation created by an unexpected stanza break after ‘ka’ and the semantically fracturing line-endings create a sense of entry into a world with a different rhythm from Calgary’s: reggae riddims steel me. ka chank. guitar and organ skank into re mory, sink into skank into me into the e ther in to the e turnal ‘s. ()
The denial of any normally anticipated English completion of the syllable re in the delayed completion that constitutes the nonce-word remory can be read as indicative of ruptured memory reconstituted to arrive at what will always be different from what was expected by those either in the ancestral cultures or in the immediately surrounding ones. Perhaps a hybrid of rupture/return/repeat and memory, remory becomes more comprehensible when considered in the context of poems that Kellough placed before and after ‘Boyhood Dub’ in Maple Leaf Rag. Before comes ‘-isery’, whose epigraph from Steve Collis reads ‘history is the interruptor, the breaker of syntax and speech’ (; italics in original). It riffs on the misery that is history, especially Black history, and what a rewriting/rerighting, from below can accomplish. Kellough sets up the further glossing in ‘Boyhood Dub’ of what it means to ‘re’ by rewinding history into dys/ distory/diestory/i-story to show it as fictional, dysfunctional, and potentially lethal, even in autobiographical form. Clearly we are a long way here from dub’s politics of accessibilty and from its demotic voice, though not so far from Kamau Brathwaite’s highly politicized language practices. After ‘Boyhood Dub’ comes ‘Root’, in which the speaker resists being manacled to conceptions of identity generated by Afrocentric discourse. Kellough satirizes as ‘tra \ di© \ tion’ the pressure to adhere to Africanist discourse, and dismisses it with ‘root / you grow, rote’ (). He thus claims the freedoom to ‘re’, re-root and re-write history in his own way.
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In ‘Boyhood Dub’, he does so by recalling his youthful attempt to recreate the Caribbean in his Calgary livingroom. He re-members and re-presents himself feeling the enlivening effects of reggae by repeating the heart-beat b-sound in the phrases ‘each bea / tific beat, each wailed be / who you be, each bass boon’ (). He suggests such sound was boomed as a boon into his altogether different-sounding ‘vapid / vacuumed living-room’, with its ‘plastic fern / fire-green in winter [. . .] furled / down the speaker’s trunk’ (). Though lively Caribbean music cannot bring to life the ‘sham isle’ () the youth tried to conjure with reggae, at the end of the poem, Kellough will loop and modulate the earlier sound of ‘reggae riddims steel me’ to record how, as a youth, reggae gave him a firm sense of who he was: ‘these riddims // real me’ (). Considering the future of dub poetry some twenty-five years ago, Habekost argued that ‘the militant sentiments and revolutionary fervour of dub poetry’s heyday are ebbing away’ and that dub ‘may be on its way into the museum of twentieth-century revolutionary arts’ (–). These are sentiments remarkably similar to those Miller articulated more forcefully some twenty years later. Yet Habekost allowed that not all the older generation of dubpoets had lost their revolutionary fire or were failing to respond to the changes in their cultural environments. Furthermore, he suggested that dubpoetry might avoid consignment to a museum were ‘a renovation and modernization of [dub’s] [. . .] outward appearance and its network of communication’ to occur (). Such renovation and modernization have in fact occurred. This essay’s lens of transition has focused on latterday dub and dub-related poetry’s continuities with early dub and on ways dub’s post-founding generations have moved the genre forward by enlarging its thematic territory and addressing newly perceived urgencies, developing new genres, using new media for dissemination, and employing and adapting Afrofuturist philosophy and aesthetics. By documenting some of the ways skilled second-generation and later dub and dub-related poets have sustained the vigour of this performance-cum-neo-literary genre, and by noting the especially strong contingent of dub inheritors innovating in Canada, I have contested Miller’s suggestions that the poetic arsenal of contemporary dubpoets is not up to the task of justifying a defence of dub and that Canada’s claim to a particularly strong showing in this performance art is dubious. And . . . dub ‘composing still’!
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Notes Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Ronald Cummings for generously directing me to, and providing, resources used in this essay; to Klyde Broox, d’bi.young anitafrika, Kaie Kellough, and The No-Maddz for answering my questions, and in the latter case, providing me with transcriptions of the band’s lyrics; and to Lesley Biggs for editing suggestions. To privilege the primacy of sound in dubpoetry and not separate dub from poetry, I adopt Klyde Broox’s practice of making the spelling of the word (and its cognates) conform to the pronunciation of the term as one word. Henceforth I often abbreviate ‘dubpoetry’ to ‘dub’. Kei Miller, ‘A Smaller Sound, a Lesser Fury: A Eulogy for Dub Poetry’, in Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Petal Samuel, ‘A “Right to Quiet”: Noise Control, M. NourbeSe Philip and a Critique of Sound as Property’, Journal of West Indian Literature, . (), –, . Lillian Allen, ‘Black Voice: Context and Subtext’, in Measures of Astonishment: Poets on Poetry, presented by the League of Canadian Poets (Regina: University of Regina Press, ), –, . Christian Habekost, Verbal Riddim: The Politics and Aesthetics of AfricanCaribbean Dub Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi Editions, ), . I use the word ‘published’ here as Allen does in the Preface to her Women Do This Every Day (Toronto: Women’s Press, ), to mean made public not just in print but also in ‘readings, performances and recordings’ (). In the context of dub, riddim, a Jamaican patwa pronunciation of rhythm, refers to the instrumental b-sides of reggae singles, and to ancestral rhythmic patterns some consider sacred. Helen Gregory coins the portmanteau word ‘for(u)m’ to identify what slam is, and I use it here to signify that dub is also ‘a movement, a philosophy, a form, a genre [. . .] a community, an educational device, [and] a career path’ (‘Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage: Insights from Slam’, in Susan Gingell and Wendy Roy (eds.), Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual [Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, ], –, ). Derek Walcott, ‘The Spoiler’s Return’, in The Fortunate Traveller (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), –, . Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems (London: Penguin, ). Jenny Sharpe, ‘Dub and Difference: A Conversation with Jean “Binta” Breeze’, Callaloo, . (), –, . Poems in Talking Turkeys (London: Puffin, ), and Wicked World! (London: Puffin, ) exemplify his children’s dub, and in The Little Book of Vegan Poems (Chico, CA: AK Press, ) and ‘Love the Life’ (Video,
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, The Vegan Society Facebook page www.facebook.com/watch/?v= and YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v= PUfTJoFrw) his other unique genre. Benjamin Zephaniah and the Imagined Village, ‘Tam Lyn Retold’, YouTube video (), www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYvgoBRbJO; for this work, Zephaniah won the Best Original Song in the Hancocks Talkawhile Awards for Folk Music; benjaminzephaniah.com/biography/? doing_wp_cron=.. Ronald Cummings, ‘Dub Pedagogies: An Interview with d’bi young anitafrika’, in Natalee Caple and Ronald Cummings (eds.), Harriet’s Legacies: Race Historical Memory and Futures in Canada (Montréal and Kingston: McGill– Queens University Press, forthcoming). Keith Shepherd is perhaps best known for the dubpoems ‘One A Dem Deh Yout Deh’ and ‘And She Danced’, both included among his five in his son’s book of dubpoems: Sheldon Shepherd, In the Morning Yah (Kingston: Pelican Publishers, ). The title of Keith’s first is there emended to ‘One A Them Youth Deh’, and the latter poem was featured in the movie Better Mus Come (). Shepherd, in the Acknowledgements of his book, calls his father his ‘favourite dub poet’ (ix). The description of the band comes from The No-Maddz’s Facebook site description: www.facebook.com/pg/thenomaddz/about/. Writing of mandiela’s theatre company, b current, Ric Knowles asserts, ‘Broadly diasporic in mandate, the company nevertheless began with [. . .] dub poetry, and with a landmark production of mandiela’s dark diaspora [. . .] in dub! [. . .] It also launched the Canadian careers of many key Afro-Caribbean artists, [including] d’bi.young anitafrika’; Ric Knowles, Performing the Intercultural City (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), . See jamila malika, ‘anitafrika dub theatre trailer’, YouTube video (), www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaWLqVmFp; and ‘The Anitafrika Method’, Anitafrika Retreat Centre, www.anitafrikaretreatcentre.com/the-method. Cherry Natural, ‘Share It Up’, in The Lyrical Contortionist (Kingston: Selfpublished, ), Kindle edition, unpaginated. The Watah Theatre, ‘Sorplusi Method Arts Based Health Intervention – BDWSHP’, YouTube video (), http://dbiyounganitafrika.com/the-anitafrika-method; and Karin, ‘The Turn Around Project (TAP) at Work in Jamaica’, yardedge.net (), www.yardedge.net/art/the-turn-around-projecttap-at-work-in-jamaica. See also www.thespec.com/news/hamilton-region/ ///gaining-voice-through-verse-poems-for-mental-health.html. Allen, ‘Black’, . Kwame Dawes, ‘Lillian Allen’, in Kwame Dawes (ed.), Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, ), –, . Allen, ‘Black’, . Ibid., .
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Donna P. Hope, Inna di Dancehall: Popular Culture and the Politics of Identity in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, ), . The No-Maddz, ‘Shotta’, prod. Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, YouTube video (), www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmPfDTOHI. Poem written by Keith Shepherd and The No-Maddz. Citations of lyrics are from the digital copy provided to me by The No-Maddz. For another example of this latter trope, see Lillian Allen’s ‘Rub-a-Dub Style inna Regent Park’, in Women Do This Every Day, . The No-Maddz, ‘Nuh Guh Deh’, prod. ‘Sly’ Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, dir. Kurt Knight, YouTube video (), www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RMCtLxNKnw. Poem written by Joy Crawford and the NoMaddz. Citations of lyrics are from the digital copy provided to me by The No-Maddz. Raymond Antrobus, ‘Award-Winning Poet Raymond Antrobus on Hearing, Seeing and Grieving through Verse’, Writers and Company, CBC Radio, June , updated June , www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcom pany/award-winning-poet-raymond-antrobus-on-hearing-seeing-and-griev ing-through-verse-.. Raymond Antrobus, ‘The Father of Dub Poetry – Linton Kwesi-Johnson’, Shapes and Disfigurements of Raymond Antrobus, blog post May , raymondantrobus.blogspot.com///. Words transcribed from Raymond Antrobus, ‘Haikus/Jamaican British’, YouTube video (), www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJfCKTOAbg, uploaded by Muddy Feet Poetry, punctuated and lineated from the version in Raymond Antrobus, The Perseverance (London: Penned in the Margins, ), –, . Subsequent references to this poem are, in the same ways as above, to these video and book versions. Raymond Antrobus, ‘Dear Hearing World’, YouTube video (), www .youtube.com/watch?v=A_SmbxEIgI. Subsequent references to this poem are to this video, which has alphabetic captioning. Danez Smith, ‘Dear White America’, YouTube video (), www.youtube .com/watch?v=LSpvxog. Allen, ‘Black’, . Klyde Broox, ‘wordsoundsystemengineering! Metadub and Creation’, in Caple and Cummings (eds.), Harriet’s Legacies. Klyde Broox, ‘Dubpoetriology! Dub, Poetry, & st Century “Neoliterary” E-Mergings’, in Sheri-D Wilson (ed.), The Spoken Word Workbook: Inspiration from Poets Who Teach (Banff: The Banff Centre Press, ), –, . Broox, ‘wordsoundsystemengineering!’, . Klyde Broox, ‘Under the Influence of Dub’, in My Best Friend Is White (Toronto: McGilligan Books, ), –, ; and ‘Reloading the Can(n)on’, in My Best Friend, . Klyde Broox, ‘A Dubpoet Declares’, in My Best Friend, –, . Broox, ‘Under the Influence of Dub’, .
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Klyde Broox, ‘The Revolution Has Changed’, in My Best Friend, –, . Here and elsewhere, I present midline slashes in -point font to distinguish them from the marking of line-endings. Klyde Broox, ‘Metanarrating Dubpoetry as WorldWideWordsounds of Global Communal Soul’, Hamilton Arts and Letters, . (–), unpaginated. Subsequent references to this performance essay are to this source. For an account of the revolutionary Caribbean environment from which dub emerged, see Brian Meeks, ‘Reading the Seventies in a Different Stylie: Dub, Poetry, and the Urgency of Message’, Small Axe, (), –. d’bi.young anitafrika, ‘revolushun (i)’, in dubbin poetry: the collected poems of d’bi.young anitafrika (Toronto: Spolrusie Publishing, ), –, , , . d’bi.young anitafrika, ‘Children of a Lesser God’, Vimeo video (), https://vimeo.com/; d’bi.young anitafrika, blood.claat = sangre, bilingual, trans. queen nzinga maxwell edwards (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, ). d’bi.young anitafrika, ‘gendah bendah’, in dubbin poetry, –, . Subsequent in-text reference to dubbin’s version given parenthetically. d’bi.young anitafrika, ‘gendah bendah’, featuring ngozi paul and lesedi moche, Vimeo video (), vimeo.com/. Allen, ‘A Sixth Sense in Performance’, , : d’bi.young anitafrika’, in Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars (eds.), More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (Montréal: Artexte Editions, ). Phanuel Antwi, ‘Dub Poetry as a Black Atlantic Body-Archive’, Small Axe, (), –, . I quote the dubbin version () of the phrases here to indicate anitafrika’s queered spelling. Kaie Kellough, ‘Word Sound System #’, in Maple Leaf Rag (Winnipeg: Arbiter Ring, ), –. Wayde Compton, ‘Illegalese: Floodgate Dub’, in Performance Bond (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, ), –, . Kaie Kellough, email attachment of answers to questions from the present author, July . Kellough, email attachment. Kellough, Maple Leaf Rag, . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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Postcolonial Ruins, Reconstructive Poetics: Caribbean Urban Imaginaries Christopher Winks
In , several weeks after the killings of three men on the grounds of the Marley Manor residential development in Kingston, Jamaica, the poet Kamau Brathwaite, who was living there at the time, was subjected to a pre-dawn home invasion where he was assaulted, tied up and gagged, and his dwelling was ransacked. Not long thereafter, he wrote Trench Town Rock (), a documentary poem placing his own traumatic experience within the larger context of pervasive violence in Jamaican society, with specific attention to ‘Kingston in the kingdoom of this world’. After a sequence of press quotations about the extent of the violence in Jamaica and an account of the funeral of one of the men murdered at Marley Manor, Brathwaite moves beyond the immediate situation to a sorrowful yet unflinching revelation of a collective, historically entrenched dance with death: So that these crimes we all embrace the victim & the violate the duppy & the gunman so close on these plantations still so intimate the dead undead. ()
Brathwaite’s jagged, collage approach to the ongoing ravages of urban violence reflects a longstanding concern with the Caribbean’s fragmented – now veering perilously towards broken – reality, and much recent urban literature from the region shares something of his anguished pessimism. His reference to ‘these plantations still’ points towards the persistence of endemic impoverishment and neocolonial domination, in which the ‘long twentieth-century’ dream of freedom and independence has been overwhelmed by globalized capital and its local enforcers. Urban areas have
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long been both witnesses and catalysts to this process; as Rivke Jaffe, Ad de Bruijne and Aart Schalkwijk point out: ‘From the beginning, Caribbean cities operated as loci of mediation and control, forming the link between the plantation and the motherland [. . . and] have long functioned as links between the centre and periphery.’ Sylvia Wynter develops this point with respect to the internal social tensions generated by the historic conflict in the Caribbean between plantation (‘a system owned and dominated by external forces’) and the Creole garden, conuco, or plot (‘the indigenous, autochtonous system’), ‘between the city which is the commercial expression of the plantation and the marginal masses, disrupted from the plot’. And writing early in the millennium, Édouard Glissant finds that ‘the Plantation is entangled with the cities, the city invades the Islands, which are muddled in turn, ethnicity with ethnicity’, creating a dense intercultural texture that defines Caribbean cities as incubators of cross-cultural interchange and creative innovation, as well as radical social consciousness (and unrest). Analysing selected Caribbean literary texts set in urban contexts, this essay aims to trace what Glissant has identified as ‘a literature of passage [. . .] which delineates [. . .] for each of us the slow mapping of those paths all of us are on: from the Plantation to the Metropolis’ (). In ‘Springblade’, an earlier poem first published in , Brathwaite depicts the bleakness of urban reality (Jamaican, specifically), enlivened only occasionally by intimations and atmospheric foreshadowings of a desired revolution. In the wake of the dashed hopes of postcoloniality, Brathwaite assumes the responsibility of his independence generation for turning its back on its children and refusing to educate them into an understanding of history and an appreciation of their cultural and natural ecologies, preferring instead to set them up here some to build crazy palaces imperial shops supermarkets that have become cages that have become prisons some to better their lives into hovels.
The imbalance between the rural and the urban has become compounded – as it has been worldwide with the metastases of ‘markets that have become cages’ and the related catastrophic consequences of climate change – to the point of intensifying long-term patterns of exodus from
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despoiled countrysides (another legacy of plantation monoculture) to shanty-towns in ever-overcrowding ‘strangled cities’ (to borrow an image from Guyanese poet Martin Carter) that in some cases have started spreading into the countryside. Brathwaite views all these phenomena in terms of waste and reduction, a foreclosing of possibilities. What Mike Davis says of urbanization in the global third world and the resultant emergence of a ‘planet of slums’ certainly applies to the Caribbean: ‘urbanization without growth [. . .] is [. . .] the legacy of a global political conjuncture – the worldwide debt crisis of the late s and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third World economies in the s’. In the case of post-revolutionary Cuba, the deterioration of the urban environment engendered by bureaucratic policies was aggravated by the country’s loss of subsidies following the implosion of its erstwhile economic patron, the Soviet Union. It should not be surprising, then, that much urban literature from the Caribbean should emphasize bleakness, foreclosed possibilities, and violence born out of desperation and lack of concrete alternatives. This can be seen in the representation of Kingston’s yards in Roger Mais’s The Hills Were Joyful Together (), the ‘Dungle’ in Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus () and Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (), Earl Lovelace’s Calvary Hill in The Dragon Can’t Dance (), Luis Rafael Sánchez’s San Juan of La Guaracha del Macho Camacho (), and the eponymous Fort-de-France bidonville of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (). Nor is it surprising that urban Caribbean narratives should be thoroughly permeated by an engagement with historical conjunctures seen as prefiguring or ushering in current crises, as they narrate a present in the long shadows of the past. In this literature, history often manifests itself in the form of ghosts, unquiet spirits betokening unresolved conflicts and unhealed social and psychic wounds. This uncanny spatiality of the city disrupts novelistic canons of realism and points towards submerged and often unacknowledged spiritual lifeways and traditions – invisible cities – that wrested themselves out of the harsh, centuries-long struggle against the oppressive constraints of the plantation and its modern offshoots. Katherine McKittrick states that ‘precisely because [the plantation] housed and historicizes racial violences that demanded innovative resistances, [it] stands as a meaningful conceptual palimpsest to contemporary cityscapes that continue to harbor the lives of the most marginalized’. Looking ahead to ‘plantation futures’ threatening a perpetuation of racialized domination and its attendant violence, McKittrick posits counter-hegemonic possibilities ‘underwritten by life, the poetic, the theoretical, and the
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creative’, wherein spaces of what Sylvia Wynter has termed ‘secretive histories’ forged and lived within a plantation context can reconstruct a solidary sense of place. Where the Caribbean urban novel is concerned, Wynter’s observation remains relevant: ‘In effect, the novel form and the novel is the critique of the very historical process that has brought it to such heights of fulfillment.’ Indeed, the novels and poems under discussion here – drawn from francophone, hispanophone and anglophone sources – speak with the eloquence that literature can bring to bear on the variegated textures of lived experience, crafting powerful social critiques. Moreover, by placing these texts in dynamic Relation (to borrow Édouard Glissant’s concept of ‘totality in evolution [. . .] what the world [here, the Caribbean world] makes and expresses of itself’), it becomes possible to tease out common themes, images, and preoccupations over and above linguistic and postcolonial separations. Such an analytical approach could thereby contribute in some small measure towards seeing the region as a whole, against what Brathwaite sees as ‘implosion deep within ourselves: hence spread of conflagration, rape, the rain of terror of the M-: an egg, it seems, that has no future issue’. Importantly, he follows this grim assessment with an assurance that ‘the fragmentations which [he has] been speaking of are very real and also, in a very real way, apparent only’. Much can be gained from attempting to poeticize (not to be confused with decorating) deprived realities in a way that draws on indigenous resources and practices and instantiates the plural, unfragmented, redeemed AllWorld of which Glissant speaks (‘the highest point of knowledge is always a poetics’). Contemporary Jamaican writers Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings) and Kei Miller (Augustown) open their works by giving voice to the restless dead (a strategy also followed by Guadeloupean writer Gerty Dambury): ‘the dead never stop talking and sometimes the living hear’. Their interrogations of the dead involve a necessary confrontation with history. Specific dates catalyse both texts. In James’s novel it is December , when Bob Marley (referred to throughout as ‘The Singer’) survived an assassination attempt at his home in Kingston. In Miller’s work, there are two significant dates: December , when the revival-Zion preacher Alexander Bedward attempted to fly in front of a crowd of thousands of followers in August Town, and April , when the tragic action – the ‘autoclaps’ – of the novel occurs. Marley and Bedward are the absent – binding and disaggregating – presences at the heart of these novels, generating both narrative and spiritual energy during their
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lives and after their deaths, while remaining opaque beings on whom other characters project their thoughts, emotions and memories. Bedward, the ‘flying preacher’, and Marley, ‘The Singer’, at once embody the liberatory dreams and aspirations of Jamaican sufferers at different historical moments and appear as iconic figures that both haunt and shape the urban ‘Babylonian’ imagery. One of James’s epigraphs, repeated at various points in the novel, is the Jamaican proverb ‘If it no go so, it go near so.’ If much of what surrounds the attempted killing of Bob Marley remains mysterious, James weaves together rumour, legend and imagination into a literary city of voices. These are largely male, with the significant exception of the shape-shifting witness and fugitive Nina Burgess. From James’s city of voices a picture of Kingston over three crucial decades evolves. The novel focuses on the post-independence ascendancy of garrison communities, which Rivke Jaffe has read in relation to the history of Maroon communities that developed outside of and yet in a certain symbiosis with the plantation world. In James’s work, these communities are ruled by area dons in the pay of one of the two contending Jamaican parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party. James’s novel offers an account of the spatialization of the city into political zones of conflict but also prompts a reflection on the ways in which the names of European cities recur in the Caribbean in his narration of space like ‘Copenhagen City’. The dons featured in the novel – Papa-Lo, Josey Wales and Shotta Sherrif – and their West Kingston strongholds – Copenhagen City and Eight Lanes – are thinly disguised portrayals of actual people and ghettos, easily identifiable to Jamaicans and readers of Laurie Gunst’s journalistic study Born Fi’ Dead. Both Papa-Lo and Josey Wales are ruthless killers – even as the former decides to take a quixotic step towards peace between the gangs, the latter has already planned to get rid of him and establish absolute power over Copenhagen City. James’s ‘near so’ – the fictional element – imagines a link to the Marley attack and its aftermath among all of them, narrativizing that moment as if it were a watershed in Jamaican postcolonial history, with Kingston (confirming here the truth of Peter Tosh’s ironic nickname for it, Killsome City) at its epicentre. The intricate network of CIA agents, arms dealers, terrorist Cuban exiles, Colombian drug traffickers and corrupt local politicians all have vested interests in utilizing Kingston and its posse leaders as pawns in their interlocking geopolitical, and indeed imperial, games. Much like in Gunst’s book, which begins in Kingston and shifts to New York (moving from ‘Babylon to Brooklyn’), Kingston, in James’s novel, is located
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within continental networks of movement and crime so that its borders and limits are transnational rather than local. James’s characters very consciously discuss their experience of Kingston in terms of constructed or made space. Josey Wales remarks: ‘In the ghetto there is no such thing as peace. [. . .] People in the ghetto suffer because there be people who live for making them suffer’ (). And indeed, Wales partakes of this Manichean logic by recruiting ghetto youth into his posses and feeding on and exploiting their individual vulnerabilities, fears, traumatic encounters with police, and resentments. Throughout the novel, James does not stint on depictions of the conditions that enabled the rise of the dons as a reaction to the power vacuum left by an indifferent postcolonial state – Papa-Lo describes McGregor Gully in East Kingston as a ‘hole [. . .] since Babylon don’t send garbage truck to the ghetto people get flooded with water, rubbish and shit. So much rubbish it turn into a wall of garbage’ (). Augustown, like A Brief History, blurs the line between fiction and history, and indeed questions official stories that are crowned as ‘historical’. ‘It would be no exaggeration to say that every day contains all of history’, declares the omniscient narrator-ghost from on high. By maintaining the ‘unities’ – focusing on a single day in a single community, which Miller characterizes as ‘parallel’ to the actual August Town, and a relatively small cast of characters – the novel allows more room for a tragic dimension, admirably summarized by David Scott, through Hegel, as that which ‘inheres in the elementary fact that while we can initiate action, we cannot entirely calculate or control its final outcome’. Miller describes Augustown as a village swamped by ‘the endless wave of the city. [. . .] To its own surprise, the village found that it was no longer five miles from the city, but on its edge and then comfortably inside it’ (). Like James, Miller simultaneously calls attention to a lack of urban planning while also highlighting the making of the city. With urban metastasis comes increased class differentiation similar to the disjuncture in Kingston between ‘downtown’ and ‘uptown’ – here characterized as a middle-class-devised distinction between ‘inner city’ and ‘suburbs’ – and the presence of gunmen and aggravated poverty. It is, then, an urban microcosm of Jamaica’s long twentieth century. Drawing on the significance of this organization of space and its implications for narrative, the ‘more urgent question’ that demands consideration, according to Miller’s narrator addressing a putatively middle-class reader, is ‘not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in’ (). Indeed, the novel shows the ways in which
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communities and lives previously separated by class and (relatedly) geography become, often inadvertently, mutually entangled – an unintended consequence of urban sprawl. The ultimate porosity of class barriers in Augustown is exemplified by the tragic fate of the gifted young workingclass woman Gina, whose son is the product of a liaison with the scion of the well-off ‘uptown’ woman who unknowingly later hires her as a domestic helper, encourages her educational aspirations and yet becomes a helpless witness to the aftermath of the girl’s violent death at the hands of the police. A year after the fictitious events of narrated in Augustown, the poet Michael Smith was stoned to death in Kingston, allegedly by JLP supporters, though he was equally contemptuous of the ‘politricks’ played by both parties. The refrain of his poem ‘I and I Alone’, where he purposely scrambles the Biblical myth and compares himself to a ‘Goliath with a sling-shot’ is, like many of his poems, unavoidably rife with macabre anticipation given his violent death. More importantly in this context, though, the poem itself is a dramatically vibrant, politically charged view of a market – a major point of convergence for impoverished city dwellers from the perspective of a solitary walker. As Honor-Ford Smith points out, Mikey Smith’s work can be read in relation to a practice of walking the city. In the report on his death offered by journalist John Maxwell, Smith is said to have told those who stoned him, when confronted by their policing of political boundaries, ‘I man free to walk anywhere in this I-land.’ FordSmith reads his work in relation to the concept of ‘geographic imagination’ (). She argues that Smith’s poetry ‘established connection to “dutty”, to ground, to earth, but then continuously narrates and laments the loss of locality, alienation, exclusion [. . .] As he moves through, or alternately sits in the landscape, he renders urban dispossession, eviction, homelessness, observing short scenes’ (). In ‘I and I Alone’, he shapes what he encounters and hears in the chaotic clash of voices around him (street cries, flirtations, begging, invective, quarrels, hymns, political arguments) into an indictment of capitalist society and its ultimately murderous culture of commodification as experienced and suffered by those it impoverishes: Everybody a try to sell something, everybody a try fi grab something, everybody a try to hustle something, everybody a try to kill something. but ting and ting mus ring and only a few can sing cause them naw face de same sinting.
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The poet recognizes that chronic necessity drives people to confront each other – buyers and sellers alike need to feed their families – and that the unending battle to survive cannot ultimately be alleviated by either religious faith or love ‘jus fi figet this moment of poverty’ (). ‘Party politics play de trick’ on a friend of his who was murdered, and when asked ‘Hi, lady, you believe in Socialism?’, a woman in the crowd retorts, ‘No, sah, me believe in social livin’ (). Smith shows how poverty both stimulates and diffuses the energies of the street; even as the witnessing, meditative poet seeks to protect himself from the pressures of Babylon, he recognizes that scrounging ten cents makes it possible for him to ‘get no sentence’, i.e., to avoid criminal activity (). Yet the poet’s observation about ‘de people-dem’ earlier in the poem remains an imperative for a more radical future: ‘dem mus aspire fi something better / although dem dungle-heap ketch a fire’ (), mirroring Brathwaite’s prophecy in ‘Springblade’ that ‘[. . .] there’s goin to be revolution / the yout talk about it all day long’. The transformative longing that both poets have gleaned from the urban streets are not easily reduced to a mere historical footnote from the Jamaican s; if the plantation has afterlives, so too does its counterpoetics, and the dream of ‘something better’ and ‘revolution’ continues to haunt the present day with its as-yet-unredeemed possibilities. The dystopic (pre- earthquake) Port-au-Prince described in Gary Victor’s novel Á l’angle des rues parallèles (At the Corner of Parallel Streets) is a place where nobody aspires to anything beyond violence of one kind or another and whatever share of power to which they can possibly cling. History becomes a meaningless weight, a testament to an illusory independence where all are still subject to the dictates of outside powers which they are either incapable of resisting or indecently eager to placate, deceive, and ultimately comply with. Éric, the novel’s anti-heroic protagonist, is a functionary who has lost his job as a result of the IMF-dictated structural adjustment policies implemented by the second Jean-Bertrand Aristide presidency. In the novel, Aristide himself is grotesquely caricatured as the monstrous, God-slaying ‘Élu’, the Elected or Chosen One, another in the endless line of Haitian misrulers with pretensions to omnipotence. In a desperate desire for revenge, Éric embarks on a killing and marauding spree through the streets of the city, which turns into a kind of absurdist Pilgrim’s Regress. It could be said that with his use of hallucinatory exaggerations and virtually terminal pessimism, Victor, as a writer, is trying to exorcise the historical, social and economic evils besetting Haiti, in which he acknowledges the defining role of outside interests without letting their domestic
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enforcers off the hook. His introduction describes the novel as a warning, but the verve with which he piles on outrage upon atrocity upon horror perhaps indicates a certain glee in holding the distorted, non-reflecting mirror up to a degraded reality. The novel’s psycho(tic)geography reflects the generalized degradation of city, people and country, and is well summarized by the novel’s title, which appears in a poem written by Éric’s cocaine-addicted cousin, later murdered: ‘The solution to the mystery of the perpetual captives is to be found at the corner of parallel streets.’ In his obsessive quest, Éric provides jaundiced descriptions of Port-au-Prince’s squalor: a day in the city is characterized as ‘leprous [. . .] stinking because of the refuse swept along by the water from the latest downpour [. . .] cursed by the hordes of unemployed thronging the streets in search of their daily bread’ (), and further: ‘The impression left by this chaos was that life had sounded the retreat’ (). Formerly well-off areas like Pétionville are surrounded by slums and peopled by refugees from the ravaged countryside. Disgust and hatred appear to be the only possible responses to this crisis: ‘Land where we greet people for fear of the other, land of reciprocal and eternal hatred, prison-land, land of contempt, sirensong land, dream-aborting land’ (). A bizarre twofold plague invades the city: all the mirrors gradually cease to reflect (a sign that the population has become zombified) and the alphabets start reversing themselves (so everything written will be illegible). As he works himself up into a homicidal rage while walking the streets of Port-au-Prince, Gary Victor’s character Éric passes the Presidential Palace: The one and only public building in the country that’s maintained! When everything led back to the exercise of power for power’s sake, it was really necessary to give its supreme symbol a clean, modern appearance, even if a few kilometers away, the cankerous slums of the Fort-National district were spewing out their misery. ()
In the event, this palace was destroyed in the earthquake, as if to indicate the potential transitoriness of power and its architectural symbols. But if disasters like earthquakes expose glaring social inequalities, particularly in urban areas, governmental neglect of such areas, when made into de facto policy, can have comparable (if less overtly spectacular) adverse effects on the texture of civic life. Following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in , which promised to transform Cuba into a democratic, equitable society, the city of Havana, where the most difficult and dangerous work of the
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insurrectionary movement was carried out, was, in the words of architectural critic Emma Álvarez Tabio-Albo, ‘opportunely identified [by Fidel Castro and his comrades] with the corruption of Republican governments and the vices of the “American way of life”’. Álvarez Tabio-Albo sees this attitude as part of ‘an antiurban revolution [where] the “new man” was converted into a version of the “noble savage”. Ignoring the traditional model of civic coexistence, the city was utilized as if it were a provisional encampment, with all the consequences for the city’s conservation that this implied’ (). Antonio José Ponte’s four-part essay La fiesta vigilada (The Surveilled Party) devotes much attention to the phenomenon of ruins, specifically in Havana, which he uses as a field study in what he calls ‘ruinology’. He recalls reading somewhere about ‘miraculous stasis’ as exemplified by ‘Havana buildings still standing despite the fact that the most elementary laws of physics would require their collapse’, and half of the buildings in the densely populated Central Havana area fit that description. Buildings have been divided and subdivided into dwelling spaces, and the combination of lack of maintenance and structural tensions have led to several collapses, sometimes in chain reactions, particularly after heavy rains: ‘Walled-up balconies, roofed-over patios, improvised partitions: architecture undertakes the path of internal exile, closes in on itself, and ends up devouring its possibilities: to encounter itself as a ruin’ (). Ponte describes a situation where residents of one building in imminent danger of collapse refused to leave, eluding the visits of authorities charged with getting them into a shelter, with the inevitable result that all were buried under rubble: ‘They maintained, while possible, a desperate defense of intimacy. They preferred living in danger to lowering themselves to the promiscuity of a shelter where they would never leave’ (). Weeks later, the vacant space was cleared and turned into a parking lot, a standard practice which, as Ponte wryly notes, ‘every clearing produced by a building collapse aspires less to be filled than to extend itself, and if the Cuban capital extends itself at all, it is towards its leveling’ (). Ponte’s Havana is a sad and austere city, but only insofar as its inhabitants are trapped by their spiritual as well as material scarcity. By turning their back on the constraints of normal everyday life, where ‘we’re a pair of numbers in a column’, the two protagonists of Abilio Estévez’s novel Los Palacios distantes (Distant Palaces) are able to glean fragments of meaning and beauty. Also set during the Special Period (specifically on the eve of the new millennium), Los Palacios distantes depicts Havana in a more romantic light, as if its magic persisted even (or perhaps especially) amidst deprivation. Havana at dawn is shown to convey two
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images of itself: ‘a city awaiting the slightest shower, the merest blast of wind, to disintegrate into a heap of stones [. . .] and a sumptuous and eternal city, newly built, erected as a concession to future immortality. Havana is never the same and it is always the same’ (). Nightfall marks the beginning of ‘Havana’s rapid process of disappearance. They cut off the electricity. Life appears to be suspended, or it really is suspended, time stands still. Waiting is all there is’ (). By night, Havana ‘has little or nothing to do with the city of the severe mornings, of the unbearable, humid, violent middays [. . .] here, at intervals are the windows and the lights’ (). The male protagonist, Victorio, is forced to leave his room in a former palace long since subdivided into single-room occupancies – an example of Ponte’s ‘miraculous stasis’ – when the authorities decide to demolish it. He subsequently quits his job for a life on the streets. The routes of his characters’ peregrinations are meticulously and lovingly chronicled, as are street names and buildings. It is as if there is still a ‘real Havana’ – the ‘distant palaces’ of the book’s title – somewhere to be dreamed, or found, or shaped. For Silvia, the narrator of Rita Indiana Hernández’s novella La Estrategía de Chochueca (Chochueca’s Strategy), who drifts through presentday Santo Domingo, the first city of the Caribbean and the launching pad for the colonial/imperial enterprise in the Caribbean, the terrain of action is daily life, whose adventurous possibilities she is constantly seeking out, alone or with others (as she puts it, ‘I was seventeen and unbearably bored’). No mere thrill-seeker, however, Silvia possesses a disabused intelligence (she speaks of her ‘style of making literature with my mouth closed’ []). Politically cynical, especially after learning that a friend’s father, a former revolutionary, is now working with the government, she remarks that ‘everything’s a lie, we all want a little Japanese car and a swimming pool’ (), though of course she has little chance to get either. Cultivating a cool pose fuelled in no small measure by the Valium and Diazepam she steals from her grandmother’s medicine cabinet, Silvia moves with seeming effortlessness through an urban youth subculture where rich and poor mingle in house parties where the pleasures of drugs, alcohol and sex are freely bestowed and indulged. She describes her wanderings in the company of her friend Salim – ‘when we were together the day shook off the dust and turned into an enormous firefly on which you and I traversed the city in perfect, pointless circles, prying into the labyrinth of crap that is Santo Domingo’ () – and finds a perfect moment in the Parque de la Independencia at : pm (‘all it takes is certain visionary qualities’, as long as the walker follows a specific
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trajectory, meticulously set forth in the text). As Silvia puts it, ‘The mere action of walking offers inevitable possibilities, you walk without thinking you’re walking’ (). But what could be superficially seen as aimless hedonism takes on a different signification when the violence of Santo Domingo is considered: the novella’s opening sentence is ‘Somebody was killed outside’; this somebody turns out to be a youth crushed, eviscerated and dragged by a beer delivery truck. Later, she recalls a high-speed car ride with a friend who hit something and accelerated away from the scene (that same friend, involved in the criminal underworld, will later vanish from her life, most likely murdered for having run afoul of someone in that world). Another friend of hers gets his face slashed by a jealous girlfriend (who calls later to apologize). Her wealthy friend Franco, who hosts the various raves and parties and has a penchant for rough trade, is brutally beaten and hospitalized by one of his tricks, and when she goes to visit him, she finds him sleeping and momentarily imagines dispatching him with one blow of the bedside vase. She has already put on his slippers, which according to the urban legend that gives the book its title makes her an incarnation of Chochueca, a crazy old man who begs mourners for dead men’s clothes. Silvia’s restless quest for experiences becomes another variation on the adage that what matters most is not to die ‘in this shitty underdevelopment’ (), and there is something about her self-aware indifference that goes well beyond such facile words as ‘transgressive’ – whatever the city places in her path, she will go along with, while keeping her thoughts active and to herself. Indiana’s novella pushes individual response to the Caribbean city to the point where radical refusal of conventional social expectations breaks through into outright disaffiliation and a consequent search for other ways of living in the present, with the awareness that all those who embark on that search are being shadowed on every street corner by Chochueca, ever eager to swoop down on them and beg for their clothes. Gerty Dambury’s novel Les Retifs (The Restless, ), which focuses on a workers’ strike in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, crushed by the (French) authorities, would appear to have little in common with Indiana’s. However, the two texts could be considered as complementary explorations of socially fostered ‘restlessness’: Silvia’s individual revolt involves in its way as much courage as the workers of Guadeloupe acting together – it is just that she lacks recourse to a narrative of collective resistance capable of convincing her, especially as the memory of past revolts has hardened into adaptive conformity. Both novels are shadowed
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by violent death, and the dead are presences, more dramatically in Dambury’s novel in that their voices emanate from a level equal to the living, but Silvia also invokes them through Chochueca and her nightmares. Most importantly, what is at stake in these texts is daily life and its possible transformation. The Guadeloupean May could be seen as anticipating the May revolt in the metropole one year later, but precisely because it occurred in the ‘periphery’ and as such was drowned in blood (compare the few killed in the French May to the more than deaths in Guadeloupe), memory of the strike and massacre was repressed by the authorities (compare again the ongoing deluge of analyses of May with the virtual silence surrounding the Guadeloupean ). Dambury’s novel is an act of resurrecting the unremembered, so it is logical that she would enlist the dead in that endeavour and place at its heart the preternaturally wise, imaginative seven-year-old Émilienne, who speaks for all when she declares: ‘I have no name, I have no face.’ It is the literary equivalent of the ‘memory walks’ organized by labour and community activists as a means of conscientization in the movement that culminated in the general strike; on these walks, as described by Yarimar Bonilla, spaces of history are brought into relation with each other and reinvested with the urgency of the present: ‘During these events participants are remade as both subjects and agents of history. History spirals around them, shivers through them, and leaves them with the distinct feeling that they were there. This certainty about the past in turn fuels their hope of the possibility of a new collective future.’ Likewise, Dambury’s narrative renders the past immediately present; the strike movement of is rescued from imposed forgetting and implicitly points proleptically toward the events (when Émilienne will have become a mature woman helping those younger than she to situate themselves in the past of struggle). Émilienne is another avatar of Legba, who often takes the form of a child. She waits in the courtyard of her home for her father to return from the violence she has earlier witnessed and fled from, positioning herself at the crossroads between life and death and invoking the dead she has personally known in full awareness that many have died that day. She opens the way for the other voices to enter, which they do through the quadrille (a dance which organizes the movement of the novel), described by one of the dead, the old woman Nono, as ‘a perfect example of a group living in harmony’ (). The voices also travel into spaces beyond Pointeà-Pitre – rural spaces, smaller towns – and past times. Not all is
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harmonious in the quadrille, which in any case is by design not conventionally organized; the dead interrupt the accounts of the living, introducing the textures of the distant and recent past into the present. The action and characters converge on the central Place de la Victoire, which has become an open forum for discussion during the strike movement and will become the scene of the police assault on the strikers. As he enters the realm of the dead, one of those killed by a stray bullet, Émilienne’s uncle, remembers a story his mother had told him about popular rage in response to an act of injustice perpetrated by the police: ‘the sound of the people’s fury [. . .] arose from the corners of the land because our words travel faster than telegrams. Because our words are like the earth’s words’ (). Like the ‘memory walks’, which join city and countryside in a single movement of recovered insurgent traditions, the strike moves outward, beyond the city of its staging, into the length and breadth of the island. But the intention that the chorus of quadrille callers states at the novel’s conclusion remains an open-ended demand for truth: ‘We’ll wait until someone explains all this to us. [. . .] We’ll wait for the finale of the finale. For this dance to end’ (). If this dance of living and dead did not necessarily end in with the general strike (which spread to Martinique and Guyane, the other French Caribbean départements-d’outre-mer before a settlement was reached), it was unquestionably and productively interrupted – even to the point of sketching the steps of an entirely new dance of and in freedom. Bonilla notes that ‘even movements that fail at eradicating the injustices they seek to overcome can still manage to have transformative consequences. Indeed, one could argue that they can effectively change the world by radically altering the possibilities imaginable for it’ (). If to name systemic historical injustice and to anatomize its effects on daily life and individual and collective psyches in a continually urbanizing region already implies an attempt at redress, then – keeping all due proportion in mind – the literary texts discussed in this essay, for all their differences of style, approach and intention, can be said to partake of the long-range transformative potential that Bonilla sees in movements like the general strike in Guadeloupe (and which reappeared in the mass demonstrations in Puerto Rico that unseated a corrupt governor). McKittrick, referencing the poet Dionne Brand, speaks of developing a decolonial, indeed reconstructive, poetics founded in a ‘new math-space’ that could potentially counteract the unending statistics of violent urban death, ‘where the calculus of human actions and cooperative human efforts encounter poetry to reinvent the unambiguous dead-end culmination that
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is so often coupled with analyses of violence’. In the face of continuing urban devastation and impoverishment in the Caribbean, wagering on such a poetics – as expressed both in literary works and in the various theatres of daily life, from home to street to school to workplace – is the first step to its actualization.
Notes Kamau Brathwaite, Trench Town Rock (Providence, RI: Lost Roads, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Rivke Jaffe, Ad de Bruijne and Aart Schalkwijk, ‘The Caribbean City: An Introduction’, in Rivke Jaffe (ed.), The Caribbean City (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers / Leiden: KITLV Press, ), –, . Sylvia Wynter, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’, SAVACOU, (), –, . Édouard Glissant, La Cohée du Lamentin: Poétique V (Paris: Gallimard, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Springblade’, in Black + Blues (New York: New Directions, ), –, . Martin Carter, ‘Not Hands Like Mine’, in Selected Poems (Georgetown, Guyana: Red Thread Women’s Press, ), . Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New York: Verso, ), . Katherine McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, Small Axe, (), –, . Wynter, ‘Novel and History’, . Ibid., . Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), , . Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Missile and Capsule’, in Ju¨rgen Martini (ed.), Missile and Capsule (Bremen: No publisher, ), –, –. Ibid., –. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, . Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings (New York: Riverhead, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Rivke Jaffe, ‘From Maroons to Dons: Sovereignty, Violence and Law in Jamaica’, Critique of Anthropology, . (), –. Peter Tosh, ‘Peace Treaty’, Mama Africa (EMI America, ). Laurie Gunst, Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey through the Jamaica Posse Underworld (New York: Henry Holt & Co., ), . Kei Miller, Augustown (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Honor Ford-Smith, ‘The Ghost of Mikey Smith: Space, Performance and Justice’, Caribbean Quarterly, .– (), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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Michael Smith, ‘I and I Alone’, in, It a Come, ed. Mervyn Morris (San Francisco: City Lights, ), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Brathwaite, ‘Springblade’, . Gary Victor, Á l’angle des rues parallèles (Châteauneuf-le-Rouge: Vents d’ailleurs, ), (my translation). Subsequent references given parenthetically. Emma Álvarez Tabio-Albo, Invención de La Habana (Barcelona: Casiopea, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Antonio José Ponte, La fiesta vigilada (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, ), (my translation). Subsequent references given parenthetically. Abilio Estévez, Los Palacios distantes (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Rita Indiana Hernández, La Estrategía de Chochueca, (San Juan and Santo Domingo: Isla Negra Editores, ), (my translation). Subsequent references given parenthetically. Gerty Dambury, The Restless, trans. Judith G. Miller (New York: Feminist Press, ), . Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. McKittrick, ‘Plantation Futures’, .
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Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction Rebecca Romdhani
Jamaican-Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson is often attributed with beginning a dialogue about anglophone Caribbean speculative fiction when discussing her novels Brown Girl in the Ring () and Midnight Robber () in interviews. She comments, It is important to me to be identified as a writer of speculative fiction, perhaps because it feels like claiming my share of space in a literature that has largely not represented me. [. . .] If black people can imagine our futures, imagine – among other things – cultures in which we aren’t alienated, then we can begin to see our way clear to creating them.
Hopkinson also played an important role in conceiving and presenting this field through her edited collection Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (). Her inclusion of new lesser-known writers such as Grenadian Tobias S. Bucknell, who later became renowned in science fiction literary circles due to his futuristic Xenowealth Series (Crystal Rain [], Ragamuffin [], Sly Mongoose [] and The Apocalypse Ocean []), was a significant gesture. Equally important was Hopkinson’s decision to gather some of the most established writers in the Caribbean canon under this rubric, including Guyanese Wilson Harris, Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid and Jamaican Olive Senior. As Bajan writer Karen Lord posits in her foreword to the collection New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean (), the works of writers such as Kincaid, Guyanese Edgar Mittelholzer and Jamaican Erna Brodber have always contained speculative elements. This, as I will argue, is a claim that can be extended to much of Caribbean literature. Lord catalogues speculative texts as those employing ‘science fiction, fantasy, and several other subgenres of improbable what-ifs’. Although speculative fiction is a relatively new term, older gothic texts should not be forgotten under the remit of the speculative because the Caribbean has a long history of gothic literature, including multi-genre works, and many
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recent texts rework these older gothic writings. Likewise, ‘speculative’ also needs to be recognized as magical realist in a Caribbean context. As Brodber explains in her essay ‘Beyond the Boundary: Magical Realism in the Jamaican Frame of Reference’ (), Caribbean writers, unlike Latin American writers, have traditionally not been encouraged by publishers to produce magic realist narratives, as these publishers have preferred writers to ‘fill the gaps created by the absence of a Sociology and History of the English-Speaking Caribbean’, even though the Caribbean is full of tales of the supernatural and magic, with the result that ‘the tale of the flying human and by extension magical realism exists in the Jamaican mind’. A notable exception in this regard is Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock (), along with his other works, which were categorized as magical realism as early as , and accepted as such by the s. However, one has to wonder whether the geographical setting of Guyana, both Caribbean and South American, aided this early recognition. The main objectives of this essay are to establish the abundance of speculative fiction in the region, outline the diversity of genres and subgenres that writers use, and encourage readers to rethink generic categories. To this end, this essay will be divided into broad generic categories and themes, rather than charting a chronological path, and it will begin with the gothic, move on through magic realism, folklore, science fiction and young adult fiction to conclude with two works that exemplify Caribbean speculation. This exploration will also involve linguistic and other borders as many speculative texts interact with those written in another language. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (), contends that it is through the gothic that the Caribbean first ‘learned to “read” itself in literature’ and ‘address the violence of colonial conditions’, using the tropes of brutality, Caribbean religions, and rebellions (–). She also maintains that later texts that rework – and thus are haunted by – the English gothic novels Jane Eyre () and Wuthering Heights () should also be classified as Caribbean gothic: Dominican Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (); Trinidadian V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas (); Jamaican Michelle Cliff’s Abeng () and No Telephone to Heaven (); Puerto Rican Rosario Ferré’s Sweet Diamond Dust (, trans. ); and Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother () (). This list would also now include Kittitian-British Caryl Phillips’s rewriting of Wuthering Heights in The Lost Child (). An early example of rewriting and the gothic is Jamaican H. G. de Lisser’s The White Witch of Rose Hall (), which rewrites rumours about Rose Hall in Jamaica and recalls Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le
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Fanu’s vampire novella Carmilla (). The narrative is told from the perspective of English Robert Rutherford, who works on Irish-born and Haitian-raised Annie Palmer’s plantation in Jamaica on the eve of emancipation. Paravisini-Gebert argues that Annie is a soucouyant figure – a vampire who sheds her skin at night and flies as a fireball to suck people’s blood. The novel culminates in a supernatural battle between Annie and the African Obeah man Takoo. De Lisser’s novel shares many features with Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute: A Ghost Story in the OldFashioned Manner (). Set in post-slavery Guyana, Mittelholzer’s novel features characters that must battle against angry spirits in order to give a proper Christian burial to a cruel plantation owner killed by his slaves in an uprising. The novel ‘speculates’ about an imaginative type of truth and reconciliation committee, whereby the oppressors and the oppressed redress past wrongs to transcend the hauntings of the past and open up possible futures. A contemporary novel from the francophone Caribbean that combines the gothic with folklore, magic realism and mystery, and that uses Shelley’s Frankenstein () as an intertext, is Guadeloupian Maryse Condé’s Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale (, trans. ). Set in Ivory Coast, Guadeloupe, French Guiana and Peru, the narrative alternates between those opposing the seemingly demonic/soucouyant Célanire and Célanire’s own quest for vengeance. While this woman from Guadeloupe, who is possessed by spirits, battles against female genital mutilation and protects young girls in an orphanage in Ivory Coast, she also turns the orphanage into a brothel and argues that Black women can hold colonization in check by having sexual relationships with white men, thus making these men see Africa differently. Eventually the reader discovers that Célanire is the child of Chinese orphans, sold as a baby to a white planter who sought political power through magic involving the sacrifice of a baby. Célanire’s mission is to avenge herself but the somewhat baffling complexities and contradictions in her character cause the reader to question the difference between vengeance and justice, how they may impact and complicate anticolonialism, feminism, and queer ideologies in the narrative, and why, after Célanire has completed her task and the spirits leave her, this exceptional woman becomes unexceptional. Jamaican Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil () follows in a similar vein to the novels by Condé, de Lisser and Mittelholzer. Here, though, the spiritual battle is between the seemingly newly arrived self-proclaimed Apostle who practises dark magics and the town’s pastor, the Rum preacher. Like Condé’s Célanire, the Apostle initially appears to be a
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mysterious outsider, but it turns out that he is originally from the town and has come back to wreak vengeance on all those who turned a blind eye to the sexual abuse he suffered as a young boy. Lucinda, the Apostle’s obeah-practising female sidekick, resembles Célanire as she has been a victim of physical and psychological violence and seeks vengeance. Moreover, Lucinda, like a soucouyant, has the ability to fly. Under the authority of both a paedophile and an inebriated Preacher, Gibbeah is a place that allows all forms of sexual violence to thrive, under a veneer of respectability preserved by silence. The Apostle’s arrival turns this ideology on its head by sanctioning heterosexuality, and publicly punishing adultery and bestiality. He provokes the town’s people into unleashing their inner violence publicly, and others, as a consequence of his actions, wake up from their inertia to engage in a spiritual battle against him. The fact that the Apostle’s dystopian society is less violent than the previous repressive environment of the preacher forces the reader to acknowledge the normalized violence that heterocolonialist structures would rather conceal. A Cuban novel that also uses the gothic and magic realism is Daína Chaviano’s The Island of Eternal Love (, trans. ). Chaviano’s novel, in two parts, draws on folkloric figures. One narrative resembles a supernatural detective story and follows the Cuban immigrant Cecilia’s attempts to uncover the truth about a ghost house that moves around Miami – a task that forces her to confront Cuba’s past. A political perspective is interwoven into the gothic element by making the ghost house appear on dates that are said to be unlucky for Cuba, including Fidel Castro’s date of birth and the triumph of the revolution. Castro also is depicted in gothic terms, as the Grim Reaper. The second section is a collection of stories told to Cecilia in a Cuban bar by Amalia, an old Cuban woman, who later turns out to be a ghost. Amalia tells the stories of her family who derive from Nigeria and Spain, as well of those of her husband Pag Li’s family who come from China; these are stories of enslavement, indentureship and migration that also involve folkloric entities. Through Cecilia’s investigation and Amalia’s stories, Cecilia slowly begins to reconcile with her Cuban heritage, appreciate its diversity and believe in a better future for Cuba, which can only be achieved through listening to the voices of the now invisible past. The theme of reconnecting to a splintered heritage in a wider diasporic collective with the help of spirits also informs Brodber’s Louisiana (). Ella, the protagonist, is a young anthropologist who makes contact with Mama, an old African American woman in Louisiana who soon after dies. Ella records her anthropological interviews on a tape recorder, and later
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discovers the voices of Mama’s husband and her Jamaican friend Lowelly on the recording. The tape recorder enables Ella to listen to the voices of the dead and to transcribe them for the present as part of the healing process that ancestral reconnection offers, and its status as an instrument of research becomes emblematic of the need to understand the ways in which historical voices need to be heard through the present. This novel, like The Island of Eternal Love, depicts bodies and spirits transcending and defying geographical borders between the Caribbean and the USA to become a part of a collective spiritual family. The folkloric tradition in Caribbean speculative fiction, and specifically the fish woman (whether a mermaid or a spirit that derives from West Africa, such as Mami Wata, or from Haitian Vodou, such as LaSiren), surfaces in The Water between Us () by Jamaican-American Shara McCallum. In a section of poems dedicated to this figure and combining the Caribbean mermaid with European and Hindu legends, McCallum explores topics as diverse as mother and daughter relationships, tourism and the legacy of slavery. These same themes are explored in Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (), which Caribbeanizes the Celtic myths of the seal-like Selkie to also thematize current pressing ecological concerns. Adapting folklore from other continents is common within Caribbean speculative fiction. Lord’s Redemption in Indigo () combines the European fairy tale genre, Senegalese folktales and spirits called djombi, one of whom is a trickster spider figure who resembles Anancy. When asked in an interview where djombis come from, Lord replies, ‘They were inspired by every myth. Jumbies. Djinni. Wood, water, earth and animal spirits in mythologies around the world. And quantum mechanics.’ However, in another interview the same year, Lord states: Don’t get distracted by the talking animals, the deathless beings, the Object of Power and the other staples of fantasy that I’ve added to Paama’s story. Redemption in Indigo is a novel which celebrates ordinary people and everyday magic, because sometimes all it takes to be a heroine is to choose wisely, walk softly and carry a small Stick.
Here we can see Lord’s elevation of the potential of ordinary women over the genealogy of the spirits at work that corresponds to the novel’s insistence on human empowerment. Indeed, in this novel, it is not the supernatural that empowers a mortal, but it is Paama’s human compassion, loyalty and duty to others that inspire the Indigo Lord – and the reader.
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Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction
In Consuming the Caribbean (), sociologist Mimi Sheller discusses the historical and political dimensions of tales about cannibals, vampires and zombies to argue that these relate to the ways in which the Caribbean has been eaten by Western consumers: ‘The ingestion of embodied commodities (such as slaves, scenic labourers, service workers, and sex workers), apparent “intimacy” operates not as a relation of responsibility towards others, but as an unethical relation of violent domination.’ Giselle Liza Anatol’s The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diasporas () extends Sheller’s work to investigate vampires in Caribbean, African American and Black British narratives, including Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring and her short story ‘Greedy Choke Puppy’ in Skin Folk (), as well as Trinidadian-Canadian David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (). Anatol also expands the speculative horizon through allusions to the soucouyant in less obvious works, such as Trinidadian-Canadian Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here (), Trinidadian-Canadian Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night () and Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (), to highlight how the soucouyant consistently provokes questions of female agency and often symbolizes gendered violence and trauma. The last figure Sheller discusses, the zombie, both features in Caribbean literature and has also been deployed by American and European authors and filmmakers to demonize the Caribbean, especially Haiti. Sheller argues that in the Caribbean the zombie’s history derives from the memory of slavery and US occupation, and later this came to symbolize that cultural discourses in the USA blamed Haitians for HIV. Paravisini-Gebert argues that the zombie narratives by Haitian writers – Jacques-Stephen Alexis’s short story ‘Chronique d’un faux amour’ () and René Depestre’s novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves () – are gothic narratives that intertwine ‘zombification and the erotic’, and advance ‘a critique of colonization’. In anglophone literature, the term zombification is often connected to Brodber’s Myal (), even though this novel is rarely classified as speculative fiction. Here the zombie is a figure of mental colonization: ‘Taken their knowledge of their original and natural world away from them and left them empty shells – duppies, zombies, living dead capable only of receiving orders from someone else and carrying them out.’ Like other Jamaican novels, the book features a battle between two forces (here between the new zombie makers and the African spirits along with an English woman who has joined them) fighting for the spirits of two young girls, Anita and Ella. After being zombified by a white
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American who turned her life into a minstrel show, Ella is healed during a Myal ritual involving the whole community. At the end of the novel, Ella joins league with the spirits and directs her own fight against the zombiemaking colonial education system. Anita’s violation involved a spiritual rape; consequently the fight for her mind, body and spirit also involves a form of penetration and possession: Anita, an African spirit in the body of a female Kumina leader, and the Jamaican ex-constable who violated her, enter each other’s bodies during this battle, which once again symbolizes how identity is porous, but in this instance it depicts the self as a we-self – a self in community. In Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, set in a near-future dystopian Toronto, the zombie is joined by other Caribbean folkloric figures such as the soucouyant and the Jab-jab from Caribbean carnival. The main story line revolves around the protagonist, Ti-Jeanne, who, together with her Vodou-practising grandmother, battles against Ti-Jeanne’s drug-dealing, zombie-making, Vodou-practising grandfather. In the novel the zombie is used as a metaphor for drug addiction, capitalism, sexual commodification and emotional colonization. Puerto Rican writer Pedro Cabiya’s novel Wicked Weeds: A Zombie Novel (trans. ), set in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, makes overt the link between zombification and emotional being. If, in Brown Girl, TiJeanne is at risk of becoming a zombie, in Wicked Weeds the main character is seemingly a zombie from the beginning, but at the end of the book the reader discovers (via the detectives investigating his murder) that he may instead have a mental illness. Cotard’s syndrome is explained in the novel as a form of zombification: ‘the emotional disconnect affects the recognition of absolutely everything, including one’s own self. The story that the brain invents to explain the situation? “I must be dead and rotting.”’ The narrative follows the zombie’s attempt to find a cure to being a zombie. Instead of relating to zombies in films, he tells us that the nearest depiction of his condition is Pinocchio and the AI computer Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s film : A Space Odyssey (). Like Hal he wants to obtain qualia, ‘the living being’s capacity to establish a connection between his experiences of the world and the self’ (); and it is emotion that is at the centre of being: ‘To be one’s self is our principle emotion’ (). Yet, we also learn that even though all humans seek happiness, it is unhappiness that ‘reaffirms the self. Happiness erases it. Our home is the void. Ironically, the self constantly seeks its own annihilation’ (). Thus, in this amusing and thought-provoking work, the emotionless zombie with an annihilated self is trying to escape from happiness.
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Trinidadian-Canadian writer André Alexis’s philosophical and often humorous novel Fifteen Dogs () also speculates on questions of being and happiness but through dogs rather than zombies. The novel’s reflections on the nature of power could be read as an allegory of slavery, emancipation, independence or migration, both documented and undocumented. It begins with the Greek gods Apollo and Hermes sitting in a bar in Toronto and conjecturing about whether animals could die happy if they had human consciousness. After making a wager, they give fifteen caged dogs at a veterinary clinic human intelligence. The dogs can be roughly divided into three categories: those who want to be ‘real’ dogs, those who want to connect with humans and the poet Prince, whose wish is to compose poetry in the newly created dog language. After escaping from the clinic, the first group ban the new language and are so obsessed with being ‘real’ dogs that over time they become a caricature of both authenticity and performance: ‘Their movements and sounds were now unselfconsciously produced but they were even further away from the canine. The pack had grown very peculiar indeed: an imitation of an imitation of dogs. All that had formerly been natural was now strange. All had been turned to ritual.’ The pack no longer conforms to a canine hierarchy and takes pleasure in humiliating those beneath them. Atticus, the pack leader, philosophizes on what is happening, and in very little time reproduces Hegel’s master–slave dialectic to fit his situation. To further mock the West’s elevation of European philosophy, even Benjy, a less intelligent dog, quickly reaches similar conclusions. Unlike Atticus, Benjy is a dog that wants to connect with humans. However, despite flashes of insight, his attempts to assimilate into the human world fail mainly due to his lack of critical thought and his disregard for ‘pointless speculation’ (), and for the arts. The portrait of Benjy can be read as an allegorical attack on a reader who fails to appreciate the novel or speculative fiction in general. Majnoun, who also belongs to the second category of dogs, has the qualities that Benjy lacks, and craves a close relationship with Nira, his human friend, whom he tries to understand. After Nira dies without his knowledge, he loyally waits for her return. What Majnoun craves to know the most is what love means to Nira. In order to win his wager, Hermes takes the dog ‘through every encounter Nira had had with the word love, allowing Majnoun to feel her emotions and know her thoughts’ (). This extreme form of empathy makes his grief for her unbearable and he lets go of life and dies unhappy. The relationship between Majnoun and Nira is somewhat touching, and the reader knows that Nira sees Majnoun
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as her equal and refuses any form of ownership. However, because she does not legally own him and does not have him micro-chipped (documented), she leaves him vulnerable to the city dog catchers that she warns him about. The exceptional life, in the novel, is that of the writer. The poet dog Prince is the only dog that disregards all power structures and when dying comes to realize that ‘his beautiful language existed as a possibility, perhaps as a seed’; he manages to die happy in the knowledge that his art cannot be destroyed even though nobody has understood him, as one day ‘It would flower again’ (). Imagining possible futures, such as Fifteen Dogs does, is a theme in most of the previously discussed texts, but it is in science fiction that these speculations are most concretely rendered. Agustín de Rojas is considered to be the father of Cuban, and likely Caribbean, science fiction, beginning with his novel A Legend of the Future (trans. ), which is a futuristic rewriting of the legend of The Flying Dutchman. Set against the backdrop of ongoing negotiations between the World Communist Federation and the Empire in , the story focuses on a group of young people selected to travel to Titan. Their ship is struck by a meteorite and most of the crew are killed. The three survivors, two of whom are dying of radiation, have to find a way for Isanusi, the physically injured third survivor whose brain is connected up to the ship, to return the latter to earth. The novel is less about science and politics than one might expect, and more about psychological and philosophical issues. That capitalism, individualism and materialism are out-dated and barbaric is an established fact in this text. The psychological conundrum to which the survivors have to find a solution is how a single member of a cohesive unit (here the crew, representing a miniature Communist society) can function alone. Through speculations on the nature of identity, the crew conduct emotional telepathy experiments to try to infuse the dead and dying crew members into Isanusi in a way that is beyond subjective memory and experience: the dead must live on inside Isanusi’s mind as independent beings. Although the reader never learns whether this experiment is successful, the dead do appear to live on in Isanusi’s memories as autonomous selves, and several millennia later, a new crew on the same ship are able to communicate with Isanusi and his crew. Thus, the novel speculates that collective identity under Communism is more than socio-political idealism: the self is capable of becoming a we-self through emotional telepathy. Another important Cuban text now translated into English is Yoss’s A Planet for Rent (, trans. ), which imagines the earth as a
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Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction
devastated planet rescued and colonized by other planets becoming nothing more than a tourist destination for alien species. Most of the human characters view their only hope for a better future in moving to the planets of the colonizers. The size of this relatively short novel is deceptive, as the scope and depth of its philosophical and political content is dazzling. Besides the obvious themes of colonization, neocolonization, tourism and emigration – based on artistic or scientific talent, relationships with alien tourists or through illegal travel – the novel contemplates the consumption of the colonized artist and his work by the colonizer, and the prostitution of the artist necessary to find a patron. Aliens were brought to anglophone Caribbean literature by Geoffrey Philp’s short story ‘Uncle Obadiah and the Alien’ in Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (). This comic tale is about aliens who need the best marijuana from Jamaica in order to counteract a genetic accident that makes them look like Margaret Thatcher; the alien who visits Jamaica reassures the human characters that Haile Selassie is alive and well on another planet. Also published in , Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, the first anglophone novel to foreground science fictional qualities, is set in a future in which Caribbean people have migrated to planet Toussaint and are technologically advanced enough for each person to have an earbug that connects them to the Grande Anansi Nanotech Interface. References to Caribbean history abound in the novel, and Caribbean culture thrives through traditions such as carnival. Initially, this book appears to present a dystopian society, as the surveillance system is ostensibly oppressive. The young protagonist Tan-Tan’s father seems to be a heroic rebellious and loving figure. However, just as Tan-Tan and her father escape to the prison planet New Half-way Tree, he tells her that she will be his wife. What follows is a tale of incest and rape, finally culminating in Tan-Tan killing her father and fleeing with the help of a bird-like species. As she grows up, Tan-Tan becomes an outlaw, the Robber Queen from carnival. At the end of the novel, she learns that what appeared to be a surveillance system is actually a metaphor for the collective psyche, which she never lost. She finally embraces her we-self and gives birth to a son that she calls ‘Tubman: the human bridge from slavery to freedom’. Thus, in science fiction, as elsewhere in Caribbean literature, freedom and the strength of the human collective are connected. Tobias S. Bucknell’s Crystal Rain (), set on a fictional planet in the future where an ongoing conflict rages between the descendants of Caribbean people and the Aztecs, returns to the importance of collective survival. Here the loas from Vodou and the Aztec gods take corporeal form
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as aliens, and live amongst their people, with the warlike Aztecs continually demanding human sacrifices and seeking to use their enemies for this purpose. However, at the end of the novel, the new leader of the Caribbean society chooses to let the enemy keep the thousands of her people that they have captured in order to stop the war, as she is faced with an unbearable choice between sacrificing individuals and the survival of the collective. Lord’s The Best of All Possible Worlds () is also a novel about survival. Set on a future colony made up of different types of humans, the newest refugees called the Sadiri have arrived due to their homeland being destroyed. The protagonist Delarua is a biotechnician who is sent on a diplomatic and anthropological mission to help Sadiri people find others with whom they can procreate to preserve their culture and genetic skills. Over time, relationships develop amongst the crew, and the characters slowly change as they begin to learn from and understand each other. The love story between Delarua and a Sadiri symbolizes the potential for different races and ethnicities to coexist. Lex Talionis () by Trinidadian writer R. S. A. Garcia is a lesserknown anglophone science fiction novel, and it could be argued that Garcia is the Caribbean daughter of African American Octavia Butler, literary mother of Black women’s science fiction. Garcia’s protagonist Shona resembles Butler’s Shori in Fledgling (). Both have been genetically altered, have amnesia, have experienced traumas that they cannot remember, and occupy positions of the oppressed and the oppressor simultaneously. However, while the symbiotic relationships in Butler’s novels are ethically problematic as they involve one species’ enslavement of another, in Garcia’s novel the relationship between Shona and an alien is mutually beneficial. What turns out to not always be beneficial is telepathy. Shona and her lover have a telepathic connection and so when Shona is gang-raped on a spaceship, her lover, along with the reader, has access to her interiority. Subsequently, when Shona then takes revenge on the crew and her lover takes control of her body, he creates more carnage than Shona wants. His actions add a further violation for Shona, and she is rendered a zombie. This scene differs significantly from Myal, in which Anita is aided to reclaim her whole self after violation. Lex Talionis instead raises questions about the thresholds of experience and telepathy in terms of gendered experience and autonomy. Later, when Shona discovers that she is the niece of a woman at the head of the UK multi-planetary corporation who is responsible for killing her parents, she sets out to seek revenge. However, unlike many other vengeful characters in Caribbean literature, Shona begins to discover that it is justice she seeks rather than
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Reimagining Caribbean Time and Space: Speculative Fiction
lex talionis, the law of revenge. The novel ends with her planning to go to war against the evil corporation. Coming to know one’s purpose and being endowed with superhuman abilities are also themes explored in much young adult speculative fiction from the Caribbean. In , Jamaican writer Michael Holgate’s Night of the Indigo and Trinidadian Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Chalice Project were published. Both books are about twins being forced to deal with adult responsibilities. In Night of the Indigo, the Jamaican protagonist Marassa discovers that he is not only from another planet but is also destined to be the leader of that planet. Through psychological and physical trials, he must prove that he is worthy of this title, save his twin brother, and lead his people in a battle against the enemy. In The Chalice Project, teenage twins Ada and Evan in Trinidad discover that they were created in a secret laboratory in Jamaica and are the biological product of their Trinidadian father and an English scientist mixed with chemicals and DNA from other subjects. Both twins have a superhuman ability for sport and healing, and both can time-travel. Their challenge is to resist the temptation of reconnecting with their biological mother who wants to kidnap them to carry on her research, and to time-travel back to the past to save their father from an explosion instigated by their mother. The twins finally discover that their father implanted them in a Black woman’s womb, and it is this woman who they call aunt who really is their ‘true’ mother. Thus, the novel serves as an allegory of independence, as well as a message to its young Black readers to prioritize and value their African roots. While this essay seeks to extend what can be considered as Caribbean speculative fiction, certain themes and tropes can be seen to characterize the Caribbeanness of this genre. Bucknell’s short story ‘Spurn Babylon’ (), which is set in the Bahamas and is about the raising of an old slave ship on the coast, exemplifies the theme of reimagining and healing historical trauma in order to forge a better future. To the surprise of the narrator, the islanders repair the ship, and at the end of the story the entire population leaves the island for a new future in Zion. As the Rasta man explains to the narrator, they must travel on this old slave ship because ‘We ah bring we history with we. We face it, not run from it.’ Eventually the narrator decides to share the islanders’ faith and belief and sets out after them on a little wooden boat called Little Garvey. Like many Caribbean speculative texts, this story can be read as meta-fiction. The repaired slave ship could symbolize Caribbean literature and its rewriting of the past with messages of collective self-affirmation and self-determination that enable Caribbean readers to move towards a better future.
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Trinidadian Anthony Joseph’s The African Origins of UFOs () is a linguistically and formally experimental poetic novel with visuals that interweave the past, present and future to show that the tools to create a better future already lie in the past. At the end of the book, we learn that an enslaved African Prince called Daaga in Trinidad escaped his enslavement, along with those he later helped, on what used to be called a UFO: ‘drifting from place to place. Still trying to find where they come from.’ In this fiction, UFOs are panspermic dust; panspermia theory – the word meaning all seed – holds that space dust carries life throughout the universe; however, the book’s definition of this dust is ‘Bio/genetic dust. The texture of memory. Skin reveals a living history of the body. It is possible to see and touch these genetic memories’ (). Therefore, the seed of possible future(s) of the Caribbean lies in its past lives. Indeed, in their sustained and insistent connection to historical as well as future imaginings, Caribbean speculative works link to an established body of more socially realist writings that also draw on imagining and writing towards and for a better reality.
Notes Gregory E. Rutledge, ‘An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson’, African American Review, . (), –, –. Karen Lord, ‘New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean. Foreword’, in Karen Lord (ed.), New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean (Leeds: Peekash Press, ), –, . Ibid., . Erna Brodber, ‘Beyond the Boundary: Magical Realism in the Jamaican Frame of Reference’, in Timothy J. Reiss (ed.), Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ), –, –. Joyce Thomasine Forbes, ‘Magical Realism: A Study of Seven Wilson Harris Novels’ (PhD thesis, University of the West Indies, ), cited in Jean Weisgerber, Le réalisme magique: roman, peinture et cinéma (Lausanne: L’age d’homme, ), . Wilson Harris, ‘Author’s Note’, in Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, ), –, . Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean’, in Jerrold E. Hogle (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –, –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Giselle Liza Anatol, ‘The Sea-People of Nalo Hopkinson’s The New Moon’s Arms: Reconceptualizing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic through Considerations of
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Myth and Motherhood’, in Emilia María Durán-Almarza and Esther ÁlvarezLópez (eds.), Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic: (En)Gendering Literature and Performance (New York: Routledge, ), –, . Tia Nevitt, ‘Interview and Comment Chat with Karen Lord’, in Tia Nevitt: Anywhere but Here, Anwhen but Now (), http://tianevitt.com/// /interview-and-comment-chat-with-karen-lord/. John Scalzi, ‘The Big Idea: Karen Lord’, in Whatever: This Machine Mocks Fascists (), https://whatever.scalzi.com////the-big-idea-karenlord/. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean (London: Routledge, ), . Ibid., –. Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic’, . Erna Brodber, Myal (London: New Beacon Books, ), . Rebecca Romdhani, ‘Zombies Go to Toronto: Shame in Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring’, Research in African Literatures, . (), –. Pedro Cabiya, Wicked Weeds: A Zombie Novel, , trans. Jessica Powell (Simsbury, CT: Mandel Vilar Press, ), , emphasis in the original. Subsequent references given parenthetically. André Alexis, Fifteen Dogs (London: Serpent’s Tail, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (New York: Warner Books, ), . Tobias S. Bucknell, ‘Spurn Babylon’, in Nalo Hopkinson (ed.), Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (Montpellier: Invisible Cities Press, ), –, . Anthony Joseph, The African Origins of UFOs (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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Caribbean Drama and Performance Justine M cConnell
Speaking in , the renowned Trinidadian playwright and scholar Errol Hill declared there to be three stages in the movement from colonial oppression to national identity: ‘First comes political freedom; next, economic control; finally, cultural liberation.’ The West Indies, he pronounced, was still at the second stage. Tracing the history of drama and performance in the anglophone Caribbean, Hill simultaneously set forth his proposal for the establishment of ‘a West Indian national drama’ that would exemplify the region’s newly won cultural liberation (). The nation he envisaged was not delineated by island borders but instead harked back to the short-lived West Indies Federation, which had collapsed in just four years after it was founded. In doing so, Hill signalled his belief in the power of collaborative work and a move away from the region’s imperial past without rejecting all of its legacy. European languages, for example, may have been imposed by the colonial powers, but they became equally the discourse of Caribbean peoples, whether in their metropolitan forms as they had been imported from Europe or in their creolized forms which syncretized African, Caribbean and Asian languages, bringing their political valence to the fore. Hill’s vision of the anglophone Caribbean as ‘a single cultural unit’ is mirrored by his conception of the artistic uniqueness of drama and performance (), which lies in its collaborative aspect, needing audience, actors, directors and the moment of performance itself to ‘complete’ any playscript. Stressing this in his talk, ‘The Emergence of a National Drama in the West Indies’, Hill remarked: ‘In all other genres of creative writing – poetry, the novel, short story, or the familiar essay – the author is wholly responsible for a finished work of the imagination’ (). While this is an axiom of performance studies, it has particular currency in moments of dynamic political change, especially when that change has been hardfought and vehemently resisted, as was the case with the independence of Caribbean nations serially throwing off the oppression and domination
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Caribbean Drama and Performance
of the European powers. As Sylvia Wynter had written just three years earlier, the creative arts were part of the ‘path for the West Indian from acquiescent bondage to the painful beginning of freedom’. Hill was in agreement, but in keeping with his own work as a theatre practitioner, his primary focus was on performance. Observing that ‘drama is a social act in contrast to the private act of writing a poem or a novel that is addressed to the individual reader’ (), Hill identifies performance as the pre-eminent mode of creating a new sense of community in the wake of the decolonization of the s and s. This essay examines significant trends in Caribbean drama and performance since . Beginning in an era in which several Caribbean islands were still ruled by imperial European powers while others had only recently won their independence, public performance was one way to create and consolidate a new sense of national identity. It is not only that political concerns of the period are represented and explored on stage, but that the act of creating performance pieces is itself a socially engaged, activist project at the level of both aesthetics and politics. Decolonization and the concomitant independence movements gave the impetus not only to Errol Hill’s ‘Mandate for a National Theatre’, with carnival at its root, but to other forms of theatre-making too. The mode of theatricalization and its political perspectives varied across the region and across time, as well as from one practitioner to another, but there are also certain categorizations which repeatedly come into play in the Caribbean during this period. Examining these groupings illuminates connections and distinctions between different island traditions and eras, allowing a view of performance in the region across linguistic and geographic boundaries. The categorizations to be considered are as follows: firstly, plays which engage in what Helen Tiffin has termed ‘canonical counter-discourse’ and do so by syncretizing Caribbean elements with those from Europe. Secondly, works which explore a global political perspective, particularly in terms of Afrocentrism and an independent Caribbean identity. Thirdly, those committed to an exploration of domestic political contexts foregrounding issues of gender and class. And finally, Caribbean performances developed by artists in the Caribbean diaspora. These categorizations, prompted by the performance works themselves, frequently overlap and build on some of the most important studies of drama and performance in the Caribbean, updating older works to take account of recent developments. For instance, two of these categories, domestic politics and an independent Caribbean identity, were identified by Kole Omotoso under the headings ‘family’ and ‘nationalism’ in his seminal work, The
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Theatrical into Theatre: A Study of the Drama and Theatre of the EnglishSpeaking Caribbean as being the major themes of Caribbean plays during the s and s. Judy Stone’s valuable work focuses on ‘Theatre of Realism’, ‘Theatre of the People’, ‘Total Theatre’, ‘Classical Theatre’, ‘Theatre of Ritual’, and ‘Black British Theatre’; the foundations of these categories still hold, but can be usefully adapted to take account of, for example, postcolonial theory when looking at ‘Classical Theatre’ or expanding the focus on the Caribbean diaspora beyond Britain. Katherine Ford’s The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean () hones in on both the process and the kind of works which can be designated as ‘counter-discourse’, while Stéphanie Bérard terms these ‘dramas of the inbetween’ in Théâtres des Antilles: traditions et scenes contemporaines (). Equally, Bérard’s work on ‘dramas of orality’ informs consideration of performances in a number of categories. How drama and performance have developed since the older of these works were published, and the other themes that have come to dominate Caribbean theatre and performance, are the subject of this essay. Drawing on the theoretical work of Edward Said, Helen Gilbert, Joanne Tompkins and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Jamaican theatre practitioner and scholar Honor Ford-Smith explains her wide-reaching vision of ‘postcolonial performance’: ‘This usage of the term “postcolonial” refers to ongoing attempts to dismantle the cultural and political authority of Western imperialism at the level of both theory and practice.’ Hill and Omotoso, as well as Wycliffe and Hazel Bennett in Jamaican Theatre (), demonstrate that theatre in the Caribbean was dominated by Europe until the s. Even after this date, though the subject and themes of the plays became more closely related to the Caribbean, the form and ‘manner of presentation’ remained European in orientation for a number of decades. Hill advocates carnival as a model for ‘national theatre’, explaining that, ‘The Trinidad carnival has achieved a synthesis between old and new, between folk forms and art forms, between native and alien traditions’ (). Extrapolating from carnival to performance more widely, Hill’s formulation is fundamental to considerations of the Caribbean. The idea of a synthesis ‘between native and alien traditions’ prefigures scholarship on postcolonial art that ‘writes back’ and refutes any accusation that such work is imitative. Since , numerous Caribbean performances have engaged with and adapted canonical works from elsewhere. As we hear in the opening moments of Derek Walcott’s Nobel Lecture ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’, the Ramleela, a dramatized adaptation of the ancient
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Indian epic the Ramayana, is still performed annually in Trinidad. Although not all these adaptations are counter-discursive, the Caribbean has a rich tradition of canonical counter-discourse. To see this at work, one need only think of plays such as Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête () and Alwin Bully’s McB (), which are both in dialogue with Shakespeare, or Feliks Moriso-Lewa’s Antigòn an Kreyòl () and Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice (), which rethink Sophocles’s tragedy, Antigone ( BCE). Six years after the first performances of Une tempête, Césaire’s younger Martiniquan compatriot, Patrick Chamoiseau, also turned to a foundational work of the Western canon. Une manière d’Antigone (A Kind of Antigone) is Chamoiseau’s first play, written when he was just twentytwo. It has been performed in Martinique and Europe but remains unpublished. For Chamoiseau, as for many writers before and since, Sophocles’s fifth-century BCE tragedy Antigone is a fitting vehicle for the expression of political resistance. Une manière d’Antigone articulates Chamoiseau’s resistance to the continued French rule of Martinique and the violent suppression of anticolonial political demonstrations in the late s and early s. The death of a young student, Gérard Nouvet, during one of these protests in was a catalyst for Chamoiseau’s adaptation, which depicts an Antigone who, like her ancient Greek predecessor, refuses to leave the body of a young man unburied. In Chamoiseau’s play, however, the young man, rather than being her brother, is no relation at all. This moved the action entirely away from the personal and familial exclusively into the realm of the public and political, further exemplified by the Caribbean Antigone covering the corpse with the red, green and black Martiniquan flag, symbol of independence from France. Furthermore, in Chamoiseau’s version, Antigone commits suicide on the first day of carnival. As a time when usual roles are overturned, Antigone’s decision to die during carnival symbolizes a reversal of the dominance of the colonial power: the French rulers can imprison her but cannot deprive her of the autonomy to end her life; at the same time, as Bérard discusses, carnival being symbolic of death and rebirth means that her suicide on this day ‘symbolizes ongoing resistance to oppression’. This dimension of resistance and moral rights is a central theme of Sophocles’s play too, making Chamoiseau’s counter-discursive strategy simultaneously oppositional and laudatory. Translocating the ancient tragedy to the Caribbean, the contestation between Antigone and the ruling powers plays out alongside a politically laden interplay of metropolitan
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French and Martiniquan Creole. Given Chamoiseau’s later authorship, alongside Jean Bernabé and Raphael Confiant, of Éloge de la créolité () (In Praise of Creoleness), the way language is used in Une manière d’Antigone may surprise. Antigone, in the role of nationalistic hero, speaks not in Creole but in Metropolitan French, while the rather gauche guard – who likewise speaks primarily in that same colonial language – peppers his speech with Creole, tells stories, sings folk songs and impersonates the characters who are missing from Chamoiseau’s version. The guard, therefore, functions much like a traditional Martiniquan storyteller (akin to the protagonist of Chamoiseau’s novel, Solibo Magnifique), inhabiting the roles of everyone in his story. Patricia Cumper, who is often seen as inheriting from Una Marson the mantle of foremost female Jamaican playwright, and who served as Artistic Director of Talawa, the UK’s ‘primary Black-led touring theatre company’ from to , also turned to a cornerstone of the European literary canon to explore contemporary Caribbean politics. Benny’s Song (), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet set amidst the terrible violence that accompanied the elections in Jamaica, recasts the houses of Montague and Capulet as supporters of the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) respectively. As with Chamoiseau’s prioritization of the political over the personal, Cumper’s play likewise capitalizes on the political undercurrents of Shakespeare’s play: Benny’s Song retains the love story but expands the enmity between families across the nation. This is not to suggest that either Une manière d’Antigone or Benny’s Song can be considered only in light of their engagement with Sophocles and Shakespeare; rather, as David Scott’s concept of the ‘problem-space’ makes clear, the very questions to be asked of these works must be reconsidered. Recognizing this, Kwame Dawes has noted that in Cumper’s work, ‘the governing forces are critical antagonists in the text’; the Jamaican political context of the earlier s is at the heart of Benny’s Song. Unlike Césaire’s and Chamoiseau’s earlier adaptations or Mustapha Matura’s riff on J. M. Synge in his Playboy of the West Indies (), Cumper flags her ‘source’ text only obliquely: the Benny of her play is Benvolio, whose role is magnified in this play and whose new story arc allowed Cumper to ‘weave the random brutality of party political violence into the heart of the play’. The adaptation of Romeo and Juliet to a context of urban violence has a prominent precedent in the Broadway musical and film, West Side Story, which could be seen as an important link in the ‘chain of reception’ between
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Shakespeare’s play and Cumper’s, an impression that is reinforced by the recollection that the JLP and PNP were supported in the election by the United States and Cuba respectively, echoing West Side Story’s conflict between white New Yorkers and more recently arrived Puerto Ricans. Cumper was keen, as she has explained, to overturn some of the structures that underpin Shakespeare’s drama: ‘I was also concerned to create a moral voice in the play that did not reinforce the very hierarchical view of the nobility as intrinsically superior and the poor as the source of comedy and vulgarity espoused in Shakespeare’s writing.’ Cumper credits her background in Caribbean theatre with making her particularly alert to the problematic subtexts of Shakespeare’s work: ‘Theatre was used as a way of looking at, analyzing, responding to, even criticizing political and social matters.’ Explaining that the original performance of her play was by students of what is now the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, she was free to be more experimental in her approach, not constrained by the limits of a single set and four actors. Instead, Benny’s Song was a promenade performance that, echoing Hill’s discussion of the syntheses of carnival, included a ‘Greek-style chorus of johncrows and a full-on dancehall scene’. One danger of ‘canonical counter-discourse’ such as this is only perceiving the work in relation to the canonical text with which it is engaged. This is a problem common to adaptation, which is ‘likely to be greeted as minor and subsidiary and certainly never as good as the “original”’. Despite the fact that this fault lies with readers and audience members, it can be particularly undermining if the newer works are concerned with political independence and ridding themselves of the shackles of the past. When Hill and Walcott consider the way forward for Caribbean theatre at the start of the s, they arrive at different conclusions, which they explore in their distinctive theoretical and creative works. Hill’s Man Better Man () and Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain () are creative forerunners of their respective works, The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre () and ‘What the Twilight Says: An Ouverture’ (). Omotoso sets up a kind of dichotomy between the two, positing Hill’s advocacy of a turn to the traditions of carnival against Walcott’s rejection of Afrocentrism and his prioritization of explorations of the colonial condition in the Caribbean. For Walcott, ‘going back to Africa is assuming an inferiority’ – ‘We must look inside. West Indies exists but we must find it’ – yet he overlooks the fact that carnival, with its triad of syntheses, is not an African form but a
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distinctly Caribbean one. Nonetheless, both Walcott and Hill believe in and embody a syncretization of forms and ideas in their works. By the end of Dream on Monkey Mountain, the play’s protagonist, Makak, confirms Walcott’s idea that the ‘West Indies exists but we must find it.’ Inspired by the apparition of a white woman who tells him that he is ‘from the family of lions and kings’, Makak sets out for Africa; yet finally he sees that his vision of a unified, peaceful Africa is an idealized one, and that his desire to ‘return’ there, prompted as it was by a white woman, has led to his newfound pride in his blackness being structured by Manichean dualisms of black and white. Laurence A. Breiner suggests that the play’s first epigraph from Jean-Paul Sartre’s prologue to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth provocatively ‘invites the view that Black pride remains less a positive statement than the negation of a negation initiated by Europe’. At the same time, the decision to quote Sartre in the epigraphs to both Parts and of the play, and particularly the fact that these quotations are drawn from Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s work, means that the epigraphs foreshadow the apparition of the white woman, while Fanon himself is only obliquely (if unmissably) quoted when Makak’s friend Moustique brandishes a white mask and exclaims ‘black faces, white masks!’ Walcott’s play, then, rejects Afrocentrism, while Hill’s advocates the prioritization of Afro-Caribbean folk traditions. Also at stake here are issues of class: for Hill, the turn to folk aesthetics critiques middle-class theatre aesthetics which had dominated formal theatre under colonialism and could be seen to be continued in the work of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, founded by Walcott in and led by him until . Despite their intentions, however, the break with prior forms, whether those be European or African, is not wholly carried out in either Dream on Monkey Mountain or Man Better Man. In Walcott’s case, this is a feature of the plot and is one of the elements his play explores, while in Hill’s play it may be less intentional. As Rob Canfield has argued, Man Better Man embodies Hill’s celebration and prioritization of Caribbean forms and moves away from European ones in its use of calypso, creole and calinda (stick-fighting), but is less successful in this break from European modes than it might have been. Hill radically revised the first version of his play, incorporating music and dance into it, which changed the tone from a ‘melodramatic revenge play’ to ‘an ingenuous comedy with music and dancing’, which he described as an ‘experiment in integrating music, song and dance into dramatic action, and using the calypso form with its rhymed couplets to carry the rhythm’. It is this version that was first
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performed at the Yale School of Drama in and subsequently published, becoming Hill’s best-known dramatic work. But despite the calypso, creole and calinda all being distinctively Caribbean, Man Better Man still comes close to reinscribing some of the binaries (such as those of master–slave) of European colonialism and its social hierarchies of race and class. Striking among these is the treatment of women within the play, and the way that the comic elements of the drama centre around the trick that Papa Diable plays, which – contrary to Hill’s intention as outlined in his theoretical works – has the potential to re-entrench prejudices against Afro-Caribbean rituals. Although the comic elements offer one way to explore and even resolve the tensions laid bare in the play, the fact that Papa Diable’s obeah rituals are fake also risked deepening prejudices towards obeah and rituals with roots in Africa. Indeed, contesting such prejudice is a major theme of Una Marson’s Pocomania (), which was recognized even at the time of its first performance as marking ‘the Birth of Jamaica’s National Drama’ and lauded because ‘for the first time Jamaican audiences see their own people in a play written by a Jamaican’. The syncretism of forms and ideas found in the work of both Hill and Walcott – whether via the prioritization of carnival forms and its triad of syntheses, or in Walcott’s syncretization of European and Caribbean myths, literary forms, and performance practices – exemplify the ‘theatrical syncretism’ argued by Christopher Balme to be a powerful tool with which the stage is decolonized. Likewise, the only play by Guadaloupean novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, Ton beau capitaine (Your Handsome Captain) (), engages in this ‘theatrical syncretism’ to powerful effect. The eponymous protagonist of Ton beau capitaine is Wilnor, a Haitian farm-worker who has come to Guadeloupe in search of work; he and his wife, Marie-Ange, who remains in Haiti, communicate by sending cassette tapes back and forth. Wilnor is the only character who appears on stage; further emphasizing his isolation, the disembodied voice of MarieAnge is heard emanating from the cassettes, though she is never seen. Schwarz-Bart syncretizes theatrical forms throughout the play, including those from Noh theatre, ballet and Creole dances developed on slave plantations, most strikingly in Wilnor’s syncretic dances, which lead him to work through, and finally accept, his wife’s infidelity and pregnancy, which he learns of via the tapes. As Schwarz-Bart explains in the stage directions: ‘These dances have a dramatic function; they express the different moments of an individual drama rather than a collective state of mind. They can be regarded as an additional language.’ Though one might think Marie-Ange’s lack of embodied presence diminishes her
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power within the play, Emily Sahakian has discussed how she effectively plays the commandeur of the Creole quadrille dance that Wilnor performs and which structures the entire play. As in the work of d’bi.young anitafrika and Staceyann Chin discussed below, in which the embodied performance is itself performative, so too is it in Schwarz-Bart’s play, making Marie-Ange’s physical absence embody the dislocation of migration. At the same time, as Judith Miller discusses, her physical absence prevents both Wilnor and the audience subjecting her to their gaze. Omotoso, in seeking a middle way between the stances of Hill and Walcott, proposed not ‘syncretic theatre’ as we see in Schwarz-Bart’s play, but the socially engaged work of community theatre groups created in Jamaica in the s: ‘Neither Derek Walcott’s dismissal of the African heritage (in this case carnival) nor Errol Hill’s maintenance of the opposite position would lead to the creation of Caribbean theatre and drama, the praxis in Jamaica seems to point the way forward.’ Omotoso identified the Children’s Theatre Workshop, the Gun Court Cultural Movement, and especially the Sistren Theatre Collective, as forging new paths. Each of these were born out of the work of the Jamaica School of Drama (JSD), founded by the Little Theatre Movement in , and in particular by the experimental Caribbean Lab there, which sought to create drama that was Antillean not only in form but in its genesis and production too, and was often rooted in ritual. The poet and playwright Dennis Scott was key to this movement, serving as Director of the School of Drama from to . He contributed to the formation of a new, decolonial era of theatrical practice in the region, heralded by the establishment of the JSD and consolidated by works such as his most famous play, Echo in the Bone (), as well as the work of his JSD colleague, Honor FordSmith, with the Sistren Theatre Collective. Exemplifying the collaborative and socially conscious approach that Hill deemed fundamental to drama and performance in the Caribbean, and further prioritizing a range of ritual practices, Sistren was founded in Kingston in by a group of mostly working-class Jamaican women with three aims: ‘To analyze and comment on the role of women in Jamaican society through theatre, to organize ourselves into a self-reliant co-operative enterprise and to take drama to working-class communities.’ Sistren’s focus on women and issues of gender was a radical innovation, as was their mode of collaborative enterprise. While such collaboration was in keeping with that of other performance collectives such as the Little Theatre Movement (Jamaica), the Company of Players (Trinidad and Tobago), the Little Carib Theatre (Trinidad) and the St
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Lucia Arts Guild, Sistren’s internal dynamic was very different. Rejecting ‘the rigid and hierarchical divisions of labour as they have come down to us in the Western theatre tradition’, whereby the writer and director do the intellectual work and issue directions to actors in a way that ‘dehumanizes’ them, for Sistren the ‘collective creation’ was that of both text and performance. Influenced by Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’, Sistren took the stories of the actors and the communities they performed among as the subject of their works and created their plays collectively via improvised workshops, rather than working from playscripts. In this sense, Sistren can be seen as epitomizing the collaborative ‘social act’ Hill identified, because their plays were developed explicitly to confront societal problems and articulate the experiences of those people whose voices had not often been heard. Indeed, their work was supported in the early years by Michael Manley’s democratic socialist government (–). Simultaneously, Sistren’s method of ‘witnessing’ and ‘testifying’, whereby they merge the narratives of the communities in which they work with folkloric tales and motifs in order to produce theatre, may come closest to the development of spectacles for carnival, which Hill sees as being at the root of a ‘national theatre’ for the Caribbean. What Hill, Scott and Sistren all strive for with their turn to folk aesthetics is theatre that is not only decolonized but also reclaimed from its pristine isolation as middle-class entertainment. Sistren’s approach can be seen as akin to groups such as Trinidad’s youth-led Cents Movement and Cuba’s Grupo Teatro Escambray. Like Sistren, Teatro Escambray – which was founded in in the wake of the Cuban Revolution of to bring theatre both closer to the people of Cuba and to a wider range of audiences – involved the community in the composition and performance of its works. Ford-Smith’s idea of ‘collective creation’ closely echoes the Cuban group’s ethos as articulated by their director Sergio Corrieri: ‘una creación colectiva para una comunicación colectiva’ (‘collective creation for collective communication’). Although the impetus of ‘collective creation’ had been set aside by the s, the group continues to produce and perform socially engaged work to this day. A more fraught form of collaboration created the seminal Jamaican film, The Harder They Come (), co-written by Perry Henzell and the dramatist Trevor Rhone, and starring Jimmy Cliff. Rhone had co-founded Theatre (later renamed Barn Theatre) in alongside George Carter and Yvonne Brewster, where a number of his plays, including the very successful Smile Orange (), were first produced. The relationship between Henzell and Rhone disintegrated over the course of the film,
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and Rhone’s contribution has often been neglected. Yet the fact that no complete script for the film exists and actors were free to improvise during filming indicates traces of Rhone’s theatrical practice structuring the film. So, too, does the use of the vernacular throughout, which was such a radical manoeuvre in a film made for international as well as local audiences that Kamau Brathwaite declared that for the first time ‘a nation language voice was hero’. The Harder They Come sits in the middle of a spectrum of ‘collective creation’ with the work of groups such as Sistren at one end and singleperformer works, created and embodied by a single figure on stage, at the other. The latter may be exemplified in Trevor Rhone’s Bellas Gate Boy (), which draws on his biography, and the work of performance artists such as d’bi.young anitafrika and Staceyann Chin, both originally from Jamaica but living and creating their work elsewhere. While Chin identifies the hostility she encountered in Jamaica towards her queerness as a primary factor in her choice to live in the United States, anitafrika frames hxr narrative of migration in economic and class terms too. The coexistence of author and performer distinguishes performance poetry from many theatrical forms, in which the writer and performer are seldom one and the same, but also links it with the collaborative work of collectives such as Sistren where productions have been developed from the stories and improvisation of the performers. This lineage is particularly striking in d’bi.young anitafrika’s dub theatre, not least hxr play, blood.claat: one oomaan story (), which tells the story of a young Jamaican woman’s journey to adulthood, suffering abuse and turmoil often at the hands of those closest to her. Likewise, Staceyann Chin’s plays Border/Clash: A Litany of Desires () and Motherstruck! () are autobiographical, politically engaged works, exploring and confronting issues of identity, as well as the violence and discrimination that she has been subjected to on account of her queerness. blood.claat, a solo performed play, goes beyond the usual conceptions of monodrama (as a piece played by one actor who often portrays only one character), with anitafrika embodying several different characters over the course of the play. Borrowing from Audre Lorde’s term ‘biomythography’, anitafrika terms hxr work ‘biomyth monodrama’ and explains hxr methodology thus: ‘biomyth monodrama is a mythologized autobiographical play told by the story’s creator/performer [. . .] the storyteller–audience relationship is crucial in biomyth monodrama storytelling: encouraging the biomythicist to constantly explore and expand the relationship with themselves, their communities, and their belief and practice in art as a tool for
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social transformation’. The importance of the relationship between audience and performer, as Hill identified, is foregrounded here; likewise, despite creating and performing hxr works solo, political activism is key to anitafrika’s work just as it is to the work of Sistren and Teatro Escambray. The monodrama, particularly in anitafrika’s embodiment of it, also has roots in traditional oral storytelling. For hxr, this recovery of a non-colonial heritage has been mediated via dub poetry (anitafrika’s mother is the renowned dub poet Anita Stewart, of the Jamaican ‘Poets in Unity’ group); as shx explains, ‘dubpoetry is rooted in oral storytelling traditions that were brought to the americas by afrikan peoples’. When anitafrika performs hxr plays, shx works on the cusp of oral storytelling, dramatic embodiment and dub poetry. Staceyann Chin’s artistic background is in slam poetry rather than dub, and her theatre work likewise bridges performance poetry, drama and oral storytelling. Fittingly so, given her resistance to carefully delineated categorizations of all kinds: I want to go down in history in a chapter marked miscellaneous because the writers could find no other way to categorize me. In this world where classification is key I want to erase the straight lines So I can be me.
The form of the work of both these artists can be seen to reflect their central concerns with the multiplicity of identity, articulated by Chin as a resistant practice of self-authorship. The multiple, interwoven strands of culture and identity that Caribbean performance works foreground are characteristic of what Antonio BenítezRojo has termed the ‘supersyncretism’ of the Caribbean. Amidst the enormous diversity of Caribbean drama and performance, and its continuing exploration and creation of new forms and dramatic languages, this may be the one feature that is consistent.
Notes Errol Hill, ‘The Emergence of a National Drama in the West Indies’, Caribbean Quarterly, . (), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Sylvia Wynter, ‘We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism’, Jamaica Journal, . (), –, .
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Helen Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse’, Kunapipi, . (), –, . Kole Omotoso, The Theatrical into Theatre: A Study of the Drama and Theatre of the English-Speaking Caribbean (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, ). Judy S. J. Stone, Theatre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Katherine Ford, The Theater of Revisions in the Hispanic Caribbean (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Stéphanie Bérard, Théâtres des Antilles: traditions et scenes contemporaines (Paris: L’Harmattan, ), especially chapter (‘Dramas of the InBetween’), –. Ibid., especially chapter (‘Dramas of Orality’), –. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, ); Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, ); Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Context, Practices, Politics (London and New York: Verso, ). Honor Ford-Smith (ed.), Jamaican Plays: A Postcolonial Anthology (–) (Kingston: Paul Issa Publications, ), . Hill, ‘National Drama’, , ; Omotoso, Theatrical into Theatre, ; Wycliffe Bennett and Hazel Bennett, Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, ). Errol Hill, The Trinidad Carnival: Mandate for a National Theatre, (London: New Beacon Books, ), –. Subsequent references given parenthetically. On ‘writing back’, see Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, nd ed. (London: Routledge, ). For the lecture see Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says (London: Faber and Faber, ), –, with discussed passage on –. See also Stone, Theatre, . Bully’s play, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, was first performed in as a staged reading in Jamaica, but remains unpublished according to Stone, Theatre, –. Patrick Chamoiseau, Une manière d’Antigone (, unpublished). See Stéphanie Bérard, ‘From the Greek Stage to the Martinican Shores: A Caribbean Antigone’, Theatre Research International, . (), –, and Théâtres des Antilles (–) for analysis of the play; the latter is translated by Tessa Thiery and Jonathan S. Skinner as Stéphanie Bérard, Theater of the French Caribbean: Traditions and Contemporary Stages (Pompano Beach: Caribbean Studies Press, ), –. On the many adaptations of Antigone, see George Steiner, Antigones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson, Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (Oxford:
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Oxford University Press, ); Erin B. Mee and Helene P. Foley, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Bérard, ‘A Caribbean Antigone’, . The official Martiniquan flag is, of course, the French flag. Bérard, Theater of the French Caribbean, . ‘About’, Talawa, www.talawa.com/about/. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), passim, –. Kwame Dawes, ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Cumper, Inner Yardie: Three Plays (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), –, . Matura, who moved to the UK when he was just twenty-one, is one of the foremost diasporic Caribbean playwrights, and co-founder of the Black Theatre Co-Operative. Cumper, Inner Yardie, . Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), ; Charles Martindale, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Cumper, Inner Yardie, . Patricia Cumper, ‘Tropical Shakespeare’, in Delia Jarrett-Macauley (ed.), Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard (Abingdon: Routledge, ), –, . Ibid., . Tiffin, ‘Post-Colonial Literatures’, . Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, ), xii. Hill, Trinidad Carnival; Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), –. Omotoso, Theatrical into Theatre, passim, especially , , . Selden Rodman, Tongues of Fallen Angels: Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges et al. (New York: New Directions, ), . Hill, Trinidad Carnival, , quoted above. Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, . Ibid., . See Tejumola Olaniyan, Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Laurence A. Breiner, ‘Walcott’s Early Drama’, in Stewart Brown (ed.), The Art of Derek Walcott (Bridgend: Seren Books, ), –, . Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain, . Rob Canfield, ‘Theatralizing the Anglophone Caribbean, to the s’, in A. James Arnold (ed.), A History of Literature in the Caribbean, vol. : English- and Dutch-Speaking Regions (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, ), –, –.
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Errol Hill, ‘Introduction’, in Derek Walcott, Dennis Scott, and Errol Hill (eds.), Plays for Today (Harlow: Longman, ), –, , . Canfield, ‘Theatralizing the Anglophone Caribbean’, –. See Stone, Theatre, , for a comparison of Man Better Man with Walcott’s The Charlatan, which is likewise a musical comedy incorporating calypso, pivoting around a love story, and including a fraudulent obeah man. Una Marson, Pocomania, (Kingston: Blouse and Skirt Books, ), –. Reviews in The Gleaner on and January respectively, quoted in Leah Reade Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Hill, Trinidad Carnival, , quoted above. Christopher B. Balme, Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and PostColonial Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). Simone Schwarz-Bart, Ton beau capitaine (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, ). Translated by Jessica Harris and Catherine Temerson as Your Handsome Captain, in Callaloo, (Summer ), –. Emily Sahakian, Staging Creolization: Women’s Theater and Performance from the French Caribbean (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, ), –. Schwarz-Bart, Your Handsome Captain, . On Schwarz-Bart’s transcultural performance, see Alvina Ruprecht, ‘Performance transculturelle: une poétique de l’interthéâtralité chez Simone Schwarz-Bart’, in Pierre Laurette and HansGeorge Ruprecht (eds.), Poétiques et imaginaires. Francopolyphonie littéraire des Amériques (Paris: L’Harmattan, ), –. Schwarz-Bart, Your Handsome Captain, . Sahakian, Staging Creolization, . The ‘commandeur’ is the name both for the caller of the dance and for a slave driver, underlining the roots of the dance as a subversive and empowering means of communication among slaves on plantations. Judith Miller, ‘Simone Schwarz-Bart: Re-Figuring Heroics, Dis-Figuring Conventions’, in Karen Louise Laughlin and Catherine Schuler (eds.), Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, ), –, . Omotoso, Theatrical into Theatre, . Stone, Theatre, . On the way that rituals are deployed in Bellywoman Bangarang, see Rhonda Cobham, ‘“A Wha Kind a Pen Dis?”: The Function of Ritual Frameworks in Sistren’s Bellywoman Bangarang’, Theatre Research International, . (), –. From Sistren’s brochure, and quoted in Sistren Theatre Collective, ‘Introduction to Bellywoman Bangarang’, in Contemporary Drama of the Caribbean, eds. Erika J. Waters and David Edgecombe (St Croix: University of the Virgin Islands, ), –, .
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Honor Ford-Smith, ‘Notes toward a New Aesthetic’, MELUS, . (–), –, –. See Karina Smith, ‘Narratives of Success, Narratives of Failure: The Creation and Collapse of Sistren’s “Aesthetic Space”’, Modern Drama, . (), –, for more on the influence of Boal’s techniques on Sistren’s work. Gilbert and Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama, . Ford, Theater of Revisions, ; Alma Villegas, ‘Grupo Teatro Escambray: Theater in Revolutionary Cuba’, trans. Ted Kuster, The Black Scholar ./ ( ), –. Sergio Corrieri, ‘El Grupo Teatro Escambray: una experiencia de la Revolución’, in Gerardo Luzuriaga (ed.), Popular Theater for Social Change in Latin America: Essays in Spanish and English (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, ), –, (quoted and translated in Ford, Theater of Revisions, ). Judith Rudakoff, ‘R/Evolutionary Theatre in Contemporary Cuba: Grupo Teatro Escambray’, TDR, . (), –, . See Loretta Collins, ‘The Harder They Come: Rougher Version’, Small Axe, (), –, for details of the contested circumstances of the making of the film. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, ), . d’bi young anitafrika, ‘r/evolution begins within’, Canadian Theatre Review, (Spring ), –, . Hill, ‘National Drama’, . anitafrika, ‘r/evolution begins within’, . See Lyndon K. Gill on anitafrika’s use of ‘dub as a bridge between poetry and theater’; Lyndon K. Gill, ‘I Represent Freedom: Diaspora and the MetaQueerness of Dub Theater’, in E. Patrick Johnson (ed.), No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, . Staceyann Chin, ‘If Only Out of Vanity’, YouTube video (), www .youtube.com/watch?v=CocmRzcSk. Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, , trans. James E. Maraniss, nd ed. (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, ), .
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Here Are the Others: Caribbean Creative Nonfiction Kei Miller
The genre of nonfiction is an unwieldy one – perhaps more accurately supergenre than genre. Its arms spread wide enough to include the vast majority of literature we encounter daily – from news articles to cookbooks, from technical manuals to letters and emails, from diary entries to historical tomes. The more specific genre of ‘creative nonfiction’ (popularly understood as the use of literary techniques to render factual accounts, and importantly factual accounts in which subjectivity is valued and centred) tries to constitute a somewhat smaller and more manageable field. Still, as we begin to ponder what is potentially included in this supposedly smaller remit (literary journalism, narrative essays, narrative histories, personal essays, memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, letters, etc.), it becomes clear that creative nonfiction is in fact its own supergenre. It is useful then to bear in mind Derrida’s ‘The Law of Genre’ in which he suggests that genre is not a category to which writers and their books neatly belong but rather categories in which they participate. This essay addresses how selected Caribbean writers have participated in the genre of nonfiction from the s to the present. The discussion is divided into two aspects. In the first, I explore the issues and problems of categories and classifications. I engage this question through a practice of offering an account of the varied texts that might be classified in relation to this genre. This aspect of the discussion might be seen as taking up what the critic Gordon Rohlehr calls ‘the problem of the problem of form’. In his work, Rohlehr begins with the problem of categories by noting the multidisciplinary practice of Caribbean writers and artists. Similarly, as part of this discussion, I note how Caribbean writers have ranged across a number of genres and how these potentially impact on their nonfiction texts. In the second part of this discussion, I offer closer case studies on three writers – V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and Rachel Manley. My selection of these three is an attempt to suggest something of the multiple realities that the Caribbean presents to us and
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which the region’s nonfiction writers in turn try to represent. Naipaul, Kincaid and Manley are from different islands, different races, different classes; they also migrated to different countries. So it is hardly surprising that their writing points us into different directions resisting any neat conclusion as to what constitutes Caribbean creative nonfiction. And yet, it must be noted that the diversity that these three writers represent only covers the anglophone region. What is most obviously missing are writers from the francophone and hispanophone Caribbean. The very beginnings of a tradition of Caribbean creative nonfiction is arguably conterminous with the beginnings of the Caribbean in the imagination of Europe. When that now infamous Genoese sailor arrived with his fleet of three Spanish ships into Caribbean waters, he took pen to paper and began writing his letter to the Spanish monarchs describing what he had found. Columbus only completed his letter when he had returned to Europe. Importantly, he had returned without his flagship, and the two remaining ships were absent of the bounty of wealth he had promised. Columbus had to carefully craft a letter that made the trip not seem like the unmitigated disaster that it was. He succeeded. One copy was dispatched to the joint Catholic monarchs, King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella I, and other copies were widely disseminated throughout Europe. I would argue that Columbus’s letter is the first example of creative nonfiction from the Caribbean, though its creativity rested not in its literary flair but in its creative licence – in precisely those moments that undermined its claim to nonfiction. Many untrue tropes and incorrect ways of seeing the Caribbean find their beginnings in Columbus’s letter. He describes gold without measure that would spur on the myth of El Dorado; he describes a tribe of warrior women that would grow into the myth of the Amazonians; he warns about indescribable monsters, and even names the entire landscape the Indies, believing the indigenous people he encountered were in fact ‘Indians’, a fiction which over time has become nonfiction. Columbus is only the first in a long line of intrepid explorers who have journeyed to the Caribbean and then journalled about it. From Harry Alverson Franck’s caustic Roaming Through the West Indies () to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Traveller’s Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands () to more recent and sensitively researched and written accounts like Joshua Jelly Schapiro’s Island People: The Caribbean and the World (), the Caribbean from to the present has attracted numerous writers who have written accounts of their sojourns. This essay is concerned with the period from s, and even more
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concerned with how the Caribbean has written the factual story of itself, oftentimes responding to and writing back to some of the dangerous tropes that Columbus introduced in his missive.
Caribbean Essays as Critical Interventions In the last half century, Caribbean creative nonfiction has held a place that is simultaneously pivotal and peripheral. While few of the region’s major writers have produced work exclusively within the genre, when they have approached the genre they have not merely dabbled but written seminal works. The circumstances that at first compelled many of these writers towards nonfiction are worth commenting on. Caribbean literature is still relatively young, but from its beginning, the old tools of literary analysis seemed inadequate or sometimes unsuitable to understand or fully appreciate the aesthetics and the politics of this emergent literature. What was essential in those early days was a robust critical space and language in which and by which this increasingly voluminous output of literary creative works from the region could be placed and intelligently spoken about. It was often creative writers who rose to this challenge, contributing to the building of that space and that language. Many early works of nonfiction written by creative writers in the Caribbean therefore performed a kind of literary criticism. In other words, much of this early work neither imagined nor positioned itself as creative work in its own right. Essential works of nonfiction were written by some of the region’s best creative writers and thinkers, and yet when reading them now, few of them bear the marks of ‘creative nonfiction’ as we understand the genre today: Edward Baugh’s () ‘The West Indian Writer and his Quarrel with History’; Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘History of the Voice’ (); Aimé Césaire’s ‘Discours sur le colonialisme’ ()(‘Discourse on Colonialism’, ; Wilson Harris’s Tradition, the Writer and Society: Critical Essays (); and Sylvia Wynter’s ‘We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism’ (); and Édouard Glissant’s Le Discours antillais () (Caribbean Discourse, ). George Lamming’s masterful collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, is a notable exception here, but published in it falls a whole decade earlier than the period we wish to survey. Perhaps it is only after the s, after a general architecture has been laid out and established for Caribbean literature, that a much richer tradition of nonfiction could begin – some of these voices looking closely
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at that very architecture and questioning what rooms have been left out of the house. The essay has been a particularly useful form used by Caribbean writers over the last fifty years to pursue this kind of interrogation and point out what has been excluded both from our imagination of Caribbean society and our literature, and the proliferation of literary magazines and journals such as Tapia, SAVACOU, Bim, Jamaica Journal and Kyk-Over-Al have provided platforms for an emerging essayistic tradition. ‘Where Are All the Others?’ asks Erna Brodber in her essay collected in Caribbean Creolization. Brodber claims her own space within the Caribbean as a descendant of enslaved Africans alongside her project of writing out of that experience and history even while she calls for Caribbean citizens of other ethnic backgrounds to write their own stories, therefore complimenting and filling out her own. Dionne Brand’s essay ‘This Body for Itself’, collected in her collection, Bread Out of Stone, tells us her story of a conference for Caribbean women writers. Brand feels at home in this gathering – in the familiarity of Caribbean accents and gestures that she grew up with, and also a set of politics that doesn’t require explanation: ‘It is probably not even necessary to say “poetry and politics” as if those words are distinct, but I’ve become so used to explaining their dependency on each other to Canadian reviewers and audiences that I’ve forgotten that it is unnecessary here.’ Yet still, Brand feels that something is missing. It is the sexual body of the woman that Brand yearns for – a desire that comes out of the female body, is articulated by that body and is directed towards other female bodies. It is in fact her own lesbian body and desire that have been censored, even in a space meant to be safe and hospitable for Caribbean female subjectivities: For several days I listen, and listen, and then it is my turn and then it comes to me and then I know what I have not heard, what has not been said. Then I know what the eyes have not read passing over that earth and river and swamp and dust, more accurately, what the eyes demur, what is missing: the sexual body. ()
Michelle Cliff’s searing essay, ‘If I Could Write This in Fire’, articulates a complicated and intersectional rage that is as much the result of inclusion as exclusion. As a very light skinned Jamaican woman able to pass as white, Cliff is uncomfortable with the class and colour privilege that has been handed to her and the performance of such that is expected of her by a male cousin in a restaurant in London. This cousin is in fact darker than Cliff and so his claim to whiteness is by proximity to her. His expectation that Cliff should perform her own class and colour privilege
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could be seen as him needing her to perform it on his behalf. It is a complicated power dynamic and one that is not only race- and class-based, but gender-based as well. The male cousin also expects Cliff to grant him a sexual favour at the end of the night. He is not aware of her own lesbian desires, yet another way that Cliff finds herself unseen, passing. I don’t want to. Because I remember what happened in the bar. But I can’t say that I’m a lesbian either – even though I want to believe his alliance with the white men at dinner was forced, not really him. He doesn’t buy my excuse. ‘Come on, lady, let’s do it. What’s the matter, you ’fraid? ’
She seethes at the weight of these expectations and at the way she is identified with communities she no longer chooses to identify with. But Cliff’s anger is also formal and literary. How does one write these things, and following in what tradition? The very title of her essay expresses a dissatisfaction with simple literary tools, a suggestion that rage requires more than just language. ‘If I Could Write This in Fire’ is a playfully structured essay where slogans or small italicized words seem to act as memory prompts. Like many Caribbean writers, within the essay Cliff is searching for a form that can represent her experience truthfully. In the preface to her collection she tells us, One of the effects of indoctrination, of passing into the anglo-centrism of British West Indian culture, is that you believe absolutely in the hegemony of the King’s English and in the proper forms of expression. Or else your writing is not literature; it is folklore, or worse. And folklore can never be art. Read some poetry by West Indian writers – some, not all – and you will see what I mean. The reader has to dissect anglican stanza after anglican stanza for Caribbean truth, and may never find it. The anglican ideal – Milton, Wordsworth, Keats – was held before us with an assurance that we were unable, and would never be able, to achieve such excellence. We crouched outside the cave.
Following in the tradition of Cliff’s and Brand’s writing on sexuality and Audre Lorde’s essays, which have been important to the emergence and development of queer Caribbean writing, the work of writers such as Thomas Glave, Words to Our Now () and Among The Bloodpeople () has continued to fearlessly centre and advocate for narrative attention to the queer body at the limits of Caribbean belonging. In this regard, we might read this genre as offering important interventions for queer narration as seen in the rich body of work included in Glave’s edited anthology Our Caribbean. Other important essayists who have challenged the margins of Caribbean society and literature include M. NourbeSe Philip with
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Frontiers () and A Genealogy of Resistance () and Mervyn Morris with Is English We Speaking () and Making West Indian Literature (). Philip’s work has been interested in diasporic spaces, raising a consistently arched brow to Canada’s imagination of itself as an inclusive space. She positions herself and the Caribbean subject within this ‘genealogy of resistance’ that she is trying to map out and that happens outside of the geographic Caribbean. In contrast to Philip’s mappings of Caribbean cultural diasporas, Mervyn Morris’s essays have served to rethink Caribbean cultural nationalism. From his first significant essay in , ‘On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously’, to his work on dub poets, Morris has challenged an elitism in literary criticism and advocated for the inclusion of more voices, and has offered important interventions and critical readings of Caribbean poetry and aesthetics. Though generally regarded as more traditional scholars, the essays of Carolyn Cooper and Gordon Rohlehr are also worth mentioning. Examining popular culture in Jamaica and Trinidad respectively, it is possibly their lively subject matter (dancehall and reggae in the case of Cooper, and carnival and calypso in the case of Rohlehr) that has led these two academics towards an essayistic style that is sometimes more inviting and less rigid than traditional scholarship, incorporating narrative tools and experiments of voice that should be acknowledged as participating in creative nonfiction.
Self, Autobiographies and Memoir Writing It is no surprise that the subgenre of the memoir has been an increasingly popular one in the region, especially as various public figures – entertainers, politicians of repute and disrepute, and even convicted criminals – have tried to satisfy public interest in their own stories. It is more surprising and unfortunate that such scant critical attention has been given to these accounts, even to those memoirs of more conscious literary intent and ambition. These include Dany Laferrière’s The World Is Moving About Me: A Memoir of the Haiti Earthquake (), Mirta Ojito’s Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus (), Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island (), and Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (). Having already established herself through her fiction as one of the most important voices of a new generation in Caribbean literature, the Haitian writer, Edwidge Danticat, has since emerged as an equally powerful force in creative nonfiction as both memoirist and essayist. Her first foray into nonfiction, After the Dance (), is often labelled as a travel book but is
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in fact a sensitively written account of the carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, and what it means as an immigrant to return and participate. It is her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, that more firmly establishes both her reputation as a nonfiction writer and a nonfiction project of productive lamentation – one that not only mourns, but tries to make sense and beauty, and find purpose, out of grief. This work was followed by the essay collection, Create Dangerously, and the memoir of her mother’s life with cancer, The Art of Death.
Heritage Writing and Social Histories Neither a memoirist nor a regular essayist, Olive Senior’s contribution to the genre of creative nonfiction is arguably at once the most singular and the most various. A modest book published in , A–Z of Jamaican Heritage, acts as a sort of first draft to her incredibly ambitious and painstakingly researched tome Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (). In The Message is Change () Senior writes on the general elections in Jamaica; in Working Miracles () she looks on the lives of women in the English-speaking Caribbean, and, most recently, in Dying to Better Themselves, () Senior gives one of the most comprehensive accounts of the lives of West Indians involved in the building of the Panama Canal. It is this commitment to research and deep archival work alongside the stylistic easy touch of a short story writer and poet that distinguishes Senior’s nonfiction books. A look at the OCM Bocas Prize can give us some insight on the place and health of Caribbean nonfiction over the last decade. Beginning in , the literary prize out of Trinidad and Tobago has sought to award the best new works of Caribbean literature each year in three categories – poetry, fiction and nonfiction – with the three winning titles competing for the overall award. In the first six years of the prize, the winning nonfiction titles by Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (), Godfrey Smith, George Price: A Life Revealed (), Rupert Rupnaraine, The Sky’s Wild Noise: Selected Essays (), Kei Miller, Writing Down the Vision (), Olive Senior, Dying to Better Themselves: West Indians and the Building of the Panama Canal (), and Jacqueline Bishop, The Gymnast and Other Positions () did not go on to win the main prize. In its seventh year, the chief Judge, Edward Baugh, was bitingly critical of the winning nonfiction title by Angelo Bissessarsingh, who was only recently deceased. In the eighth year of the prize, no nonfiction book was judged worthy of even the category
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prize. In , Kevin Adonis Browne, a Trinidadian rhetorician, became the first nonfiction writer to win both the category and the overall prize with his book High Mas () – a beautifully produced tabletop book which combines photographs of carnival with lyrical criticism. Bending the form of the lyrical essay to suit his purpose as a literary and cultural critic, Browne does not eschew complexity but radically challenges the discursive tradition of the academy to produce a text that in cadence and tonality is much closer to the kinds of texts he would analyse. Browne’s win might well signal the beginning of a new generation of Caribbean writers and thinkers moving towards the genre of nonfiction in robust and experimental ways. To consider more carefully the creative nonfiction of V. S. Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid and Rachel Manley is to consider the work of writers who hail from different islands (Trinidad, Antigua and Jamaica), who migrated to different countries (United Kingdom, United States and Canada), whose racial and cultural backgrounds are complexly different, and in turn whose practices of creative nonfiction vary significantly. Yet, to consider these differences is to understand something of the rich and multi-layered reality of the Caribbean which can only be understood through such a multiplicity of voices and approaches.
V. S. Naipaul After his first four books of fiction, the Trinidadian writer and Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul began to express frustration with the form of the novel to effectively capture and depict the world he wanted to write about. In his essay, ‘Conrad’s Darkness and Mine’, he laments, ‘the novel as a form no longer carries conviction. [. . .] And so the world we inhabit, which is always new, goes by unexamined.’ In fact, Naipaul never abandons the novel, but his embrace of creative nonfiction and his commitment to exploring its possibilities is unwavering. By the end of his life, Naipaul had authored over thirty books with more than half creative nonfictions, beginning with his controversial The Middle Passage, published in , and ending full circle with his The Masque of Africa. And because Naipaul so often expressed an almost visceral contempt for the academy and for the kinds of prose produced out of such institutional constraints (he once proposed that English academics would serve a more useful function by driving buses), it was certain that his own nonfiction work could never be confused for the kinds of literary criticism then being produced by many of his contemporary Caribbean writers.
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Travel writing was integral to Naipaul’s literary project, and the Caribbean features significantly in this. Naipaul sets out to find a world in ruins before he ever ventures on his actual journeys. Though written in the s, his letters were collected and first published in . This collection of epistolary correspondences is itself a remarkable example of creative nonfiction and helps us to understand his project as a whole. In the letters, we not only see a young man beginning to flex his muscles and grow as a writer, but also the beginnings of stories that eventually find their way into his novels, notably A House for Mr Biswas. Naipaul’s letters to his father and other family members also reveal his thesis on the world – a grim and unsympathetic view that does not alter much in seventy years, as in one of his early letters to his sister, Kamla, who had just then gone to India to study: There is one point that I want you to help me to stress. My thesis is that the world is dying – Asia today is only a primitive manifestation of a long-dead culture; Europe is battered into a primitivism by material circumstances; America is an abomination. Look at Indian music. It is being influenced by Western music to an amusing extent. Indian painting and culture have ceased to exist. That is the picture I want you to look for – a dead country still running with the momentum of its heyday.
Still, the letters are also infused with the clear love Naipaul extends to and receives from his family back in Trinidad – although such sentimentality never compromises the literary merit of these exchanges, and the traffic between fiction and nonfiction ends up being a two-way street. The young Naipaul is often thinking through and practising style in these letters, despite his suggestion that letters are written spontaneously and without much thought. Indeed, it is clear that Naipaul’s letters are not so spontaneous and make quite a conscious effort at literature. Look here, I understand what letters mean. The Porters probably get tired of my asking whether there is anything for me, and when does the next mail come in? I read my letters slowly, afraid to get to the end. But if I don’t write it means that I really can’t afford the time. Take this letter for instance, I began it at a quarter past eight after dinner. It is now ten to nine. ()
Carefully written, slow and deliberate, using literary styles and techniques to render factually accurate narratives – it is the definition of creative nonfiction that we are most accustomed to. Some of us might question the multiple signees within the collection ‘Letters to my Father’ as opposed
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to the single name they are gathered under. In fact, this is not creative nonfiction by the single author, V. S. Naipaul, but by an entire family. A seven-year-old Shiva Naipaul makes a kind of authorial debut here with the endearing note to his older brother, ‘I am behaving a good boy. I send you , kisses. Shivadhar’ (). Some of these signees will emerge, as it were, from Sir Vidia’s shadow and author their own books of nonfiction. Shiva Naipaul certainly, and most recently Savi Naipaul Akal with The Naipauls of Nepaul Street (), a sometimes moving and sometimes biting memoir of that distinguished literary family. Naipaul’s narrative history of Trinidad, The Loss of El Dorado, is worth mentioning if only for the fact that we see here that early Columbus myth resurfacing, and it becomes clear how the practice of nonfiction in the Caribbean is often responding to and disputing earlier accounts. Originally commissioned by Little, Brown and Company, the final manuscript of The Loss of El Dorado did not meet the publisher’s approval. They had hoped for a simple guidebook – a factual narrative of sorts that could be easily digested by the potential tourist. Naipaul subverts that expectation of the guidebook and tells a story of Trinidad that has much deeper and more uncomfortable implications for the writer, the reader and history. Naipaul is undisputedly the most prolific Caribbean nonfiction writer of the period under analysis here, but his project often extended beyond the region, and works such as Among the Believers () or The Congo Diary () can only really hold a place as ‘Caribbean nonfiction’ through lineage of their author, who himself did not always claim himself as a Caribbean writer, even though his is an essential voice when we think of the history of the region’s nonfiction. As the title of another of his nonfiction books suggests, Naipaul is interested in the writer and the world.
Jamaica Kincaid Like Naipaul, Jamaica Kincaid’s literary output is split almost evenly between fiction and creative nonfiction. To date she has published five novels and five works of nonfiction. A collection of short stories tilts the balances towards fiction, but even these flirt, and to some extent participate, in the genre of nonfiction, incorporating autobiographical work. The title of her novel suggests as much – The Autobiography of My Mother. ‘Everything I say is true’, Kincaid once declared in an interview, ‘and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence.’
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Also, like Naipaul, some of Kincaid’s later works have explored landscapes far away from the Caribbean – her own back garden in the United States in My Garden Book () and her journey through the Himalayas in Among Flowers (). Kincaid’s first and most celebrated work of nonfiction is her book-length essay and polemic, A Small Place, also referencing and subverting the form of the tourist guidebook. Though the book’s direct address is to the tourist vacationing in the Caribbean and in Antigua in particular, we can also productively understand the text as an indirect reply to Columbus’s first letter, the indigenous account unavailable in the fifteenth century, the native’s own instruction on how to properly see the Caribbean. A Small Place famously begins, ‘If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see.’ If the potential tourist is expecting a soothing guide to a Caribbean paradise, they are quickly disappointed. What follows from that first sentence is a blistering critique of the tourist industry, and one that unapologetically implicates and accuses the tourist, placing him in a sort of lineage to the Columbus figure. An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you. ()
Perhaps the urgency that underlies Kincaid’s work is that there is a compelling fiction of the Caribbean, one that has been perpetuated through the industry of tourism, and such fiction is most effectively countered through the genre of nonfiction. ‘The Antigua that I knew, the Antigua in which I grew up, is not the Antigua you, a tourist, would see now’ (). The Antigua of the tourist is only a façade, and reality lies somewhere behind it. Kincaid offers us a brutal poetics of witness, firmly holding the head of the tourist and forcing him to observe the performance behind the placid smiles of the locals, the history behind the resorts, the pollution that is behind and inside the idyllic beaches. Kincaid follows A Small Place with her memoir My Brother, another work that attacks and dismantles compelling Caribbean façades. My Brother is ground-breaking not because it tells the story of a thirtythree-year-old man dying from AIDS, but because it is one of the first of such narratives to take place in the Caribbean. Before returning to his bedside, Kincaid had not been back to her native island for twenty years. What stretches between those years is not only time but a simmering animosity between mother and daughter, an animosity that Kincaid has
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faithfully returned to again and again in both fiction and nonfiction. The story of her brother’s dying is ultimately also a memoir of that fraught relationship with her mother. My mother and I were in one of our periods of not speaking to each other, not on the telephone, not in letters. In the world I lived in then, my old family was dead to me. I did not speak of them, I spoke of my mother, but only to describe the terrible feelings I had toward her, the terrible feelings she had toward me, in tones of awe, as if they were exciting, all our feelings, as if ours had been a great love affair, something that was partly imaginary, something that was partly a fact; but the parts that were imaginary and the parts that were only facts were all true.
Here, Kincaid faces squarely perhaps the most obvious tension of creative nonfiction – its commitment to truth-telling even while it embraces its own subjectivity and admits to the unreliability of the memory that feeds its narrative. This acknowledgement does not mean Kincaid ever waivers from her project. Like A Small Place, My Brother is always looking behind the familiar tropes. The strong Caribbean matriarch is presented here as a grotesque figure who can only love her children when they are weak and in need of her. The trope of the hyper-masculine Caribbean man also hides something which Kincaid herself doesn’t realize until her brother’s death – that all his womanizing was a performance to hide his homosexuality. And as in the best nonfiction, the author herself isn’t spared. If the mother comes across a grotesque figure, so does Kincaid – a sister who has never gotten over the resentment of the birth of her brothers, robbing her of her much coveted ‘only child’ position, and a sister who even as she sits by her brother’s bed is sometimes impatient for his impending death. It is worth noting, however, that the entire arc of Kincaid’s nonfiction project to date might show something disturbing – for where her first book in the genre, A Small Place, is a blistering attack on the figure of the tourist, in her most recent, Among Flowers, she has become the tourist, and in many ways produces some of the very behaviours which she earlier criticizes, not bothering to learn the names of the local people who are there to serve her, and seeing Nepal as place where she might go to extract things (flowers) for her own consumption back home. It is Kincaid’s own words that come back to haunt her: ‘An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing’ (), and yet, what is useful here, as with Naipaul, is to consider how Caribbean nonfiction can extend beyond the Caribbean, showing the Caribbean citizen as a wanderer moving throughout the world.
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Rachel Manley Rachel Manley is one of the few – perhaps the only – Caribbean writer today who is known primarily as a creative nonfiction writer. Still, her first book, A Light Left On (), is a collection of poetry, and her most recent book, The Black Peacock (), is a novel, albeit a thinly disguised autobiography of the author’s friendship and complicated relationship with the Trinidadian writer, Wayne Brown. Between the poetry and the novel stands a trilogy of sorts, Drumblair (), Slipstream () and Horses in Her Hair () – memoirs of Manley’s childhood and the figures that towered both over her and an entire island. ‘This is my story’, writes Manley in the opening pages of Drumblair, her Governor-General prize work, ‘It is not history. It is memory.’ If the works of Naipaul and Kincaid are both profoundly marked by various distances (physical and emotional) with which the writers hold themselves back from the landscapes they are writing about, then Manley’s work is profoundly marked by its intimacy. Manley’s memoirs both refute and reaffirm one of Kincaid’s claims: the people in a small place cannot see themselves in a larger picture, they cannot see that they might be a part of a chain of something, anything. The people in a small place see the event in the distance heading directly towards them and they say, ‘I see the thing and it is heading towards me.’
Though Kincaid claims that the people of a small place cannot give an exact account of these large events, this is what Manley provides. Because of her particular family, what she ends up accounting for is not just her youth but also the birth of a nation. What she bears witness to is the early firmament of nationalism in the Caribbean generally, and in Jamaica in particular. The grandparents she gives us intimate access to as ‘Pardi’ and ‘Mardi’ are in fact Norman Washington Manley and Edna Manley, who would latterly be bestowed such titles as ‘Father of the Nation’ and ‘Mother of Jamaican Art’ respectively. Kincaid imagines these large events as oppressive things that happen to people: ‘The people in a small place then experience the event as if it were sitting on top of their heads, their shoulders, and it weighs them down, this enormous burden that is the event, so that they cannot breathe’ (–). Manley, however, is telling another side of the story – not of the big events that merely happen to people, but rather of the people who are able to orchestrate such events. Drumblair, the Manley family house, becomes the hub of early Jamaican nationalism, a meeting place for
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political and literary agents. ‘Drumblair was filled with activity. [. . .] In addition to the party executive, the Focus group was meeting from time to time to work on the third edition. It seemed quite natural to me that the progress towards nationhood should be made culturally in one room and politically in another’ (). This is one of the rare moments that Manley moves towards a sort of analysis – an awareness of what these events might mean. Generally, she sticks to her opening statement, ‘It is not history. It is memory.’ Exactly a decade before the publication of her essay ‘Where Are All the Others?’, Erna Brodber had published her second novel, Myal in which one of the most memorable characters is the figure of Maydene Brassington, a transplant from England who seems to understand and appreciate more about the local people than her mixed race husband. It is Maydene Brassington who is willing to walk into Grove Town and communicate with people in their own language, something her husband is unwilling to do. ‘And that’s another thing [. . .] that William refuses to deal with. That there are classes everywhere and that those below must hate those above and must devise some way of communicating this without seeming too obviously rude. He refuses to participate in “silly linguistic rituals”.’ What Brodber describes in fiction is an uncannily perfect mirror of the relationship that Manley describes between her grandparents, Norman and Edna. Norman is described as a deeply sensitive and thoughtful man, but either unwilling or genuinely unable to communicate with the Black peasantry in their own language or with their own symbols. It is on one of Manley’s trips to England that the image of the broom becomes a charged and powerful symbol for the People’s National Party that he leads, as masses of people become determined to literally sweep Bustamante’s Party out of power. When Manley gets news of this symbol, he is upset at what he sees as mere gimmickry and is determined not to participate in what William Brassington might have dismissed as a ‘silly linguistic ritual’. When the family returns to Jamaica and are met at the airport by a throng of broom waving people and Manley is called upon to address the crowd, at first he is firm in his resolve. He talked of history, and of the country at that time. He spoke of perils and solutions and the process of change. Mardi watched the crowds once again struggling with his erudite words and ideas. They clapped because they were aroused by the cadence of his oratory – not, as he thought, persuaded by reason. But their patience was proof of their faith and affection, and she found herself calling to him silently from her heart, ‘Meet them halfway’.
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If we read Manley’s trilogy of memoirs as being one of the possible answers to Brodber’s question, then we will understand it as representing a real maturity in Caribbean creative nonfiction as the works begin to respond to and grapple with questions arising out of the region rather than responding to Columbus’s early and dangerous letter.
Conclusion In the historical context of the Caribbean territories as colonial outposts, as both place and people peripheral to the centre, Erna Brodber’s simple question, ‘where are all the others?’, is a powerful reclamation of the self as being African descended, female and from a small village in Jamaica. Hers is an unlikely self to be positioned so unapologetically in literature. But perhaps there is an even broader way to mobilize Brodber’s question across the region where the self cannot always be easily essentialized as Black. Identity is complicated in the Caribbean. It is a region that has been profoundly marked by racial and linguistic diversity, creolizations and multiple pluralities. The various practices of creative nonfiction have reflected this. Here is a practice with widely divergent themes and forms. Sometimes the only commonality is indeed the uncommonality between the works. But where these various works speak with a single voice or in harmony, perhaps it is to claim that voice that speaks from the edge, from places of alterity. Increasingly bold and experimental, Caribbean creative nonfiction does not shy away from claiming the self even as it says to the world – here we are; we are the Others.
Notes Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, Critical Inquiry, (), –. Gordon Rohlehr, ‘The Problem of the Problem of Form: The Idea of an Aesthetic Continuum and Aesthetic Code-Switching in West Indian Literature’, Caribbean Quarterly, . (), –. Erna Brodber, ‘Where Are All the Others?’, in Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Angès Sourieau (eds.), Caribbean Creolization (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ), –. Dionne Brand, ‘This Body for Itself’, in Bread Out of Stone: Recollections Sex, Recognitions Race, Dreaming Politics (Toronto: Coach House Press, ), –, . Michelle Cliff, ‘If I Could Write This in Fire’, in If I Could Write This in Fire, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –, . Cliff, If I Could Write This in Fire, viii.
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M. NourbeSe Philip, A Genealogy of Resistance (Toronto: The Mercury Press, ). V. S. Naipaul, ‘Conrad’s Darkness and Mine’, in Literary Occasions (New York: Alfred Knopf, ), –, . V. S. Naipaul, Between Father and Son: Family Letters, ed. Gillon Aitken (New York: Alfred Knopf, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Jamaica Kincaid quoted in Kay Bonetti, ‘An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid’, Missouri Review, . (), –, . Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Plume, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), –. Rachel Manley, Drumblair (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, ), xiv. Kincaid, A Small Place, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Erna Brodber, Myal (London: New Beacon Books, ), . Manley, Drumblair, .
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‘Let Every Child Run Wild’: Cultural Identity and the Role of the Child in Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction Aisha Takiyah Spencer In his poem ‘Let Every Child Run Wild’, Martin Carter invokes a sense of childhood as being sacred, and the poem calls for an end to the ‘shuddering’ of the child’s ‘wild’ music as a result of censorship and restriction. Carter’s poem is one of many literary works produced since the s which places the Caribbean child as its centre. Offering what John Stephens et al. refer to as an ‘emic viewpoint’ or ‘an insider’s perspective’, the literary production of Caribbean writers that focus on the child or young adult enables a concentration on the Caribbeanness of life that was particularly valuable to a decolonizing agenda. Yet, while the centrality of the child’s perspective within the work of established anglophone writers such as George Lamming, Jamaica Kincaid and Olive Senior has been acknowledged, Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction have remained marginalized genres for almost fifty years. This marginalization is repeated globally for, as Peter Hunt explains, ‘childhood is [. . .] a state we grow away from’ and ‘children’s books have been largely beneath the notice of intellectual and cultural gurus’. Prior to the mid-s, many Caribbean children’s and young adult authors and works did not have an established presence in literary dialogues, either regionally or internationally, and minimal critical attention was given to this area of literary activity. In order to fully appreciate the developing poetics of Caribbean childhood over the past fifty years, a number of sociocultural contexts need to be discussed. In Europe and America by the end of the mid-nineteenth century, children’s books were no longer ‘overtly didactic’ but ‘written specifically for the enjoyment of children’. In the Caribbean context, Children’s and Young Adult Fiction became visible genres in the mid- to late twentieth century within the umbrella genre of Caribbean literature that was itself still critically under-researched and slowly developing, between the s and the s, into a corpus of texts which could be identified and understood as a literary tradition in terms of content, form and function. As a result, Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction
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has been represented mainly as Caribbean literature with a focus on the child or young adult, without distinct recognition for a body of work written for and about children and/or young adults. It is not necessarily that ‘the Caribbean [has] seen a relatively recent emergence of modern children’s literature’, but rather that what has been recognized as Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction, such as Disney’s Pirates in the Caribbean series, Cendrillon (), Caribbean Dream (), Down by the River – Afro-Caribbean Rhymes, Games and Songs for Children (), has been defined and categorized as such through nonCaribbean critical models. Importantly, children- and young adult-focused narratives by Caribbean writers have often been published as textbooks rather than trade books. Such works have been vital to establishing the curriculum for primary schools, with various book series initiated by the ministries of education across the Caribbean (e.g. Macmillan’s Caribbean Reggae Readers, the Roraima Reader in Guyana, the Rainbow Readers in Jamaica), and also for secondary schools, with the introduction of the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) that replaced the overseas General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) and Advanced Level (‘A’ Level) examinations in the late s. Indeed, the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) examination syllabuses have played an important role in introducing anglophone secondary school students to Caribbean children- and young adult-focused texts. As educational publishers, Macmillan, Heinemann and Longman have supported the creative visibility and critical discussion of Caribbean experiences of childhood and adolescence by publishing literary works from both established and new Caribbean writers, including Earl Lovelace, Beryl Gilroy, Curdella Forbes and Jacques Romain. Unfortunately, however, any children’s or young adult literary text that is not listed on these syllabuses remains largely unknown and minimally publicized. Often Children’s or Young Adult Fiction works that are not on the main primary and secondary school syllabuses are not purchased by popular bookstores, which confirms the mistaken idea that their value exists only as educational resources. This education-driven model means that even when established Caribbean writers such as Diane Browne, Hazel D. Campbell, Grace Nichols, Cecil Gray and John Agard have been commissioned by the government to write stories for the Language Arts or literacy-focused sections of the curriculum, their works have been compromised by the request to mirror basal readers’ texts, with a traditional literacy focus
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on phonetics, vocabulary and the processes of decoding and encoding. Browne discusses the role she and other writers played as part of a creative writing group producing literary materials for the Ministry of Education in Jamaica and how, many times, their original stories were met with resistance by those at the Ministry who seemed to prefer shorter, less exciting stories with more of a language and literacy focus. Velma Pollard, in her interview with Daryl Cumber Dance, spoke about this connection more positively and how she and Jean D’Costa wanted to write stories for children because of the roles they played in the educational sphere in Jamaica between the mid-s and early s. Pollard was a linguist and educator and D’Costa had been hired by the Ministry of Education in Jamaica to produce literary material for children. One consequence of this link between Caribbean-authored Children’s Literature and an educational context is that the significant explorations of sociohistorical and cultural experiences and of navigating identity that these works offer are confined to a purely educational framework, often still constrained by Eurocentric, canonical ways of reading and analysing literature. Between the s and the early s, these discussions universalized the Caribbean child figure and his/her experience through a broad thematic focus (the individual and the environment, love and family relationships, attitudes to power and authority, etc.). Another problematic consequence is the lingering colonial legacy. As Patrick Chamoiseau laments in Kemedjio’s translation of the author’s views of what had happened to Antillean literature after colonialism, ‘these forces imposed themselves upon me with the imperial authority of their world, which obliterated mine [. . .] I only perceived the world as a Western construct, uninhabited, and it seemed to me the only one that mattered’. Within the anglophone Caribbean region until the early s, Shakespeare continued to hold a more prominent position on the CSEC syllabus than Caribbean texts like Beka Lamb, published in by Belizean writer Zee Edgell. In her online article discussing the ongoing imperialism implicit in rebuilding libraries in islands damaged by recent climate catastrophes with donated Eurocentric collections, Summer Edward argues that ‘Caribbean children’s lack of access to books that are culturally relevant and written in their own languages’ remains highly problematic. Even though Haiti had much more control over its laws and systems than other territories in the French Antilles, Jean Jonassaint reports that in the secondary school system, ‘it is clear that a marked preference for canonical metropolitan French literature overdetermines the choice of examination
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topics, and even the questions in the field of comparative literature leave no room for Francophone literatures or writers from outside of Europe’. As decolonial theoretical positions on Caribbean identity and Caribbean literature became recognized and established within the Caribbean literary sphere in the late twentieth century, and with the onset of globalization which enabled greater access to new and varied forms of children’s literature from across the globe, many Caribbean writers of Children’s and Young Adult Fiction began to emerge. Some of these writers had been writing for some time but had either been self-publishing or working for educational projects. Others are new to the Caribbean literary scene and have emerged through the support of a range of literary festivals, events, workshops and competitions held in the different Caribbean territories in the past decade, such as the Bocas Literary Festival in Trinidad and Tobago, the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC) National Creative Writing competition and the Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica, the Ferial de Libro in Cuba, and the BIM Literary Festival in Barbados. Additionally, the demand for multicultural literature in American and British schools has increased the demand for ethnically diverse narratives. This context has afforded Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction writers a place where they can publish that appreciates their literary as well as educational value, and with an emphasis on craft as well as purpose. Over the past two and a half decades, the genres of Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction have significantly expanded, with the inclusion of a wide cross-section of sub-genres including picture books, chapter books, science fiction or futuristic novels, and realistic fiction texts. Many of these books are listed under the umbrella of Multicultural Children’s Literature and so may easily be missed if publishers or websites do not categorize them specifically as Caribbean works. There are several writers from across the regions of the Caribbean who have contributed significantly. From the anglophone region, writers such as Diane Browne (Jamaica), Cherryl Shelley-Robinson (Jamaica), Jean D’Costa (Jamaica), Grace Nichols (Guyana), Hazel D. Campbell (Jamaica), Tanya BatsonSavage (Jamaica), Summer Edward (Trinidad), Lisa Allen-Agostini (Trinidad), Natallie Rochester (Jamaica), Sherlina Nageer (Guyana), Imam Baksh (Guyana), Kellie Magnus (Jamaica), A-dziko Gegele (Jamaica) and Felene Caytano (Belize) have helped to introduce new ways of affirming and celebrating one’s identity as a Caribbean child and young adult in a constantly changing world. Francophone Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction has been connected to writers like Edwidge
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Danticat (Haiti), Gisèle Pineau (who has origins in Guadelope and resides sometimes there and other times in France), Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique), and Yanick Lahens (Haiti). Writers such as Margarita Engle and Joel Franz Rosell from Cuba, Julia Alvarez (Dominica), and Viviana Prado-Núñez (Puerto Rico) have explored the impact of sociocultural changes on the hispanophone Caribbean child, and they present stories that help Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican children to embrace their identities in the face of the socioeconomic and political realities which impact their lives. The use of international genre categories alongside an expanded Caribbean poetics which now pluralizes the child figure has given more visibility for literary production which focuses on the Caribbean child or young adult and foregrounds storylines, characters and settings which portray a new kind of Caribbean consciousness through the eyes of the child or the adolescent. What commonly faces the twenty-first century child or young adult in these genres of Caribbean literature is a sense of returning to the question of who I am, but portrayed through different and new lenses that reveal extended experiences of the effects of entrenched colonial beliefs for those born in the twenty-first century. Donnarae MacCann and Katharine Capshaw-Smith’s introductory words in ‘This Quest for Ourselves’: Essays on African and Caribbean Children’s Literature () stress the ways in which cultural forms of identity, otherwise negated or silenced by oppressive colonial mindsets through the kinds of stories children read and hear, are brought to life through the representations of themselves that African and Caribbean children are able to experience through African and Caribbean Children’s Literature. As Rampaul and Skeete () contend in the introduction to their book The Child and the Caribbean Imagination, throughout Caribbean literary history, there has been ‘the tendency for Caribbean authors to use the child figure to represent, if not vicariously theorize, the region’s myriad sociocultural issues, political evolutions and articulations of identity’. Representations of Caribbean children’s and young adults’ identity in twenty-first-century works now more commonly include interrogations of gender, sexuality, body-image and the technologically projected versions of the self. These interrogations occur largely through the child or young adult protagonists’ struggles to navigate the discourses of identity rooted in either the adult world of respectability, or the versions of self, promoted through popular cultural channels. There are a number of factors which have resulted in the resurgence of a more distinctive form of Caribbean Children’s Literature and Young Adult
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Fiction over the past two decades: the introduction of new literary festivals; the advancement of technology, which has opened the doors for many Caribbean authors to publish through less demanding publishing houses and to market their books on platforms like Amazon; the expansion of critical work on non-Western forms of Children’s Literature, including blogging and book-length contributions such as Giselle Rampaul and Geraldine Skeete’s The Child and the Caribbean Imagination (), which creates a space of inclusion for this sub-genre of Caribbean literature, despite its otherwise marginal positioning. Online platforms, such as Alice Curry’s Lantana Publishing Multicultural Children’s Literature and Summer Edward’s Anansesem websites, have brought increased visibility to Caribbean Children’s Literature from all areas in the Caribbean. The Anansesem website offers book reviews, publishes interviews with Caribbean writers and facilitates engagement with Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction on a variety of topical issues relating to the processes of reading, writing, publishing and marketing Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction. By enabling more people to access both the books and the issues related to Caribbean Children’s Literature and Young Adult Fiction, websites such as Anansesem generate further the demand for this genre. Despite the constraints described above in terms of the lack of generic recognition and sparse critical commentary both genres received during the twentieth century, Caribbean novels and short stories written since the s do represent a substantial body of work that can productively be considered under the rubric of Children’s Literature. All the same, for Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction to experience both regional and international growth in a sustainable way, a more concentrated literary critical engagement needs to develop. Caribbean literary critics need to pay more serious attention to the developing poetics being presented by many of the children’s books and Young Adult Fiction coming out of the Caribbean region. Although this essay focuses on prose fiction in order to present the main areas of literary production in relation to writing for children and young adults across the period in view, poetry for children and young adults has also provided several avenues for critical discussions on cultural identity in the Caribbean. Particularly rewarding collections to consider under the genre include Grace Nichols’s Jumpstart to Poetry (); A World of Poetry (), edited by Mark McWatt; Facing the Sea (), edited by Kamau Brathwaite, featuring Nick Caistor and Errol Lloyd; Anne Walmsley’s Give the Ball to the Poet (), edited by Georgina Horrell, Aisha Spencer and Morag Styles; and Julia Avarez’s, The Woman I Kept to Myself (),
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which utilizes the female child figure and voice, though the poems are written with a young adult or adult audience in mind.
Folktales as Narratives for Children In the Caribbean, children are always being told stories. The oral tradition plays an essential role in many of the embedded cultural beliefs and customs of Caribbean people. Anancy (also spelt Anansi or Ananse) stories are the most popular form of Caribbean folktales, and prior to the numerous print versions of these stories, storytellers from across the Caribbean would entertain children with oral versions. Centred around the figure of a trickster hero, these tales have been transmitted across various Caribbean regions and play an important role in presenting in detail the cultural practices, beliefs, and history of peoples and societies across the Caribbean. The stories relate issues of identity, race and social status and have their root in Afro-Caribbean culture. Many Caribbean writers – such as Philip Sherlock, Louise Bennett and Andrew Salkey, from the anglophone Caribbean; June Stoute, Nina Jaffe, Lucia Gonzalez and Julia Alvarez from the hispanophone Caribbean; and Robert D. Sans Souci from the francophone Caribbean – have heavily utilized the oral tradition through their various acts of storytelling. From the s, Caribbean folk tales have tended to be popular within Children’s Literature, carrying proverbs, legends and other forms of Caribbean cultural memory, although until recently they were not always specifically written for children and have not tended to employ children characters with the exception of those that are adapted versions of European fairy tales. Derek Walcott’s play Ti-Jean and His Brothers () retells a West Indian folktale about three brothers who fight with the devil to highlight the value of the oral tradition in helping Caribbean people to understand the impact of history on their present and on establishing Caribbean cultural identity across generations. Merle Hodge’s novella Crick Crack, Monkey () also invokes an awareness of the folkloric tradition as valuable cultural knowledge that weaves itself in and out of the story’s plot. By gathering a variety of Anansi stories from across the Caribbean, the Anansesem website pays tribute to Anansi and celebrates not simply his ‘trickster’ abilities, but more specifically his legacy as ‘the original bearer of all stories’. One of the most recent publications associated with this subgenre of Caribbean Children’s Literature is Tek Mi! Noh Tek Mi!, a
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collection of Caribbean folktales by different Caribbean authors, edited by Hazel D. Campbell (), with an introduction by Professor Maureen Warner-Lewis. Each of these folktales offers an exciting storyline or alternative ending to traditional European and African folktales that have existed for centuries.
Children’s Literature and Cultural Nationalism From the early twentieth century, the Caribbean literary landscape was beginning to take shape as writers in the region created and established a distinct set of literary forms that could be characterized as Caribbean rather than British. Most children’s narratives written during this period were published by Caribbean male authors and centred on Caribbean male protagonists needing to assert a national consciousness. A historical sensibility became a central and significant part of reconstructing a decolonized self for Caribbean people within Caribbean literature. Across the region, many writers used the literary text as an important vehicle through which to transmit knowledge about the history of national homelands as they moved through the processes of decolonization into independence. Victor Stafford Reid’s The Young Warriors, published in , is a good example which represents the history of the Maroons in Jamaica and their struggle against Spanish claims, which started in . Five young men battle different kinds of obstacles to attain the title of warrior. The communal achievements of the five, who symbolically depicted the history of the Jamaican Maroons, stands as an indication of the potential of Black youth to fight for social justice. In this way it has been acknowledged as a landmark narrative in the history of Caribbean children’s books. Reid here celebrates ideas of historical reclamation and national identity by conjuring a spirit of community amongst the Jamaican people. Reid wrote other children’s and young adult novels which also articulated pre- or decolonizing histories, including New Day (), Sixty Five () and Peter of Mount Ephraim (), and was recognized as a pioneer for shaping characters of West Indian literary consciousness. Jamaican C. Everald Palmer continued to narrate the child’s experience of the new nation through his realist novellas, A Cow Called Boy () and My Father, Sun-Sun Johnson (), that deal with the harsh realities of families struggling to survive the impoverished conditions they face as the nation moves into independence. Still predominantly focused on the male child and his experience, Palmer utilizes more of the child’s sensibility
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and imagination in his texts than was achieved by Reid. In A Cow Called Boy, the setting and plot are centred around the typical environments of the child: home and school. George Panton, in his Gleaner article about C. Everard Palmer in November , noted the author as ‘skillful with the portrayal of youngsters’. Josh, the main character in the text, is a mature child who is sensitive to the needs of those around him, including his pet cow called Boy. Once the summer holidays are over, Josh grapples with the harsh reality of leaving his cow behind as he enters the inflexible space of school. Through Josh, Palmer introduces the journey of the Caribbean male child who attempts to stand up for what he believes in and to embrace his rural surroundings and customs, while at the same time attempting to receive an education, which his mother, a single-parent, views as a matter of priority for her child. The plot reveals both the individual and social responses to the main character’s efforts to accept his agricultural roots and simultaneously to embrace his access to education, while rejecting the oppressive values of the school system. Rami, the male child protagonist in My Father, Sun-Sun Johnson, navigates a similar path but here the main conflict pivots on a father’s failure to secure his farmland because of his financial instability, despite having been the biggest landowner in the village. Again, the focus is on the challenges the individual faces in a newly independent nation, but here there is more engagement with the intimate climate of the home and the inner turmoil of the male child battling psychologically and physically with his father as he refuses to fit into a system which defines him only according to his economic and social status. The story’s first-person narrative style foregrounds the child’s consciousness and highlights for the reader the obstacles and victories associated with the difficult journey individuals and Jamaica must make as a postcolonial society. The use of the rural settings in these texts realises the imagining of the new nation space through the pastoral. Typically characterized as a space of marginality, it is noteworthy that Reid and Palmer establish their fictional communities in the rural space, which during that period was being forsaken and associated with forms of ‘backwardness’. Both Palmer and Reid subvert the notion of the nation’s identity being rooted in its urban growth and development by narrating the rural space as enabling personal, communal and national growth. Other children’s stories, such as Andrew Salkey’s Hurricane () and The River that Disappeared (), as well as Jean D’Costa’s Escape to Last Man Peak (), are set in Jamaica. These, as well as Trinidadian narratives Crick Crack, Monkey by Merle Hodge () and Michael
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Anthony’s All that Glitters (), narrate different sociocultural realities, but all shed light on the specific ways in which landscape shapes Caribbean cultural identity. Salkey focuses on both the urban and rural landscapes in Hurricane and The River That Disappeared. In the first story, the child narrator describes in detail how the people in the community disregard the emergency messages with respect to an impending hurricane and suffer as a result, and in the second story the refusal of a father and brother to understand the imaginative ‘vision’ of their daughter and sister opens a door that leads to the death of all three. Collectively these stories explore how place, and an awareness of place, deeply inform identity. The narratives demonstrate how the child’s perspective is rarely seen as important in the adult world despite its value and capacity to enact a deep recovery of history needed to reconfigure community. A Caribbean poetics of childhood emerges here because of the ‘original vibrancy’ that is attached to the child’s imagination and function in the story. The sensibility of the child in these works maintains positive and empowered notions of the self that have gradually been buried or distorted in an adult consciousness due to negative experiences and the masks of social conformity. Interestingly, childhood poetics works to highlight the trauma of adult experience in ways that only children can recognize through their innocence and freedom from masking and self-deceit. In All that Glitters (), Michael Anthony centres the action on the consciousness of a male child narrator who observes people’s reactions to his aunty who works in Panama when she returns home for a visit. Anthony shares the child narrator’s strong emotional response to the negative reactions of family members who regard his aunt as a prosperous migrant and cannot acknowledge her need to be viewed as at ‘home’ in Trinidad and not as an outsider. Trinidadian Earl Lovelace’s The Schoolmaster () had earlier also centralized the experiences of a child whose innocence and livelihood are maimed, here by the exploitative actions of a male adult in the Trinidadian village of Kumaca. Whereas the books previously mentioned are children’s books, suitable for children between seven and twelve years old, The Schoolmaster directs the reader’s attention to the life of its teenage female protagonist, who is sexually molested by her male teacher and describes the horrifying effects of this action not simply on the life of the female character, who eventually commits suicide, but on the life of the entire community who experience the tension, rage, bitterness and social decline as a result of this violence. In this work, Lovelace subtly presents a connection between Eurocentric models of progress and the intersecting
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levels of exploitation (sexual, emotional, mental) experienced by members of the Caribbean nation, whose wholeness is sacrificed to maintain the very social and cultural ideals that betray their own sense of identity and culture. In her book Escape to Last Man Peak (), Jean D’Costa offers a focus on landscape with a distinctive narrative style guided by the collective pronoun ‘we’. D’Costa introduces a group of children in a foster care facility called ‘Sunrise Home’ who lose their matron to a sudden epidemic that rapidly destroys the lives of several people in the area of Spanish Town. The children depart the relic of an ‘old sugar estate house’, in search of a new home, realizing that their guardian will not be returning and refusing to be taken by the authorities (). D’Costa’s book, like Salkey’s Hurricane, shifts from the central setting of the rural landscape so common in children’s stories written by Caribbean male writers between and the late s, reflecting the preference of her narrator: ‘we were town children, and bush did not interest us’ (). Here D’Costa’s female protagonist narrates the journey of these orphans as they move away from the rigid adult world of buildings, rules and restrictions to the outskirts of the city, where they find a cave to make their dwelling place. The narrative emphasizes the children’s need for freedom from adult rules and expectations: ‘We liked Matron; but it was nice to do as one chose, without being told not to do this and come and do something else all day’ (). Jamaica Kincaid’s collection of short stories, At the Bottom of the River (), offers an intense and moving account of a female child’s consciousness as she negotiates who she is through her experiences with her mother. These are recounted by Kincaid as both mythical and domestic female realities which seemingly suffocate the female child as she moves from childhood into adolescence and young adulthood. This is also an important collection because it initiates the beginning of a corpus of short story collections by Caribbean women writers invested in exploring the dynamics of cultural identity and self-discovery through the Caribbean child protagonist.
Women’s Writing and the Child-Centred Sensibility By the s, Caribbean women writers were taking centre-stage in Caribbean literature as they published short stories, novels and poems that greatly influenced patterns of literary production coming out of the region. Erna Brodber (Jamaica), Lorna Goodison (Jamaica), Velma Pollard
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(Jamaica), Olive Senior (Jamaica), Grace Nichols (Guyana), Merle Collins (Grenada), and Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua) dominated the anglophone Caribbean literary sphere. In the francophone Caribbean, even before the s, ‘leading figures include[d] Simone Schwarz-Bart (Guadelope), Michele Lacrosil Conde (Guadelope), Myriam Warner-Vieyra (Guadelope), Gisèle Pineau (Guadelope), and Ina Cesaire (Martinique)’, and in the hispanophone Caribbean, despite a constant struggle for visibility, by the s and s, Conrad James argues that the field of women’s writing in Dominica, Puerto Rico and Cuba, ‘was coming of age’. Although works by these women were never branded as Caribbean Children’s or Young Adult Fiction, many of them were selected for school syllabuses across the Caribbean because of their striking child protagonists. Texts such as Beka Lamb (), Summer Lightning (), Harriet’s Daughter () and Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home () were commonly taught as part of the curriculum for English literature at both secondary and tertiary levels. In Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, Brodber employs the female child’s sensibility to interrogate the way the belief systems, speech and actions of adults affect the lives of children. Through a focus on the intuitiveness of the female child and the ways she absorbs and illustrates the world surrounding her, Brodber (also a sociologist) presents what she describes as ‘her first extended work of the imagination’ and sheds light on the way our education system creates a disconnection both within and between individuals in society. Velma Pollard’s and Jean D’Costa’s edited first collection of children’s stories entitled Over Our Way, first published in , included stories by the editors, John Wickham, Judy Stone, David King, Olive Senior, Merle Hodge and others. This collection centres Caribbean childhood experiences as the lens through which to understand childhood realities across the Caribbean, and the way the realities of class and race either promote or discourage a positive sense of self for the Caribbean child who typically exists on the margins, verbalizing and denouncing many of these prejudices – rather than seeing and remaining silent as tends to happen in the adult worlds into which they are born or raised. The child figure in these narratives has transitioned from articulating the imagined nation to critiquing the negative realities that continue to shape the nation. During the s and s, many Caribbean female authors explored the construction of cultural identity through the eyes of the female child in order to examine social constructions of gender. Olive Senior’s short stories in Summer Lightning focus on cultural phenomena and experiences
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associated with children in rural Jamaica. The reader’s attention is captivated by the fast-paced narrative style and the child whose eyes and ears absorb all the intricate details of a conversation, an event or a scene and assimilate this information easily and quickly, throwing out all the pieces at once so that the reader is barely able to take a breath. This technique allows Senior to depict the adult community, with all its prejudiced and hypocritical tendencies, through the innocent, enquiring eyes of the child. In Senior’s stories, those rendered unimportant or silenced are given the highest significance as storytellers. In stories such as ‘Ascot’, ‘Bright Thursdays’, and ‘Do Angels Wear Brassieres’, the child protagonist functions as observer and bystander who is expected to be ‘seen and not heard’ and therefore not noticed or unappreciated by the adults. The female protagonist in Harriet’s Daughter by Canadian-Trinidadian M. NourbeSe Philip () celebrates her race, culture and sex by reenacting the actions of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railway experience, when playing with her friends. One of the first Caribbean diasporic texts which makes the life of the child a central part of the narrative, here the intersectional constructs of race, femaleness, Caribbean identity and migration are all neatly pulled into the plot in ways that were barely present before. Margaret, the young Barbadian child, draws on the activist world of Tubman as a way of accessing a space of freedom and rebellion for herself as a Black girl, in the face of the regular childhood authority figures – her parents and her school. Not only does Margaret internalize the story of Harriet Tubman to empower herself, but she also uses the personal upliftment she gains through this historical, ancestral figure to reach out and further empower her close female friend Zulma.
Contemporary Caribbean Children’s Books and Young Adult Fiction The character and profile of Children’s and Young Adult Fiction began to shift in major ways during the mid-s and into the start of the century. A distinctive body of Caribbean children’s and young adult texts written for a child audience began to emerge from authors like Diane Browne (who had been writing since the s without recognition), Hazel D. Campbell, Diana McCauley, Curdella Forbes and Paulette Ramsay. If the child protagonist moved from being the symbolic figure of the nation in the s to offering a critique of the corrupt nation in the s, then the child offers the opportunity for the adult to remember him or herself in the s. This becomes evident through the epistolary form
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utilized by Ramsay in Aunt Jen and Forbes in Songs of Silence, as their main female protagonists articulate situations involving the adults in their worlds that force these adults to come face to face with harsh truths about their identities and the impact of their actions on those around them. In the past decade, Young Adult Fiction has gradually claimed its own space and is now becoming a highly popular genre. Twenty-first-century writers have utilized this genre to delve into complex issues surrounding the identity and experiences of young people in the Caribbean today and the shifting paradigms through which human existence is being understood. Globalization and technological advancement have shaped young lives but also the possibilities for writing, marketing and selling Young Adult Fiction, which has also become increasingly popular. Diana McCaulay’s novels Dog-Heart () and Gone to Drift () focus on male protagonists who struggle with a sense of self amidst stereotypical labels, chaotic social realities and deep levels of alienation. Through her novel All Over Again, award-winning A-dziko Gegele from Jamaica carefully portrays the harsh realities of puberty for a twelveyear-old boy. These recent novels and short fictions being written for and about children and young adults are more concerned with the child’s expression of self in a world that seemingly swallows him or her up because of its dysfunctional image-perfect realities which confuse and distort the young mind. Launching into science fiction, in Children of the Spider (), Imam Baksh also demonstrates the complexities surrounding one’s identity in a space where a female protagonist enters and exits diverse worlds and experiences, on her journey away from those who seek to oppress and suffocate her life. Although belonging to the realm of fantasy, symbolism is utilized by Baksh as a way of helping the adolescent Guyanese reader to access the seeming world of impossibility through various historical connections to Guyana. It is while on this adventure that Mayali learns to trust herself and comes to understand that some of the things we believe to be true might need to be questioned. Baksh’s novel is a powerful demonstration of how dramatically Young Adult Fiction has shifted since the s. The focus is no longer simply on establishing one’s identity but on affirming, celebrating and owning that identity. One of the most popular genres exemplifying this new mode of writing about the identity of Caribbean children across the world is the picture book, now one of the most popular genres of children’s books internationally. Olive Senior’s Birthday Suit () pulls readers into the world of a little boy who is transitioning from being an infant to becoming a
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toddler. It is a simple storyline with a powerful message about the importance of valuing the feelings of both children and parents when trying to help the child to adapt to a new stage of life. To walk around naked is all Johnny wants, and he refuses to adhere to his mother’s instructions to put on clothes. Soon, however, his father displays an uncharacteristic parental approach in Caribbean life – he ‘reasons with’ the child, shows that he values his opinion, but explains that if he wants to be a man like his father, he needs to put on some clothes. We then watch Johnny embracing his new stage of development without being traumatized about releasing his former self. Senior has produced three picture books, including Boonoonoonus Hair in , which engages readers with an alternative to the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ principle. Other fairly recently published picture books include Janet Plummer’s A Long Way from Home (), which creates the opportunity for children and adults to understand the deep longing for home and stability that children tend to experience as a result of the process of migration, and Diane Browne’s Abigail’s Glorious Hair (), which honours the beauty of a little girl’s ‘black hair’, which she treasures with all her heart. Child characters are also depicted in picture books as being intimately connected to the Caribbean landscape because of their heightened level of awareness and connection to nature and animals in an eco-poetics that places importance on respecting and cherishing the elements of nature. Olive Senior’s Anna Carries Water () illustrates the importance of keeping children grounded and connected with nature. In Natalie Rochester’s Hazel Hummingbird: La Colibri (), written in both English and Spanish, two children are captivated by the colour and movement of the Jamaican hummingbird, which they learn to appreciate by observing the bird’s strategic movement and grace as it flies from one element of the landscape to another. The power of what exists in the mind of the child is evident in Edwidge Danticat’s moving picture book story Eight Days (), which is about a Haitian boy who uses his imagination to survive eight days of being trapped as a result of a horrific earthquake. As a body of texts, Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult Fiction continue to not only play a significant role in expanding Caribbean literary discourse, but also to function as a transformative agent within the Caribbean literary sphere. As Roni Natov () argues in The Poetics of Childhood, ‘childhood narratives bring us to an exquisitely liminal place in adulthood, one that generates [. . .] a rich variety of expression of psychological and aesthetic possibility’. Caribbean Children’s and Young Adult
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Fiction ought to be identified and recognized as a significant genre, and the Caribbean writers who have contributed to the development of this genre merit serious critical attention for providing literary production for our children and young people that will enable them to understand their histories, their societies and their worth.
Notes Martin Carter, Selected Poems (Georgetown, Guyana: Red Thread Women’s Press, ), . John Stephens et al., ‘Introduction’, in John Stephens et al. (eds.), The Routledge Companion to International Children’s Literature (Oxford: Routledge, ), –, –. Peter Hunt, ‘Introduction: The Expanding World of Children’s Literature Studies’, in Peter Hunt (ed.), Understanding Children’s Literature, nd ed. (Oxford: Routledge, ), –, . Ibid., ; Barbara Z. Kiefer, with Susan Helper and Janet Hickman, Charlotte Huck’s Children’s Literature, th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, ), . Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber and Faber, ); Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory-Fido (eds.), Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ); Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (New York: Routledge, ). Stephens et al., ‘Introduction’, . Diane Browne, personal interview with Aisha Spencer, . Daryl Cumber Dance and Velma Pollard, ‘A Conversation with Velma Pollard’, CLA Journal, . (), –. Cilas Kemedjio, ‘Founding-Ancestors and Intertextuality in Francophone Caribbean Literature and Criticism’, Research in African Literatures, . (), –, . Summer Edward, ‘On the Imperialist “Charity” of Rebuilding Caribbean Children’s Libraries with Eurocentric Books’, The Millions (), https:// themillions.com///imperialist-charity-of-rebuilding-caribbean-chil drens-libraries-with-eurocentric-books.html. Jean Jonassaint, ‘French and Francophone: The Challenge of Expanding Horizons’, Yale French Studies, (), –, . Rampaul, G. and Skeete, G. (eds.), ‘Introduction’ in The Child and the Caribbean Imagination (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, ), –, . ‘About Anansesem’, Anansesem: News, Ideas, Arts & Letters from the World of Caribbean Children’s Publishing, www.anansesem.com/p/about-anansesem .html [Accessed July ].
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Hazel D. Campbell (ed.), Tek Mi! Noh Tek Mi! (Kingston: Carlong Publishers (Caribbean) Ltd, ). George Panton, ‘C. Everard Palmer: The Boys’ Ideal Story-Teller’, The Gleaner ( November ), https://nlj.gov.jm/wp-content/uploads// /hn_palmer_ce_.pdf. Roni Natov, The Poetics of Childhood (Oxford: Routledge, ), . Jean D’Costa, Escape to Last Man Peak, (Trinidad: Longman Caribbean, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Kasonga M. Kapanga, ‘Caribbean Literature (Francophone)’, in M. Keith Booker (ed.), Encyclopedia of Literature and Politics: Censorship, Revolution, and Writing, vol. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, ), –, . Conrad James, ‘Spanish Caribbean Women Writers: Introduction’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, . (), –, . Erna Brodber, ‘Fiction as Hypothesis’, in Mervyn Morris and Carolyn Allen (eds.), Writing Life: Reflections by West Indian Writers (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, ), –, . Natov, The Poetics of Childhood, .
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Cultural and Political Transitions
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Caribbean Feminist Criticism: Towards a New Canon of Caribbean Feminist Theory and Theorizing Simone A. James Alexander
As several Caribbean critics have observed, the s witnessed the end of an era of male domination in Caribbean literature. From this decade onwards, Caribbean feminist thinkers right across the region generated a surge of publications that showcased both their creative and critical talents. The range of these texts is itself impressive, as just a sample reveals: Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (), Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women Writing from the Caribbean (), Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (), Caribbean Women’s Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (), Green Cane and Juicy Flotsam: Short Stories by Caribbean Women (), Gender in Caribbean Development (), Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (), Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santeria, Obeah, and the Caribbean (), The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (), Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers (), Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses (), Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (), Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (). Together these collections and critical interventions engendered a significant transition, not only the dislodging of the androcentric canon but also the raising of the profile and relevance of Caribbean feminist thinkers. This essay surveys these publications and maps the emergence of Caribbean feminist criticism as a mode of theoretical challenge that enacted a transformative critical praxis that not only centred women’s lived experiences, but also fostered transnational alliances, dialogues, and partnerships among women. In reading these texts, I note how a politics of inclusion proved necessary for reclaiming and reconceptualizing Caribbean female histories and reading narratives of gendered lives, alongside an expanded focus on racialized transnational subjects that
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complicated a ‘black/white dominated historical paradigm’ that ‘overlooks the multicultural, multi-ethnic make-up of the Caribbean region as a whole, but also erases Indo-Caribbean and other subjectivities’. The use of anthologies as a discursive and theoretical platform for celebrating and registering the emergence of Caribbean feminist work has been effective. With a sampling of writers and writings, they provide ready access to both established and emerging writers, as well as to a wide range of literary works and different genres. In this way, they foster reflection on ideas of unity in diversity – a recurring theme of Caribbean feminist scholarship – and perform the dismantling of barriers and hierarchical relations they often argue against. Anthologies disrupt the centrality and singularity of authorship, authority and knowledge production. In anthologies generated by conferences, the abstract form of theorizing is decentred as dialogue, and sites of theoretical and literary exchanges take shape. This literal and symbolic interchange and interface between academics, theorists, (grassroots) activists and artists is one of the hallmarks of Caribbean feminist criticism. Advocating for practice as theory and theory as practice, Barbara Christian pontificates that ‘people of colour have always theorized – but [. . .] not in the Western form of abstract logic’. Their theorizing resides in the ‘narrative form, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language’ (). Christian holds Barbadian-American Paule Marshall’s introduction to theory as a blueprint for a ‘black feminist literary critic’: ‘She learned about language and storytelling from her mother and her mother’s friend talking in the kitchen.’ Christian also suggests that Black feminists need to speak the language of familiarity-cumintimacy to engender self-articulation as well as to remain in dialogue with each other: ‘When we speak and answer back we validate our experiences’ (xii). Christian’s invocation of Marshall is no coincidence; actually it lends itself to the discourse of theory meets practice, validating a shared experience between the critic, Christian, a pioneering Caribbean and Black feminist critic, and the literary foremother of African American and Caribbean literature, Marshall. A forerunner of literary criticism, Christian completed her graduate studies at Columbia University in the s, and her ground-breaking Black Women Novelists, published in , achieved attention when Black women critics were few. Marshall published her debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, in when the literary field was dominated by men. The feminist concerns of the novel are laid bare in the everyday struggles of Marshall’s ordinary men and women, working-class immigrant families, particularly Black working-class
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Caribbean Feminist Criticism
women: ‘These women, the “mother poets”, never had the opportunity to be recognized published poets. They were invisible, both as poets and women. These women were invisible on four counts: they were black, women, immigrants, and working-class. They had all of those strikes against them.’ Writing themselves into a literature and history that systematically excluded them, Marshall/the ‘Mother Poets’ have brilliantly mastered the master narrative (read Western theory) through the art of storytelling. In bringing attention to Marshall’s literary work, Christian makes visible a distinct Black female literary tradition. The intimacy and trusting of self, that Christian underscores as critical to Black women’s survival, surfaces as central in Audre Lorde’s definition of the erotic, in which ‘our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within’. Illuminating the limits of theory in her assertion that ‘The master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house’, Lorde proposes the erotic, empowered self-knowledge as critical in dismantling the social, racial and political hierarchy of white heteropatriarchal power structures. Brilliant at politicizing the personal, Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde offers a valuable and ground-breaking analysis by bringing a discussion of women’s sexuality into Black feminist criticism. This collection of essays and speeches critiques the marginalization of Blacks, gays, the elderly and women, and, despite Lorde’s tongue in cheek declaration ‘that she doesn’t write theory’, her words radically reshape feminist politics and theorizing (). From the position of an outsider, she understands oppressions as overlapping and interlocking. Lorde consciously rejected so-called safe spaces for unsafe ones, in(ter)jecting a lesbian consciousness into the Caribbean literary canon. Her Zami: A New Spelling of My Name remains an important text for its challenge to heteronormative formations of women’s desire as well as its attempt to forge a new narrative form through the use of what Lorde calls ‘biomythography’, a form that mediates and gathers together personal and collective knowledge to construct an alternative history of gender, sexuality and political organizing. In her memoir, The Cancer Journals, Lorde stages an alternative practice of Black feminist criticism. Her body becomes the site of feminist contestations, of theoretical analysis, and engenders the experiential. Lorde, and Caribbean feminist criticism as a whole, posits the body as a site for politics, a site where social constructions of difference are mapped. Puerto Rican author and poet Mayra Santos-Febres puts it best: ‘The body is the site of perception, the filter, and the page on which life writes itself. The body reflects the ways in which history touches a person [. . .] the
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body is the quintessential instrument of literature.’ Rejecting the censorship of the female body, the hierarchized dichotomies engendered in the heterosexual binary, because ‘[it] totally dimiss[es] [her]knowledge as a Black lesbian’, Lorde advocates for a politics of inclusion that acknowledges shared experiential knowledge amongst women. Reiterating the demand for a reordering of literary criticism, espoused by Christian and Marshall, the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé proposes another way of theorizing. For Condé, the task of the black woman writer ‘is to forget the kind of superstructure imposed upon us by education, tradition, and going to university. We have to listen to another voice. We can write just like the whites. But we must use another method.’ Caribbean women writers/critics have unsurprisingly always utilized ‘form’, practice, storytelling and language, as part of what Conde calls ‘another method’. Furthering this line of reasoning, Puerto Rican feminist scholar Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert reinforces the need for theory to reflect practice and vice versa: ‘When studying Caribbean women, we must anchor our work in a profound understanding of the societies we (they) inhabit.’ Identifying a distinct Caribbean feminist epistemology, Paravisini-Gebert argues that Caribbean feminist criticism is responsive to lived experiences and realities; in other words, ‘It [is] responsive to the conditions in which that existence must unfold’ (). Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson boldly underscore the lived feminist knowledge embedded in their collection of creative writings, Her TrueTrue Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean, arguing that, ‘where the Anglophone Caribbean is concerned, if that literature has up till recently been a literature of middle-class values and bourgeois preoccupations, we need regretfully to assign the responsibility to male writers. The focus of most of the women’s writing – especially recent writing – has been on grass roots concerns and ordinary people’. With a cross-cultural, multilingual focus, this collection gathers women writers at home and abroad to forge an imagined community in which they share a personal history of migration and imperialism. The collection Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory-Fido, represents the expanding fields of women’s writing alongside a break from traditional ways of theorizing to advocate for a woman/feminist-conscious approach. The comparative and expansive collection of critical essays from the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean fosters inclusivity and intertextuality. The aptly titled interview/dialogue ‘Preface: Talking It Over: Women, Writing and Feminism’ between Davies and
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Savory-Fido serves as a classic example of the interface of practice (oral literature) and theory. In a text ushering in a new generation of Caribbean feminist thinkers, the afterword ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meaning: Un/Silencing the “Demonic Grounds” of Caliban’s Woman’, by Jamaican writer and critic Sylvia Wynter, calls attention to Wynter’s preeminence as a critic and her continued contribution to Caribbean intellectual (feminist) thought. Wynter’s uncoincidental address of the absence of Caliban’s woman calls attention to ‘ontological absence [. . .] which is functional to the new secularizing schema by which the peoples of Western Europe legitimated their global expansion as well as their expropriation and/their marginalization of all the other population-groups of the globe’. The absence of Caliban’s woman conversely engenders a reimagining of Caribbean feminist theory ‘beyond hegemonic and secularizing systems of meanings’ (). Another landmark collection, Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (), edited by Selwyn Cudjoe, focuses on the wealth of women’s writing primarily from the Englishspeaking Caribbean. While Cudjoe’s claim that the first International Conference on Caribbean women writers hosted by the Black Studies Department of Wellesley College was ‘the founding event of Caribbean women’s writing’ is disputable – and, notably, Sylvia Wynter and Beryl Gilroy, who began writing in the s, were in attendance – the conference was transnational in scope as it brought together an eclectic group of Caribbean women writers and theorists ‘to talk about their writings and to articulate concerns that generated their literary production’ (). In the section appropriately titled ‘The Text: In Their Own Words’, theoretical and experiential knowledge converge as authors and critics explore the writing process and the attendant interpretation of literary/critical texts. The intersection and exchange between textual and theoretical strategies is extended in interdisciplinary terms as Erna Brodber shares how her method of Caribbean feminist criticism blends sociology and literature, teaching and ‘activist intentions or praxis’. This practice of disrupting received categories and orders of knowledge was acknowledged and celebrated as a mode of Caribbean feminist intervention in Evelyn O’Callaghan’s book, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women, the first full-length critical study devoted to West Indian women’s writing. Although O’Callaghan started studying West Indian fiction in the s, and with the exception of Jean Rhys, she only became aware of other West Indian women writers
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in the s after being introduced to Erna Brodber’s Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home. O’Callaghan begins from the premise that ‘critics in the Caribbean don’t simply assume the “truth” of imported theory, but adapt and modify it, argue against it, and force it into counter-discursive roles’ (). Practising her theoretical insight that reading women writers is critical to an understanding of Caribbean feminist theory, in O’Callaghan introduced the first course that exclusively examined the writing of Caribbean women at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. Illuminating women-centred scholarship, O’Callaghan observes that West Indian fiction by women is marked by its ‘insistence on questioning the received order, exploring political and other structures that support the dominant discourse, not least by interrogating the necessary rightness of binary opposites (man as presence/woman as lack)’ (). Accordingly, anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean writers engage, she argues, in ‘a constant investigation and relativizing of all “ways of knowing”’, resulting in the articulation and validation of unauthorized knowledges and histories of those whose knowledge is discredited (). Equally but differently attentive to the practice and detriment of exclusionary politics, and the significance of recognizing the range of lived realities for women in the Caribbean, Indo-Trinidadian author Ramabai Espinet speaks to the particular challenges facing feminists of Indian Caribbean descent. Drawing attention to the religious, social and historical complexities of South Asian culture that are compounded by indentureship and ‘the particular experience’ of Indo-Caribbean women, Espinet nevertheless argues that the absence of Indo-Caribbean (women) writers from the region’s literary and artistic expression is unjustified and warrants criticism: There is no question that our contributions have been ignored or marginalized [. . .] I think that the experience of Indo-Caribbean people should not remain within their relatively isolated community. It is part of the general historical movement of peoples into this archipelago and as such belongs to all, impacts on all and should be known by all.
Redressing the marginalization of Indo-Caribbean women’s literary voices, Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai co-edited the first critical collection devoted to this field, published in . Attending to novels, poetry and children’s literature by both recognized voices, such as Shani Mootoo and Meiling Jin, as well as relatively unknown writers, such as Madeline Coopsammy and Vashanti Rahaman, the editors and authors in this work
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collectively contest the critical recalcitrance shown to this body of writing which also emerges into visibility in the s. They draw attention to the literary activism and distinctive poetics of social solidarity and justice within this body of writing, as in Pirbhai’s essay on fictions of plantation history in Trinidad, Guyana and Martinique, where she develops the concept of jahaji-hood, or ship-sisterhood, as a specific historical bond and woman-centred resistant sensibility. Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar extend these opportunities for serious critical engagement in their edited collection, Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, devoted to IndoCaribbean feminist thought and theory. Emphasizing the genealogy of Indo-Caribbean feminism, this collection advances a cross-cultural/crossracial alliance of feminist theorizing. In reimagining Indo-Caribbean female histories, it moves beyond regional thinking or politicizing, providing a ‘cross-cultural interrogation both within the region and beyond’. Restating the politics of inclusion as a necessary ingredient to reclaiming and reconceptualizing female histories is one of the core arguments of this collection. Although identifying a discreet body of work by and often for Indo-Caribbean feminists, this collection seeks to expand and explore intersectional identities and contributes to the move in Caribbean feminism towards establishing cross-racial solidarities that unsettle the ‘narrative of purity’ and respectability in favour of douglarization or creolization. Hosein’s article, ‘Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Reflection and Reconceptualization’, argues for a reconceptualization of dougla poetics in Indo-Caribbean feminist thought. For Shalini Puri, in drawing attention to existing interracial contact more than a decade earlier, dougla poetics ‘provide[s] a rich symbolic resource for interracial unity’ as it offers ‘a means for articulating potentially progressive cultural projects de-legitimized by both the AfroCreole dominant culture and the Indian “Mother Culture”’. Hosein’s reconfiguration more than a decade later accommodates ‘thinking about multiple embodiments of Indianness, which neither displace nor efface Dougla in Indo-Caribbean feminist thought’, but it also moves beyond hybrid identity represented by Indian–African contact, to accommodate plurality, thus extending Indo-Caribbean identity to be inclusive of dougla subjectivity or dougla feminisms. Hosein’s embrace of a ‘pluralistic’ dougla poetics eschews the misgivings expressed by some members of the Indo-Caribbean community towards reconstructing Indianness within a creolized framework. Hosein’s reservation about fixed, nontransformative identity bears echoes of Espinet’s earlier critique of
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exclusionary ethnic politics: ‘There is also within that context of “purity” a fixedness which denies the evidence of creolization.’ Moreover, Hosein’s theoretical knowledge is embedded in and bolstered by experiential knowledge as the mother of a dougla daughter, thus engendering the interface between theory and practice that informs both her feminist and theoretical writings as well as her blog. The pan-Caribbean (regional) focus of many of these feminist publications in English also brings attention to unity in diversity across the interrelated histories and cultures of the anglophone, hispanophone, francophone, lusophone and Caribbean Dutch territories, and suggests that shared concerns across the Caribbean remain central to any serious study of the region. This interrelatedness is characterized by the cultural, ethnic, linguistic and historical diversity of Caribbean societies and diasporas that require a comparative approach to women’s issues, a transnational feminism that can attend to women’s difference both locally and globally. Furthermore, by seeking to encompass an eclectic mix of genres – critical essays, poetry, prose, interviews, memoirs, autobiography and testimonials – these publications demonstrate the need for feminist spaces of dialogue and communication inter-regionally and internationally that are intertextual and interdisciplinary. Despite their deep commitment to gender issues, Guadeloupean writers Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Myriam Warner-Vieyra object to being called feminists. Acknowledging that ‘francophone literatures, and the women writers within them, have clearly flourished in the recent past’, Christiane Makward and Odile Cazenave nevertheless point out that the stark absence of francophone women writers and writings from college curricula, and the literary canon as a whole, points to the fact that ‘the francophone woman writer – at least outside of Europe – is a relatively modern phenomenon’. Drawing a parallel with the outsider status, ‘the others’ others’, of francophone women writers and their reluctance to embrace the label ‘feminist’, Makward and Cazenave surmise: ‘Like “feminist”, “francophone” has the treacherous value of a handy label’ (). This scepticism finds resonance in their argument that: ‘The closer francophone women writers are to the literary standards that dominate the Parisian scene, the better they will fare – and to date no outspoken francophone feminist has been a “bookstore success”. The less culturally confined their work, and the more standard their French, the more easily they will achieve success’ (). While Makward and Cazenave’s argument that Condé and Schwarz-Bart ‘would not have dared use distorted or dialectal French because it would have guaranteed them failure to gain
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recognition on the French front’ () is compelling, I would argue that Condé’s outspokenness – her non-conforming political stance – has, on the contrary, propelled her to international fame and success. Condé and Schwarz-Bart’s unwavering commitment to gendered issues – their interrogation of patriarchal structures, female subjection, and subjugation, their challenge to patriarchal motherhood and polygamy – is undeniably feminist. It seems that only a narrowly defined feminism prevents their recognition as Caribbean feminist theorists, as in Makward and Cazenave’s description of Schwarz-Bart’s activism: ‘Although SchwarzBart never paid “feminist” attention to women’s issues, her readers will instantly sense a genuine love of women in her novels’ (). Suffice it to say, francophone women writers, namely Condé, SchwarzBart, Warner-Vieyra, Myriam Chancy and Edwidge Danticat, are equally invested in women and gender issues as their writings are rooted in struggles for identity and cultural expression. Condé proposes PanAfricanism as the lens through which to advance the struggle for independence, suggesting that fellow activists ‘review Pan-Africanism and its possibilities in relation to our struggles’. A participant at a conference on Pan-Africanism in the United States, Condé, advocating for unity in the Caribbean, argues: ‘If we are not allowed to be diverse and different, we cannot be united. Diversity within unity is the definition of our shared objectives of national autonomy and cooperation within the larger Caribbean’ (). While identifying the shortcomings of Pan-Africanism, Condé nevertheless considers it a vehicle for promoting and espousing feminist views, noticeably inviting Paule Marshall and Louise Merriweather to a conference in Guadeloupe to promote ‘unity within the diaspora’ (). A valuable addition to the canon of Caribbean feminist criticism came in the twenty-first century with the first collection of writings by writers of Haitian descent in the United States: The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (), edited by writer and activist Edwidge Danticat. The compilation of essays and poetry in The Butterfly’s Way links the voices of English-, French- and Kreyol-speaking subjects, and of community activists, filmmakers, scholars and visual artists. This engagement of theorists/storytellers and activists facilitates a grassroots ideology that renders the collection accessible and of interest to both academic and non-academic readers, fostering a marriage between scholarship and activism. While the collection examines life and politics in Haiti and the dyaspora, the tenth department of Haiti, the floating homeland, Danticat’s stance on feminist issues is unequivocal; the resilience and
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resistance of Haitian women is accorded sustained critical attention. Paule Marshall underscores the importance of Danticat giving voice to political and feminist issues: ‘A silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.’ Unsurprisingly, the literature of Haiti has been maledominated; this paucity is being addressed by the increase in publication of work by Haitian and Haitian dyasporic women writers. In her literary tribute (a political obituary of sorts) that doubles as the introduction of the collection, to friend and renowned radio journalist and writer Jean Dominique, who was murdered by the Duvalier regime, Danticat defies generic boundaries, ‘bringing the personal (private, emotional issues) into the public arena (literature)’, to echo O’Callaghan, and registering what Newtona Johnson aptly calls an ‘audacious emancipatory act of breaking out of literary subalternization and staking claim to space on the literary terrain’. Reconfiguring the dyaspora beyond dispersals, the opening essay by Joanna Hippolite, fittingly titled ‘Dyaspora’, conceives of her displacement as liberatory in terms of new possibilities and new beginnings. Hence space is not socially bounded; the proverbial butterfly exemplifies shifting, migrating locations and landscapes. The term ‘dyaspora’ itself resists fixity, resonating with Davies’s view in her influential critical study, Black Women and Identity: Migration of the Subject, that women’s writing ‘should be read as a series of boundary crossings, and not a fixed geographical, ethnically or nationally bound category of writing’. Danticat’s collection coincides with Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance () by Beverly Bell and extends the creative field for important critical responses advanced by Chancy’s Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women () and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (). As the title, Walking on Fire, intimates, the thirty-eight oral histories of a diverse group of Haitian women of which the collection is comprised chronicle the statesponsored violence and horror these women endured and their ultimate triumph and heroism as they weathered the storm. The first collection of critical essays and creative writing of hispanophone writers of African descent, edited by African American writer and professor Miriam DeCosta-Willis, also foregrounds the importance of connecting Caribbean women writers across the diaspora. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers () includes short stories and excerpts from novels, many of which are translated into English for the first time. It foregrounds how Afra-Hispanic writers are also invested in movements for political and social change in their countries and revolutionize literary discourse by subverting its conventions. Although many of
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the writers do not identify as feminists ‘because they do not want their work pigeonholed by labels [. . .] and because they consider feminism a Euro-American ideology that is exogenous to their culture’, their writing is grounded unmistakably in redressing gender imbalances, so much so that the literary period is referred to as the womanization (mujerización) of literature. Afra-Hispanic feminists also interrogate the ‘black-white dichotomization of race in the United States’, introducing mestizaje (racial and cultural mixing) as a new lens through which to explore Caribbean feminist theory (xxiii). Indeed, Santos-Febres explains that although ‘gender is a definite point of departure for talking about politics’, it is not the ‘predominant way in which [third world] women experience oppression’. Rather, their oppression is intertwined with other forms of oppression. As an Afra-Hispanic writer, Santos-Febres, like Lorde, stresses that difference is enhancing, not limiting, suggesting its ‘eras[ure] through writing’, so as not to engender a hierarchy of race and class oppression (). These landmark publications of Caribbean women’s writings and feminist theorizing have been hugely successful in complicating and enriching the literary agendas of a male canon and invigorating new analytic discourses with a focus on gender and sexuality. While Caribbean feminist criticism is now established, as evidenced by the mounting publication of work on sexuality and gender in the last decade, Caribbean feminist criticism can ill-afford to lose sight of the tasks at hand and needs to remain attentive to the concerns around the multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, exclusion and marginalization it first undertook to address. Indeed, while anthologies of writing and literary critical works have been successful in mapping the major contribution made by women writers and critics to the fields of Caribbean literature and theory, this field has also been enriched by cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship. A pioneering work, Gender in Caribbean Development, edited by Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd, was the first interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary reader to focus critique on gender and development in the region. Calling attention to the rapid evolution of gender as a critical concept, Mohammed and Shepherd observe that feminist scholars must be engaged and remain fully committed ‘to keep up with its genealogy’. In common with feminist literary critics they also emphasize the ways in which theory and practice converge to locate fertile ground for further research, as they articulate the goal of their collection: ‘To bring the different components of Women’s Studies – theory, methodology, and practice – into dialogue with each other, in order to situate the ongoing
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work in Women’s Studies in the Caribbean in a theoretical framework from which further analyses, research and practice can proceed’ (xx). From a contemporary vantage point, this goal has been realized and is an ongoing reality. Centres for Gender and Development Studies have been established on each campus of the University of the West Indies, and the focus on Caribbean feminist criticism in university-wide curricula in the Caribbean and its diasporic metropolises signals an enduring detour and disruption of the once predominantly male-dominated and male-centred curricula. As Jamaican feminist librarian and scholar Catherine Shepherd argues, interest in women and gender issues ‘has created a thirst for Caribbean feminist scholarship that is only beginning to be quenched, by a plethora of academic publications’ (xvi). Published a little over a decade after Gender in Caribbean Development, Mohammed’s subsequent edited collection, Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought, broadens its focus to gendered relationships ‘in all areas of life’. Unsettling the conventionally defining domains of national identity, it debunks the notion that the private sphere, to which women are relegated, and the public domain, regarded as the realm of men, are incompatible or at odds. Calling attention to the ‘colonial and postcolonial processes of settlement and migration [that] required equally the labour of both male and female’, Mohammed argues that the ‘neat separation of gender [. . .] into a privileged public masculinity and a subordinate domestic femininity’ is woefully inadequate for understanding the complex male–female relationships in the Caribbean (xv). Enacting a counter discourse, Mohammed showcases the distinct role of women as economic stakeholders and thereby insists on Caribbean feminist approaches being informed by the regionally specific past and present. Verene Shepherd’s chapter, ‘Constructing Visibility: Indian Women in the Jamaican Segment of the Indian Diaspora’, addresses the ongoing need for feminist scholarship to recognize and redress imbalances in representation across different ethnic groups to provide a more inclusive account of women’s experiences and voices in the region. Other important sites of scholarly enrichment include revisiting the Caribbean family and Caribbean womanhood through a feminist lens, and the feminist potential of counter discourses to challenge and disrupt nationalistic politics advanced by Eudine Barriteau, Alissa Trotz and Joan M. Rawlins. Fittingly, Linden Lewis’s concluding chapter, ‘Envisioning a Politics of Change within Caribbean Gender Relations’, a manifesto of sorts, brings forward the issue of masculinity as integral to gender studies and appeals to Caribbean men to engage in a serious and necessary reassessment of gender relations in the region.
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Caribbean masculinity is more fully explored in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses, edited by Rhoda Reddock in . This first full-length study primarily concerns itself with the politics of gender relations and the family. Despite the emphasis on a domestic and located consciousness, Caribbean feminist criticism has remained in conversation with global feminist activism and has notably been transnational in its formation, making visible the potential for transnational solidarity while also highlighting an uneven global system of knowledge production. As Lorde writes poignantly at the beginning of this critical praxis: ‘It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.’ Importantly, attention to these complexities is also Mohammed’s touchstone: ‘There has always been a consistent scrutiny and crossexamination of gender with the categories of race, ethnicity, class, age and regional difference by scholars in the region.’ Given the history of colonialism and patriarchy’s unidimensional conceptualization of gender and race, intersectionality, in its interrogation of institutional power, disrupts hierarchies of oppression and has been vital for opening the way for multidimensional, inclusive, and collaborative organizing and movements. Integrating and embracing a coalition of identities, Caribbean feminist criticism refrains from centring privilege and reproducing systemic oppressions, and instead centres and amplifies marginalized voices. The embrace of multiple perspectives in Caribbean feminist criticism registers resistance to singular normative and prescriptive paradigms, allowing for new innovative, variegated, yet cohesive ways of feminist theorizing to emerge. Caribbean feminist criticism is both regionally specific and alive in dialogue with North American and European (Western) feminist practices. At the core of Caribbean feminist criticism is the notion that meaningful unity is unachievable without difference and diversity. Unity engenders solidarity, a shared identity and commonality rooted in overlapping histories of slavery, indentureship and postcolonial struggles. Through their collections, feminist scholars and thinkers have been able to map the range and diversity of approaches and interventions and to accrue inventories of cultural and historical knowledge to build upon, challenge and reconfigure this dynamic field, all the while carving out a coveted space for Caribbean feminist criticism in the canon of contemporary literature and feminist theory.
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Notes I use the terms Caribbean feminist theory and Caribbean feminist criticism interchangeably. Brinda Mehta, Diasporic (Dis)Locations: Indo-Caribbean Women Writers Negotiate the ‘Kala Pani’ (Kingston: University of the West Indies, ), . The chapters of Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference and Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers were collected from conference proceedings: the First International Conference of Caribbean Women’s writers hosted by Wellesley College on April , and the International Symposium on Afro-Hispanic Literature at the City University of New York respectively. Barbara Christian, ‘The Race for Theory’, Cultural Critique, (Spring ), –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon Press, ), x, xii. Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Christian is a pioneer on several fronts, including being the first African American woman to receive tenure at University of California, Berkeley in . Melody Graulich and Lisa Sisco, ‘Meditations on Language and the Self: A Conversation with Paule Marshall’, NWSA Journal, . (), –, . For a more detailed discussion of Marshall’s ‘Mother Poets’, see Simone A. James Alexander’s Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ). Christian also brought to the attention of academia the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. The phrase ‘safe spaces’ is borrowed from the title of feminist critic and author, Myriam Chancy’s Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, ). Mayra Santos-Febres and Elba D. Birmingham-Pokomy, ‘The Page on Which Life Writes Itself: A Conversation with Mayra Santos-Febres’, in Miriam DeCosta-Willis (ed.), Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, ), –, . In her memoir, The Cancer Journals, in which Lorde provides a graphic account of her treatment of breast cancer, she indicts the American Cancer Society for promoting and practising medical profiling. As I have argued elsewhere, the state’s apparatus, the American Cancer Society, obliterates Lorde’s lesbian identity by positing compulsory heterosexuality as the norm; Simone A. James Alexander, African Diasporic Women: Narratives of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, ), .
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Barbara Lewis, ‘No Silence: An Interview with Maryse Condé’, Callaloo, . (), –, . Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Decolonizing Feminism: The Home-Grown Roots of Caribbean Women’s Movement’, in Consuelo López Springfield (ed.), Daughters of Caliban: Caribbean Women in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, ), –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson, ‘Introduction’, in Pamela Mordecai and Betty Wilson (eds.), Her True-True Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing from the Caribbean (Oxford: Heinemann Publishers, ), ix–xviii, xiii. Here I draw on Benedict Anderson’s concept of ‘imagined communities’. He argues that a nation ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, but yet in the minds each lives the image of their communion’; Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, ), –. Sylvia Wynter, ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the “Demonic Ground” of Caliban’s “Woman”’, in Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine SavoryFido (eds.), Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ), –, –. Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Importantly, Caliban’s woman is imagined in an unsubordinated role as his equal, his ‘physiognomically complementary mate’ (ibid., ). Selwyn Cudjoe, ‘Introduction’, in Selwyn Cudjoe, ed., Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, ), –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Erna Brodber, ‘Fiction in the Scientific Procedure’, in Cudjoe (ed.), Caribbean Women Writers, –, . Evelyn O’Callaghan, Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (New York: St Martin’s Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Ramabai Espinet, ‘Ramabai Espinet Talks to Elaine Savory: A Sense of Constant Dialogue. Writing, Woman, and Indo-Caribbean Culture’, in Makeda Silvera (ed.), The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature (Toronto: Sister Vision, ), –, –. Espinet shares that while living apart from other ethnic groups afforded IndoCaribbean people the opportunity to retain their tradition and language, it also set them apart from ‘the mainstream of the Afro-Caribbean struggle’; whereas in contrast to Afro-Caribbean women, Indo-Caribbean women seemingly inhabit a covetable and advantageous position within a secure family structure, their ‘self-determination was held back in comparison to that of Afro-Caribbean women’ (). Joy Mahabir and Mariam Pirbhai, Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature (London: Routledge, ), .
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Patricia Mohammed, ‘A Vindication for Indo-Caribbean Feminism’, in Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –, . Douglarization is the cultural and biological inter/mixing of Africans and Indians. Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Gabriella Hosein, ‘Dougla Poetics and Politics in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts: Reflection and Reconceptualization’, in Hosein and Outar (eds.), Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts, –, . Espinet shares that she had ‘been pounded by some Indo-Caribbean friends for [including] Rasta talk and two lines of one of Bob Marley’s songs in her poem, “Merchant of Death”’, told that ‘it takes away from the ‘purity’ of the Indian experience’; Espinet, ‘Ramabai Espinet Talks to Elaine Savory, . Ibid., . I am cognizant that my analysis of the Caribbean region (and its diasporas) is limited to the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone Caribbean, shortchanging the lusophone and Caribbean Dutch territories. Nevertheless, some of the volumes examined here include essays from the Caribbean Dutch territories, though not enough to redress the disparity of visibility for this region. Christiane Makward and Odile Cazenave, ‘The Others’ Others: Francophone Women and Writing’, Yale French Studies, (), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. The recipient of numerous awards, including Le Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme (), Le Prix de L’Académie Francaise () and the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres awarded by the French government, Condé became the first recipient of the New Academy Prize in Literature in . Deeply committed to political issues faced by women of colour, Schwarz-Bart wrote a six-volume encyclopaedia, Hommage á la femme noire (In Praise of Black Women) to honour the Black heroines missing from the historiography. Reputed for her laser-focused vision and unwavering engagement with strong feminist and political issues, Condé’s writing that espouses her radical activism mirrors her life. She was deported from Ghana because of her political activism. Maryse Condé, ‘Pan-Africanism, Feminism and Culture’, in Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelly (eds.), Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora (London: Verso, ), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. One of the (regional) shortcomings of Pan-Africanism that Condé cites is the failure of the political regimes of Caribbean countries, namely Suriname and Trinidad, which denied asylum to political activist Luc Reinette, and St Vincent that gave him permission to land but, upon landing, orchestrated
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Caribbean Feminist Criticism
his arrest by the French government. On a domestic level, she is appalled by the prejudice levelled against the school children of Haitian migrants by fellow Guadeloupean school children. Attempting to maintain the true spirit of PanAfricanism, she wrote a children’s book, Haiti Cherie, in defence of Haitian children. It chronicles the tragic story of a boatful of Haitians, who fleeing the turmoil in their country in jumped to their death after being confronted by the United States Coast Guard off the coast of Florida. Suffice it to say, that Condé activism paid off: after prolonged negotiations, Haiti Cherie was included on the curriculum of the Guadeloupean primary schools (Condé, ‘Pan-Africanism’, , ). Danticat ascertains: ‘Haiti has nine geographic departments and the tenth was the floating homeland, the ideological one, which joined all Haitians lying in the diaspora’; Edwidge Danticat, ‘Introduction’, in Edwidge Danticat (ed.), The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States (New York: Soho Press, ), ix–xvii, xiv. Quoted in Joycelyn Burrell, ‘Edwidge Danticat, Women Like Us’, in Joycelyn Burrell, ed., Word: On Being a (Woman) Writer (New York: The Feminist Press, ), –, . In , the Miami literary based society, Women Writers of Haitian Descent, Inc. that provides support for Haitian women writers, was created. O’Callaghan, Woman Version, Newtona Johnson, ‘Challenging Internal Colonialism: Edwidge Danticat’s Feminist Emancipatory Enterprise’, Obsidian III, –.– (), –, . Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migration of the Subject (New York: Routledge, ), . Danticat’s foreword to Bell’s collection further lends itself to the collective creative spirit of the women writers. Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ‘Introduction: “This Voyage toward Words”: Mapping the Routes of the Writers’, in DeCosta-Willis, ed., Daughters of the Diaspora, xvi–xlii, xxv. Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Santos-Febres and Birmingham-Pokomy, ‘The Page on Which Life Writes Itself’, . Santos-Febres chronicles a breakthrough in Puerto Rican literature: ‘Women are not marginal in Puerto Rico. We now define the canon of contemporary literature. That is a fact that nobody can deny’ (). This book was first published in by the University of the West Indies Women and Development Studies Project with a foreword by Lucille Mathurin Mair. Elsa A. Leo-Rhynie wrote the foreword for the republished text. Subsequent to the seminar and publication that followed, an interdisciplinary Center for Gender and Development Studies was established within the University of the West Indies in September , attesting to the volume’s success. Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd, ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd (eds.), Gender in Caribbean
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.
Development, (Kingston: Canoe Press, ), xvi–xviii, xiii. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Patricia Mohammed, ‘Introduction: The Material of Gender’, in Patricia Mohammed (ed.), Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thoughts (Kingston: University of the West Indies, ), xiv–xxiii, x. Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Gendered Realities is one of ‘three major publications to come out of the Center for Gender and Development Studies over the last two years’ (ix–x). As I pointed out earlier, Gender in Caribbean Development is the genesis of feminist theorizing in the Caribbean. The papers published were first presented at a symposium ‘The Construction of Caribbean Masculinity: Toward a Research Agenda’, organized and hosted by the Center for Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, in January . The symposium was noted for being ‘one of the first encounters between both female and male Caribbean scholars engaged in the study of the construction of masculinity in the region’; Rhoda E. Reddock, ‘Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: An Introduction’, in Rhoda E. Reddock (ed.), Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, ), xiii–xxxiv, viii. Lorde, Sister Outsider, . Mohammed (ed.), Gendered Realities, xv.
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Writing of and for a Revolution Alison Donnell and Nalini Mohabir
While the cultural memory of revolutionary movements has remained consistently significant within Caribbean literary traditions, the imaginative shaping of what constitutes revolutionary ideals and subjects has undergone meaningful transitions across the decades of the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Literary works engaging with the memories and legacies of the region’s landmark revolutionary moments have undertaken the important task of remembering and mourning events that are now recognized as either compromised or unfinished struggles: the Haitian Revolution of ; the Cuban Revolution of ; the Rodney Riots in Jamaica in ; the Black Power Revolution of in Trinidad; the Grenadian Revolution of ; and the cultural – and attempted political – revolution in Guyana that bookended the s. In the diaspora, moments of rebellion and revolution echoed through later decades, with notable flares of resistance in the UK Brixton Riots of and the Canadian Yonge Street Riot of . Importantly, Caribbean literary works that write of and for a revolution in the period since the s have often surpassed a conventional historical reimagining of these events to raise questions and present multiple, alternative perspectives. Through their narrative forms as well as viewpoints, these works deliberately foreground disenfranchised voices and pluralize the undertaking to speak about exceptional times. Given that from the s onwards Caribbean postcolonial politics have been held in the grip of spreading neoliberalism, and political disillusionment has become a norm, these works remain compellingly engaged with anticipations of social and personal transformation. In the introduction to his work Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr, Jamaican political theorist Brian Meeks observes that ‘the history of postindependence revolt in the anglophone Caribbean has been not so much an attempt to seize power in order to transform the economic substructure, as it has been an endeavour to transform the
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hegemonic values which, with modifications, have dominated the Caribbean for four centuries’. While Meeks is focused on a series of specific events that sought to contest the long shadow of colonial power, it is also at this level of unsettling, uncovering and resisting cultural hegemonies that Caribbean literary works can productively be considered revolutionary. Indeed, consistently poised at the interface between rights and representation, the project of Caribbean literature across the region has been centrally concerned since its beginnings both with a restoration of local lives, voices and histories, and with a rebellion against the authorizing paradigms of colonialism and its cultural grammars of normalized inequality. This essay considers the contribution made by selected literary works that engage with major historical moments of revolt and revolution across the Caribbean by tracing three characteristic features: first, a sensibility tuned to the excess of the possible over the actual; second, a commitment to narrating the punctuations of revolutionary time; and third, a move towards testimonial forms that foreground the direct voicing of previously peripheral and silenced subjects. This distinctive body of writings maps shifting horizons that extend the progressive and activist character of Caribbean writings as well as of revolutionary consciousness: narrating queer, altered and dissident perspectives. In this way, the texts considered here not only write of but also for a revolution.
Revolutionary Inheritances: Haiti, Cuba, Grenada A paradigmatic literary epic, and arguably foundational to the project of writing Caribbean revolutions, is C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, published in in the wake of the labour riots across the anglophone region that galvanized and organized anticolonial demonstrations. James’s literary imagination, his political commitments to Marxism and his dedication to rendering the historical agency of Black West Indians combined in this work, as in his later fictions, to transform the representational axis authorized by a colonial worldview. James’s account enabled the Haitian Revolution of – to be read as ‘one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement’. Following James’s magnus opus, writers across the Caribbean have continued to be inspired to write of the Haitian Revolution, and it has gained a central place within a literary anticolonial imagination through the works of Édouard Glissant in Martinique, Alejo Carpentier in Cuba, Luis Pales in Puerto Rico and Derek Walcott in St Lucia. Raphael Dalleo’s study, American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean
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Writing of and for a Revolution
Anticolonialism, added a dimension to the literary resonance of Haiti by drawing attention to radical writings by Claude McKay, George Padmore and others that engage with the US occupation of Haiti (–). The Cuban Revolution of has similarly continued to feature as literary subject, with its historical proximity leading to a more divergent imaginative reckoning that accounts for both its strident project of decolonial egalitarianism, as well as its increasing social control and rigid revolutionary identity. What is also notable in the case of Cuba is the particular prominence given to the role of the arts within the nation’s revolutionary vision. Alongside successful literacy programmes that grew new readers, a national literary movement talleres literarios was developed in the s to nurture and grow new writers and narratives. Still a thriving movement today, many Cuban-based writers from the s onwards have been supported by this programme. In Meesha Nehru’s extensive research on talleres literarios, she draws attention to the importance of this movement in terms of crafting Cuban cultural citizenship and its role as the invisible scaffolding of Cuban literature: ‘whilst separate bodies of work address both the issues of literature and participation in the Revolution, the talleres literarios have largely been overlooked, as the question of how culture has related to citizenship in practice in Cuba has hardly been addressed’. Given the active sponsorship of Cuban writing from within government structures, it is perhaps not surprising that Cuban literary works that correspond to and champion the political ideals of the state have mainly emerged from within and those that critique have generally been written in the diaspora. Twentieth-century technologies of travel, communication and print meant that writers across the whole Caribbean region were able and keen to engage with the Cuban Revolution. Jamaican-British writer and editor Andrew Salkey published his Havana Journal in , providing a detailed account of his visit to participate in the Cultural Congress of Havana in January alongside a valuable glimpse into the centripetal pull of Havana for the region’s writers. The journal opens in London in the summer of when the idea of the Congress is announced at a meeting of the Caribbean Artists Movement in Orlando Patterson’s north London flat where Salkey, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming and John La Rose, along with Orlando and his wife Nerys, host Pablo Armando Fernández – the Cuban poet also serving as the Revolutionary Government’s cultural attaché in London. The invitations arrive a month after the news of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s assassination in October , and the journal proper begins when Salkey’s plane lands at José Martí
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National airport on December . The Congress brought together four hundred intellectuals from artists to athletes and sociologists to scientists to discuss the problems of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Salkey’s journal gathers a range of speeches and stories that represent the experiences of the invited delegates alongside those of the Cuban students and workers he meets during his visit, and his fellow visiting West Indian writers. Initially allocated a pass as a journalist rather than a writerdelegate, Salkey contests his relegation to observer and finally, somewhat ironically given the journalistic tone of the Journal, is accommodated with Lamming and La Rose. Also invited, and treated with particular attentiveness, was C. L. R. James, whose Black Jacobins had recently been translated by the Cuban National Publishing House. This cemented James’s status a revered revolutionary voice, despite the fact that his elected role was to question the lavish entertainment and draw a focus back on egalitarian ideals. The connection between revolutionary writing and action is an unassuming but consistent backdrop to Salkey’s observations of Cuban life after the Revolution. He notes that in the days before the Congress he is reading Martinican Frantz Fanon’s Toward the African Revolution, published in after Fanon’s death. Of course, the influence of Fanon as a key revolutionary thinker of this period cannot be overstated. Fanon’s study of the dynamics between race and power under colonialism, developed through the nexus of a lived Caribbean sensibility and the study and practice of psychiatry in France and Algeria, was not only a touchstone of Caribbean Revolutionaries in the s and s but also of Steve Biko in South Africa and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers. Salkey speaks of the ‘Cuban visit [as] a top priority in [. . .] our writing lives’, confirming the desire for liberation models among West Indian writers. His journal is persuasively unadorned in terms of its reporting style and is far less concerned with creatively shaping his Cuban vision than it is with accommodating uncompromising – often conflicted – voices to be emancipated beyond Cuba. Including some delegate speeches as well as his interview with Estaban Montejo (the only surviving runaway slave) in their entirety, Salkey patchworks different voices to capture the overwhelming spirit of the Congress which rallies around the shared historical and political sensibility pronounced by the Haitian poet-in-exile René Depestre’s ‘There can be no decolonization without a true Revolution’ (). Yet alongside his description of the frequently disorganized and sometimes disruptive urgency expressed by this considerable gathering of committed intellectuals, Salkey’s attention in this work is also on the fractures and
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flaws of a lived Cuba that might still demand attention. Talking intently to those he meets in both formal and informal encounters, Salkey questions persistent racialized hierarchies and poor working conditions as well as the limits of freedom of speech and government interference. Importantly for this essay, Salkey also brings revolutionary Cuba’s conservatism in relation to gender and sexuality to the surface, referencing the lingering machismo, obsession with female virginity and intolerance of homosexuals. On the final part of his Cuban journey, Salkey observes yet another mural commemorating Che’s heroism and ventriloquizes a school information officer: ‘It isn’t easy to avoid Che. Who would want to, in Cuba? He’s so close to us’ (). This imagined proximity of Che takes a rather different articulation in Ana Menéndez’s novel Loving Che, in which the revolutionary hero figures as the lover of Teresa, a married female painter who may also be the lost mother for whom the narrator is searching and through whom she eventually reconnects to a Cuba distant from her own childhood in Miami where she was raised by her grandfather. Although the romance of returning to her motherland is short-lived, as she perceives that Havana, ‘so lovely at first glance, was really a city of dashed hopes, and everywhere I walked I was reminded that all in life tends to decay and destruction’, the passionate affair of her likely mother that she glimpses through photos and letters continues to drive the narrative. Loving Che is the story of a young woman abandoned by her mother during the early days of the Cuban revolution; the unnamed narrator garners ‘that my father had been in prison, and had died there, and that in her grief my mother had sent me away’ (). While the collision of different movements towards liberation – revolution at home, exile in the US – provokes a questioning of singular trajectories of freedom, it is the overlaying of political with erotic revolution that most dramatically transforms received histories. The guerrilla fighting of the revolution is a reality on the streets of Havana with their soldiers and explosions, but it is the power of erotic love that is foregrounded in Teresa’s revolutionary testimony. The utopian energy of a freedom struggle is microscoped in this work into an adulterous affair between a middle-class artist and Che. Once we enter Teresa’s story, told through the letters and photos that she posts to her abandoned daughter, the erotic logic takes precedence, and rather than reading her love as being like a revolution, Teresa inverts this perspective so that ‘cataclysmic events, whatever their outcome, are as rare and transporting as a great love’ (). The historical events leading to Castro’s overthrow of Batista’s government are the footnotes to Teresa’s story: ‘Forgive me, my daughter. I have laboured to construct a good
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history for you, to put down the details of your life smoothly; to connect events one to another. But my first efforts seemed false. And I am left with only these small shards of remembrances written on banners of wind’ (). This deep preoccupation with recalibrating the intersecting stories of family and nation through the perspective of female, privatized, adulterous desire may seem to underplay its political stakes at a national level. All the same, the narrative’s foregrounding of excessive desire associated here with adultery is in itself a revolution of sorts that unsettles the neat concentricity that aligns heteronormativity, marriage, and the nuclear family to conservative nationalism. This queering of female desire is also an interesting counterpoint to the much more celebrated literary depictions of erotic transgression against revolutionary citizenship found in the male same-sex desiring worlds of Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas (discussed in chapter ). Another distinctive literary work that also captures a multiplicity of differently positioned voices reflecting back on the Cuban Revolution, here from the s, is Mirta Yáñez’s novel Bleeding Wound/Sangra por la Herida, published in a bilingual English/Spanish edition in . The distributed viewpoints of its twelve narrators relating their everyday lives in Havana offer a democratized narration of the nation, but in this dystopic work the people’s voices cohere around the disintegration of the revolutionary dream and its demonstrably broken promises of decent housing, education and even nutrition for all. Punctuated by the apocalyptic premonitions that ‘Havana is dying’, as proclaimed by the nameless ‘woman who talks to herself in the park’, this narrative in glimpses discloses the details of demanding daily lives pitched against the official story of Cuban revolutionary values while also gradually accruing information surrounding the appalling deaths of two young women: La India, whose body was dismembered and scattered around Havana following her brutal murder, and La Difunta, who jumped from an eighteen-storey building following public accusations of ‘improper conduct’ (a coda for her same-sex relationships). As Flora M. González argues, ‘Yáñez’s novel structures its narrative around the unsolved crimes against two women, yet the author is ultimately concerned with the disintegration of popular memory around violence against women during the last decades of the twentieth century.’ Indeed, the fragmented accounts of these deaths and the difficult human proximities that their stories bring to light also work to distribute the failings of the revolutionary project as they show how individual choices and silences undermined the possibility for a transformative people-
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making project and the particular unacknowledged violence against samesex desiring subjects. The revolutionary entanglements of political liberation and erotic freedom are an important dimension in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, which lightly, but significantly, fictionalizes the rise and demise of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) of Grenada from to . The sense of yearning for freedom from all national frameworks is perhaps part of its anonymous location, but so too is Brand’s commitment to a revolutionary subjectivity articulated in her statement: Revolutions do not happen outside of you, they happen in the vein, they change you and you change yourself, you wake up in the morning changing. You say this is the human being I want to be. You are making yourself for the future, and you do not even know the extent of it when you begin but you have a hint, a taste in your throat of the warm elixir of the possible.
Like a number of other writers born elsewhere in the region, Brand was drawn to revolutionary Grenada and in worked for ten months in the Agency for Rural Transformation before the internal rift that finally led to the murder of Prime Minister Bishop and others, followed by the US invasion. Like Yáñez’s novel, Brand’s also situates the revolutionary desires of women against a backdrop of the sexual violations and compromises they routinely endure. Yet here the moments of queer desire between Elizete and Verlia, surplus to the dictates of the liberation movement as well as the colonial state, mark a culmination of meaningful freedom. While Verlia’s reading of Che Guevara and C. L. R. James shows her sense of a Caribbean revolutionary history, the narrative also hints at another submerged historical freedom struggle. In a phrase now widely referenced in relation to Caribbean female same-sex erotics, Elizete considers her pleasure as ‘grace’: ‘Is Grace, yes. And I take it, quiet, quiet, like thiefing sugar.’ As Ronald Cummings notes, ‘The desire shared between these women is compared to a tradition of maroon resistance enacted in the day to day strategies deployed by slaves on the plantations.’ This deep historical referencing of anticolonial resistance movements is particularly interesting in Grenada in relation to the Caribs who repelled British and French colonial incursions during the first half of the seventeenth century before their resistant leap to death at Sauteurs in , and whose presence and precedence feature in the revolutionary writings of Jan Carew and Merle Collins. Carew, the Guyanese writer, artist, broadcaster and anti-imperialist, probably best known today as the author of the
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novel Black Midas, was also a supporter of the PRG and spent periods of time in Grenada between and . While his focus during the Revolution was on supporting youth and community farming projects, the work he wrote after its collapse was distinguished by a continued investment in the political project of self-rule and anticolonial resistance. Grenada: The Hour Will Strike Again () – described by Maureen and Rupert Lewis as a piece of writing that ‘gave hope for a long rebuilding of the progressive movement in the Caribbean’ – traces the struggles of the Grenadian people back to and stresses the Caribs’ resistance to European colonizers as mode of being Grenadian that the bloody coup and US invasion could not erase. This theme was developed here by Carew, who traced an intersectional history of the Seminole (a Muscogee/Creek word referring to runaways) and cimaronne (Maroon) uprisings in the US and the Caribbean (). Carew’s historical evocation of Carib resistance is particularly interesting when read alongside Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting, published in . Collins was deeply involved in the PRG and served as coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. Like Brand and Carew, she knew that educational and literacy opportunities were vital to building a reading public. Collectively these writers worked as teachers and educators, and in political roles. Their writings came after the Revolution’s terrible implosion, with the exception of Merle Hodge and Chris Searle’s work Is Freedom We Making: The New Democracy in Grenada, a ninety-two-page pamphlet published by the Grenada Information Services that represents the principles, policies and processes of participatory democracy through photographs, narrative and first-person testimonials. Although it is understandable that Collins’s Angel takes centre stage as her novel about the Revolution, it is The Colour of Forgetting, set in a lightly fictionalized Grenada, that brings Carew’s longer perspective of historical resistance and alternate worldviews into an imaginative and literary form. This novel explores how important the literally grounded knowledge of working folk and their past is to understanding the causes and consequences of social inequalities and establishing the priorities for a progressive politics of inclusion. In his work, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice, David Scott offers a compelling reading of Collins’s crafting of time within this work. For Scott, The Colour of Forgetting reorganizes thinking about the Revolution and its catastrophic ending by narrating ‘generations of conflict’ and delivering ‘a sensibility of time that is at once recursive and cumulative rather than successive and teleological’. What might be
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added to this reading through a focus on Carib, a female figure who returns for each generation to voice a demonstrably altered consciousness of island life through the acoustics of deep memory, is a cyclical temporality invoked by the repeated call for attention to history in a time of amnesia. While the Revolution’s motto of ‘Forward Ever, Backward Never’ strongly signalled that the New Jewel Movement was directed at making a definitive and defiant break from colonialism, as well as its nationalist mimics, Collins’s work seems insistently to recover what is lost by a repudiation of history. Although a figure of apocalyptic premonition, akin to the unnamed woman in the park in Yáñez’s Bleeding Wound, Carib’s singular consolation is deep memory: ‘But is all right, you know. Is all right as long as we see and we know and we remember. Is young blood. Is the young people to stop the blue from crying red in between. And it going be all right.’ Indeed, the reconciliation between people and place, shattered by generations of colonial and postcolonial violence, is finally glimpsed in the novel through a girl of the youngest generation, Nehanda, who sees through the falsehood of a plaque to the ‘Great Country’, instituted to memorialize the US intervention, to remember those who have truly sustained the island’s life: She ask me, Gran, it go be something, eh, if John Bull name was there, and Ned name was there and if we had a monument for Carib people and things like that? And I thinking, I proud of you, child. Mamag would well proud. Ned name will write one day. John Bull name will write for sure, because the generations didn’t expire. I thinking, too, that with little ones thinking like that, the dream Carib have will come to pass. (, emphasis in original)
In many ways, the rearrangements of time and place that characterize these literary works may constructively be read in response to Shalini Puri’s conclusion in her book-length study of the Grenada Revolution that ‘what comes through most strongly in all accounts of October that I have seen is a profound sense of disorientation’ occasioned by the traumatic and bloody implosion of the Revolution. Like Collins, Grenadian writer Jacob Ross, PRG’s Director of Culture, moved to the UK in late . ‘Oleander Road’, published in his short story collection, Song for Simone, narrates a profound loss of confidence in expressive culture to respond to the devastation caused by the bloody ending to the revolution’s dreams. Jo-Jo almost chopped his hand off; just for a rotten piece of cane he’d tried to steal from the man’s garden [. . .] Had he chopped it off, there would
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have been no poems, no ‘forward-ever’ slogans on the walls, houses and culverts of Oleander Road; neither joy nor miracles expressed with pen or paint. Not that it mattered now. The time of miracles, of making flowers, grow on stones, and the sun rise in children’s eyes, had been crushed beneath a storm of guns.
In their engagements with silence and with memory, writers have mourned both the dead of the Grenadian Revolution and the brutal collapse of the political transformation it represented.
Power to the People: Rodney, Rastafari and the Legacies of Caribbean Popular and Public Protest Although Haiti, Cuba and Grenada form the trinity of revolutionary movements which have most inspired Caribbean writers and writings, other significant moments of revolt and rebellion, such as the Rodney Riots, the Black Power Revolution of in Trinidad and the huge political upheaval in Guyana in the s, have infused literary imaginings of the region, both as vision and as warning. The heightened meaning of senseless violence in times of upheaval is a theme of Guyanese writer N. D. Williams’s novel Ikael Torass (), based loosely on Williams’s experiences during the ‘Rodney Riots’ on the Jamaican Mona campus, at the University of the West Indies (UWI) in October . Walter Rodney embodied the revolutionary ideal of the time, a Guyanese scholar who aligned his ‘reasonings’ with the needs of the masses. In William’s novel, an unnamed lecturer, ‘that black power man’ (i.e. Rodney) is banned from campus, and consequently ‘the whole campus’ mounts a protest. The police react violently: ‘It was a case of ridding the island of so much scum of the earth [. . .] [they take an] almost carnal delight in battering bones and bodies’ (). While attempting to restore the prevailing ‘order’, the police shot and killed an unarmed Rastafarian man. With his revolutionary consciousness awakened by the incident, the narrator assumes the name Ikael and finds community with the most potentially subversive population on the island at that time: grassroots Rastafarians. Portraying the class sensibilities of s campus politics in the anglophone Caribbean, the story serves as a testimony, alluding to the potential of the Rodney Riots to overthrow the colonial order in its imagining of students and working-class peoples coming together. In the context of the post-independence moment when promised liberation was visibly constrained by global economic systems which prevented governments from addressing the needs of their people, student rebellions
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against subservient knowledges and lack of opportunities, as well as Rastafarians’ attention to capitalist exploitation, provided glimpses into revolutionary worlds yet-to-come. Ikael Torass was awarded the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize; however, the author still failed to find a metropolitan publisher, suggesting that Casa (established soon after the Cuban revolutionary government came to power) was more sensitive to pan-Caribbean worldviews, including the importance of co-imagining new possibilities for young and marginalized peoples within the region, which remained a significant challenge throughout the twentieth-century, and into the twenty-first. The Black Power movement in Trinidad was contemporaneous to Black Power struggles across North America that demanded human rights, social change and an affirmation of Black history and identity. Trinidad and Tobago’s independence in brought hopes of equality, dignity in labour, as well as economic and educational aspirations. In other words, there were clear anticipations of a social transformation that should have followed ‘massa day done’ (the end of colonialism). Instead, discrimination and a lack of access to land, capital and/or opportunity continued under a Black prime minister, Eric Williams, in control of an independent state. In solidarity with arrested Trinidadian students in Montréal who faced deportation as a result of their protests against racism, students at Trinidad’s St Augustine UWI campus organized a protest in February . The protest grew into a wider critique of neocolonialism and spread quickly beyond the university to mobilize intellectuals, disenfranchised youth, trade union activists and mutinous military officers, all of whom were frustrated at the slow pace of change following independence. The rebellion ended when Williams declared a state of emergency in April . Literary responses to this moment of resistance have ranged significantly in their viewpoints and sympathies. Earl Lovelace, an active participant in the Black Power Movement, is still best known for his novel, The Dragon Can’t Dance, that offers a searching celebration of the power of carnival to transform individual lives and yet leave colonial divides in place. The novel gently satirizes the futility of the revolt in an episode where Aldrick and Fisheye join the ‘People’s Liberation Army’. Significantly though, in his most recent work, Is Just a Movie (), Lovelace returns to consider the aftermath of the Black Power Revolution with another sympathetic, but not uncritical, rendering of a community struggling to recognize their own capacity for meaningful self-determination. Lovelace has spoken in an interview about
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his ongoing preoccupation with the importance of taking seriously cultures of resistance that emerged directly from the Black Trinidadian experience, such as steel band, calypso, carnival, and Creole, alongside the larger moments of revolutionary action. His novels continue to look to history in order to reflect on possible decolonial futures: ‘I think a big point for me, which is the point of Is Just a Movie, is that the resistance and rebellion have not really been acknowledged in the whole society, and this has prevented the society really from coming to grips with itself and with its history, and therefore from being able to move forward.’ However, for V. S. Naipaul, Trinidad’s Black Power Revolution represented what he considered to be a wider malaise in the region, an inherent disorder present since the beginnings of Caribbean society. His brutal novel Guerrillas, that fictionalizes the moment, is equally scathing in its portrayal of differently invested but equally self-interested parties: Michael X, the Trinidadian Black Power leader; Jane, the white liberal woman; and the bauxite mines whose noxious fumes signal Naipaul’s prescient attention to America’s toxic neo-imperialism. A very different reading of these events emerges in the novel The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Trinidadian-British writer Monique Roffey. In its second part, voiced first-person by Sabine Harwood, the ‘white woman’ who had relocated to Trinidad in with her husband, Roffey interrogates the charismatic masculinity of Williams and the soured romance of anticolonialism alongside the alarm among local white society (French creoles) at the implications of Black Power in , one of the narrative’s key moments. was also significant for the Caribbean Writers and Artists Conference, marking Guyana’s republican status and the plan for what would become the region’s foremost annual arts festival, Carifesta. Salkey’s Georgetown Journal records his visit, along with that of Sam Selvon, John La Rose and others. The country’s prime minister (later president), Forbes Burnham, supported Caribbean cultural expression as fundamental to a renewed self-image for Caribbean people and an important marker of independence. However, the rigged elections which brought Burnham to power made it difficult for conference attendees to embrace his ideal of cultural revolution without acknowledging the ethno-racial tensions and political turbulence that scarred the country, as Salkey notes in his interview with artist Philip Moore (whose own work gestured towards African continuations as part of the struggle against Eurocentric conventions):
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Writing of and for a Revolution
:
One last question, Philip. How conscious are you of the rift between the Indians and the people of African extraction in Guyanese society? [. . .] : [. . .] Individuals always smash the walls down, in their quiet ordinary way, like artists, you see. But I know what you mean about the rift. We had riots to prove that there is this rift, one that could be exploited, both from outside the country and inside it. ()
As David Scott reminds us while reflecting upon Georgetown Journal, ‘Guyana is but one deeply scarred face’ of the Caribbean predicament of multiracial societies and divisive interference from imperial powers. The essence of everyday yet unpredictable violence, along with ordinary yet extraordinary moments of despair and hope, that shaped s Guyana are captured beautifully in the posthumously published poetry collection, A Leaf in His Ear by Guyanese Mahadai Das (). This collection reflects a naïve optimism inspired by independence and a desired new place for Guyana in the global order: Militant I am Militant I strive. I want to march in my revolution, [. . .] I want my blood to churn Change! Change! Change!
Contrary to the ideals of Indo-Caribbean femininity, Das had enthusiastically joined Guyana’s National Service, intended to develop the country’s interior and support the building of a new society. While this programme was a universal requirement for all students attending the University of Guyana, rumours of rape shadowed her involvement, and sexual assault appears to have been one of the hidden secrets of this revolution too. Walter Rodney’s revolutionary presence back in Guyana also signalled a compromised transition. While the University of Guyana supported the official project of cultural transformation of the s, it did not embrace Rodney. He was denied a professorial position despite being a highly regarded Africanist historian and leading Caribbean Marxist. Rodney’s proposed solidarity between the intellectual and grassroots classes of society was seen as dangerous, potentially building a large-scale opposition that could topple the government. Rodney then turned his attention to political activism and founded the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) in , a party that consciously worked across racial lines. Six short years later,
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Rodney was killed by a bomb planted by an agent of the Burnham government. Although previous Caribbean revolutionaries had been murdered by an independent state (the Mirabal sisters were killed by the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, as chronicled in Julia Alvarez’s novel In the Time of the Butterflies), this was the first extra-judicial killing of a political activist in the Anglo-Caribbean. Urgent elegies penned to Rodney mirror the violence of his death as well as the collective shock, to quote Gordon Rohlehr, ‘that this could happen under a regime which four years earlier had the generosity, scope and vision to inaugurate Carifesta’. The poetic tributes to Walter Rodney form the shards of a whole that piece together the loss of an extraordinary individual whose own vulnerability mirrored that of the region. Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Poem for Walter Rodney’ captured his corporeal suffering – ‘to be blown into fragments: your flesh / like the islands that you loved / like the seawall that you wished to heal’ – as does Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Reggae fi Radni’: blown to smidahreen inna di miggle a di dream [. . .] some say dat Waltah Radni woz noh shaak fi de sea an’ all dat him did want woz fi set him peeple free.
Both poems represent the explosion as more than itself, as a metaphor for the incomprehension of the deathly blow to liberation. Similarly, the violent imagery in Das’s poem ‘For Walter Rodney & Other Victims’, renders the private and political sorrow that stemmed from the betrayal of the postcolonial state: Framed by their metal-heavy ring of guns, silently she sits upon the stone of her grief; she holds a pair of bombed-out limbs hacked by the sudden blow, the treachery.
Martin Carter, who had himself faced political repression from the colonial power, penned a condemnation of Rodney’s assassins: they bury the voice they assassinate, in the beloved grave of the voice, never to silent. I sit in the presence of rain
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Writing of and for a Revolution
[. . .] Risker, risk. I intend to turn a sky of tears, for you.
Carter’s tribute offered a reminder of the possible inherent within the provisional. In the wake of suffering, loss and tragedy, this poetry represents the reparative work of grief and healing which accompanies a revolution. The development of revolutionary politics was also a matter of life and death in the context of Caribbean diasporic lives in the late twentieth century as racist attacks and police brutality often took aim at Black communities settled in the UK and North America. A revolutionary poetics became a vital form of voicing the demand for civil liberties. Many of the poems in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s collection, Mi Revalueshanary Fren, which spans the s to s, pays tribute to those who fought back. By giving expression to survival, inflected with a distinctive Rastafari rhythm and patois language, Johnson’s verse provided a critical alternative to the mainstream media narrations of ‘senseless’ acts, that are clearly intelligible within longer histories of colonial domination. So-called race riots, whether Notting Hill (), Brixton () or Tottenham () in the UK, or Toronto’s Yonge Street (), all represent complex moments of resistance to societies that either chose to ignore, or are indifferent to, questions of systemic racial injustice. During the s and s in particular, a rise of Rastafarian-influenced spokenword poetry became the voice of defiance in the diaspora, with the artist and educator Mutabaruka becoming a lead voice on the oppressions of Babylon (the continuing colonial, capitalist order). This distinctive declaration of a resistant global social imaginary was also echoed by women artists in the dub tradition, including Jean Binta Breeze and Lillian Allen, whose collection Women Do This Every Day, writes of resistance to Canadian imperialism in the Caribbean. Creatively refusing the cultural hegemony of Babylon has been a continued literary project into the twenty-first century. European cataloguing, classification and cartographic practices are subject to anticolonial challenge from ‘the rastaman’ in Kei Miller’s poetry collection The Cartographer Maps a Way to Zion. Here again, Rastafarianism provides a model of liberation not only through militancy but also a spirituality informed by a different worldview, not invested in control of labour, resources, land. Miller’s poems contrast the cartographer’s quest to pin truth onto a map with the Rastaman’s alternative knowledge of and feeling
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for Caribbean land, where ‘whole places will slip / out from your grip’. In the poetic dialogue between the Rastaman and the cartographer, ephemeral expressions (such as song and sound) or long-standing landmarks (trees that have seen four centuries) amplify an understanding of the unseen Caribbean in contrast to the pursuit of narrow truths embedded in empirical and developmentalist paradigms. Miller’s poetry challenges modes of inquiry, reframing the possibility of postcolonial questions – ‘if not where then what is Zion’ () – to instigate a quiet revolution illuminating a sense of place and being that does not rely on the limiting confines of colonial framings, but rather engenders a co-imagining of indigenous, environmental and Rastafarian visions of what it means to be human in the everyday wonder that is the Caribbean. If within the continuing chains of neocolonial and neoliberal domination that encircle the region, ‘the arts are probably the only area in which sovereignty is possible’, then cultural expression and resistance remains integral to maintaining the hopes of full decolonization and liberation. Collectively the literary works discussed here represent an ongoing revolutionary spirit in Caribbean writings that seeks to summon the political energetics of hope and of imagining otherwise, even as they reckon with flawed and open-ended revolutionary histories. In their creative insistence on an excess of the possible over the actual, their punctuations of revolutionary time and their emphasis on giving voice to the marginalized, Caribbean writers continue to generate new literary forms and sustain the conditions for positive imaginings of social transformation and a Caribbean revolutionary sensibility.
Notes The development of the testimonio as a genre associated with revolutionary thought is addressed in a number of critical works; see Rafael Dalleo, ‘PostGrenada, Post-Cuba, Postcolonial: Rethinking Revolutionary Discourse in Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, . (), –; Ronald Cummings, ‘Between Here and “Not Here”: Queer Desires and Postcolonial Longings in the Writings of Dionne Brand and José Esteban Muñoz’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, . (), –; and Maria Helena Lima, ‘Revolutionary Developments: Michelle Cliff’s “No Telephone to Heaven” and Merle Collins’s “Angel”’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, . (), –. Brian Meeks, Radical Caribbean: From Black Power to Abu Bakr (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, ), .
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Writing of and for a Revolution
C. L. R. James, ‘Preface’, in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, (London: Penguin, ), xvii–xix, xviii. Meesha Nehru, ‘A Literary Culture in Common: The Movement of Talleres Literarios in Cuba, s–s’ (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, ), , available at http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk///Meesha_ Thesis.pdf. Andrew Salkey, Havana Journal (London: New Beacon Books, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Ana Menéndez, Loving Che (London: Hodder Headline, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Mirta Yáñez, Bleeding Wound/Sangra por la Herida, trans. Sara E. Cooper (Chico, CA: Cubanabooks, ), . Flora M. González, ‘Mirta Yáñez’s Dystopic Vision of Havana’, Hispania, . (), –, . Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections Sex, Recognitions Race, Dreaming Politics (Toronto: Coach House Press, ), . Dionne Brand, In Another Place, Not Here (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, ), . Ronald Cummings, ‘Queer Theory and Caribbean Writing’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, ), –, . Maureen Lewis and Rupert Lewis, ‘Tributes’, Race and Class, ., special issue ‘The Gentle Revolutionary: Essays in Honour of Jan Carew’ (), . David Scott, Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), , . For a fuller reading, see Alison Donnell, ‘When Seeing Is Believing: Enduring Injustice in Merle Collins’s The Colour of Forgetting’, in Bénédicte Ledent, Evelyn O’Callaghan and Daria Tunca (eds.), Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave, ), –. Merle Collins, The Colour of Forgetting (London: Virago, ), . Shalini Puri, Grenada Revolution in the Caribbean Present: Operation Urgent Memory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), . Jacob Ross, Song for Simone and Other Stories (London: Karia Press, ), . Raphael Dalleo, American Imperialism’s Undead: The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), . N. D. Williams, Ikael Torass (Havana: Casa de las Américas, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Also see Orlando Patterson’s An Absence of Ruins (London: Hutchinson, ). Joseph Pereira, ‘The Influence of the Casa de las Americas on English Caribbean Literature’, Caribbean Quarterly, . (), –, . Sophie Megan Harris, ‘An Interview with Earl Lovelace’, sx salon, (), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/interviews/interview-earl-lovelace. David Scott, ‘Preface’, Small Axe, (), vi–vii, vi.
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Mahadai Das, A Leaf in His Ear: Selected Poems (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Report of the Commission of Inquiry Appointed Enquire and Report on the Circumstances Surrounding the Death in an Explosion of the late Dr. Walter Rodney on Thirteenth Day of June, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty at Georgetown. Volume : Report and Appendices. Georgetown, Guyana. February : . Gordon Rohlehr, ‘Trophy and Catastrophe’, Caribbean Quarterly, . (), –, . Edward Kamau Brathwaite, ‘A Poem for Walter Rodney’, Index on Censorship, . (), –, . Das, A Leaf in His Ear: Selected Poems, . Martin Carter, Poems by Martin Carter, eds. Stewart Brown and Ian McDonald (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, ), . Kei Miller, The Cartographer Maps a Way to Zion (Manchester: Carcanet, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Rohlehr, ‘Trophy’, .
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Digital Yards: Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms Kelly Baker Josephs
In ‘Note(s) on Caribbean Cosmology’, Kamau Brathwaite writes about the importance of the ‘yard’ as a space where Caribbean culture begins and continues in all its dimensions. He writes that the yard is open space behind or ‘inside’ (courtyard) one’s house where Man lives, secular & sacred [. . .] The yard is also where the anansesem are relayed & where MUSIC (panyard) is invented (the pan) & created (drum, kaiso). The social, political, economic & psychological microcosm of the culture is also found in the yard. Caribbean arts (anansesem, kaiso, the Caribbean novel) begin in the yard.
I propose that we view the World Wide Web as providing this yard-like space for connecting people – across nations, across the region and across the diaspora – as well as for generating, circulating and preserving the Caribbean arts. The digital spaces online that most correspond to Brathwaite’s theorization of the yard and its importance to Caribbean culture are, of course, social media sites. Such sites, which I am proposing we regard as digital yards, are designed to bring people together and ‘encourage’ them to interact in a broad variety of ways, from the relatively low stakes ‘like’, to comments, threaded replies, research/teaching collaborations and in-depth conversations. As in the yard Brathwaite describes, these interactions take place in a relatively public space and they serve as microcosms of the culture beyond the yard, though they are increasingly becoming larger parts of our everyday lives. I am beginning, then, from a place that situates the Internet as having made more public a process that was already, as Brathwaite argues, vital to the creation and communication of Caribbean culture. But I hope to show that it has also allowed for some new forms of creative connections: from collaborative hashtag innovations to museum exhibitions shaped by collective Facebook responses, Caribbean cultural production is noticeably influenced by digital communication and forms. But, although the
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technology is new and ever evolving, many continuities remain between earlier forms of representation in and of the region and what is happening on the web today. Thus, though its end form may look new, many of the themes and motivations of digital cultural production are congruent with our more traditional notions of what makes the Caribbean. For example, Aimé Césaire’s rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or Maryse Condé’s reworking of the Tituba story, can be placed alongside memes or Seth ‘Xcel’ Bovell’s Barbadian revisions of various Disney tales. The writing back, or in many digital cases writing over, of canonical, non-Caribbean stories continues in a different form. In short, Caribbean cultural producers have taken traditional concepts and reimagined them via digital media. Though mainly an expository survey of the current state of Caribbean literary practices online, this essay aims to convey via examples from the digital yards of the moment that the idea of the ‘Caribbean writer’ is expanding, not just because many more people have access to the new technologies of storytelling and publication, but also because many of those who fit our traditional notion of ‘writer’ are now engaging differently, and more frequently, with their readers via these same technologies. In line with my positioning of these spaces of engagement as digital yards, I include here the ‘publication’ of oral texts via audio and video technologies and platforms that support them. I also survey digital literary publications and archives that inform and further document the engagement in digital yards. Across these various digital platforms, the old divide of oral versus print Caribbean storytellers becomes less significant, though not imperceptible, broadening how we think of Caribbean literature and literary practices.
Social Media Platforms The growth of social media has been phenomenal in the past decade. From academia to the service industry, celebrities to heads of state, a social media presence has simply become part of one’s job. Instagram images have become evidence, and tweets have become sources for reportage. We have seen various popular platforms become instrumental in revolutions and in emergency situations, such as connection and support during and after a natural disaster. The evolution of the hashtag has been especially remarkable as a means of connecting and building communities across platforms, though hashtags are more popular on Twitter (where they began in ) and Instagram. Hashtags are now relatively commonplace and are expected
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Digital Yards
for such things as hot topics and hurricane relief. They are also used creatively in Caribbean social media for activism (for instance the #lifeinleggings movement, which began in Barbados and is aimed at fighting violence against women) and to build community through humour (for instance the various #growingupwestindian posts, with subsets like #growingupjamaican and #growingupbajan). Hashtags also facilitate ‘Twitter chats’ on myriad Caribbean topics, including literature, as shown below. Of special note for Caribbean literary use of hashtags is Trinidadian Shivanee Ramlochan’s series of close reading projects, which include corresponding blog posts on her site, Novel Niche. Already a presence on social media since the early s for her book reviews in the Trinidadian Guardian and Caribbean Beat, as well as serving as social media maven for the Bocas Lit Fest, Ramlochan came into her own with the publication of her critically acclaimed debut collection of poetry, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, for which she was shortlisted for a Forward Prize. In , she ran three themed close reading series that focused on poetry, publishing hyperlinked posts about the chosen poem/poetry collection on Novel Niche and publicizing them across Twitter and Facebook using the related hashtag. For April, designated National Poetry Month in the US and Canada, Ramlochan ran #PuncheonAndVetiver, a ‘Caribbean Poetry Codex’ that sought to ‘honour the verse we Caribbean people make, to herald its visibility, to read our poems, and read them, and say “more”’. For June, designated Pride month globally, she ran #HereForTheUnicornBlood, a ‘Queer POC Poetry Reader’ that focused on the work of queer poets of colour from the Caribbean and elsewhere. After conducting a poll on Twitter and Facebook to determine what she should focus on next, Ramlochan chose to run #OtherKindsOfMen (‘a speculative poetry reader’) from August to October and has promised a later series on Caribbean short stories. Though she has been consistently dedicated to the discussion and publicization of Caribbean literature, with these hashtagged series Ramlochan made a concerted effort to connect across the oft-closed boundaries of various digital yards. Ramlochan consistently pushes the boundaries of our understandings of Caribbean literature and Caribbean literary communities via her usage of digital technologies and social media platforms. In an essay for The Poetry School, Ramlochan shares the role Facebook played in her composition of one of the poems in her collection. She writes: I’m new to Jouvay, and each time I’ve played, I’ve taken to Facebook the day after [. . .] to write about how the mas makes me feel. ‘All the Dead, All
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the Living’ began its life as a Facebook post [. . .] At the time of its writing, I didn’t think of this as a poem, nor did I expect it would be part of Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting.
Ramlochan then recounts how this Facebook post became a poem: The advice of a fellow Caribbean poet whom I love and admire, Loretta Collins Klobah, is one of the chambers at the heart of this alchemy. Loretta, commenting a year earlier in on my very first Jouvay post, also shared on Facebook, called it ‘one for the forthcoming collection’. I was delighted and surprised by her suggestion. I normally don’t think of cannibalizing my social media essays, which I think of as a form of cultural and archival commentary, for poetry. But I couldn’t ignore Loretta’s counsel, which was brief and bold: ‘little more mud, little less editorial, it goh be great. dohn work it to death, though. It’s a living throbbing thing now’.
There’s a little more back and forth to the Facebook conversation, but the influence in the digital exchange is clear, and one can see Ramlochan seeing her own writing differently; the poem grows from the seed planted here in this digital yard. The interplay between Ramlochan and Collins Klobah – as well as between Ramlochan and many of the other commenters, several of whom are recognized Caribbean writers themselves – approximates a Caribbean call-and-response storytelling, including the aspects of praise for a story well told, requests for more detail and a few ‘let me tell you my story too’ additions that might happen in a backyard lime. Many of the commenters ask to share Ramlochan’s post, extending the boundaries of the digital yard and inviting others in. As evidenced in her close reading series, however, Ramlochan doesn’t just depend on the serendipity of Facebook conversations for such connections; she also actively seeks to use various facets of social media to create the types of community that she wants to engage with. In , Ramlochan collaborated with collage artist Mark Jason Weston and graphic designer Kriston Chen of #douenislands, a Trinidad-based initiative that has experimented with various forms of digital literature. In July, before the official launch of her book, there was a Twitter chat, a PDF e-chapbook, a special website and a special run newsprint centrefold. Later in the year, they conducted an innovative hybrid event that involved a real yard space – Alice Yard in Port of Spain – and hashtagged posts across digital yards. As Weston put it in a pre-event promotion Instagram post, they were ‘creating new platforms’ for Caribbean work. The Douen Islands project is an almost too ideal example of the connections between the yard space that Brathwaite describes and the
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communal spaces for storytelling that can be found, or made, online. Their mission statement is revealing of the ways they were trying to link the virtual and the real in artistic creation. They describe themselves as: A publishing project that aims to blur the boundaries between digital online and physical spaces in today’s new reading environment [. . .] The project reimagines new reading experiences for Caribbean futures.
Unfortunately, they seem to have stopped producing content after the #DIHaunting collaboration in . Like Ramlochan, a variety of Caribbean writers, broadly defined, are using social media platforms to produce and/or disseminate content widely across the diaspora. I will discuss blogs separately below because their use by Caribbean writers has been slightly different than what have been called the ‘microblogging’ sites of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, although the aspects of sharing and commenting via these latter platforms are intricately entwined with the Caribbean blogosphere. From one perspective, these writers’ reliance on proprietary systems of usergenerated content are a detriment to Caribbean writing: siphoning off the ‘good stuff’ from the larger public, locking it behind a log-in screen or making it increasingly difficult to access without an account, and subjecting the potential readership to the vagaries of the social media matrix. From another perspective, these systems represent a boon to Caribbean literature because they allow for new forms of creativity, more sharing of Caribbean writing, and more interaction between writers and readers. They are, of course, both: offering a differently public space to new and established writers and thinkers to share with (and sometimes beyond) their networks while also reinforcing an inside and outside of the digital yard. In particular, the personal interactions between writers, and between writers and their readers, on social media posts offer digital replications of what would have been, in the past, letters between these groups of people, including the arguments, reflections and quotidian minutia of their lives. Like such letters now locked away in material archives, writers’ social media posts, especially from Facebook and Twitter, have begun to infiltrate academic papers. Such posts and exchanges also serve similar purposes as literary interviews, but without the care, revision and depth that often accompany formal published conversations. With these new sources, academics have had to be creative in how to find and archive these sources because companies like Facebook and Twitter are not in the business of making it easy to discover past posts and interactions.
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There is, then, both loss and gain in the shift to these digital yards, and though the continuities with older forms are generally clear, we should keep in mind that social media users have a variety of motivations and these affect not only the utility and authority of their posts, but also the accessibility of these posts now and in the future. The different platforms and media that the more popular Caribbean storytellers chose to use are driven in part by these motivations. It is important to remember here the examples that Brathwaite provides in his claim that the Caribbean arts (and particularly storytelling) are generated from the yard space. He names anansesem, kaiso and the Caribbean novel, moving from oral to scribal but including all under the umbrella of art. I would like to expand this notion of the Caribbean storyteller, the Caribbean writer, to include photographer Ruddy Roye, who tells stories not only with his images on Instagram, but also with his longer-than-usual captions and connected series of posts; comedians like Majah Hype, Seth ‘Xcel’ Bovell and Senior Gum Boy, who use both YouTube and Instagram to post short skits about Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic life; and Roger Alexis and Ian Pantin, whose company Lexo TV produces the popular Trinidadian web series, Santana, distributed primarily via YouTube. Several writers who fit a more conventional profile of a Caribbean writer with published scribed works gravitate heavily toward the microblogging social media platforms. Jamaican novelist Marlon James is perhaps the most popular and most prolific in this style. He shifted his musings from his self-titled blog to the shorter form of Facebook in mid-, and his posts range from very short, one-sentence commentary to longer, blog-like mini-essays. Like his blog from to , his posts are about a wide variety of topics: current events, politics, music, the art of writing, his own writing, lizards, and more. His Man Booker Prize for Fiction in broadened his Facebook circle even more, and at the end of he had .K followers on his personal page. On Twitter, a more public space than Facebook, writers have more followers, but the digital yards are arguably more defined. Although their tweets may cover many topics, in general Caribbean Twitter is narrower in connective scope than Facebook; science fiction writers engage most with other science fiction writers, poets with other poets, academics with other academics, and so on, with some crossover for nation-based or diasporic metropole commonalities. And across various social media platforms, the linguistic divide makes the ‘world wide’ of www seem but a myth.
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The Caribbean Blogosphere A blog is about freedom. And if we can get that idea into our heads, many things will change. Geoffrey Philp ()
Caribbean writers have a relatively deep history with blogging, embracing early the opportunities it offered to share their ideas and their work in varying forms. There was what might be seen as a heyday of Caribbean blogging toward the end of the first decade of this century, before Facebook and Twitter offered easier and faster options for communication. One of the earlier writers to embrace blogging was Jamaican poet and novelist Geoffrey Philp, who started his eponymous blog in and still maintains it. For his blog, Philp used the platform Blogger (acquired by Google in ), which was popular with early adopters in the Caribbean blogosphere and the format of which encouraged interaction among related bloggers. So when, in a interview for Global Voices, Nicholas Laughlin described Philp’s blog as ‘an important meeting place for Caribbean writers and readers’, he meant it quite literally (in the virtual realm at least) because those interested in Caribbean literature – often also bloggers themselves – would ‘meet’ in the comments section of Philp’s blog. Laughlin was himself an engaged member of this community of Caribbean writers/readers/bloggers, and in addition to his contributions to Global Voices, he also posted on his own Blogger-based site, begun in . His Global Voices post, ‘ Key Moments in [Anglo]Caribbean Blog History’ provides an important overview of how Caribbean bloggers of the time took themselves seriously as a crew, and blogging seriously as a genre. Being a ‘blogger’ meant hyperlinking to others, in your posts and/or your blogroll; it meant celebrating when mentioned elsewhere; it meant watching for ‘spikes’ in traffic. It was the Caribbean reading the Caribbean writing in a new, self-conscious way. Unfortunately, much of that is lost now; while some of the blogs remain accessible, albeit many without the comments section, just as many lead to error messages with only short references and defunct hyperlinks as clues to their having existed. The challenges around precarity and discoverability can be just as real for online writing as for printed forms. The Caribbean blogosphere recreated, especially for diasporic writers, a place to gather and discuss current events and longstanding issues of concern to Caribbean peoples and Caribbean literature. From to
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, Laughlin conducted seven interviews with Caribbean bloggers, some of whom he dubbed litbloggers to denote their status as both published creative writers and bloggers, but all of whom were in some way invested in the Caribbean digital yard and its connections to Caribbean arts. Like his ‘ Key Moments’ post, together these interviews serve as an invaluable source for those interested in the Caribbean blogosphere. They provide a sense of why Caribbean writers turned to blogs and what kept them posting. In her interview with Laughlin, Charmaine Valere (of the Signifyin’ Guyana blog) states, ‘Through blogging, I’ve created a new way of belonging to Guyana.’ In his interview, Marlon James makes clear the connection between online and offline communities: ‘Caribbean authors are so scattered and apart for all sorts of reasons, coming together once a year for the Calabash Literary Festival [in Jamaica]. I don’t know if we’ll ever get our Paris, but we could come together online.’ One of the most popular places for this ‘coming together’ was Annie Paul’s blog, Active Voice. From posts and comments at the time on Active Voice, we can see that an entire network of Caribbean writers was at play in the late s. Another interesting nexus was science fiction writer Tobias Buckell’s self-titled blog, started in . Although not primarily Caribbean in its audience (based on identification in the comments), Buckell’s blog was a popular place for discussion of all things writing, and he served as a link to other Caribbean writers’ blogs. The conversations that were public but ‘hidden’ in the comments section of these blogs – and those that were conducted privately via emails and face-to-face dialogues but were hinted at in comment threads – were often later articulated into blog posts crafted for the public, representing the individual bloggers navigating a variety of digital and non-digital encounters, within and beyond the borders of their respective yards. Across this network of digital yards one could find book reviews, discussions of Caribbean literary events (see, most famously, the heated discussion of ‘“Bad Words” at Calabash ’ on Active Voice), tributes to canonical Caribbean writers, aesthetic philosophizing, interviews with other writers and more; but very few of the writers would use the space to publish creative work. As the twenty-first century continued into its second decade, the blog format was adopted more for announcements, and very few of the early Caribbean bloggers continued to write the type of personal and/or philosophic posts they wrote in the peak period. Most who do continue to post such blogs do so less frequently, and conversations happen in Facebook and Twitter threads rather than in commentary on a blog post itself. Instead, we have less personal literary blogs
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maintained by institutions and organizations, like the blogs for Caribbean Literary Heritage (CLH), Peepal Tree Press and the Journal of West Indian Literature, which announce new books, literary events and happenings, and other news like the passing of writers. There are also blogs like Repeating Islands, The Public Archive and Caribbean Commons that are run by individuals but provide similar information on conferences, publications, and occasionally book reviews and interviews with writers.
Digital Literary Publications and Archives As personal blogging by Caribbean writers has declined, or shifted to the microblogging of social media, online publications focused on Caribbean literature have proliferated. Often relying on the same underlying technology as that of blogs (with several based on the WordPress format), these text-based but born-digital publications present Caribbean writings via easier access than the printed ‘little magazines’ of the past and the more recent digital and digitized academic journals hidden behind paywalls. Online literary publications have varying levels of institutional support, some relying on grant funds or editorial staffing supplied by academic resources and others working to be self-supporting via self-generated income, including running advertising and making use of digital crowdfunding platforms such as Patreon. While the Internet certainly reduces barriers to entering the publishing field (evidenced by the growth of Caribbean and other digital publications in the past fifteen years), the primary obstacle of sufficient resources remains (evidenced by the failure of several of these digital publications in the past fifteen years). Such resources include not only time and funding, but also networks, experience and quality submissions. It is possible that ‘failure’ is not the right word for these efforts at digital publication, since in many cases the issues that were published are still available: for example, the short-lived Town, which published four issues between October and June and aimed to straddle the print and digital worlds. Nicholas Laughlin, who co-published Town with Vahni Capildeo and Anu Lakhan, describes it as ‘a modest journal of literature (mostly poetry) and art, published via broadsides posted in public places in Port of Spain as well as online; an experiment in low- (or no-) budget publishing’. The digital issues of the experiment remain online as a testament to the vulnerability of small literary publications, whether digital or print, to the lack of resources. Laughlin is more well known for his editing of the Caribbean Review of Books (CRB), which was a print
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publication until and was relaunched in as online only. Though it remains a useful and much cited resource on Caribbean literature (especially with the addition of digital access to issues from through ), the CRB has not published a new issue since . Unlike Town and CRB, tongues of the ocean (published by Nicole Bethel in Nassau between February and October ) was born-digital. In the first few issues, the publication took advantage of its digital format and published two poems every Sunday night. The poems were then gathered into issues three times per year. Later issues began featuring audio-visual files of poetry and art as well as prose pieces. Although there is no indication in the last published issue that the publication would end, the website now frames the contents as an archive, complete with a ‘who we were’ history. There are, of course, digital publications still active, though publishing at varying intervals. Susumba’s Book Bag, created in a flipbook-style reader format by Jamaican Tanya Batson-Savage, was meant to be a quarterly literary magazine distributed via the more broadly cultural Caribbean site, Susumba.com. The magazine published its first issue in June and has had an irregular publishing schedule since then, with the most recent issue (as of writing) being issue , published in June . Also somewhat irregular in terms of schedule, but still active is Moko: Caribbean Arts and Letters, a biannual born-digital journal of literary and visual art begun in by Richard Georges (British Virgin Islands) and David Knight, Jr (US Virgin Islands). Recently, Moko established a Patreon account to raise funds ‘towards paying for our domain registration, website hosting, and later our contributors’, thus making visible the costs of online publishing. Much newer on the Caribbean literary online scene is PREE. Launched in and headed by Annie Paul in Jamaica, PREE is billed as a ‘unique online magazine for new contemporary writing from and about the Caribbean’ that aims to give ‘our authors international visibility far beyond the islands’. These three publications are based in the Caribbean region and each in turn speak to a desire to use the Internet to provide an array of publishing opportunities to Caribbean writers, particularly Caribbean-based writers. The importance of publishing from the region has long been a concern of Caribbean literary communities. Whether creative work or criticism, spaces not just for, but made by, Caribbean writers are key to centring and preserving a Caribbean aesthetic. Digital tools and the reach of the Internet have made publishing from the region a more viable possibility, but, as evidenced by delayed and defunct online publications, there are still
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obstacles of resources to overcome. The Internet offers, as Roopika Risam writes of digital humanities largely, the ‘opportunity to intervene in the digital cultural record – to tell new stories, shed light on counter-histories, and create spaces for communities to produce and share their own knowledges should they wish’. But it does not remove all the difficulties involved in publishing Caribbean literature, particularly within the region. The Douen Islands project, mentioned above, serves again as an ideal example. In this case, their experimentation with different forms of ‘publication’ and their subsequent decline illustrates the promise and pitfall of digital publishing. As Andre Bagoo states in an interview about the project: Most Caribbean writers are published by foreign publishers, which is not itself a bad thing, and which certainly has its place in relation to the important process of reaching an international audience. But I wonder if the Internet, while often seen to be in animus with publishing, is not also an opportunity for post-colonial countries like ours, to publish our own stories in our own ways, using cyberspace’s breath (sic) of tools and its reach.
But time and money remain scarce resources even as digital technology and the Internet reduce how much of each is necessary to edit and distribute Caribbean writing. Institutional support, particularly from universities, has been one means of garnering the resources for publishing Caribbean literature. As such, the more lasting Caribbean literary digital publications have been connected to scholars with institutional affiliations, primarily in the US. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal (started at the University of Miami in by Sandra Paquet Pouchet) and sx salon: a small axe literary platform (started by myself in ) remain two of the longest-lived born-digital Caribbean literary publications in existence today. Additionally, the Journal of West Indian Literature, headed by faculty from the University of the West Indies, recently moved to a fully online, though not open access, platform in order to offset the costs of publishing a print journal. Digital archives have also brought some older literary print publications into the digital sphere, making them relatively accessible worldwide and sometimes providing additional context for reading. For example, the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) has digitized back issues of Planter’s Punch (–); Kyk-Over-Al (–); Jamaica Journal (–); Sargasso (–); Caribbean Writer (–); and Caribbean Review of Books (–). Another major digital project providing access to rare (and even older) print sources of Caribbean writing is
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the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), which is described as a ‘publicly available archive platform for accessing, researching, and contributing pre-twentieth-century Caribbean archival materials’. Because of the access they provide to Caribbean literary resources, both dLOC and the ECDA have become invaluable to Caribbean literary scholars and already have significant pedagogical utility for courses on Caribbean literature. More recently, the CLH project has begun initiatives to not only provide a ‘fuller literary history of the period –’ via a location register of existing literary archives, but also encourage and advise contemporary Caribbean writers in proactively preserving their own papers. In addition to digital archive projects that preserve and make more accessible print materials, there are also, albeit often on a smaller scale, open-access archives of multimedia Caribbean literary materials. For example, when Anthurium launched in , the University of Miami also launched the digital archive of the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, which provides access to recordings of interviews and events hosted by the University of Miami English Department each summer from to . More recently, the Bocas Lit Fest has provided live-stream access to, as well as an archive of, its festivals (– only) via SoundCloud and Facebook. Bocas Lit Fest turning to Facebook is an especially important example in thinking about one of the barriers to digital archiving, the same that has plagued material archiving: that of storage space. Though the digital is often lauded as the solution to the problems of space and the threat of destruction of physical archives, it similarly relies on physical resources that are limited, especially in the Caribbean. Even as they may have a presence on – or, like the Bocas Lit Fest, make use of – the same platforms that enable digital yards, Caribbean digital literary publications and archives, whether institutionally supported or not, exist on the peripheries of such interactive spaces, depending primarily on search engine results and social media sharing to aid in their discoverability beyond relatively small scholarly circles. Articles and items from these projects are often circulated, commented upon, and otherwise engaged in digital yards and may even spark storytelling and creation, but they generally remain unidirectional in their provision of information and resources.
Conclusion As described by Kamau Brathwaite, the yard provides a valuable (and in some cases sacred) space for community and communal engagement;
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digital yards provide similar opportunities, though the ‘community’ may be less limited by geography and demography. Caribbean writers move between these generative social spaces and more formal ones that support and preserve their work, both on- and offline. If and how the digital nature of the yard and digital technology in general are changing our storytelling – what Brathwaite calls our anansesem – remains to be seen. For example, flash fiction has enjoyed much more popularity in the past two decades because of the publishing affordabilities and constraints of the Internet, but it is not a new form of writing. What perhaps may most affect our overview of Caribbean literature today is the impermanence of the platforms via which many Caribbean stories, and the stories of those stories, are being told. Defunct blogs and publications, broken links and error messages, digital breadcrumbs that lead nowhere – these have all become facts of our twenty-first-century Caribbean literary lives and haunt writers and readers alike. The sense of impending loss is not new in Caribbean cultural production, but it is more immediate and more visible in the spedup world of the digital. Although many of us in Caribbean literary communities had already begun discussions about how to guard against such loss in our usage of digital platforms, the potential impact of the disappearance of our digital cultural work became very real when we lost Giselle Rampaul, lecturer at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, who died suddenly in Trinidad in February . Giselle was the producer of The Spaces Between Words: Conversations with Writers, a growing archive of recorded interviews with Caribbean writers. Driven by Giselle’s leadership and personal involvement and dedication, Spaces published almost one hundred podcasts, providing an extensive resource for other creative writers and for scholars and students of Caribbean literature. The project halted, however, with Giselle’s death. The Spaces site URL has expired and is, two years later, available for sale. Fortunately, the collection of valuable recordings, painstakingly curated and edited over the past five years, is archived by the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, though it is not easily accessible to the public. Unfortunately, when one person is the driving force, or perhaps only force, behind digital Caribbean projects, they are vulnerable to such loss. This is also true of primary creative work like Robert Antoni’s digital companion to As Flies for Whatless Boys and Oonya Kempadoo’s Naniki (which is already defunct). These works are not only connected to institutional funding that may run out, but also to ‘ephemeral entities’ – i.e. us and our limited human bodies – and therefore are subject to
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deterioration and/or expiration. In an ironic turn, print becomes one of the ways we preserve the traces of digital communities of creation and communication. With more published monographs on writers who use digital technologies, with citations and references in printed work, and with survey essays like this one, we maintain a fuller picture of Caribbean literature, digital and otherwise. Digital intertextuality, of course, remains another means of recording online Caribbean literature and literary spaces, but as Johanna Drucker reminds us in ‘Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing’, the digital is no more ‘safe’ for eternity than the material, analog method of storing data. Indeed, it is similarly if not more precarious because ‘a book once finished sits on the shelf, opens without electricity or upgrades to its operating system or to the environment in which it is stored’. Even as archives like dLOC, the ECDA and CLH are trying to bring the analog past into the digital present, we must record the digital present in analog form for the future. All attempts, then, at preservation are already limited; but we continue to save and store the fragments – our influences and our interlocutors, our processes, posts, and publications – that tell a history of twenty-first-century Caribbean literature.
Notes Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Note(s) on Caribbean Cosmology’, River City, . (), –, . ‘Anansesem’ refers to the arts of storytelling. Shivanee Ramlochan, ‘“Museum of Anagapesis” – Nicholas Wong’, Novel Niche: A Place For Books, June , https://novelniche.net//// museum-of-anagapesis-nicholas-wong/. Shivanee Ramlochan, ‘How I Did It: Forward First Collection – Shivanee Ramlochan on “All the Dead, All the Living” from Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting’, The Poetry School, https://poetryschool.com/how-i-did-it/how-idid-it-forward-first-collection-shivanee-ramlochan-on-all-the-dead-all-the-liv ing-from-everyone-knows-i-am-a-haunting/ [Accessed March ]. Shivanee Ramlochan, ‘What I learned at my first Jouvay: no amount of powder you predict can prepare you for the amount of powder you will face’, Facebook, February , www.facebook.com/shivanee.ramlochan/posts/ . Douen Islands (@douenislands), ‘Calling all hauntings, graphic inventors, playmakers, mythic duennes and more’, Instagram photo, July , www.instagram.com/p/BWiwkhHDW/. Douen Islands, ‘Twitter Chat: Douen Islands Haunting’, Facebook, July , www.facebook.com/events//.
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Recognizing the growing usage of social media as material in humanities research, the MLA Handbook offered online updates in on various social media citations. These updates were included in the th edition. James also has a ‘business page’ granted by Facebook to personages of note but he does not post there frequently, and it carried only .K followers at the end of . Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Talking to Jamaican Litblogger Geoffrey Philp’, Global Voices, May , https://globalvoices.org////talking-to-jamai can-litblogger-geoffrey-philp/. Nicholas Laughlin, ‘ Key Moments in [Anglo-]Caribbean Blog History’, Global Voices, January , https://globalvoices.org////-keymoments-in-anglo-caribbean-blog-history/. There is a parallel that may be drawn here with the proliferation of ‘little magazines’ in the mid-twentieth century and the difficulties of access to that material now. Although, with digitizing of publications like Tapia and KykOver-Al (in the Digital Library of the Caribbean) that difficulty has been lessened. Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Talking to Guyanese Litblogger Charmaine Valere’, Global Voices, October , https://globalvoices.org////talk ing-to-guyanese-litblogger-charmaine-valere/. Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Talking to Jamaican Writer and Blogger Marlon James’, Global Voices, May , https://globalvoices.org////talking-tojamaican-writer-and-blogger-marlon-james/. Laughlin also interviewed Annie Paul in . The other interviews, both in , were with Andre Bagoo (of the blogs TATTOO and PLEASURE) and Lisa Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo (of The Repeating Island blog). Buckell remains a key figure in connecting the worlds of science fiction and fantasy and Caribbean literatures, especially via Twitter, where he regularly dialogs with Karen Lord and Nalo Hopkinson. The three writers built a reference site for Caribbean science fiction and fantasy (http://caribbeansf .com/) in but it does not seem to have been updated since March . Nalo Hopkinson was also an important member of the Caribbean blogosphere in the mid-s but her blog has not been updated since September and is currently only (partially) accessible via the Internet Archive. Annie Paul, ‘“Bad Words” at Calabash ’, Active Voice, April , https://anniepaul.net////bad-words-at-calabash-/. Nicholas Laughlin, Nicholas Laughlin’s Website, http://nicholaslaughlin.net/. [Accessed March ]. See the Town issues here: http://cometotown .blogspot.com/. ‘Moko Magazine is creating Moko Magazine and the Moko Writers’ Workshop’, www.patreon.com/mokomag [Accessed March ]. Patreon is a web-based service that connects creators of all genres to potential patrons. Creators generally provide tiers of incentives for monthly financial support.
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‘About Us’, PREE: Caribbean. Writing, https://preelit.com/about-us/ [Accessed March ]. Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ), . Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Douen Islands and the Art of Collaboration’, Caribbean Review of Books, (), http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com//// douen-islands-and-the-art-of-collaboration/. ‘About’, Early Caribbean Digital Archive, https://ecda.northeastern.edu/ home/about/ [Accessed June ]. ‘Aims’, Caribbean Literary Heritage, www.caribbeanliteraryheritage.com/aims/ [Accessed March ]. See, for example, Kelly Baker Josephs, ‘Digital Publishing: A Roundtable Conversation from the West Indian Literature Conference’, sx salon, (), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/digital-publishing. The Spaces Between Words Podcast feed is, as of writing, available at https:// libraries.sta.uwi.edu/podcasts/. As Flies to Whatless Boys project: http://whatlessboys.com/; Naniki was a collaborative project directed by Oonya Kempadoo. The site is no longer available via its original URL, but can be found on the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web//http://nanikistory.org/story .html. Tzarina T. Prater, Personal communication, March . Johanna Drucker, ‘Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing’, Los Angeles Review of Books, January , https:// lareviewofbooks.org/article/pixel-dust-illusions-innovation-scholarly-publish ing/.
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Developing and Sustaining Literary Publics: Prizes, Festivals and New Writing Ifeona Fulani
In her article ‘We Want Books – But Do We Encourage Our Writers?’ Jamaican writer Una Marson states, ‘I do not think the public knows what our leading writers look like – nor is interested. Our writers have no Guggenheim, Rockefeller or Rosenwald Scholarship to keep them while they spend a couple of years on research for the production of a book.’ Marson alludes to the lack of exposure of Caribbean writers to potential readers and bemoans the lack of interest in reading. She also implies that Caribbean writers might be scarce or unproductive because they lack financial support. A quick survey of the literary cash prizes for which Caribbean writers, currently located in the region or transnationally, might be eligible today indicates how much has changed in this respect. The Guyana Prize, Jamaica’s Lignum Vitae Awards, the Casa de las Américas Prize, Trinidad’s OCM Bocas Prizes, and others are awarded annually or biannually and reward the winners with money, publicity and exposure. However, prizes alone are not enough to gestate writing talent and support talented, productive writers; and the existence of talented writers in a community cannot of itself cultivate a literary public. By ‘literary public’ I refer here to the interrelated and interdependent worlds of writers, agents, publishers, critics, literary journals, festivals, and their audiences, as well as audiences for readings of fiction and performance poetry, and crucially, readers. As the second decade of the twenty-first century closes, it is clear that the cultivation of a Caribbean reading audience and a market for Caribbean literature has gathered momentum since . During the anticolonial foment of the mid-twentieth century, a generation of writers inspired by anticolonial, nationalist politics established a canon of Caribbean literature that was explicitly political in content. However, the migration of many Caribbean writers to Europe during this period ensured that the audience for Caribbean writing about the region was predominantly found in the imperial cities of Europe. C. L. R. James,
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George Lamming, Vic Reid, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, Alejo Carpentier, Nicholas Guillén, Jacques Roumain, Aimé Césaire, Joseph Zobel and Maryse Condé, to name a few, each participated in a literary field within their respective linguistic spheres that was transnational and, consequently, bifurcated. Though based in a European metropolis, they remained Caribbean literary intellectuals, concerned with the politics of aesthetics and with local anticolonial politics. However, their engagement with both a metropolitan and a local Caribbean literary public was inevitably limited. The relative popularity of West Indian writing in the UK peaked in the exceptional phase mid-century, in which some sixty works by West Indian authors were published in the UK, leading Kenneth Ramchand to comment that London was ‘indisputably the capital of West Indian Literary capital’. Across the twentieth-century, the corporatization and globalization of the publishing industry, the commercialization of literary fiction, the commodification of literary authors alongside the ‘niche’ marketing of writers and writing based on place of origin, has prioritized the market status and perceived commercial viability of Caribbean writing as much as, and arguably above, literary merit. An important mechanism of selection and promotion of chosen authors has been the literary prize.
Literary Prizes and Their Effects In the UK and North America, the literary prize that might once have been seen as the reward for rare literary merit has become instrumental to the publishing industry’s commodification of writers and writing from the global South. When Caribbean writers win major prizes such as the Man Booker and Forward Prizes in the UK, the Scotiabank Giller and Governor General’s Literary Awards in Canada, and the Windham Campbell Prize in the US, the publisher-propelled publicity machinery that promotes authors validate the winning works and introduce their authors to a wider audience. It is arguable that winners of prestigious prizes open the gateway for other Caribbean writers to gain attention from publishers and readers beyond the committed audience of literary scholars and more literary readers in the region and elsewhere. The political considerations that inevitably influence the selection of prize winners are often complicated and influenced by local issues and priorities, but commitment by awarding bodies to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion across the arts, and publishing industry awareness of the commodity value of ‘new’ voices and perspectives, are increasingly
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significant contributing factors. The selection of finalists for Canadian prizes, for example, must comply with a legal mandate that Canada’s literature reflect the state’s commitment to multiculturalism. In Canada, the publicity that follows winning a major Canadian prize raises authors to national prominence and effectively mainstreams writers from minority communities, more so than Canadian winners of prestigious Caribbean prizes. As a result, Caribbean-born winners of major prizes may be better known in Canada than in their country of origin, in the region or in the centres of the Caribbean diaspora. Austin Clark and Dionne Brand were awarded the Governor General’s Prize relatively late in their careers, a belated acknowledgement of their contribution to Canadian literature by then representative of Canada’s multicultural present. Similarly, the and awards of the prestigious Windham Campbell Prize to writers Erna Brodber and Lorna Goodison, whose works are already firmly established in the Caribbean literary canon, brought late-career recognition that will diversify the list of Windham Campbell Prize winners and introduce their work to a mainstream audience. The prizes for literary fiction awarded by Commonwealth Writers, the cultural arm of the Commonwealth Foundation, are effectively sponsored by an intergovernmental organization based on a historical colonial formation – the British Commonwealth. As stated on their website, the goal of Commonwealth Writers is to ‘inspire and connect writers and storytellers across the world, bringing personal stories to a global audience’. This statement may be parsed into three mandates: to stimulate literary production (‘inspire’), to create a global literary network based on a shared colonial language and a shared colonial history (‘connect’), and to constitute and sustain a ‘global audience’ for the literature. The concept of a ‘Commonwealth Literature’ has been strongly critiqued for its colonial foundation and the implied assumption of continued British cultural leadership, with the persistent prioritizing of the English language and literary values. Until they were discontinued in , the Commonwealth Writers Prizes for Best First Book and Best Book, and for Best Commonwealth Short Story, were awarded in regional categories in which the Caribbean was bracketed with Canada. Despite the imbalance of this pairing, writers from the Caribbean region frequently won the regional prize. The list of prize winners includes writers such as Erna Brodber and Olive Senior, who are now ensconced in the Caribbean literary canon, as well as early-career authors of short stories who have subsequently won publishing contracts, such as Diana McCaulay, Sharon Millar and Kevin Jared Hosein. The prizes have proved important in cultivating Caribbean
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talent and presenting Caribbean writers to a global readership – of which Caribbean readers are, of course, a part. Arguably prizes based in the Caribbean, specifically for Caribbean authors, assume a more supportive, less explicitly commercial function, informed by the legacy of the pioneering work in support of the development of Caribbean writing in the mid-twentieth century by Una Marson, Henry Swansea and subsequently the members of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) founded in London in by Kamau Brathwaite, Andrew Salkey and John LaRose, which included many writers, artists and critics. The leaders of CAM recognized two crucial prerequisites to building a literature: funding for writers of talent and opportunities for publishing and promoting their work. These functions are important goals of established regional prizes, namely the Casa de las Américas Prize, the Guyana Prize, the Lignum Vitae Prizes (formerly the Una Marson and Vic Reid Prizes) and the Grand Prix littéraire caribéen of the Regional Council of Guadeloupe. The Casa de las Américas Prize is the first of these to be instituted, initially as the Concurso Literario Hispanicamericano in and with a change to the current name in . The prize is offered annually and has incrementally extended its eligibility from work in Spanish in its early years to works in English since , and in Portuguese and French since . In her study of the institutionalization of Cuba’s literary culture, Pamela Maria Smorkaloff notes that the prize is one of several means that advance the aim of the Casa de las Américas to break through Cuba’s isolation and establish intellectual, cultural and artistic dialogue throughout the Caribbean and Latin America and, secondarily, with the rest of the world. While not limited to the Caribbean region, the prize is envisioned as constituting a literature that builds on commonalities of history in the Americas, as Smorkaloff explains: ‘The evolution of the criteria selections and categories in which prizes have been awarded over the years [. . .] demonstrates Casa’s faithfulness to a guiding notion of solidarity based on the cultural values and elements of a common heritage that unite the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.’ Regional prizes that emerged later were less encompassing in their geographic and linguistic remit but equally committed to recognizing regional commonalities and building on shared cultural and literary heritages. Established by the government of Guyana in , the Guyana Prize aims to reward outstanding literary merit with awards for fiction, poetry and drama in English, and is open to citizens of Caricom states, the Commonwealth Caribbean and the Netherlands Antilles. Introduced in , the OCM Bocas Prizes for fiction, poetry or literary nonfiction are
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administered by the Bocas Literary Festival, as are the CODE Burt Award for Young Adult Literature and The Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize. The latter is open only to writers resident in the region, and all three are limited to authors who were either born in or are citizens of a Caribbean country, and writing in English. The Bocas Literature Festival also sponsors The Henry Swanzy Award, a unique award recognizing the crucially important service rendered to Caribbean literature by editors, publishers, critics and others constitutive in nurturing Caribbean literary publics. The Grand Prix littéraire caribéen, also established in by the Regional Council of Guadeloupe on behalf of the Association of Caribbean Writers, is more linguistically inclusive; awarded biennially for novels, volumes of poetry, essays and plays, the prize is open to work in French, English and Spanish. The prize prioritizes work demonstrating overt expressions of Caribbeanité, examinations of the foundations of Caribbean languages and identities, and the lucidity of the author’s view of the Caribbean, as well as excellence of writing. The emphasis of these stated criteria on the eligibility of specific works is unique to this prize; and although these criteria may be assumed to be important in the judging of all the regional prizes, their clarity helps forestall post-fact controversy about the suitability of a winning text. Similarly, the requirement of all the prizes mentioned above, of Caribbean nativity or citizenship, contributes to ensuring that these sought-after regional prizes are not colonized by writers with a tenuous connection to the region and little experience of its cultures – a persistently sensitive and contentious issue. All literary prizes attract publicity and increased book sales to benefit the writers who win, their publishers, and the literary contexts from which they emerge, and these factors weight a literary prize far beyond its monetary value. From her research on the impact of the Caine Prize for new African Writing, Samantha Pinto notes an increase in output, sales and visibility in the West. For winning authors, the Caine Prize functions as a literary passport enabling their work to reach previously unavailable agents, publishers, markets and audiences. The most prestigious prizes have even more far-reaching consequences. Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize drew the world’s attention to Caribbean poetry and has opened doors for Caribbean poets to compete for prestigious prizes in the UK and the USA, with remarkable success. The Booker Prize win of Jamaican writer Marlon James had a similar, enabling effect for Jamaican novelists, as evidenced by the visibility of subsequent novels by Nicole DennisBrown and Kei Miller in the USA and the UK.
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Similar advantageous consequences and effects may be observed on the careers of winners of Caribbean prizes, based on increased number of book sales locally and abroad, as well as invitations to participate in literary festivals in and outside the region, all of which combine to raise the profile of the writer and their island, and contribute to the expansion of an audience for Caribbean literatures. Winners of the Guyana Prize and the Bocas Prizes are promoted in local media, including the giveaway journal of the Trinidad-based Caribbean Airlines, as well as to local publics via readings and other events. Raising authors’ profiles and creating an audience for the authors’ work also boosts local sales. Winning one prize seems to guarantee invitations to literary festivals in the region and further afield. Following the award of the Guyana Prize for her novel The Loneliness of Angels (), Myriam Chancy was invited to the St Maarten Literature Festival and offered a residency in the Department of English at University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, that also entailed public readings and literary events. Poet Vladimir Lucien, whose volume of poems Sounding Ground won the OCM Bocas Prize in , was similarly offered a residency in the Department of English at UWI Mona, with public engagements, and was invited to participate in the Calabash literary festival in Jamaica, the Jaipur Festival in India, the Brooklyn Book Fair and other important literary events. Lucien is very clear about the authentication conferred by a prize, ‘I do think that the Bocas prize may perhaps have justified to others more on the outside of things, why this debutante was present at a festival that brings together some of the world’s most seasoned, achieved and celebrated writers – Caribbean and beyond.’ Even being named on a shortlist attracts publicity that will expand a writer’s local audience and might attract the attention of a publisher and lead to a contract. It follows, then, that Caribbean literary prizes are highly competitive; they attract submissions from authors residing within the region and from across the Caribbean diaspora. This raises the question of how this particular playing field can be level when potential competitors located outside the region may have workshopped and developed their books in MFA programmes or residencies in the USA, Canada or the UK. Region-based competitors are at a relative disadvantage, as they may not have had access to these resources and the quality of mentoring they can provide, although the Bocas Writer’s Centre has stepped into this role. For a literary community that historically and contemporaneously extends transnationally, questions of inequality of access to resources to promote the development of Caribbean writers and Caribbean writing are likely to persist.
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Fostering New Caribbean Writing If, as Paul Gilroy argues, the demands of commodity culture effectively suppress creative expression of unique aspects of Black Atlantic histories and cultures in the interests of market viability and corporate profits, what are the consequences for writers in the Caribbean and for local literatures? Are Caribbean literatures protected to some extent by the very lack of access to publishing decried by many region-based writers? The difficulty of gaining access to agents and to publishers was a concern of Una Marson and Henry Swanzy, her successor at the influential BBC literary radio show Caribbean Voices, which served as a highly productive incubator and showcase of Caribbean writing by the region to the region in the s and s. Decades later, in the anglophone Caribbean, responsibility for nurturing and training writers of talent was taken up by both individuals and by universities that introduced classes and programmes in writing fiction and poetry. In the late twentieth century, the UWI St Augustine, UWI Cave Hill and UWI Mona all introduced Creative Writing programmes. At the University of Miami – arguably a Caribbean space – the Caribbean Writers Summer Institute provided tutoring and mentoring for writers of fiction and poetry and for emerging scholars of Caribbean literature from to when the funds expired. The roster of writers and scholars who attended the Institute and have gone on to publish or to take up literature-related position in the US academy and at UWI is impressive. Before the introduction of institutional programmes, a number of small organizations and individuals were instrumental in mentoring writers. In the anglophone Caribbean, the Creative Arts Centre in Trinidad and the Poetry Society of Jamaica have been sources of support and community. Poets Derek Walcott and Kendal Hyppolite in St Lucia, UWI professor and poet Mervyn Morris in Jamaica, and Trinidadian writer Wayne Brown have served as outstanding mentors. Brown (–), a protégé of Derek Walcott, was honoured by the Bocas Lit Fest as an outstanding teacher and mentor to a generation of Caribbean writers in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Kingston, Jamaica. Poet Kei Miller describes Brown as ‘the most technically sophisticated poet of his generation’: ‘Wayne created a space that supported excellence and because that space existed, writers stepped into it. There is a whole generation of Jamaican writers that came out of that space.’ Although a poet himself, Wayne Brown’s legacy is embodied in the writers he
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mentored who exemplify the influence that skilful tutoring can have on a writer’s development. All the same, an awareness that the hub of writing is overseas remains strong. Trinidadian author Lisa Allen-Agostini writes of the dominance of literary powers located ‘Elsewhere’ and of the persistent difficulty of gaining access to publishers. Her comments indicate that even with the advent of the kind of Caribbean literary prizes that Una Marson had wished for, they represent only small steps in providing support and access to publishing for the Caribbean writer located in the region: As a black woman writer living in TT [Trinidad and Tobago], I am at the mercy of others Elsewhere. [. . .] My concern is for this space where I live and where I plant my work, not for Elsewhere. [. . .] Yet for most of my writing career access has been vested Elsewhere. Access to publishers Elsewhere. Access to training and education Elsewhere. Access to agents Elsewhere. Ultimately, access to readers Elsewhere.
Allen-Agostini flags a concern shared among region-based writers about the powers of individuals ‘Elsewhere’ to influence the development of Caribbean writers and their work from a distance and who often lack local knowledge. Agents, editors and publishers ‘Elsewhere’ have the power to reshape the narratives that writers create to suit the tastes of their mainly white, Western audiences, often diminishing or sacrificing local specificity in the interest of ‘universal’ appeal. Two widely shared concerns are implied by Allen-Agostini’s comments: concern about the priorities of technocrats in the publishing industry, and concern about audiences ‘Elsewhere’, whose demands wield considerable influence over the careers of authors writing in their domestic space. Of course, European or American readers are not the only audiences for Caribbean writing, but they constitute the largest, wealthiest number of readers. John Young’s comments on the troubled relationship between African American authors and white readers and the problematic textual mediation of white editors in the US are relevant to Caribbean authors and their experiences with editors and publishers in the US. Young refers to ‘the complex negotiations required to produce African American texts through a predominantly white publishing industry’, and the impact on the ‘textual condition’ – the character and content of the work – of the editorial, publication and marketing processes. He raises questions about the discomfort Black authors often feel at the end of the chain of processes that, no matter how subtly, almost inevitably change or alter their book. These questions resonate with concerns of authors in the Caribbean about
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the influence of ‘Elsewhere’ on their aesthetic choices and sit in tension with the undeniably positive impact on their careers of prizes and publication by a mainstream press in the global North.
The Impact of Literary Festivals For a region comprised of small island states, the Caribbean hosts a surprising number of literary festivals, particularly if those in the circumCaribbean, such as the Miami Book Fair and the Brooklyn Book Fair, are included. Large book fairs such as those in Miami and Brooklyn, that stage readings and conversations with writers, blur the distinction somewhat and attract a general audience. The oldest, most established book fair in the region is La Feria Internacional del Libro, la Habana, but Cuba’s relative isolation has meant that it has not been a destination for a general regional or international audience. The Miami and Brooklyn Book Fairs, both in cities with significant Caribbean populations, have designated slots for Caribbean writing, which are extremely well attended and are instrumental in promoting or introducing Caribbean writings to non-Caribbean readers. Launched in and blazing a trail for smaller festivals to follow in Barbados, Antigua, Dominica and Guadeloupe, the Calabash International Literary Festival is now the ‘big little festival’ that, according to British author and Calabash alum Robert McCrum, rivals Hay, Bath and Cheltenham – all well-established, world-class British festivals. A significant appeal of Calabash for authors and their audience is the location of the festival in the quiet Jamaican fishing village of Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth. Festival proceedings take place in a huge tent pitched beside the blue Caribbean, from which cooling breezes rise and blow, dispersing the heat generated by an audience of over , people, gathered to hear readings and conversations with world-class writers – such as Salman Rushdie, Geoff Dyer, Eleanor Catton and Toshani Doshi – alongside both established and emerging writers from within the region. Authors are not paid, but are rewarded with generous hospitality, a warm and appreciative audience, book sales, and five days in the beautiful setting of Treasure Beach. Calabash offers a laid-back environment but presents a carefully curated literary programme, interspersed with popular open-mike sessions that have provided a platform for writers who have gone on to occupy bigger stages, the most notable being Marlon James and Ishion Hutchinson. The thousands who travel from across Jamaica and farther afield are
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rewarded with books, food stalls, and locally made crafts, and evenings are taken over by music performances. The free concerts by well-known musicians are an important aspect of the festival’s effort both to give back to the local community and to draw locals into the readings and openmike sessions. From its inception, the ambition of the festival’s cofounders, poet Kwame Dawes, novelist Colin Channer, and hotelier and entrepreneur Justine Henzell, was to grow an audience of literature consumers and, ideally, literature lovers from all social classes, which they have fulfilled. Calabash’s target audience is Jamaican; however, a large segment of their audience travels to the festival from across the Caribbean diaspora, attracted by the setting, the programming and the now-legendary Calabash vibe. As the festival has grown, its growth has stimulated local enterprise and services to meet the demand of festival-goers. The festival founders were clear from the outset that in order to attract and grow an audience it was necessary to change negative perceptions of literature held by many Jamaicans. A survey of bookstore sales conducted by Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer when they were planning the festival revealed that the highest sales were of pulp fiction by US authors; literature by Caribbean authors was tainted by association with boring English classes. Kwame Dawes has further contested this widespread prejudice directly by writing introductions to reprints of Jamaican works in Peepal Tree Press’s Caribbean Modern Classics series, that situate each book in a context recognizable to Jamaicans in order to remove the ‘school book’ stigma. Extensive promotional and advertising campaigns in the Jamaican media during the months prior to each festival have proved effective in creating a buzz around the festival as both literary and cool. The increasing attendance numbers, from in to , in , are evidence of the success of these, and book sales at the festival confirm the success of Dawes’s and Channer’s goal to change the way Jamaicans value literature. The festival is one arm of the Calabash International Literary Trust, which also sponsors the Calabash Writers’ Workshop (CWW). The CWW offers a small number of fellowships to emerging poets and novelists to enable them to attend seminars and workshops in Kingston, Jamaica, with the aim of producing a manuscript for publication under the mentorship of an established writer. The anthology Iron Balloons, edited by Colin Channer and published in , showcases the work of the authors emerging from the CWW and includes writing by Sharon Leach, Alwyn Bully and A-dZiko Simba, who went on to win the Bocas
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Literary Festival’s Burt Award for Young Adult Fiction. Calabash does not offer any literary prizes, but the founders are committed to supporting the development of local writers and expanding the local audience for literature. The festival’s open-mike sessions are an important part of its programming and provide a unique platform for unpublished or aspiring local writers to perform their work to a large audience. Although the level of talent and quality of performance varies, open-mike sessions are popular with audiences as they introduce an element of the unexpected into an otherwise carefully curated programme. The Calabash Literary Festival has demonstrated to its early doubters that it is indeed possible to cultivate both a local/Caribbean audience for literature and an international audience for Caribbean writing, from a small local base. Launched ten years after Calabash and based in Port of Spain, the OCM Bocas Lit Fest soon became an important event for writers and readers in Trinidad and Tobago, the region and further afield. The festival’s founder and director Marina Salandy-Brown returned to Port of Spain after a distinguished career as a programme maker at the BBC and served as Executive Director of the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival before launching Bocas. She brought project management and fundraising experience to her vision of Bocas as a festival that would stimulate literary activity in Trinidad and Tobago and provide a locus for writers and their work to be seen and known locally, regionally and internationally. The festival’s programme director Nicholas Laughlin brought extensive knowledge of writers and literary activity in the region, accumulated over years of editing The Caribbean Review of Books. It is an aim of the festival directors to showcase a broad variety of voices, subject matter and writing styles of Caribbean authors working in fiction, poetry and literary nonfiction. By making the centrepiece of the festival the OCM Bocas Prizes, the programming of readings, interviews and discussion panels focuses attention on the works and authors on the long-list and on the work or expertise of the prize judges, who have been literary agents and editors as well as writers. Introducing emerging local writers to a wider audience, local and international, is also an ongoing goal, despite the phasing out of Bocas’ highly successful New Talent Showcase, which was a springboard to book contracts for fiction writers Sharon Millar and Barbara Jenkins, and poet Shivanee Ramlochan. Bocas Lit Fest shares with Calabash the larger agenda of building a local and regional literary public. However, Bocas differs significantly in creating space for discussion and debate about current events and issues of local concern, such as migration, child marriage in Trinidad and human rights.
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These discussions attract large local audiences and have influenced national debates on particular issues. To reach a younger demographic, Bocas organizes year-round writer- and reader-development events and work in schools in partnership with the Cents Youth Outreach organization. The five-day festival, which takes place at the end of April each year, is the climax of all these activities. Bocas’ reach is also international, extending the festival’s mission to promote Caribbean writers widely and to expand audiences for their writing. In addition, Bocas partners with the British Council, which sponsors the staging of specific activities for writers selected by Bocas for their festival. In the US, Bocas has partnered with the Brooklyn Book Fair to present readings by authors selected from its long list, an annual event which has attracted a capacity audience. Although cognizant of Walcott’s definition of Caribbean literature as ‘one literature in five languages’ and committed to the aim of staging a festival with an international scope that is pan-Caribbean in focus, the ambitions of Bocas directors are constrained by the limits imposed by finite resources. The cost of translators makes it impossible for the festival to function in French, Spanish and Dutch, which means that the festival’s prizes are limited to works written in English. However, a much smaller festival, the Guadeloupe-based Congrès des Écrivains Caribéen (Congress of Caribbean Writers) has staged a conference every two-tothree years since and is making progress towards regional and linguistic inclusivity. In the past, the Congrès has invited participation from writers working in all Caribbean languages; and submissions to their Grand Prix littéraire caribéen of the Regional Council of Guadaloupe are invited from authors writing in English, Spanish or French. The Congrès was formed primarily to promote and give visibility to Guadeloupean writers; consequently, activities at their festival are designed to address the concerns of local writers. Nevertheless, the inclusivity of their prize reflects the aim of the Congrès to establish links with writers across the region. In addition to prizes and festivals, small publishers play a crucial role in sustaining and expanding a Caribbean literary public in the region, the diaspora and globally. While small presses typically do not have resources to promote their authors widely, a prize-winning book and its author will usually attract wide publicity. The non-profit House of Nehisi Publishers Foundation based in St Martin publishes poetry, literary fiction and scholarly works with the objective of contributing to the development of a national literature of St Martin (North and South) and to promoting the diversity of Caribbean literature regionally and globally. The list of Nehisi
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House authors includes titles by Bahamian poet Marian Bethel, Kamau Brathwaite and George Lamming, as well as a small number of international authors such as American Amiri Baraka and Toshani Tosi from India. The Foundation is also co-founder of the St Martin Bookfair. The UK-based Peepal Tree Press is well known as the leading publisher of anglophone writing from the Caribbean and its diasporas. The partnerships forged by Peepal Tree Press with Bocas Lit Fest and the Calabash Festival organizers have proved particularly dynamic in generating and expanding an integrative transnational literary ecology that encompasses the support, development and exposure of writers in the region and diaspora, with the long-term goal of nurturing and growing the branches that constitute a Caribbean literary public and support a body of Caribbean literature. A strategically important manifestation is the partnership between Peepal Tree Press and the New York-based Akashic Books to form Peekash Press, launched at the Bocas Lit Fest to publish the work of emerging writers living in the Caribbean, and for which Bocas assumed responsibility for producing its new titles in . Una Marson would approve of these developments. Caribbean writers currently have more support for their writing, and more opportunity for publishing their work and developing their careers, maybe not enough to meet the need that exists, but certainly more than at any other previous time.
Notes Una Marson, ‘We Want Books – But Do We Encourage Our Writers?’, Daily Gleaner ( October ), . Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber and Faber, ), . Writing about Zora Neale Hurston’s and Jean Rhys’s work, Delia Caparoso Konsett observes ‘a high degree of awareness concerning the commodity value of ethnic narratives’ on the part of these writers. Konsett calls for ‘greater industry sensitivity and institutional practices’ that will not reduce ethnicity to a marketable stereotype’; Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. This is a concern I address later in this essay. Cultural critic Annie Paul named this the Marlon James effect: ‘Marlon James has adroitly dismantled the thatch ceiling that seems to veil the work of Caribbean writers from international visibility [. . .] Doors have been flung open!’’ (‘The Marlon James Effect, the Current and _Space Jamaica’, Active Voice, December , https://anniepaul.net////the-marlon-
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james-effect-the-current-and-_space-jamaica/). Also noteworthy is the remarkable sequence of Forward Prize wins by Caribbean poets since . Canada’s Multicultural Policy instituted in was followed by the more prescriptive Multiculturalism Act in , which ‘sought to remove any barriers preventing full participation in society and promised to assist individuals in eliminating and overcoming discrimination’; Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier , ‘Canadian Multiculturalism Act, ’, https:// pier.ca/research/immigration-history/canadian-multiculturalism-act- [Accessed July ]. In an unpublished interview with me in June , Myriam Chancy compares the popularity of Dionne Brand, the winner of Canada’s Governor General Award, with the relative obscurity of M. NourbeSe Philip, who won the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in , to make the point that the publicity and promotion afforded Canadian prize winners serves to integrate minority authors into the Canadian literary mainstream in ways that winning a regional prize does not. While this claim may not apply to every Canada-based writer of Caribbean origin, a case in point is André Alexis, Trinidad-born winner of Canada’s Scotia Bank Giller Prize and the US-based Windham Campbell Prize. Alexis was virtually unknown in Trinidad until his participation in the Bocas Lit Fest, sponsored by the Windham Campbell Prize. Commonwealth Writers, ‘About Us’, www.commonwealthwriters.org/about/. See Salman Rushdie, ‘Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist’, in Imaginary Homelands (New York: Penguin, ), –. Also, on Amitav Ghosh’s withdrawal, see Rebecca Allison, ‘Novelist Quits “Imperial” Contest’, The Guardian, March , www.theguardian.com/uk//mar// books.booksnews. Olive Senior and Erna Brodber were regional winners of the Best Book Prize in and for Summer Lightning and Myal respectively, while Alecia McKenzie and Vanessa Spence won the Best First Book Prize in and for Satellite City and The Bridges Are Down respectively. The Book Prize was introduced in along with new geographical groupings that uncoupled the Caribbean from Canada. The regional prize winner that year was Alecia McKenzie for Sweetheart, followed in by Ezekiel Alan for Disposable People. Diana Gilkes and Michael Reckord were regional winners of the Short Story Prize in and respectively. In , the Short Story Prize was also renamed and restructured; the regional prize was won that year by Diana McCaulay, by Maggie Harris in , by Kevin Jared Hosein in and by Lance Dowrich in . The overall prize was won by Sharon Millar in , by Ingrid Persaud in and by Kevin Jared Hosein in . Pamela Maria Smorkaloff, Readers and Writers in Cuba: A Social History of Print Culture, s–s (Abingdon: Routledge, ), . Kei Miller’s essay ‘The White Women and The Language of Bees’, Pree, (), https://preelit.com////the-white-women-and-the-language-
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of-bees/, addresses the contentious issue of Caribbean literary identity and authenticity and has generated an ongoing debate within the Caribbean literary community. Poets Christian Campbell, Kei Miller, Vahni Capildeo and Typhanie Yanique are recent winners of the UK’s Forward Prizes; in the US, Ishion Hutchinson won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Whiting Writer’s Award, and Safiya Sinclair won a Whiting Writer’s Award. I equate reviews in internationally circulated newspapers with visibility here. Nicole Dennis Benn’s novel Here Comes the Sun () was reviewed twice in The New York Times, in the June edition and the August edition. Kei Miller’s novel Augustown () was reviewed twice in The Guardian, UK, in the July and July editions, and in the The New York Times’s May edition. Vladimir Lucien, unpublished note to me, May . Poet Andre Bagoo’s first volume of poems, Burn (), which was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize, and Hollick Arvon Prize winner Barbara Jenkins’s volume of stories Sic Transit Wagon () were both subsequently commissioned by Peepal Tree Press. See Gilroy’s reflections on the ‘aesthetic stagnation’ produced by the fervent consumption of ‘shoppers, downloaders and headphoned poddies’; Paul Gilroy, Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, ), –. The Caribbean Writers Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Miami English Department, was funded by a time-limited endowment from author James Mitchener. Graduates of the Institute include novelists Opal Palmer Adisa, Myriam Chancy, Angie Cruz, Ifeona Fulani and Joanne Hillhouse, and poets Danielle Georges, Donna Aza Weir Soley, Lelawatte Manoo Rahming, Sasenerine Persaud, and scholars Rhonda Frederick and Maritza Stanchich. Quoted from a conversation I had with Kei Miller at Bocas Lit Fest, April . Lisa Allen-Agostini, ‘A Black, Female Writer’s Story’, Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, May , http://newsday.co.tt////a-black-female-writers-story/. John Young, Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), . I make a distinction between literary festivals and book fairs based on the commercial underpinnings of the latter where publishers show and promote their new books, rather than their authors, to booksellers. Robert McCrum, ‘Sun, Sand and a Booker Winner as Jamaica Revels in Its Literary Festival’, The Guardian (US edition), July , www.theguardian .com/books//jun//calabash-literary-festival-marlon-james-jamaica? CMP=share_btn_link. Marlon James’s first public reading from his debut novel John Crow’s Devil () was at the open mike in the early years of the Calabash Literary Festival.
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Jamaica’s Tourism Product Development Company Limited (TPDCo) has funded Calabash as part of the organization’s efforts to promote the products of TPDCo-trained and certified craft producers and artisans. In an interview with me given in May , co-founder and current director of Calabash Kwame Dawes emphasized that the festival’s target audience is Jamaicans. Dawes commented that the festival committee debated whether they should shut down after ten years, but realized that Calabash had become part of the Jamaican cultural landscape and would be missed by Jamaicans. Sharon Millar went on to win Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story ‘The Whale House’ in ; Shivanee Ramlochan won the prestigious Forward Prize for best first volume with Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (). A debate at Bocas Lit Fest on child marriage in Trinidad and Tobago was reported in the press and contributed to raising public awareness on this issue. On June , the country’s Parliament unanimously passed legislation to outlaw the practice, changing the legal marriage age to . The Cents Movement is a youth-led NGO that coordinates outreach to over fifty secondary schools and thirty primary schools in Trinidad and Tobago. Using performance art as a component of their youth development work, the organization aims to develop socially responsible young citizens ( Cents Movement, ‘About Us’, http://centsmovement.com/about/). Derek Walcott, ‘Nobel Lecture’, nobelprize.org, December , www .nobelprize.org/prizes/literature//walcott/lecture/. The winner of the Grand Prix was Marlon James for A Brief History of Seven Killings (); the winner was Rita Indiana from the Dominican Republic for her novel La mucama de Omicunlé (). The contribution of Peepal Tree Press founder Jeremy Poynting was acknowledged by the Bocas Lit Fest with the award of the Henry Swanzy Award in .
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The Caribbean Region in Transition
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The Caribbean and Britain Sarah Lawson Welsh
The Caribbean is both a geographical place, centred around the Caribbean Sea, and a radically decentred diasporic domain mapped by the migratory routes taken by its peoples. It is also an imagined space, constructed and challenged through many narratives. While Caribbean writers and writings remain informed by historical post/colonial ties to and between places, they also exceed definition in relation to a singular place as a crucial element of their Caribbeanness. When Antonio Benítez-Rojo famously termed the Caribbean ‘The Repeating Island’ (), he theorized a fluid space of plurality, difference and discontinuity, which is paradoxically united by certain ‘endlessly repeating’ experiences, practices and phenomena. Building upon Benítez-Rojo’s idea of the Caribbean as a ‘cultural meta-archipelago without centre and without limits’, this essay reads Caribbean writing in Britain in the context of the shifts and transitions that Caribbean writers have gone through in the long relationship between Britain and the region. Dominant narratives of Caribbean writing in Britain still often start with the arrival of the HMT Empire Windrush in , a foundational if over-determined moment in understanding post- British Caribbean migration and the emergence of a Caribbean literary canon alongside an overlapping Black British one. While Windrush was not the ‘beginning’ of Caribbean migration to Britain, its ‘arrival’, the accelerating endgame of empire, and the rise of anticolonial independence movements and of cultural nationalisms globally, all created the conditions for an extraordinary period of literary creativity in Britain, as Caribbean writers came to England to work, to study and to be published. Mainstream presses showed unprecedented interest in publishing Black migrant writers, and the beginnings of an organized association between writers from different Caribbean territories can be also traced to this time in Britain. While writers of the Windrush generation mainly came to Britain as adults, including Sam Selvon, George Lamming and Andrew Salkey, the second
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generation of British Caribbean writers, born in the s and s, most often migrated to Britain as children or young adults, including David Dabydeen, John Agard, Grace Nichols, Caryl Phillips and Fred D’Aguiar. This generation, who wrote and published in the late s and s, expressed different experiences, affiliations and concerns in relation to Caribbean British life. Much writing from this time was deeply rooted in wider cultural, social and political debates, often grassroots or activist in orientation, and consciously oppositional to canonical, institutional formations. Writers of this generation also commonly built or joined organizations and saw themselves as part of a wider global struggle against colonialism as well as intersecting race and class oppressions. John La Rose’s London-based New Beacon Bookshop (–), CAM (The Caribbean Arts Movement), founded by La Rose and Kamau Brathwaite (–), and the activities of the Race Today Collective in the s are some important examples. Indeed, La Rose is significant in any genealogy of Black Caribbean British connections as an activist as well as a publisher. He established the Black Parents Movement in , joining the New Cross Massacre Action Committee in and, with an eye on education and legacy, creating the George Padmore Institute in . Influenced by the international ideologies of Pan-Africanism and Black Power, both La Rose and his fellow Trinidadian George Padmore made crucial transnational connections between third world politics, writing and activism. La Rose went on to head an annual International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books (–), which provided a much needed network for transnational association and global exchange between Black writers. Another key foundational figure in Caribbean-British writing of this period was Jamaican-born Linton Kwesi Johnson, whose early poetry in Dread Beat an’ Blood () can be usefully read as ‘textual uprisings’: deeply imbricated within the often-racist politics and policies of the time. The legitimate ‘poster boy’ for Caribbean British writing and activism in the s and s, Johnson’s poems of protest and outrage chart not just Black history (‘a hurting black story’) but a wider British history. From his earliest poems (‘Sonny’s Letta’, ‘Five Nights of Bleeding’, ‘Inglan is a Bitch’), through to his iconic poems of the s (‘New Craas Massakah’, ‘Di Great Insohreckshan’), Johnson charts an alternative and largely unwritten history. Johnson’s activism and encouragement of other Caribbean British writers, together with early advocates of Black British writing, such as James Berry, helped to establish a new Black British aesthetic which later writer-mentors such as Kwame Dawes have continued to shape.
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The Caribbean and Britain
Ground-breaking anthologies of ‘British West Indian’ writing, such as James Berry’s News From Babylon () or E. A. Markham’s influential Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain (), also played a key role in the s in creating a sense of new voices breaking through and differentiating themselves from an earlier generation of writers in terms of form, subject and language. Caryl Phillips’s wellreceived novels have been adapted to film and TV, including his The Final Passage. Yet his most recent writings navigate the complexities of some of the English literary tradition’s most canonical texts. In The Lost Child (), Phillips returns to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights () to focus on parallel stories of family dysfunction, orphanhood, alienation, and the issues of race, il/legitimacy, and ‘outsidership’, originally explored in Brontë’s most infamous and iconic protagonist, Heathcliff. In A View of the Empire at Sunset (), Phillips explores the life of Jean Rhys as a transgressive and canon-unsettling literary ancestor. For other writers, aesthetic confrontation was met with critical hostility, from the establishment distrust of the dub poetry of the s and s and the controversy surrounding Benjamin Zephaniah’s shortlisting for an honorary Professorship in Poetry at Oxford University, to critical unease about the spoken-word scene and ‘Instagram poets’ of the current moment. In the s, multicultural policies, new funding streams, and the opening up of spaces for BAME artists proved conducive to the publication of a much wider range of Caribbean British writing. This decade also witnessed the development of new modes of poetry, often with a strong performance aesthetic, and continued literary experimentation with dub, rap, grime, hip-hop and other primarily black musical forms. As this essay explores, later generations born in the s and millennial writers such as Kei Miller, Vahni Capildeo, Raymond Antrobus and Roger Robinson have also crafted a more dynamic sense of their transnational belonging as writers who move and write between Britain and the Caribbean. While generational shifts do mark transitions in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain, writing by Caribbean writers in Britain across the generations is consistently marked by issues of un/belonging to the national project. Caribbean British writing has a long tradition of expressing and interrogating these discordant and sometimes discrepant attachments to Britain and ‘Britishness’. Starting with migrant writers of the s and s such as Sam Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, E. R. Brathwaite and Donald Hind, it is possible to trace a trajectory of Caribbean British
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writers who have explored the complex axes of un/belonging. Extended beyond the orthodox male canon, this grouping includes Beryl Gilroy’s semi-autobiographical work Black Teacher (), with its fictional exploration of a young woman’s arrival and struggle for recognition in post-war Britain, and In Praise of Love and Children (written in , but not published until ), as well as Joan Riley’s classic narrative The Unbelonging (). It continues in the poetry of James Berry, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, David Dabydeen, Jean Binta Breeze, John Agard, Merle Collins, Joan Anim-Addo, Grace Nichols, Dorothea Smartt and Fred D’Aguiar; the novels and nonfictional writings of Kerry Young, Zadie Smith, Monique Roffey, Caryl Phillips, Kei Miller and Andrea Levy; the genre fiction of Mike Phillips, Victor Headley, Jacob Ross and Alex Wheatle, continuing with younger writers such as Candice Carty-Williams and Adam Lowe. In the twenty-first century, Caribbean British poetry has flourished to great acclaim through works by Raymond Antrobus, Dean Atta, Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Vahni Capildeo, Khadija Ibrahiim, Hannah Lowe and Roger Robinson. Across these transitions, the question of generations is both interesting to explore and important to complicate. British-Jamaican Antrobus’s ‘Maybe I Could Love a Man’ () movingly reflects on male family dynamics and generational differences, as well as the bittersweet experiences of un/belonging in both Britain and the Caribbean. An uncle tells of the speaker’s father’s active resistance to the National Front in Britain, while the speaker reflects on his own experience of othering and exclusion in Jamaica: the host on ‘Smile Jamaica’ [. . .] said to me on live TV If you’ve never lived in Jamaica you’re not Jamaican, I said, my father born here, he brought me back every year wanting to keep something of his home in me and the host sneered. I imagine my father laughing at all the TVs in heaven. He knew this kind of question, being gone ten years, people said you from foreign now.
The poem ends with the contrast between three generations of men: the grandfathers who stayed, their sons who migrated, and their sons’ more complex sense of un/belonging in both Britain and the Caribbean. New manifestations of exclusion and ‘unbelonging’ have emerged in the mid-twenty-first century ‘hostile environment’ of the UK, endorsed by the immigration policy of successive Conservative governments and the wider contexts of ‘austerity’ Britain and Brexit. Indeed, more than seventy years after the HMT Empire Windrush sparked public and governmental
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concerns about West Indian migration, Black British citizens of Caribbean heritage are again the subject of intense media and government focus. The term ‘Windrush generation’ has been newly mobilized in relation to the widely reported, ongoing national scandal in which Caribbean migrants arriving in the post- period have been denied healthcare, social benefits and other rights which are properly theirs as British citizens because they were never fully issued with or the Home Office destroyed or lost records of their immigration documents. British-St Lucian Janice Cheddie’s essay ‘Windrush Notes to My Younger Self’ () traces the longer history of Caribbean immigration to Britain and the overarching narrative of a ‘broken social contract between the British government and its colonial subjects’, usefully historicizing the current moment in terms of shifts in immigration policy which began under Margaret Thatcher. Cheddie writes eloquently of the differing experiences of her mother’s generation (arriving from St Lucia in on the RMS Ascania), and her own arrival in . Looking back, Cheddie recognizes her application for the ‘flimsy document’ of British registration, ‘the gossamer veil between legal/illegal rights’ was precipitated by a desire to: keep [. . .] rights and privileges that you have long taken for granted and paid into – the right to a roof over your head, access to healthcare – and in the future will ensure that your British-born child can claim a British passport. You will in time become a good immigrant. Documented, educated and resilient. The postcolonial condition you will spend your adult life writing about – displacement, doubleness, and loss – will in become an embodied physical crisis. You will be un-homed within the only place that you have known as home.
For Cheddie, her mother’s increasing frailty and vulnerability, as her dementia worsens, throws into focus shifts in British attitudes to immigration and brings to Windrush new inflections of un/belonging: A day will come, unimaginable in , when Windrush is no longer the fading cinema reel of the romantic cliché of postwar immigration, of stylish young men and the dulcet tones of Lord Kitchener singing impromptu, ‘London is the place for me’. Celebrated in the opening of the London Olympics, to represent Britain’s progress as a modern inclusive nation, Empire Windrush becomes six years later the Windrush scandal, a potent omen of a future Brexit Britain, with hard, unrelenting hostility towards migrants and selective historical amnesia, even in London [. . .]
As Cheddie and others articulate, in such a volatile climate of exclusionary nationalism, racism and xenophobia, claiming and defining cultural
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affiliations and attachments as a Caribbean British citizen remains a complicated matter. The organizing structure of a generational framework has been a powerful one within the field and can be seen in a number of editorial and critical projects exploring Caribbean British writings. At the turn of the millennium, Penguin’s ground-breaking cross-genre collection of Black British writing, IC, edited by Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay (), historicized the literature along explicitly generational lines and foregrounded the contribution of younger writers. For new millennial and twenty-first-century writers, such as Jay Bernard, the question of generations appears both as a means to ground oneself and dialogue with earlier writings and a way to reframe transitions and differences. In contrast, in other recent anthologies, including Kwame Dawes’s Red () and Jacob Ross’s Closure (), generational differences and a focus on being Black in Britain are expressly eschewed as selection criteria or organizing principles in favour of thematic concerns. Indeed, one of the risks of a generational perspective is that the shifts across the terms ‘Caribbean British’ or ‘Caribbean diasporic’ and ‘Black British’ can be reductively viewed as a progressive transitioning toward identification as ‘British’. ‘Black British’ is importantly a more expansive characterization that includes writers who are not of Caribbean heritage and one that also inevitably foregrounds writings by Black writers, while ‘Caribbean British’ includes and acknowledges the multiple and creolized ancestries of writers from a region populated by people of Indian, Chinese and European, as well as African descent. As a critical formulation, ‘Caribbean British’ also foregrounds the significance of place, connection and diaspora. Rhys’s presence in Britain before importantly unsettles any easy narrative of Windrush as an originary moment for Caribbean British writing as well as the notion that all British Caribbean writers were easily accommodated within an emergent Black British canon. It is interesting to observe how, while many Caribbean writers have been seamlessly incorporated into the narrative of Black British writing, others have not. Both Wilson Harris and Roy Heath from the earlier generation and contemporary writer Kei Miller are not named or claimed as Black British, possibly because their creative worlds remain Caribbean-centred. The omission of Indo-Trinidadian Vahni Capildeo’s writing is particularly fascinating, since Capildeo’s work directly challenges the exclusions of a British canon to claim their place. In poems such as ‘Four Departures from “Wulf and Eadwacer”’, Capildeo’s academic training as a medievalist is evident, while the third and fourth
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collections, Dark & Unaccustomed Words () and Utter (), arose from the experience working in Etymology and Revision at the Oxford English Dictionary. The knowing precision of ‘On Not Writing as a Caribbean Woman’ () also usefully challenges the use of essentialized and stereotypical tropes of race and gender that can limit understandings of Caribbean British writing: She – not containing oceans, nor a spice triangle, won’t boast that cinnamon could launch femme announcements over the bounding main: set course for my rich shores. No allure for sailors [. . .] She – hasn’t cooked cassava, nor become a mother; might gatecrash Carnival flaunting last year’s costume and fall down in the dance;
The challenge to such stereotyping remains an important one, especially given that the prevalent view of Caribbean British writing from the s onwards has been that it is limited by its primarily social and political ‘Black’ themes and performative modes, both of which have been leveraged to argue that it is not properly literature. As well as challenging conventional ideas of the literary, throughout the generations British Caribbean writers in the UK have offered an important revisionary perspective on British history and the lives of Caribbean British communities by bringing attention to defining events such as the Brixton Riots, the New Cross Massacre and the multidimensional multicultural experience of the metropolis. In doing so, they challenge post-imperial amnesia about Caribbean, often Black, histories, which is still sedimented in many areas of British life, including its education system, and write into being a more inclusive and globally connected British historical narrative. Alex Wheatle, who served time in prison for his involvement in the Brixton Riots, wrote his first, semiautobiographical novel, Brixton Rock (), about a sixteen-year-old boy in care trying to make new relationships with his birthmother and sister and caught up in bigger historical events than himself. Wheatle wrote the novel partly to document this period of British history from a Black British
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perspective, something he had been unable to discover elsewhere. Wheatle’s sequel, East of Acton Lane (), returns to this flashpoint in Black British history with a sense of writing as witness, this time using the real-life oral histories of three friends who were in Brixton at this time to explore the catalyst for the uprising and the fallout from the police brutality surrounding the riot. That Wheatle recircles and returns to this earlier event suggests its continued inscription as an iconic (if also traumatic) moment in Caribbean British, Black British, and British history, as well as the sense of a marginalized experience to which literary forms can give voice and visibility. This might also be argued of Jay Bernard’s recent writing on the New Cross Fire, a notorious probable arson attack on New Cross Road, London, on January , which claimed the lives of thirteen young Black people who were enjoying a sixteenth birthday party the trauma of which was exacerbated by the incompetent police investigation which followed. Bernard’s ‘Surge: Side A’, a stunning multi-media performance, was published in Surge (), an awardwinning collection supported by a writer’s residence at the George Padmore Institute in London that allowed Bernard access their archives relating to the New Cross Fire and Black activism in its aftermath. Influenced by earlier British-Caribbean writers such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and the reggae deejays (which the title ‘Side A’ references), as well as younger writers such as Marlon James, Bernard connects the New Cross and Grenfell () fires in London in subtle and moving ways to trace the wider ‘vexed [. . .] relationship between public narration and private truths’. This work also mediates on the nature of memory and historical elision, the role of the archive and the wider invisibility of Black histories in and of Britain, as well as the potential of literature to recover and to unsettle historical narratives. As Bernard reflects: Many questions emerged not only about memory and history, but about my place in Britain as a queer black person. This opened out into a final sense of coherence: I am from here, I am specific to this place, I am haunted by this history but I also haunt it back. (xi)
In ‘Arrival’, Bernard sensitively excavates the different historical journeys made by the ancestors of the dead, and points to the terrible inevitability – and cost – of repeatedly treating Black people as statistics, from numbered slaves to the numbered dead in a London fire. Their poem ‘ma[kes] visible’ the dead as individual human beings and provides a fitting legacy:
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The Caribbean and Britain Remember we were brought here from the Clear waters of our dreams That we might be named, numbered And forgotten That we were made visible that we might Be looked on with contempt That they gave us their first and last names That we might be called wogs And to their minds made flesh that it might Be stripped from our backs [. . .] Close our smokey mouths around Their dream Swallow them as they gaze upon us Never to be fullSnap, crackle Amen. ()
Earlier examples of this important humanistic revisionary strain in Caribbean British writing include Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poem ‘New Crass Massakah’ () and La Rose’s interviews in The New Cross Massacre Story (), both of which Surge writes back to. While the thirtieth anniversary of the New Cross Fire in was marked with a series of events and publications, including the republication of La Rose’s text with a new introduction by Linton Kwesi Johnson, it was the fiftieth anniversary of Windrush in which generated the most visibility for Caribbean British writing, with, for example, John Agard in a high-profile poetry residency at the BBC. This very public moment perhaps constituted the most radical historicization of Caribbean-British writing as ‘Black British’ literature, an articulation which was both shortlived and unsatisfactory, as Roy Sommer argues when he characterizes the late s as ‘accompanied by a historical turn in Black British literary studies [which] not only helped to turn the anniversary into a media event, but also initiated a process of canon formation [. . .]’. However, such short-term media interest in this anniversary (its renewed acknowledgement in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics notwithstanding) continued to mask a longer-term neglect and lack of a critical recognition for Caribbean British writers. One important moment for raising public awareness of Caribbean British writing and history in Britain came in with the BBC’s adaptation of Andrea Levy’s The Long Song () and accompanying programmes profiling her work, which garnered both popular readership
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and critical praise. These television programmes usefully reminded many in Britain of the much longer history of interconnections between Britain and the Caribbean. Levy’s fictions interrogate the human experience of migration to and from the Caribbean in different periods. In Small Island (), she explores the ways in which Caribbean people were racially ‘othered’ and made to feel unwelcome outsiders in Britain in the post-war period, despite being invited as British subjects. Her earlier novels – Every Light in the House Burning (), set in s London; Never Far from Nowhere (), set on a North London council estate in the s; and Fruit of the Lemon (), set in the Thatcherite Britain of the s (as well as Jamaica) – document domestic experiences of Caribbean British life and the particular manifestations of racism (National Front attacks, skinhead violence, etc.) prominent in these periods. Her narratives are all underpinned by a strong ethical imperative to tell stories of Caribbean arrival in Britain and of later generations ‘Growing up black under the Union Jack’, and to address Britain’s widespread amnesia about its colonial history and the relative silence about Caribbean slavery in British institutions. The ‘Small Island’ of Levy’s title is, of course, both Jamaica and Britain: two islands intimately and often violently yoked together in over four-hundred years of shared history, culture and global connection. Indeed, Levy always framed her focus on the long historical connection between Britain and the Caribbean as a profoundly British concern, rather than seeing it as a niche area of interest only relevant to those of Caribbean heritage like herself. Two poets whose works explore these complex, sometimes contradictory, attachments and affiliations to Britain are Fred D’Aguiar and John Agard. ‘Home’ first appeared in D’Aguiar's punningly titled collection British Subjects, the cover of which declares the poet’s impeccable postcolonial credentials as transnational journeyer: ‘born in Britain, brought up in Guyana, and now living in London and America [. . .] being and feeling British but not being made to feel at home’. ‘Home’ focuses on the ambivalences attendant on traversing of continents and cultures and on the complexities of being Caribbean British: at Heathrow. H. M. Customs [. . .] I resign to the usual inquisition, telling me with Surrey loam caked on the tongue, home is always elsewhere, I take it like an English middleweight with a questionable chin, knowing
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The Caribbean and Britain my passport photo’s too open-faced haircut wrong (an afro) for the decade; the stamp, British Citizen not bold enough for my liking and too much for theirs. ()
Here the national collectivity of Britain, metonymically rendered as ‘soil’, invokes all the resonances of a much-contested and revered territory as it raises intertextual echoes of Shakespeare’s ‘sceptred isle’. However, the literalized images of clogging, caking, and a more parochial ‘Surrey loam’ ironically undermine any idealized construction of nation as this key symbol of nationhood is deconstructed. A further irony is that the ius soli, or ancient right of the soil, entitling all those born on British soil to claim British citizenship, is no longer a reality: since the Nationality Act, British citizenship has effectively been a gift of government and, for many, an increasingly elusive one. As Cheddie provocatively asks, distinguishing between her mother’s ‘Windrush Generation’ and her own ‘mask of black Britishness’, ‘If we are not British, what are we?’ In ‘Home’, D’Aguiar’s observation that being perceived as fully or ‘properly’ a British Citizen is intimately connected to one’s race and ethnicity resonates powerfully even twenty-six years later, as the poem ‘Jamaican British’ by British-born Raymond Antrobus suggests. Indeed, the policing of cultural constructions of ‘Britishness’, based on the unspoken or more open privileging of white ethnicities as normative, extends well beyond immigration border control. In contrast to D’Aguiar, Agard has been labelled as an ‘insider-outsider’, a ‘Guyanese-born [. . .] poet subverting British poetry’ rather than a black British or British voice, despite having lived in Britain for over forty years. In We Brits, Agard takes a different approach to defining Britishness, describing it as a shared performance rallied around a preoccupation with queuing, tea, umbrellas and the weather. However, the way in which the poems in this collection are viewed through an ‘insider-outsider’ lens complicates their meaning. Indeed, the larger ironies attendant on the Caribbean Briton’s peculiar sense of what W. E. B. Du Bois termed ‘double consciousness’ are not lost on the poet and remain as disquieting traces in many of the poems. ‘Feeling the Whirlwind’ describes an elderly Black Briton in London as: ‘the griot-eye man / with the picong tongue / and head full of back-a-yard politics’, ‘a tall piece of Caribbean / rounding a corner of Brixton’; here Agard sensitively maps the dual affiliations and attachments, which still infuse and perhaps define his sensibility, noting sympathetically: ‘Still, touching an exiled mango / In a busy metropolis /
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Does bring home an archipelago’ (). Like Guyanese-British Grace Nichols’s ‘Black Men in Leicester Square’ and ‘Island Man’ () or the subtler cadences of the poems in Roger Robinson’s The Butterfly Hotel (), which moves between Brixton and Trinidad, ‘Feeling the Whirlwind’ is an elegiac poem which looks back to cherished Caribbean connections and memories with a sense of loss. However, for other – often younger generation – Caribbean British writers the sense of rupture or loss is no longer central as their Britishness is taken as a ‘given’. Such are the British-set novels of British-born Zadie Smith, in which north London is characterized as home. Although Smith’s fiction depicts this city space as emphatically multi-ethnic, polyglot and cosmopolitan, her Black British characters tend to be portrayed as living contiguous but quite ordinary lives. Moreover, Smith’s focus is often on a younger generation who, unlike their parents and grandparents have had no need to ‘travel part of the journey into Britishness’. Alongside the urgency of contesting racism, and claiming a space within national narratives, Caribbean British narratives also articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK and the Caribbean. In the younger generation there is a transition to exploring sexuality – and especially queer sexualities – in their writings. In ‘Reader, I Married Him’, British-born Bajan heritage writer Dorothea Smartt contrasts the prominent homophobia and problematic retention of colonial-era legislation Section in Jamaica with the relatively liberal situation in Britain, critiquing not just Jamaican homophobia, but also the heteronormativity of the British canonical tradition. When Smartt plays upon this final line of Jane Eyre () to suggest new permutations of the transnational dynamics in the original relationship of Jane, Rochester and Bertha in Brontë’s text, she also queers and extends a dialogue with this canon that Rhys engaged in decades earlier. The direction of the journey is also reversed. Whereas Rochester is free to reside in the Caribbean and to marry into its wealth, the question of what it means to come to Britain is signified. In Smartt’s poem, a Black British lesbian marries a Black Jamaican man so he could lef outta Ja [Jamaica]. Take refuge in my British citizenship my redundant heterosex right to marry any man.
The third person in this reconfigured relationship is the man’s lover who acts as ‘best man [. . .] wedding planner, witness / and his wedding night delight’ ().
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Jay Bernard’s first collection Your Sign Is Cuckoo, Girl () offers sensual celebrations of queer sex and the female body, whereas Kei Miller’s poems in Part Two of A Light Song of Light () remind us of the frequent brutality of the lived realities of being Jamaican and queer (‘A Smaller Song’), as well as the pleasures of same-sex intimacy (‘A Short History of Beds We Have Slept in Together’). Dean Atta’s collection I Am Nobody’s Nigger combines both angry and reflective poems, which explore the intersectionality of race, queer sexuality and life in London. The title poem is a coruscating attack on the use of ‘nigger’ in a post-racial, popular cultural context and reminds readers of the contexts of power and specific histories of oppression which this racist term still evokes. In ‘Young, Black and Gay’ Atta riffs intertextually on Nina Simone’s ‘To Be Young, Gifted and Black’ (written in memory of Lorraine Hansberry), and affirms a confident voice for such intersectional identities: My people are many and few Subdivisions of me and you Substantial people sometimes called subhuman Negroes, faggots and all the youts dem Don’t think your rights came overnight So many people had to fight To gain anything like equality We ain’t there yet but we’re gonna be.
As this younger generation of Caribbean British writers reflects upon their own experiences in local as well as global contexts, some connect to the groundswell of global LGBTQ activism, which characterizes our present moment as in the work of Dorothea Smartt and Dean Atta. Arguably, all of this generation owe much to the foundational role of early Caribbean diasporic writers in Britain, but Andrew Salkey’s novel Escape to an Autumn Pavement is particularly important as one of the earliest post-war explorations of diasporic queer desire that has only recently been fully appraised as such. Like Caribbean diasporic literature in the US and Canada, contemporary Caribbean British literature is very much connected, conceptually and poetically, with regional and global cultures and perspectives as well as with national ones. From Linton Kwesi Johnson’s mobilization of Jamaican reggae to the contemporary poetic use of hip hop, rap and spoken word, Caribbean British writers’ work across borders borrows from global cultures and literary traditions, as illustrated in the thoroughly transnational reach of the poems in Malika Booker’s Pepper Seed () or Roger Robinson’s The Butterfly Hotel () and A Portable Paradise
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(). In genre fiction too, texts such as Alex Wheatle’s Brixton Rock (), Victor Headley’s Yardie (), the detective writing of Mike Phillips and the prize-winning crime thriller The Bone Readers () by Jacob Ross have brought Caribbean British writing into the global spotlight. Like the hybrid music/performance style of many young artists with Caribbean heritage, such as Akala, it is important to consider these more popular genres alongside works which more comfortably fit the contours of a Caribbean British literary canon. Some of the most exciting recent Caribbean British writing centres around the short story, as in Closure (), or speculative writing and science fiction, such as Adam Lowe’s Troglodyte Rose (), signalling the renaissance of a form that was at the beginnings of Caribbean British writing and the mainstay of the s from the BBC Caribbean Voices radio broadcast and the little magazines of that period. There are also signs that the latest generation of new young Caribbean British writers are claiming popular and commercial fiction genres such as the coming-of-age novel or romance as their own. The wide critical interest in Candice Carty-Williams’s hugely successful novel Queenie () is significant given that commercial fiction by British Caribbean writers is still often overlooked. Queenie is distinctive in using the conventions of the popular romance genre in order to take an unflinching look at some of the less visible (and less palatable) experiences of its young female Caribbean British protagonist, from daily microaggressions to racial stereotyping in work, health services, relationships, generational difference, loss, and mental illness. Indeed, there is every sign that contemporary Caribbean British writing is moving in new and exciting directions, as writers such as Akala and Bernard explore hybrid or mixedmedia formats, or new platforms such as ‘Instagram poetry’ and a resurgence of genres of writing such as eco-critical, Afro-futurist, and speculative fictions which have arguably always been part of the Caribbean tradition. Caribbean writing in Britain has come a long way from the publication of largely male West Indian novelists in London-based establishment presses such as Michael Joseph, Allan Wingate, Longman, Macmillan and Penguin in the s and s. The emergence of key independent presses dedicated to publishing Caribbean British and Black British writers, such as New Beacon, Race Today and Karnak, and the longstanding support for Caribbean and British writers provided by northernbased presses such as Peepal Tree, Bloodaxe and Carcanet has ensured that Caribbean British writing has made an enduring contribution to British
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and Caribbean literatures, as well as to global literary landscapes as it continues to launch creatively challenging and accomplished writers.
Notes Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, , trans. James E. Maraniss, nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . In Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay (eds.), IC: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ); the editors divide their contributors into three phases or generations: the settlers, the explorers, and the crusaders. I add to this final group the millennial generation. Susheila Nasta, ‘Beyond the Millennium: Black Women’s Writing’, Women: A Cultural Review, ./ (), –, –. Ibid., –. Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Reggae Sounds’, in Dread Beat an’ Blood (London: Bogle L’Ouverture Press Ltd, ), . Sarah Crown, ‘New Poets Society’, The Guardian Review, February , www.theguardian.com/books//feb//rise-new-poets. Such as MAAS, the Minority Arts Advisory Service originally set up in as a result of an Arts Council report designed to survey and to encourage ethnic minority arts in Britain. Ramey discusses ‘urban griots’ and ‘trickster figures’ in ‘Contemporary Black British Poetry’, in R. Victoria Arana and Lauri Ramey (eds.), Black British Writing (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), –, . See also Sarah Broom, Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), –. Raymond Antrobus, ‘Maybe I Could Love a Man’, Moko, Caribbean Arts & Letters (), http://mokomagazine.org/wordpress/poems-by-raymondantrobus/, italics in original. Janice Cheddie, ‘Windrush Notes to My Younger Self’, sx salon, (), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/windrush-notes-my-younger-self. Vahni Capildeo, ‘On Not Writing as a West Indian Woman’, E-Verse Radio, www.everseradio.com/not-writing-west-indian-woman-vahni-capildeo/. See also Vahni Capildeo, ‘Punishable Bodies: Poetry on the Offensive’, Poetry (), www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles//punish able-bodies-poetry-on-the-offensive. Anonymous, ‘Alex Wheatle, Bard of Brixton’, Brixton Blog, October , www.brixtonblog.com///brixton-people-alex-wheatle-the-bard-of-brix ton//?cn-reloaded=. Jay Bernard, Surge (London: Chatto & Windus, ), xi. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Roy Sommer, ‘“Black” British Literary Studies and the Emergence of a New Canon’, Orbis Litterarum, . (), –, .
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Fred D’Aguiar, British Subjects (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, ), cover. Subsequent references given parenthetically. William Shakespeare, Richard II (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., ), Act Two, Scene One. Cheddie, ‘Windrush Notes’. Raymond Antrobus, The Perseverance (London: Penned in the Margins, ), –. John Agard, We Brits (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, ), back cover. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Ferdinand Dennis, ‘The Prince and I’, Granta, , special issue ‘London: The Lives of the City’ (Spring ), –, . Dorothea Smartt, ‘Reader I Married Him’, in Reader I Married Him and Other Queer Goings On (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Dean Atta, ‘Young, Black and Gay’, in I Am Nobody’s Nigger (London: Westbourne Press, ), –. See Thomas Glave, ‘Andrew Salkey’s Escape to An Autumn Pavement’, in Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh (New York: Akashic Books, ), –; Kate Houlden, ‘Andrew Salkey, the British Home and the Intimacies In-Between’, Interventions, . (), –; David Ellis, ‘Playing Fiona and Being Happy with Dick’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, . (), –; Nadia Ellis, ‘Andrew Salkey and the Queer Diasporic’, in Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –; Ronald Cummings, ‘Johnnie’s Letters’, sx salon, (), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/johnnies-letters. Yrsa Daley-Ward and Vanessa Kisuule are notable in bringing new AfricanCaribbean British inflections to a growing body of ‘Instagram poetry’. See the writings of Kamau Brathwaite for example.
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Acts of Trespass and Collapsing Borders: Alternate Landscapes in Contemporary Caribbean-Canadian Literature Camille A. Isaacs As a body of writing, contemporary Caribbean-Canadian literature offers possibilities for reading across works by many writers whose Caribbean beginnings are varied, whose journeys to Canada differ significantly in motivation and destination, and whose allegiances to either side of the hyphen, and to the hyphen itself, are complex matters of emotional as well as legal citizenship. While it is important not to reduce the writings of Caribbean-Canadians to one experience, several commonalties can be seen. In a context where questions of land rights and sovereignty remain complex and contested, and where Canadian immigration laws have been so inconsistent, gendered and, at times, racist, Caribbean-Canadian writers continue to craft ways to transgress the nation’s narrow idea of itself and to trespass into its national imaginary. The innately pluricultural character of Caribbean identities (and Canadian ones) means that writers from and connected to the Caribbean understand and appreciate cultural multiplicity and fluidity as essential to their creative identities and practices. Their works consistently contest and collapse the borders that they encounter in terms of the subject, form and platform for their writings. In their works, identity tied to particular landscapes or certain nation-states does not emerge as important as the movements between or among these. Their writings demand that the nation, and the land on which it depends, be considered in an alternate fashion. Territoriality and belonging are recognized as ideas that are differently experienced and inscribed depending on the histories, cultural knowledges and social power that inform individual subjects and literary subjectivities. In contrast with the earlier period of Caribbean writing in Canada, which was marked by the presence of writers such as Edgar Mittleholzer and John Hearne in Montreal, Sam Selvon in Alberta, and Neil Bissoondath, Austin Clarke, and Cyril Dabydeen in Ontario, the period of the s onwards was notably an era for women writers. M. NourbeSe Philip, Olive Senior, Lorna Goodison, Lillian Allen, Pamela Mordecai,
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Dionne Brand, Afua Cooper, Ramabai Espinet, Makeda Silvera, Shani Mootoo, Tessa McWatt, Claire Harris and Rachel Manley all produced works that established their literary careers, despite a migration and publishing ethic that did not favour them as women. Collectively, their work offers a revised literary mapping that inscribes new approaches to land as a physical and psychic site of identification, creating new works that map, declaim and claim what Afua Cooper calls a ‘psychic landscape’. Many of these women’s writing careers coincided with a historical moment when the Canadian landscape was one of visible hostility towards Black citizens. Toronto, the entry point for many migrants in the s and s, was simmering with racial tension, in part because of several police killings of Black men, particularly Albert Johnson in . These killings mobilized the community, including writers Lillian Allen (Conditions Critical, ), Austin Clarke (More, ) and Dionne Brand (Thirsty, ). Brand revisits the public details of Johnson’s killing in Thirsty through humanizing the figure of Alan, who suffers from mental illness; his wife, Julia, who is powerless to get him the help he needs due to her own precarity; and his distraught mother, Chloe, who desperately wants justice for her son. As is often shown in Brand’s work, the beauty of Toronto is mingled with its ugliness: All the hope gone hard. That is a city. The blind houses, the cramped dirt, the broken air, the sweet ugliness, the blissful and tortured flowers.
She shows readers that Alan was once a sweet little boy who ‘would weep at a trail of ants spurning his friendship’ (), rather than the crazed madman wielding grass clippers seen by the police officers who kill him. One of Alan’s last words in the poem is ‘thirsty’. When the narrator speaks of her own thirst, and asks readers to do the same – ‘but thirst I know, and falling, thirst for fragrant / books, a waiting peace, for life’ () – she indicates her place in this culture and history, drawing parallels with Black lives in other diasporic places. When the police officers who assaulted Rodney King in California were acquitted in , an ‘uprising’ took place on Yonge Street in Toronto, reinforcing the idea of a porous border for African disaporic subjects and a sense of identity defined by a shared struggle against racialized hostility more than a territorially based nationality. Writer and publisher Makeda Silvera notes how ‘the culture of Black America overshadowed our reality as Blacks here [in Canada] in the s [. . .] Even when we looked at
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radical Black Canadians during the s, they modelled themselves on Black America’. For many of these Caribbean-Canadian writers, a territorially defined nation could not contain them as their identity was connected to racialized and social justice struggles wherever they showed themselves. The writings that have been produced by CaribbeanCanadians in the decades following these uprisings have brought about new ways to imagine the nation-space and broaden conceptions of Caribbean-Canadian identity. One may hold multiple citizenships, live in various countries and inhabit a conceptual space that is home. These rhizomatic paths cannot be mapped in simple terms. Despite these complexities of belonging, Canada has been a place of residence for a significant number of Caribbean writers from the midtwentieth century. A number of factors are probably at play: Canada’s proximity to the Caribbean allows for multiple types of communication and travel, not just to the region itself, but also the US and the UK, with their Caribbean communities. Canada’s shared history of British colonialism created a familiar cultural milieu, if not a desired or favourable one. As immigration policies loosened in the s and onwards, Caribbean migrants found a Canadian marketplace that was interested in their labour (as nannies, nurses, farm workers, etc.). The wider populace was, however, slow to acknowledge that these migrants were also a highly literate and educated workforce, some of whom wanted to write. Interestingly, this denial happened even though the Canadian literary establishment was undergoing a literary renaissance with large increases in book sales and the development of university courses in Canadian Literature, as the field of Commonwealth Literature began to be replaced by national cannons. As a result, Caribbean migrant writers arriving in the s onwards landed in a space that was ripe for publishing, but that was still largely homogenous and homogenizing in terms of literary nationality and that did not yet welcome and recognize the diversity and plurality of its narratives and aesthetics. For Caribbean-Canadian writers, the debates about multiculturalism that raged throughout the s foregrounded these questions of location and cultural allegiance. George Elliott Clarke, who has documented much Black Canadian literature, has written that when considering writers ‘of Caribbean origin, few respond explicitly to Canada; most celebrate ties with an external homeland, or lament their loss of those bonds’. Clarke’s repeated stress on the ‘Canadian’ side of ‘Caribbeanadian’ limits both Caribbeanness and Canadianess to territorially bound identities. Contesting Clarke’s position, Rinaldo Walcott argues for a diasporic
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perspective that does not privilege origin or orientation in its model of theorizing Black Canadian belonging. For Walcott, a Black queer diasporic framework might effectively serve ‘to continue to render complex and shifting notions of community’ as resistance to homogenous notions of community and of blackness. Walcott’s work calls for attention to what he calls the ‘instabilities of the nationally local’. Indeed, as Walcott, Brand and Silvera have shown in their writings, Caribbean diasporas point towards a fluidity of identity markers, including, but not limited to, national or regional identifications. In addition to this, CaribbeanCanadian as a literary, critical and cultural formation has also been shaped by the multiple diasporic relationalities of Afro-Caribbean-Canadian, Indo-Caribbean-Canadian and Chinese-Caribbean-Canadian experiences, among others. The imperative to recognize multiple intersecting vectors of both shared and distinctive cultural affinities leads Michael Bucknor and Daniel Coleman to discuss Caribbean-Canadian writing not so much as a category but rather ‘as an interrogative provocation’; they argue that ‘a cross-national, cross-colonial, cross-racial, cross-geographical hybrid category such as “Caribbean-Canadian” poses the question of what new mental maps or cognitive schemes [. . .] are required to “position” Caribbean Canadian writing today’. Bucknor and Coleman also question how creolization has ‘affected conceptions of Caribbean-Canadian experience in plural societies such as Canada when there is a radically different conceptual model – multiculturalism – already at work there’ (xxi). This is one of the themes Ramabai Espinet grapples with in her first novel, The Swinging Bridge (). The narrative details the intergenerational trauma of an Indo-Trinidadian family as they migrate to Canada, and how the silences around sexual orientation, physical and sexual abuse, alcoholism, and gender expectations stifle all. The father’s (Da-Da Singh) avowed creolization abuts an uncompromising multiculturalism as they all attempt to settle in the Canadian space. Upon her arrival in Toronto, the daughter and protagonist, Mona, states that if ‘multiculturalism was an idea, it never touched me’. Since her childhood in San Fernando, she considered herself a ‘nowarian’, at home nowhere and ‘never certain of the terrain’ (ch. ). Espinet’s novel suggests that in the conceptual space between creolization and multiculturalism, one is set adrift in a no-where land of psychic dislocation. DaDa’s creolization leaves him distraught at the thought of the obliteration of his Indian culture. Yet Canada’s professed multiculturalism reduces him to merely an ‘elderly South Asian man’ who never finds his place in Canada (ch. ). Only in returning to Trinidad, remembering past sexual abuse and
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researching her lost great-grandmother does Mona find any type of solace and an ability to settle with the Caroni beat she carries with her. Home, then, becomes the space between her past and present, and not geographically tied to any one nation. Seminal to the proliferation of Caribbean-Canadian women’s writing and the construction of a sense of literary community was the ‘Writing Thru Race’ conference held in Vancouver and organized by members of the Writers Union of Canada. As a result of the racism and exclusion in the publishing industry, organizers sought to ‘ensure a milieu in which writers directly affected by racism [could] engage in candid and personal discussions’. Many of the workshops were open only to people who selfidentified as Indigenous or as a person of colour, and the conference was successful in fostering a coalition of writers of colour, including the Caribbean-Canadian writers Lillian Allen, Makeda Silvera and Dionne Brand. As one of the organizers, Larissa Lai, writes, ‘Without having to attend to white guilt and recrimination, First Nations writers and writers of colour were able to get down to the actual practice of writing.’ What arose from this revolutionary period were varied attempts to represent the presence and diversity of Caribbean-Canadian female experience. Yet as Silvera notably insists in her foreword to the anthology The Other Woman (), in thinking about their shared political and creative struggles of expression, but also their differences, we should see women of color as ‘speak [ing] not necessarily in unison but to and of a common interest’. It was also significant that new publishing houses were founded in parallel to these new literary voices and enabled them to be heard, as traditional publishing houses were still reluctant to publish their works. The Women’s Press, founded in ; Williams-Wallace, established in by Jamaican publisher Ann Wallace; and Sister Vision Press (–) were pioneering in their focus on promoting the writings of women and women of colour. As Silvera, one of the founders of Sister Vision Press, describes it, ‘the emphasis [was] to give women, who have up until now been rendered invisible, a forum to have their experiences heard’. Their works delivered and demanded a new literacy and often performed a quarrel with the closed, homogenous nation, as in Philip’s engagement with a poetics of movement in texts such as She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (), Looking for Livingstone () and Zong! (). In Zong!, we see a deliberate questioning of the borders of the page, of literacy over orality, and of the meaning of a text. The work blurs the lines among various artforms when ‘read’ by Philip, as it is almost always performed with varying degrees of audience/listener participation,
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demonstrating Philip’s strong belief in the communal nature of knowledge and the collective transmission of information. Her work deconstructs the power of English and includes audience members to indicate and enact a shared responsibility: the ruins of my story theirs & yours our story it hides the secret that
in the rift between cain & abel there
rome founds her
self on murder & on death come
strum the lute some more for my late
soul
Philip’s works are an extended exercise in decolonial practices, which require alternate responses from readers, listeners and the wider publishing market. Despite the success of these women’s writings, their sense of being understood on their own terms remained a challenge. Brand remembers ‘a white woman asking [her] how did [she] decide which to be – Black or woman – and when’: ‘As if there was a moment I wasn’t a woman and a moment I wasn’t Black.’ Because the discussions around race and gender have been so polarized in Canada, Philip has argued that the feminist movement has at times let Caribbean-Canadian women down: We are a long way from a true feminist community, and even further away from a true feminist culture – one that would not, as it has tended to do, emphasize one aspect (the white and middle class) of that culture, but a culture in which the word feminist is enlarged to include these groups which have, to date, been excluded.
For Brand and Silvera, one of those groups often excluded are lesbians and women who love women, an exclusion experienced in the Caribbean context also. Brand writes about attending the First Caribbean Women Writers Conference in Massachusetts in and feeling excluded from her peers because she dared to talk about female desire, sex and sexuality: ‘The politics of the body, the female sexual body, is closed or open only to the taken-for-granted.’ That Brand felt ostracized in what she thought
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was a community of peers speaks to the shifting ground of allegiances. She has written that some think that ‘because I am a lesbian I am not a Black woman’. In her fiction and nonfiction, she reiterates that her identity is not divisible. In one of the poems in No Language Is Neutral (), she writes, ‘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.’ Exposing and re-voicing the language that reinforces the discrimination these women know to exist and that silences them is a powerful strategy in their literary works. Philip’s Looking for Livingstone shows how the practice of speech in a colonial language is also constitutive of silence/ing. It is the fable of a female traveller in Africa looking for the colonial explorer Dr David Livingstone and encountering various indigenous tribes whose names are all anagrams of silence. When she finally locates him after searching for millennia, she finds that she has ‘nothing to say to him’: ‘after eighteen billion years of travel, what was there to say – what could I say? That I had found what I had started out with? Silence?’ Her silence, however, is not erasure but a new kind of speech. Brand’s poetics also meditates on silence: ‘Silence done curse god and beauty here.’ But the fact that silence ‘curses’ shows that there is not just silence, but an active silence that ‘speaks’. Here Brand’s narrator learns a new way to speak in the context of a colonial education: ‘biting my tongue on new English, reading biology, stumbling over unworded white faces’ (). The speech she eventually finds encompasses the silences and utterances of the past, and creates new ways of using English. Part of the reason that scrutinizing and dissecting language to find a voice in which to speak are so important to these women is that in writing/speaking, one creates the self – a Caribbean-Canadian, diasporic female self. Claire Harris puts it succinctly in The Conception of Winter (): ‘with words / she was a woman’. This concern with finding a voice and language is also signalled in a number of essays by Caribbean-Canadian women writers: Lillian Allen’s ‘Poems Are Not Meant to Lay Still’ (), Afua Cooper’s ‘If You’re True to Your Voice’ () and ‘How I Found My Voice’ (), and Olive Senior’s ‘The Poem as Gardening, the Story as Su-su: Finding a Literary Voice’ (). The politics of language for these writers has also meant connecting with the imaginative and communicative resources of the oral traditions that formed a key part of their Caribbean cultural inheritance. The work of Lillian Allen, Louise ‘Miss Lou’ Bennett, and d’bi.young anitafrika, among others, shows how patois, dub and performance challenge the boundaries of creative expression and its established venues. As early as , the vinyl
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recording ‘Woman Talk: Caribbean Dub Poetry’ brought together, and facilitated the circulation of, a transnational group of women poets, including Afua Cooper, Anita Stewart and Bennett, whose voices would later be collected in the print volume Utterances and Incantations: Women, Poetry and Dub, edited by Cooper. These poets had to work around the assumptions and limitations of Canadian publishing. Dub poet, musician and university professor Lillian Allen describes the resistance she encountered when trying to showcase her craft: ‘It was impossible to get an encouraging word from publishers at the time – “there wasn’t a market for such works”, it was said.’ This exclusionary process highlights the importance of community audiences and reciprocated recognition for Caribbean-Canadian writers. As Allen argues ‘Because dub poetry is not strictly page-bound and because institutions in our society do not account for our existence, we have gone directly to the public: recording, performing and self-publishing. We sidestepped the all-powerful middle-man who serves as the arbiter of culture’ (). Allen self-published Rhythm & Hardtimes in , which eventually sold more than eight thousand copies, along with many collections that followed (). Publication on the page also allowed dub poetry to be more readily taught in various educational institutions and to be included in ideas of Canadian poetry. Susan Gingell argues that ‘Allen’s first trade book of poetry, Women Do This Every Day, decisively moved Canadian dub poetry out of the community context from which dub had come to a wider national and international context.’ Sister Vision Press was also critical in publishing dub poetry at this time. Silvera speaks of the decision to publish Speshal Rikwes (), a book of dub poems by ahdri zhina mandiela, in her essay tellingly entitled ‘The Story of Sister Vision Black Women and Women of Colour Press: We Had to Fight, Cuss, and Kick Every Inch of the Way’. She describes the work as ‘Experimental in its form and in its language’ and argues that ‘it signaled that Sister Vision was prepared to take risks. It was a co-operative effort, involving the author and many volunteers who generously gave their time to proofread, typeset, and raise funds. Speshal Rikwes brought to the forefront the cultural significance of language and how its use cannot be separated from our identities.’ The press would also later publish volumes by Afua Cooper including Memories Have Tongues (). Community was also fostered when earlier-generation writers, such as Austin Clarke, mentored up-and-coming writers. Through his writings, journalism, teaching and activism, Clarke changed the way Canada, and particularly Toronto, imagined itself. In addition, Clarke’s friendship and
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support for Caribbean-Canadian writers and scholars of later generations has been noted by many, including Dionne Brand, Rinaldo Walcott, Katherine McKittrick and David Chariandy. Chariandy’s tribute essay makes it clear how far this mentor empowered him to write his Caribbean reality into Canada literature: What you helped me see, Austin, was a bigger narrative, a deeper language. The domestic workers and factory labourers whom you chose to write about were not mere characters in a book, but my very own parents. And you helped me see their dignity, their thoughts and dreams expressed in language of which I’d been taught to feel ashamed. You helped me remember a past that wasn’t mine and also, absolutely, was mine, a being that stretched beyond the whitened suburbs, beyond the multicultural amnesia.
What begins to emerge through Clarke’s mentorship, and the work of other first-generation Caribbean-Canadian writers, is an intergenerational Caribbean ethos, that manifested itself in varied ways and unexpected places. Indeed, Caribbean-Canadian writings need to be recognized for the ways that they have expanded the terrain of Caribbean writings as well as for their contributions redefining the Canadian literary scene. Through the work of Nalo Hopkinson, science-fiction, speculative and fantasy forms gained important acknowledgement as literary genres that could speak meaningfully about the Caribbean past and present. Born in in Jamaica to Guyanese and Jamaican parents, Hopkinson spent her childhood in various Caribbean countries before emigrating to Canada in . As with the shape-shifters she often writes about, she considers herself both Canadian and Caribbean. In response to the questions whether she considers herself a writer or Black writer, Caribbean or Canadian, a queer writer or just a writer, Hopkinson responds: ‘All my identities are important to me. I don’t need to claim just one.’ She now teaches and resides in southern California. Hopkinson’s diasporic, queer, speculative fiction is situated in the midst of the Americas and Caribbean, claimed by many nations and reflecting the various herstories she encountered on her journey. Her novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, blends its Toronto setting with Caribbean folklore in an Afrofuturist narrative, which turns dystopia on its head by making the inner city the site of power for Black youth and the underclass. The protagonist, Ti-Jeanne, muses about the changes to her city: ‘In the eleven years since the Riots, she’d had to get used to people talking out loud about her grandmother’s homemade medicines. Among Caribbean people, bush medicine used to be something private, but living in the Burn changed all the rules.’ The beauty of
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Hopkinson’s speculative fiction is its potential to imagine a world where boundaries shift, where power structures function in different ways, and where a Caribbean aesthetic can be at the forefront. A precursor to Hopkinson, although lesser known in English Canada, is Stanley Péan, who was creating speculative work, drawing on his Haitian background and writing in French from the late s. Writing for both adults and young adults, Péan’s work is often a mélange of Haitian folklore in contemporary Quebec settings. When the father-and-son dictatorship duo of Papa Doc and Baby Doc Duvalier (–) led many Haitians to flee their homeland and look for a francophone community, Canada slowly began opening its doors. Perhaps most notable of the HaitianCanadian writers of this period is Dany Laferrière. His satirical novel, Comment faire l’amour avec un negre sans se fatiguer (How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired, ), showed Montréalers the conditions of migrants moving into the city and the often-objectifying lens with which they were regarded. Laferrière, who writes exclusively in French, is widely translated, and has gone on to write almost twenty more books, and to win numerous awards, including the Prix Médicis for L’enigme du retour () (The Return, ). Other Quebecois writers of Haitian descent to emerge during this period include Marie-Célie Agnant, Gérard Étienne, Émile Ollivier and Joel des Rosiers. Because so many of these writers or their parents fled Haiti as a result of the Duvaliers, it is not surprising to find exile a repeated theme of their work. In addition to engaging with the Canadian space that was not always welcoming, there is the continual return, metaphoric or otherwise, to the Haitian space, lobbying for better government, depictions of the often-perilous journey of many Haitians to North America, and the sometimes bifurcated identity of inhabiting two homelands. As is the case with so many of the women writers during this era, Agnant’s work also speaks of being silenced as a woman and gendered invisibility: the blunt shears of exile cut out a shroud to cover my life time mocks me a long sob chokes me with the passing years I’m no longer this woman or that woman or this woman next to me I’ve become The wave to be warded off
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The thematic similarity between Agnant’s work and that of the other women writers discussed here should not be surprising; however, her limited access to wider Canadian and Caribbean markets registers linguistic confines still occurring within the field. The work of francophone Caribbean-Canadian writers reminds us that the field is multilingual and that the hegemonic power of English can still silence voices within the Caribbean-Canadian community. Questions of literary visibility and location are also relevant more widely to Caribbean-Canadian writers in the practical sense of support and remuneration. Where one feels at home globally may have as much to do with where one can find work to support oneself and a community to nourish one’s craft. André Alexis migrated to Ottawa from Trinidad as a child, and his early writing years were spent there, including books set in the Ottawa region. He is perhaps best known for his Scotiabank-GillerPrize-winning Fifteen Dogs (), a fabulist tale of dogs who are given voice and create their own society and language. Similarly, Shani Mootoo was born in Ireland and spent her adolescence in Trinidad before migrating to Vancouver as an adult. She, too, was originally able to find a writing community in Vancouver, where she published much of her fiction, including the Scotiabank-Giller-Prize-nominated Cereus Blooms at Night (), Valmiki’s Daughter () and Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (). This last novel is particularly notable for its dialogue across Caribbean and Canadian spaces and its reunion of a non-biological family in service of a narrative that brings the journey to gender reassignment and trans subjectivity to the fore. But both Alexis and Mootoo did not stay in their first port of landing and, at one point, supplemented their writing by teaching at the University of Toronto. Their mobile authorship demonstrates that community and remuneration are still critical factors in creating the ground on which Caribbean-Canadian literature can flourish. Second-generation authors have also remapped the ways we consider literary citizenship and community. The work of David Chariandy, Canadian-born to Trinidadian parents, has a decided investment in Caribbean lives, especially his first novel, Soucouyant (), despite being set in contemporary Scarborough, Ontario. Mairuth Sarsfield, whose No Crystal Stair () depicts Black Montrealers during the post WWII era, had a Guyanese father, and dramatist Djanet Sears, whose Harlem Duet () imagines a contemporary Harlem Othello, was born in England of Jamaican and Guyanese heritage, before moving to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Tessa McWatt was born in Guyana and lived in Canada for a number of years where she established her writing career, and now
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resides in England. The settings of her fiction span Guyana, Toronto and Europe. She has nevertheless been nominated for the very location-specific City of Toronto Book Award, as well as the regional OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. As McWatt writes, with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj in the introduction to their edited collection, Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada, ‘Everywhere in the discourses of how and what it means to inhabit this country imaginations are lit with the challenge of speaking many contradictions into being.’ These second-generation or multiply-located writers all reflect a Caribbean aesthetic in their work, without necessarily being born in the Caribbean (as in the case of Chariandy, Sarsfield and Sears) or currently living in either region (as with McWatt and Hopkinson). These writers, and the others mentioned in this essay, gesture toward a deterritorialization of the connection between identity and nation-state, and a reconceptualization of land and its significance. In their position paper, Bucknor and Coleman still emphasize the necessity of terrain, however considered, in notions of Caribbean-Canadian literature: ‘Caribbean-Canadian critics are beginning to emphasize the physicality of the theme of roots and routes in the Caribbean Canadian that we have traced.’ Both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ still depend on a physical landscape, either where one was born, or the various trajectories between nations one follows in migration. The writers in this essay, however, are moving toward psychic landscapes, which allow for a flexibility of identificatory markers and trajectories. Understandably, one cannot physically reside in a conceptual space; but one can inhabit it creatively. What this mental deterritorialization enables is the possibility for a fluidity of movement, in various proportions, and numerous directions, and which can continue to encompass the array of Caribbean-Canadian literature that is yet to be conceived.
Notes Canadian immigration laws have for decades restricted Caribbean migrants who were considered poor candidates for adaption to country and climate: e.g. the Domestic Scheme, which was limited to women of a certain age who could not subsequently easily bring over family members, and versions of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program, with limitations on length of stay in the country. As Karen Flynn writes, ‘Even though Caribbean people were not sought after or welcomed to Canada, they were recruited to fill a niche in the labor market that historically had been associated with black women, thereby
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reinforcing racist and sexist ideologies about who and what kinds of bodies are suited for certain kinds of work’ (‘Caribbean Migration to Canada’, in Immanuel Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., ), –, . Makeda Silvera has detailed the voices of domestic workers in Silenced: Talks with Working Class Caribbean Women about Their Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: Williams-Wallace Publishers, ). I am grateful to Andrea Davis for this idea of trespass, writing that ‘Black women writers, therefore, have to be engaged in various acts of healing, trespass, and resistance’; ‘Diaspora, Citizenship and Gender: Challenging the Myth of the Nation in African Canadian Women’s Literature’, Canadian Woman Studies, . (), –, . Afua Cooper, ‘If You’re True to Your Voice’, in Makeda Silvera (ed.), The Other Woman: Women of Colour in Contemporary Canadian Literature (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, ), –, . Dionne Brand, Thirsty (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Makeda Silvera, ‘An Interlocuter Talks to Makeda Silvera: The Characters Would Not Have It’, in Silvera (ed.), Other Woman, –, . George Elliott Clarke, ‘Does (Afro-) Caribbean-Canadian Literature Exist? In the Caribbean?’, in Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –, . Ibid., . Rinaldo Walcott, ‘Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in Diaspora’, in E. Patrick Johnson and M. G. Henderson (eds.), Black Queer Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, . Rinaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Toronto: Insomniac Press, ), Michael A. Bucknor and Daniel Coleman, ‘Introduction: Rooting and Routing Caribbean-Canadian Writing’, Journal of West Indian Literature, ./ (), i–xlii, vii. Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Ramabai Espinet, The Swinging Bridge (Toronto: HarperCollins, ), Ebook, ch. . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Monika Gagnon, Other Conundrums: Race, Culture, and Canadian Art (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, ), . Larissa Lai, ‘Other Democracies: Writing Thru Race at the Year Crossroad’, Write Magazine, . (), –. Cited from a double-spaced Word document, available at http://smarokamboureli.ca/wp-content/ uploads///Lai_Essay.pdf, –, . Makeda Silvera, ‘Foreword’, in Silvera (ed.), Other Woman, i–xii, x. Makeda Silvera and Andrea Fatona, ‘The Vision of Sister Vision Press’, Kinesis (March ), . Zong! tells the story of the overthrowing of slaves on the slave ship Zong in order to make an insurance claim on the ‘property’. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ), .
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Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections Sex, Recognitions Race, Dreaming Politics, (; Toronto: Vintage Canada, ), –. M. NourbeSe Philip, ‘Journal Entries against Reaction: Damned If We Do and Damned If We Don’t’, in Frontiers: Selected Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture, – (Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, ), –, . Dionne Brand, ‘This Body for Itself’, in Bread Out of Stone, –, Ebook. Dionne Brand, ‘Bread Out of Stone’, in Carol Morrell (ed.), Grammar of Dissent: Poetry and Prose by Claire Harris, M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, ), –, . Dionne Brand, No Language Is Neutral (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart ), . M. NourbeSe Philip, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, ), . Brand, No Language, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Claire Harris, The Conception of Winter (Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane Editions, ), . Lillian Allen, ‘Poems Are Not Meant to Lay Still’, in Silvera (ed.), Other Woman, –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Susan Gingell, ‘“Always a Poem, Once a Book”: Motivations and Strategies for Print Textualizing of Caribbean-Canadian Dub and Performance Poetry’, Journal of West Indian Literature, ./ (), –, . Makeda Silvera , ‘The Story of Sister Vision Black Women and Women of Colour Press: We Had to Fight, Cuss, and Kick Every Inch of the Way’, in Natalee Caple and Ronald Cummings (eds.), Harriet’s Legacies: Race Historical Memory and Futures in Canada (Montréal and Kingston: McGill–Queens University Press, forthcoming). Katherine McKittrick, ‘Austin Clarke’s Books’, The Puritan, special issue ‘’Membering Austin Clarke’, http://puritan-magazine.com/Austin-clarkesbooks [Accessed July ]. David Chariandy, ‘As Man’, in Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj and Dionne Brand (eds.), Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (Toronto: Cormorant Books, ), –, –. Her father is, of course, the author and actor Slade Hopkinson, who also had a trajectory that spanned the Caribbean and North America. Nalo Hopkinson, ‘FAQ, with Some Snark’, nalohopkinson.com, http:// nalohopkinson.com/faq-with-some-snark.html [Accessed July ]. Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring (New York: Grand Central Publishing, ), Ebook. Péan’s first collection of short stories, La plage des songes et autres récits d’exil (The Beach of Dreams and Other Stories of Exile), was published in and his last work in . He has gone on to become a popular jazz host of the French-language public broadcaster, Radio-Canada. Marie-Célie Agnant, ‘Balafres’, trans. Siobhan Marie Mei, Asymptote, www .asymptotejournal.com/special-feature/marie-celie-agnant-balafres/ [Accessed August ].
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Please note that Agnant and some of the other francophone writers have been translated into a variety of languages; however, the colonial nature of conquest means that Caribbean literatures can often be disconnected from each other due to linguistic differences. Tessa McWatt, Rabindranath Maharaj and Dionne Brand, ‘Introduction: Luminous Ink’, in McWatt, Maharaj and Brand (eds.), Luminous Ink, ix– xx, xiv. Bucknor and Coleman, ‘Rooting and Routing’, xxxv.
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The Caribbean and the United States Jocelyn Fenton Stitt
If, as Salman Rushdie wrote, the British do not understand their history because so much of it happened overseas, then Americans suffer from a similar misapprehension concerning how their neocolonial policies have impacted the Caribbean and engendered subsequent waves of immigration to the US. The Black British slogan ‘we are here because you were there’ as an explanation for immigration from formerly colonized nations to the UK also applies to Caribbean-Americans. Migration patterns changed across the Caribbean during the twentieth century for complex reasons, including neoliberal financial policies and US military and intelligence operations in the region. US intervention in and occupation of Cuba (–, –, , –), the Dominican Republic (–), Grenada () and Haiti (–) exacerbated the destabilization of their political systems and paved the way for dictators such as Castro, Trujillo and the Duvaliers. Volatile political climates in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic also increased immigration to the US from those nations. In addition, anglophone Caribbean people’s migration shifted from the UK to the US in the late s, spurred by changes in UK and US immigration policy. The current population of people of Caribbean descent in the US is four million. In addition, four million Puerto Ricans, US citizens since the Jones Act of , live on the mainland, while around three million live in Puerto Rico. US Virgin Islanders, also citizens of the US, have a population of around ,. Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Haiti provide the largest numbers of immigrants to the US. Correspondingly, many major contemporary Caribbean writers engaging with American imperialism and the dual identities of Caribbean and American come from these nations. Writers such as Paule Marshall (Barbados), Michelle Cliff (Jamaica), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), Christina García (Cuba), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Junot Díaz (Dominican Republic), Tiphanie Yanique (US Virgin Islands) and Marlon James (Jamaica) have achieved both critical and commercial success.
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The Caribbean and the United States
While this essay aims to explore contemporary Caribbean-American writing, it is important to note such a category has not commonly been used within the US, and Supriya Nair’s question remains relevant: why is it that ‘Caribbean literature has traditionally struggled to find a room of its own in the US academy’? Within US literary studies, Caribbean writers are often studied and taught in relation to their linguistic heritage, such as francophone or anglophone, rather than their diasporic status. Culturally specific understandings of race and language within the US also affect, and arguably constrain, interpretive practices, including categorization by publishers, media and booksellers. US dominant cultural assumptions often subsume Caribbean cultural specificity, and race seemingly takes prominence over culture, region or nation in the US. Writers of African descent from the anglophone Caribbean are often absorbed into ‘African American’ literature, and hispanophone writers may be framed as ‘Latino’. For instance, although Dominican identity is central to Junot Díaz’s work, the label ‘Latino’ (often signalling Mexican-American and Latin American writing in the US) is as regularly applied to his work as ‘Caribbean’. On the other hand, Díaz and Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat are often included in courses on anglophone Caribbean literature because they write in English, with little recognition of their connections to francophone and hispanophone writings. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario writes of the continuing difficulty of recognizing the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as a distinct area of study separate from Latin American literature and part of Caribbean literary studies. Conversely though, members of the Asian diaspora from the Caribbean now resident in the US are often not included in Asian-American literary studies, or as American writers at all. Naming a version of this exclusion in ‘The South Asian American Challenge’, Asha Nadkarni notes that these writers, including Indo-Caribbean writers, are seen as belonging to a larger body of postcolonial literature that derives its designation from origins in the Indian or Pakistani nation state. The division between IndoCaribbean writers and Asian-American writers repeats with a difference already existing boundaries between writings of the Asian and African diasporas within the Caribbean. This is what Aisha Khan calls the ‘enclave-ization of Afro- and Indo- (or Asian) diaspora studies’ in Caribbean literary scholarship where Caribbean writers of Asian descent are in the minority. An approach that singles out ‘Chineseness’ as distinct from a Caribbean regional or national identity (such as ChineseCuban) might replicate US models of study that are not necessarily relevant to understandings of identity across the Americas. The silence
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around indenture and belonging for Indians in the Caribbean, examined in Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (), becomes a source of further cultural policing when Bahadur’s family moves to the US. After immigrating, her family’s creolized religious practices and food are deemed broken by other immigrants newly arrived from India, while their Caribbean cultural identity is discounted in favour of their Asian heritage by white Americans. Bahadur writes of racist assaults on Indian immigrants in her neighbourhood in s New Jersey: We did feel solidarity with Indians in our neighborhood because of the attacks [. . .] But the embrace offered to Indo-Caribbeans by immigrants directly from the subcontinent often has a subtle edge. Indeed, they are eager to tell us our own story – what part of India we probably came from, what dialect of Hindi our ancestors probably spoke, how our singers inevitably garble those dialects when they perform chutney.
Much of the literature discussed in this essay serves as a reminder that immigrants to the US with racialized identities have a very different experience than the assimilationist tales told of the opportunities found by European immigrants in the nineteenth century. For Caribbean immigrants, negotiating their identity often means struggling with US understandings that a person with any African heritage is ‘Black’, in contrast to the ethnic multiplicities informing identity in the Caribbean, or with a refusal to see Asian Caribbean immigrants to the US as Caribbean. Despite these many divisions, the portrayal of the experience of double and triple diaspora unites contemporary Caribbean migrant writing in the US after . Stuart Hall argues that Caribbean immigrants experience a double diasporic identity, having origins in Europe, Asia or Africa and heritage from the Caribbean, and then migrating to Europe or North America. Foundational contemporary Caribbean-American writer Paule Marshall describes herself as ‘a tri-part person’, acknowledging her African, Barbadian and American heritage. Yet the different position of Caribbean writers resident in the United States relative to African Americans has caused resentment at ‘black immigrant privilege’, a stereotype of Caribbean immigrants enjoying better education, higher-class status, and the advantages from being raised outside a majority white culture. In Elizabeth Nunez’s Anna In-Between (), the eponymous protagonist is told by white Americans that she does not speak like someone from the Caribbean, while African Americans say she is not ‘Black’. Perceptions such as these create an additional outsider status for those who are already a racial or linguistic minority within the US.
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The Caribbean and the United States
While the Caribbean ‘difference’ of double and triple diaspora can mean increased marketability for narratives considered exotic, it can also mean publisher indifference to stories that do not fit with expectations of what it means to be an immigrant. Marlon James, who grew up in Jamaica and migrated to the US after his undergraduate studies, suggests that US politics and cultural influence affects both content and marketability for US publishers, who see Caribbean literature as a trend that may not be ‘in’ from one year to the next: ‘I’m not influenced by post-colonial at all’, noting ‘if we were colonized, we were colonized mentally and economically by the US’. Even if Caribbean authors no longer see Europe as the centre of the ‘high culture’ and the publishing world, they still negotiate their uncertain place within the US publishing industry and frequently remark on the lack of publishing houses and readership within the Caribbean itself, and how publishers exoticize Caribbean literature. Tiphanie Yanique, born in the US Virgin Islands and thus a US citizen, notes how her identity impacts her place in the publishing world: My work, and indeed me as a part of the package, were seen as hard to package for sale at bigger places. Is Tiphanie Yanique an American? But I write about the Caribbean. Is she Caribbean? But then how does she fit into the post-colonial conversation? Publishers didn’t know what to do with me or my work.
Caribbean-Americans’ multiple belongings and exclusions within racial identities and linguistic groups, as Mary C. Water’s sociological research demonstrates, also plays out in the publishing and academic worlds. Elena Machado Sáez argues that Caribbean diasporic writers share experiences that unite their literature beyond national or ethnic boundaries, including how their fiction is circulated and valued: ‘Since Caribbean diasporic writers are positioned at the intersection of ethnic and world literatures, local and global histories, multicultural and postcolonial discourses, I argue that these authors have more in common with each other than with isolated ethnic or island literary traditions.’ BarbadianAmerican Paule Marshall provides an example of the reception of Caribbean-American writers. An important figure in late-twentieth-century Caribbean-American literature, Marshall established her career with Brown Girl, Brownstones (), which tells the story of Barbadian immigrants to the US and their striving for upward mobility. Brown Girl makes it clear that racialized immigrants were not allowed access to education and equal opportunity to the same degree as white immigrants, also a prominent theme in works published many decades later by writers from across
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the Caribbean. Marshall’s reception as an African American writer, rather than as a Caribbean-American one, reflects Caribbean-American writers’ difficulties in being seen as immigrants, rather than belonging to an already existing ethnic group with a different history. Despite Marshall’s second novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People () being called ‘the best novel to be written by an American Black woman’ and ‘one of the four or five most impressive novels ever written by a black American’ in a review in the prestigious New York Times, Marshall’s first novel Brown Girl fell out of print. Published before the feminist and womanist movements of the s that created audiences and a critical language for interpreting Black women’s writing, Brown Girl captures a paradox in CaribbeanAmerican literature. Authors may gain from inclusion in already existing categories such as Latino or African American literature even as their cultural specificity may be lost. Brown Girl was not published again until , through the efforts of the Feminist Press, which supports the recovery of women’s texts. Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow () depicts Avery, a highly assimilated and upper-middle-class African American woman who begins to realize she has traded class status for connections to a larger Black community. By joining a ritual to honour African ancestors on the Caribbean island of Carriacou, Avery is able to remember and valourize similar cultural traditions from her childhood that she had rejected as an adult. By depicting the ritual as blessing those in the diaspora as well as those present, ‘for all their far-flung kin as well – the sons and daughters, grands and great-grands in Trinidad, Toronto, New York, London’, Marshall situates blackness as a transnational identity. Marshall’s work set the stage for the flowering of US Black women’s writing in the s by authors such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, as well as other Caribbean women writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Lorna Goodison, and Michelle Cliff in the s. Women’s movements also played a role in the reception and popularity of the works as well. Ifeona Fulani writes, ‘In the American academy the feminist movement and the discipline of black studies have come together in the field of women’s studies to generate a large audience for black women authors.’ The emergence of Caribbean women writers in the US led to the historic Caribbean Writers Conference at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Two years later, the publication of Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference, edited by Selwyn R. Cudjoe, marked a point in Caribbean literary history where the prominence of male canonical Caribbean writers often resident in Europe
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shifted to women writers resident in the US and Canada. Holding the conference in the US rather than in the UK, Canada or the Caribbean signals the role the Caribbean diaspora in the US played in the institutionalization of Caribbean women’s literary studies. The arc of Jamaican author Michelle Cliff’s three major novels provides an important example of the tensions over classification and belonging. Abeng () takes place in , four years before Jamaican independence in . It charts the coming of age of Clare, a light-skinned middle-class girl who questions the racial and heteronormative power structures around her. Clare watches American films and discovers that her family’s former plantation has been sold to create vacation homes for Americans. Cliff writes in a nonfiction essay, ‘While the primary colonial identification of Jamaicans was English, American colonialism was a strong force in my childhood – and of course continues today. [. . .] In some ways America was seen as a better place than England by many Jamaicans.’ The post-s period marked a reorientation from Europe towards North America, and, while still very much a British colony, s Jamaica was coming under the increased military and cultural influence of the US. The lure of America is explored more thoroughly in Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (). Cliff describes Clare’s family’s move to the US after Jamaican independence. Claire’s racial identity as ‘red’ in a Jamaican context does not fit into a US binary system. In fictionalizing Clare’s experience of being classified as a person of colour and her Jamaican education being deemed inferior, resulting in her being left back a grade, Cliff echoes the real-life experiences of migrants like Esmeralda Santiago. In When I Was Puerto Rican (), Santiago writes of her family’s migration to the mainland in and her placement in a special education class because of her perceived educational deficits, despite her high achievement in Puerto Rico. Returning to Jamaica, Clare forms a romantic and political relationship with Harriet, a transgender woman. While Abeng hinted at Clare’s same-sex attraction, No Telephone is remarkable for its portrayal of a gender non-conforming character as having wholeness to her identity. ‘Cyann live split. Not in this world’, Harriet tells Clare, referring to her political praxis, as well as her embrace of queerness. Harriet also experiences sexual violence. Sexual violence in Cliff’s writing, as well as later works, represents Caribbean societies rendered dysfunctional by entrenched sexism and homophobic beliefs. Representations of struggles for women’s and queer rights across the region that are met with genderbased violence are a literary means to underscore how postcolonial
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citizenship has been conditional on heterosexuality and compliance with traditional gender norms. In her third novel, Free Enterprise (), Cliff’s postmodern and hemispheric approach to writing historical fiction anticipates the popularity of this genre in the work of writers such as Junot Díaz, Christina García and Marlon James. Moving between time periods and offering ironic asides, Free Enterprise tells the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant, who assisted John Brown in his raid on Harper’s Ferry. This Black liberatory action is placed in the context of multiple trans-American nineteenth-century colonial experiences, including in the Caribbean and Hawaii. Themes of US neocolonialism, the relationship of the past to the present, and feminist responses to Caribbean culture, as well as writing that includes LGBTQ characters that appear in Cliff’s work are taken up in much of the Caribbean-American fiction published after . Moving from the relative marginalization of Caribbean writers documented at the conference to their increased visibility in the present, we can see how writers from the Caribbean region have made major contributions to literature in the US, including winning major awards. Some of the most popular texts among both general readers and college courses include those by Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Junot Díaz, Esmeralda Santiago, Patricia Powell and Marlon James. Danticat and Díaz have both been awarded MacArthur ‘Genius Grants’ for their contributions to literature. Marlon James won the Booker Prize and an American Book Award for A Brief History of Seven Killings (). James and Kincaid have both won The Ansifield-Wolf Book Award, given to a writer whose work creates important understandings of racism and diversity. Tiphanie Yanique won an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for Land of Love and Drowning (). Whether prestigious awards mark the arrival of Caribbean literature on the international literary scene or are signs of the co-optation of postcolonial writing as Graham Huggan argues, they certainly increase book sales and inclusion in syllabuses. Winning literary awards opens many doors for authors as well as signalling their acceptance as American writers. Yet, the kinds of novels that are in demand among global readers of world fiction or global anglophone literature (new categories for what was formerly called postcolonial literature) are those that provide exposure to ‘exotic’ cultures. A critique of novels that have appeal within world fiction is that they are simplified representations of the formerly colonized world. On the whole, though, even highly recognized Caribbean-American writers are known for their uncompromising critiques of neocolonialism, as in Kincaid’s A Small Place (), as well as
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complicated narrative structures and cultural references – as in Cliff, Díaz and James – that have led to this literature being called difficult. The complexity of the reasons for the success of many Caribbean-American writers is further muddied when one realizes that this group is not often recognized as culturally distinct. This diverse group, which might be categorized as canonical CaribbeanAmerican writers due to their critical and commercial success, has not been understood as such. Belinda Edmondson writes that in the late s and early s critics framed Caribbean-American writing in terms of ‘feminist theory, African American women’s literature, or both. Rarely were they discussed as West Indian writers.’ Edmondson’s analysis reflects the precarious positionality of Caribbean literature in the US academy, where until very recently gender and race provided the axis of analysis rather than national origin. Reading Edmonson’s analysis almost twenty years later reveals how much has changed in the reception of Caribbean literature, as indicated by the larger project within which this essay is included. For example, the focus on anglophone ‘West Indian’ literature has now been supplanted by the broader term Caribbean. Differences among national origin, whether first or second generation American, sexuality, and class status are as salient to an analysis of Caribbean writing in the diaspora as linguistic heritage was earlier. Taking Kincaid’s Lucy (), Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban () and Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory () as emblematic texts of Caribbean-American immigrant writing in the s reveals the prominence of themes that continue to remain central: US neocolonialism; the influence of the past on the present; Caribbean-Americans as outsiders to culturally specific racial hierarchies; and the discovery of new identities such as Black or ‘person of colour’, which may not apply in the Caribbean. All are stories of migration that reflect their different cultural contexts: Lucy is a story of economic and educational migration; Dreaming in Cuban portrays its character’s perilous escape for political reasons from Cuba during the s; and Breath, Eyes, Memory relates the psychological schism experienced by immigrants from Haiti during the Duvalier regime. Lucy, Kincaid’s second novel, might be usefully situated in relation to her wider oeuvre, such as her celebrated nonfiction work, A Small Place (), where she more explicitly explores US political agendas and the legacies of British imperialism in the Caribbean. Lucy narrates its protagonist’s arrival in New York from an unnamed Caribbean island to become an au-pair to a wealthy white family. Class, race and nation create places of disjuncture, as when Lucy’s employer points out the beauty of
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freshly ploughed fields, which Lucy sees through the lens of her ancestors’ enforced agricultural labour during slavery. Lucy’s New York life is that of an immigrant learning how to live in a new country, but also that of a girl learning to be an adult and to live without her mother. Perhaps most significantly, in creating the rebellious and caustic character of Lucy, Kincaid writes against earlier fictions in which Caribbean homelands and maternal figures are idealized. Learning of her father’s death, Lucy states, ‘I am not like my mother. She and I are not alike. She should not have married my father. She should not have had children. She should not have thrown away her intelligence. She should not have paid so little attention to mine.’ Lucy’s evaluation of her mother as a failure sets the stage for her own decision to leave nannying behind and to become a photographer, defying Caribbean cultural expectations of caretaking and US stereotypes of immigrants only being fit for menial work. Contentious mother–daughter relationships also figure in Dreaming in Cuban and Breath, Eyes, Memory. Dreaming in Cuban, the most narratively complex of the three, portrays multiple strands of a Cuban family before and after the Revolution. Some immigrate to the US and are anti-Castro, such as the character of Lordes who was raped by members of the Cuban military. Characters who stay see the Revolution and its tight control of culture and the economy as a necessary step to stem US neocolonialism: ‘Before the revolution Cuba was a pathetic place, a parody of a country. There was one product, sugar, and all the profits went to a few Cubans, and, of course, to the Americans.’ The coming of age of Pilar, Lordes’s daughter and the most fully realized character of the generation born after the Cuban Revolution, shows her longing to return to Cuba. Pilar is verbally abused by her mother and wishes to belong somewhere. Pilar realizes, like many Caribbean immigrant characters in contemporary US literature, that she has a hybrid identity: ‘Sooner or later I’d have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong – not instead of here, but more than here’ (, emphasis in original). Danticat’s text, like Garcia’s, shows that residency in the US can be healing for the second generation, but that the scars of living under a dictatorship are not left behind. In telling the story of Sophie, a child left behind in the Caribbean for economic reasons and the rocky reunion she has with her mother, Danticat touches on the impact of migration on those left behind. Sophie also experiences sexual trauma through her mother’s ‘tests’ of her virginity. Abuse at home mirrors gendered and sexual violence in the nation at large in these texts. As Sophie matures, the reader comes to understand her mother’s own trauma as a rape victim, possibly by a
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member of the Haitian paramilitary organization, the Tonton Macoute. While thematizing the dynamics of intergenerational, transnational belonging, Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory is also a text whose reception demands that we explore the complex dynamics between Caribbean and American writing and readership. It is one of the most widely read novels in the US by a Caribbean writer, and served to establish Danticat as a mainstream author by becoming a selection of ‘Oprah’s Book Club’. Another notable transition in this body of writing can be noted through its formal orientation. While many prominent Caribbean-American novels published before were realist in style, some of the most notable twenty-first-century Caribbean writing is speculative and includes supernatural elements. As Díaz writes, ‘What more sci-fi than Santo Domingo? What more fantasy than the Antilles?’ Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (), Patricia Powell’s The Fullness of Everything (), and Daína Chaviano’s La isla de los amores infinitos () (The Island of Eternal Love, ) are representative of Caribbean-American Literature in the s and describe the alienation of Caribbean-American characters informed by transnational politics, but from different generational perspectives. Díaz continues the trend – seen in the work of Cliff, Kincaid and Danticat – of writing a bildungsroman for his first novel. Oscar Wao is the most commercially and critically successful of these three works, telling the story of Oscar, a Dominican-American nerd growing up in New Jersey. Oscar’s obsessions range from Marvel Comics to Lord of the Rings, pop culture references that Díaz uses to great effect to describe the ongoing trauma of the Trujillo dictatorship among the diaspora, and the individual intensity of the pressure on Oscar, who cannot conform to the demands of Dominican masculinity and the expectations of his family. Patricia Powell’s The Fullness of Everything focalizes the perspective of Winston, a middle-aged Jamaican professor residing in the US, who, like Kincaid’s Lucy when she refuses to answer her mother’s letters, cuts off communication with his family in Jamaica for over twenty-five years, but returns to reckon with intergenerational abuse. The Fullness describes Winston’s unresolved trauma stemming from his childhood, as well as his adoption of his half-sister, who lives in conversation with the ghosts of her ancestors. Chaviano takes a multi-generational approach in The Island, telling the family story of a Chinese man and a woman of Spanish and African heritage who marry in the s though their grandchildren’s lives in the present time. This saga is related to Celia, a migrant to Miami from Cuba in the s, by a character who turns out to be an apparition, thus combining two genres, historical fiction and fantasy.
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Contemporary Caribbean fiction that incorporates elements such as ghosts, mythical creatures and magical curses represents Caribbean pasts that will not stay dead, refusing to allow readers the escapism of genre fiction. Díaz invokes ‘fukú’ at the beginning of Oscar Wao, ‘a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles’ as a supernatural explanation of the impact of colonization. In The Fullness, distance, immigration and professionalization cannot save Winston from reckoning with his past. The ghosts in The Fullness are stylistic devices that allow for an allegorical representation of Winston’s family’s unresolved past. Winston’s father is a serial paedophile. One of his victims is a young woman who bears Winston’s half-sister. In turn, Chaviano’s complex use of European and Caribbean mythology, from a Spanish poltergeist in the shape of a dwarf who troubles one of the main characters, to the use of Santería to rescue another from a curse, to the apparition of a ‘ghost house’ and a ghostly narrator who allows her to describe the indescribable in the transformation of Cuba into a dictatorship headed by Castro. Chaviano argues that Cuban writers employed fantasy or science fiction as a method to ‘camouflage ideas’ not popular with the ruling regime. Two recent publications by Caribbean-American authors employ fantastic elements as a means to write mid-century histories of the Virgin Islands and Jamaica and political entanglements with America. Tiphanie Yanique’s Land of Love and Drowning () and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings () use the fantastic, such as ghosts and magic, as well as elements of gothic literature, such as undiscovered family secrets and depictions of extreme violence, in order to convey histories that may seem fanciful to North Americans and Europeans but are in fact true. In contrast to Chaviano’s suggestion that fantasy can serve as camouflage for dangerous ideas, fantasy in these texts is used to heighten reality. ‘Nowadays people think historians are stuffy types, but history is a kind of magic I doing here’, says Anette in Land of Love, perhaps indicating that mixing genres allows Yanique to tell history more truthfully. In the present moment, the use of speculative fiction may be a formal choice that best allows an author to represent experiences of being an outsider minority within the US. Rather than categorizing Yanique and James as writing magical realism, it may be more useful to think about their work within a non-realist tradition of Caribbean literature that can be traced through Wilson Harris and Erna Brodber, among others. Jamaica Kincaid noted that fantastical portions of her writing were inspired by Caribbean culture: ‘Reality was
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not to be trusted[:] the thing you saw before you was not really quite to be trusted because it might represent something else’, such as stories of Mama Wata luring people to swim in a river and then drowning them. Indeed, Yanique begins her novel with a historiographic account of the transfer of power from the Danish to the US of the Virgin Islands: In America they have a dream. People from all about the place come together and now they is one nation. It dougla-up, just like the Caribbean. Correct? And the island intellectuals [. . .] they thinking it only a matter of time before all of we Caribbean going to be part of the US and then the US with the Caribbean.
Although Land of Love serves a pedagogic function of teaching readers a condensed history of the Virgin Islands, the story is told through a series of fairy tale motifs: a mother who is descended from mer-people and her daughters Eeona, who is irresistible to men, and Anette, who talks about the past while being able to see the future. Sexuality in this novel is repressed and distorted, just as US neocolonialist narratives subsume the histories of the Virgin Islands. Many mainland Americans are unaware the people of the US Virgin Islands are citizens, as the history of overseas territories is not commonly taught. Power imbalances and secrecy characterize many of the novel’s relationships. Incest is a major theme, with Eeona in love with her father, and Anette with her half-brother. In a scene reminiscent of Sophie’s testing by her mother in Breath, when Eeona’s mother discovers her silver pubic hair caused by molestation, she attempts to rub it off until the cloth turns bloody. The unknowing incest of Anette with her half-brother echoes (and allegorizes) Yanique’s reference to the merging of the Virgin Islands with the US, which the novel suggests should never have been attempted. Similarly, James’s A Brief History tells the history of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley and its aftermath using speculative fictional motifs. James brings the reader into a world increasingly concerned with Cold War politics with CIA and other intelligence operatives working to make sure Jamaica does not become the next Cuba. The ghost of Sir Arthur Jennings accompanies the reader, popping up after significant deaths to explain the past and the present. The connection between the US and Jamaica, written in the first half of the book as a s Cold War farce, in the second half becomes a version of ‘we are here because you were there’, with characters migrating to New York and Miami. The characters are mostly male, allowing James to explore the continuum of homosociality, homosexuality and homophobia in detail. Cliff’s account of
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s Jamaica in No Telephone, with depictions of same sex and transgender characters is answered by James though the character of Weeper, who cannot come out in Jamaica, but who finds a way to reconcile his sexuality through an American relationship. A Brief History is not a triumphant story of leaving a volatile homeland to achieve success in America. Instead, just as the first narrative arc describes the real assassination attempt on Bob Marley, the second narrative arc replicates the movement of drug dealers from Jamaica to the US. The second half of the novel fictionalizes the lives of Lester Coke/Jim Brown, who allegedly killed multiple people in a crack house in New York, and the search for his son Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, which led to the deaths of more than seventy people in Tivoli Gardens in Kingston in . In relating the story of Tivoli Gardens, James captures elements of oral and informal histories related to an event of great importance within Jamaica but not often heard of outside the country. The extremity of the violence of everyday lives of Jamaicans, James’s work implies, demands modes of the fantastic to describe the real. Caribbean-American literature has undergone significant transitions from its beginnings as a marginalized field to the present-day recognition of the diversity of writers labelled as ‘Caribbean-American’ and their broader connections to Caribbean literature produced globally. This is not to gloss over the still-contested nature of who gets categorized as a Caribbean-American writer and what that means for publishing and reception. Many of the ‘stars’ of world or global anglophone literature are Caribbean-American. Kincaid, Danticat, and James and their framing of immigrant identity clearly resonates with readers around the world. Others’ writings are not so popular. Elizabeth Nunez notes the difficulty in finding a publisher for a novel that explicitly addressed American racism, delaying its release for a decade, while Ifeona Fulani argues that the increasing commodification of the publishing industry means that few are willing to take a chance on unknown writers. While Paule Marshall moved from an unknown to a major figure, establishing many of the key themes and elements of Caribbean literature including acknowledging the experience of double and triple diaspora, the yearning to reclaim ancestral connections, and the difficulties of being an immigrant of colour in the US, even her works have issues with publication and remaining in print. Despite these barriers, Caribbean-American writers remain at the forefront of those critiquing US imperialism from within. Cliff, and the generation of writers who came after Marshall, foregrounded issues of gendered and sexual violence as well as queer subjectivities. The literature of the twentyfirst century embraced Cliff’s and Kincaid’s innovative use of form and
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voice to engage with issues of transnational identity and global politics. The newest authors of Caribbean-American literature deploy the speculative and the fantastic as a way to bridge genre and literary fiction and to continue Caribbean literature’s longstanding ability to experiment with form as part of their means to write new futures into being.
Notes Suzy Castor and Lynn Garafola, ‘The American occupation of Haiti (–) and the Dominican Republic (–)’, The Massachusetts Review, . (), –; Alejandra Broneman, On the Move: The Caribbean Since (London: Zed Books, ). Jie Zong and Jeanne Batalova, ‘Caribbean Immigrants in the United States’, Immigration Policy Institute, February , www.migrationpolicy.org/ article/caribbean-immigrants-united-states. Elizabeth Nunez describes how as an immigrant from Trinidad she benefitted from the work of minorities within the US to remove previous racial barriers to immigration and pass the Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act; ‘How I Came to America’, Changing English, . (), –. Zong and Batalova, ‘Caribbean Immigrants’. ‘Quick Facts Puerto Rico’, The United States Census Bureau, , www .census.gov/quickfacts/pr. ‘Virgin Islands’, CIA The World Factbook www.cia.gov/library/publications/ the-world-factbook/geos/vq.html [Accessed: February ]. Supriya Nair, ‘Introduction: Caribbean Groundings and Limbo Gateways’, in Supriya Nair (ed.), Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature (New York: Modern Language Association, ), –, . Belinda Edmondson, Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –. Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, ‘On the Hispanophone Caribbean Question’, Small Axe, (), –. Asha Nadkarni, ‘The South Asian American Challenge’, in Rajini Srikanth and Min Hyoung Song (eds.), The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Aisha Khan, ‘Material and Immaterial Bodies: Diaspora Studies and the Problem of Culture, Identity, and Race’, Small Axe, (), –, . Erika Lee, ‘Orientalisms in the Americas: A Hemispheric Approach to Asian American History’, Journal of Asian American Studies, . (), –, ; Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, ‘Identifying a Chinese Caribbean Literature: Pitfalls and Possibilities’, sx salon, (February ), http://smallaxe.net/ sxsalon/discussions/identifying-chinese-caribbean-literature. Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), .
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Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, ), –, . Felicia Lee, ‘Voyage of a Girl Moored in Brooklyn’, The New York Times, March , www.nytimes.com////books/paul.html. Belinda Edmondson, ‘The Myth of Black Immigrant Privilege’, Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, . (), Article . Elizabeth Nunez, Anna In-Between (New York: Akashic Books, ), . Alecia McKenzie, ‘A Conversation with Marlon James’, Jamaica Observer, October , www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/A-Conversation-withMarlon-James_. For a discussion of the lack of publishing outlets, see Kwame Dawes, ‘Finding a Home: Peepal Tree and Caribbean Literature’, sx salon, (June ), http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/finding-home-peepal-tree-and-carib bean-literature. Namrata Poddar, ‘Race, Power and Storytelling: An Interview with Tiphanie Yanique’, Kweli, January , www.kwelijournal.org/interviews-// //an-interview-with-tiphanie-yanique. Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ). Elena Machado Sáez, Market Aesthetics: The Purchase of the Past in Caribbean Diasporic Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), . See also Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York and London: Routledge, ). Donette Francis, ‘Paule Marshall: New Accents on Immigrant America’, The Black Scholar, . (), –. Robert Bone, ‘Review of The Chosen Place, The Timeless People’, The New York Times, November , , . For an analysis of the rise of markets for Black women’s fiction through the feminist and civil rights movements and its impact on the publication of Marshall’s work, see Joyce Pettis, ‘Qualities of Endurance: Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones’, The Black Scholar, . (), –. Edwin McDowell, ‘Publishing: Paule Marshall’s Success’, The New York Times, October , www.nytimes.com////books/publishingpaule-marshall-s-success.html. Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Penguin, ), . Evelyn Hawthorne, ‘Paule Marshall’s Personal and Literary Legacy’, The Black Scholar, . (), –. Ifeona Fulani, ‘Caribbean Women Writers and the Politics of Style: A Case for Literary Anancyism’, Small Axe, (), –, . J. Dillon Brown, Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, ), . Michelle Cliff, If I Could Write This in Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Michelle Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume, ), .
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Jocelyn Stitt, ‘Gendered Legacies of Romantic Nationalism in the Works of Michelle Cliff’, Small Axe, (), –; Myriam Chancy, ‘Subversive Sexualities: Revolutionizing Gendered Identities’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, . (), –. Selwyn R. Cudjoe (ed.), Caribbean Women Writers: Essays from the First International Conference (Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Publications, ). Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic. Edmondson, Making Men, , emphasis in original. The Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival, first held in July , includes writers from across the region. Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy (New York: Picador, ), . Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, ), . Subsequent reference in parentheses. Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, ), . Ibid., . Daína Chaviano, ‘Science Fiction and Fantastic Literature as Realms of Freedom’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, . (), –, . Tiphanie Yanique, Land of Love and Drowning (New York: Riverhead, ), . Selwyn Cudjoe, ‘Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview’, in Cudjoe (ed.), Caribbean Women Writers, –, . Yanique, Land of Love, . Nunez, ‘How I Came to America’, ; Fulani, ‘Caribbean women writers’, –.
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The Caribbean and the Tourist Gaze Supriya M. Nair
Jamaica Kincaid’s long essay A Small Place () remains perhaps the most searing indictment of the evolution of the Caribbean from plantation colony to tourist haven. Given Kincaid’s satirical exposure of the ugly realities that lie behind the ‘unreal’ beauty of Antigua (her birthplace), here evolving does not mean progress but rather mutation, which implies the sham promises of development ideology in a region still shackled to the legacy of slavery and saddled by the burden of neocolonialism. The glamour of tourism marketing suppresses the fact that mass tourism in the s was virtually enforced on the dependent island economies, which never quite ‘adjusted’ to punitive austerity measures supposed to enable their ascent into modernity. As the Caribbean sugar industry and other trade crops began to decline in the s, tourism and the sweatshop labour of the so-called Free Trade Zones replaced them in a process of neoliberal economic restructuring. Tourism, in particular, ‘was aggressively promoted by the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the United Nations as an economic panacea’ not just for the fragile financial systems of the Caribbean but across the developing world. State participation, whether willing or coerced, demonstrated the prescience of Frantz Fanon’s prognosis that while newly independent nations continued to be heavily dependent on the colonial metropoles, the native bourgeoisie would ‘set up’ their countries as the ‘brothel[s] of Europe’. The comparison was not simply metaphorical, because hotels, resorts and theme parks began mushrooming along beaches to ‘host’ foreign visitors, while native populations were compelled to serve them, including through the sex trade. So short sighted and imbalanced were the development policies and modernizing programmes ostensibly designed to promote tourism ‘as a force for economic growth and international understanding’, that many writers and scholars are understandably sceptical of alternative tourism when its entire foundation is fundamentally flawed.
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In a period when international tourism is a multi-billion-dollar industry, the Caribbean is ranked as ‘the most tourism-dependent region relative to the contribution of travel and tourism to gross domestic product’. While such singular reliance continues to be debated in the Caribbean public sphere, the literature leans towards a negative perspective. Although several writers, including Kincaid, are aware of multiple gazes and a complex range of tourist types and motivations, the succinct title of Frank Fonda Taylor’s study of the rise of tourism in Jamaica, To Hell with Paradise, signals the largely profane stance Caribbean literature adopts against mass tourism. Taylor’s branding of tourism as the new sugar and his sense of the ‘ratooning’ of the plantation charts a disturbing genealogy in which tourism is figured as a modern offshoot of slavery. Trevor D. Rhone’s popular two-act play Smile Orange, one of the earliest predictions of the risks of industrializing tourism, was first staged in when Michael Manley, campaigning for the position of prime minister of Jamaica at the time, was optimistically advocating sovereignty from Western economic domination. However, by the end of the seventies, Manley was forced to accept ruthless IMF terms under tough economic conditions that led to increased dependence on tourism, stalling the decolonizing euphoria of Manley’s election rhetoric. In his introduction to Rhone’s play (which was also made into a film), Mervyn Morris calls it ‘funny’ and ‘deadly serious’, and identifies the waiter, Ringo Smith, as an Anancy trickster figure. Not just Ringo, but three of the five characters in the play are unabashed hustlers (the Assistant Manager is their inept victim), using every means to make a quick and often illicit buck. The four who are low-wage service workers in the ‘third-rate’ fictional Mocho Beach Hotel have no qualms regarding their approach to the white American patrons of the hotel: ‘Is money I looking [for]’ (). Despite seemingly political statements (‘Exploit di exploiter’ []), confessions (‘I know I am a scamp. How else A going to survive?’ []) and revelations (the busboy Cyril chopped cane in the countryside before his current job), the moral compass of the characters is cheerfully absent as the play mocks both locals and tourists, each scamming the other. The metatheatrical elements of the play stage tourism itself as an elaborate performance with props, settings, roles and effects, which are sometimes subversive, but more often than not are co-opted by all concerned. The title of the play riffs on the deceptive bonhomie of the service industry. Ringo hectors the nervous Cyril to don the minstrel mask: ‘Jesus Christ, man. You can’t be a waiter if you can’t smile’ (). The title also refers to the superstition that if a man eats an orange he will be emasculated, but the
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fact that all three Black male workers eat the orange has an ambivalent meaning, since they accept service occupations but also continually roleplay to transgress and exploit them. ‘If you is a black man and you can’t play a part, you going to starve to death’, Ringo asserts (). When he installs two fake lifeguards who cannot swim and are unable to save a drowning tourist, he makes it unrepentantly clear that the death of the hotel ‘guests’ is preferable to his if it comes to a choice. The play’s jaunty perspective on how these emasculated men reassert their masculinity has another disquieting resonance in contemporary allegations that Jamaica’s tourist resorts are sites of sexual assault that goes largely unpunished. The scenes in which Ringo tutors Cyril in the art of luring female tourists, admits to engaging in sex with them even though it is against hotel regulations, and slyly refers to male tourists and their desire for native men evoked laughter among local audiences at the time. But they seem less hilarious in the current context when the US Department of State Overseas Security Advisory Council reveals that seventy-eight Americans have been raped in Jamaica between and . Numerous reports of sexual assault and rape, some by hotel employees and lifeguards, cast a more sombre shadow on not just the tourist’s hegemonic sexuality that expects titillating experiences, but also local aggression against tourists who are perceived as easy targets of sexual violence which is often conflated with seduction. The shadowy menace of service, role playing and mimicry are more explicitly staged in Derek Walcott’s Pantomime, performed a few years after Smile Orange, to which it bears some similarities. Unlike the characters in the latter, though, Jackson Phillip, the sole handyman in Harry Trewe’s decrepit and unsuccessful guesthouse, more self-consciously refuses to play by colonial rules, and constantly upstages the English owner who also stands in for the supposedly liberal but overbearing tourist. ‘Three hundred years I served you breakfast in [. . .] my white jacket on a white veranda, boss, bwana, effendi, bacra, sahib [. . .] in that sun that never set on your empire’, Phillip allegorically explains. As the play proceeds, he not only parodies the colonial script and exposes the farce of English master narratives, but keeps improvising, talking back (sometimes in Creole), and performing his own roles, much to Trewe’s helpless frustration. Walcott exploits the genre of the robinsonade and the pantomime, which was a popular form for Daniel Defoe’s Crusoe story following its publication. Like Defoe’s eighteenth-century novel, the play is set in Tobago but updates the colonial adventure to a time when the sun has decidedly set on the empire and the postcolonial natives are not only
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restless but also recalcitrant. The sarcastic litany of colonial titles ranging from Africa and the Caribbean to India, catalogued by Phillip, both undermines and reiterates the long history of subordination. Although Friday may now be rebelliously named Thursday, the manservant must still be on call. But even as the pantomime of tourism continues to play out in the Caribbean, the unwilling Black ‘host’ is no longer a passive or silenced character and the white ‘guest’ is uneasily conscious of looming threat, embodied by props like the ice pick and the hammer in Walcott’s play. In her poem ‘Meditation on Yellow’, Olive Senior addresses mendacious stereotypes about island idleness justifying tourist leisure and reiterates Kincaid’s disgust with self-centred visitors who expect the Caribbean to repeat ‘five hundred years of servitude’. The shifting poetic narrator(s) ultimately rebels like Walcott’s Jackson Phillip: ‘Though I not quarrelsome / I have to say: look / I tired now’ (). Echoing Walcott, Senior locates the Caribbean as a space continuously exploited by invaders that first took the land from the Arawaks and now keep taking ‘the breeze’, ‘the beaches’ and ‘the yellow sand’ (), displacing the actual residents. Fed up of the insistent demands by entitled visitors, the narrator says defiantly, ‘I want to feel [. . .] [that] you don’t own / the tropics anymore’ (). Just who the ‘you’ is can be as changeable as the poetic narrator, although in both Senior’s poem and in Kincaid’s essay, the ‘you’ seems to be undeniably from the North. More than a decade before Kincaid differentiated the ‘tourist, a North American or European – to be frank, white’ from the economically underprivileged Black Antiguan diaspora returning home for a visit, Stewart Brown published his poem ‘Whales’. He gleefully reveals that it raised the hackles of Canadian tourists who may have objected to lines such as these: Each Christmas they come White and blubbery from the frozen North, Strange bloated creatures pale as snow. [. . .] Flopped ungainly along the sea’s edge.
The poem’s concluding, collective desire for ‘a black Ahab’ () belies the ‘Peace and Love’ signs that the locals are coerced to flash in the Jamaican government’s desperation to woo the tourists who supposedly maintain the nation’s economy and whose whims therefore ought to be indulged. In his essay ‘Peace an’ Love’, Brown, whose poem was promptly disowned by the Jamaican government, explains that many locals, restricted to marginal
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roles in the hotels and at beaches, and far less likely than state officials, wealthy elites and offshore multinational corporations to gain monetary benefits, could hardly be blamed for resenting tourists. ‘Peace and Love’ have long been conscripted into the advertising campaigns of the Jamaica Tourist Board, with slogans like ‘One Love’ and YouTube ads on ‘The Home of All Right’, trying to persuade tourists that they are as welcome as their funds. Several of the posters are available online, and, although a controversial pose by an Indo-Trinidadian girl in a wet, clinging Jamaica T-shirt was uncritically recreated by Grammy winner Alicia Keys in an ‘empowering photo shoot’, many of them provide ample material for spoofs. Damien Marley, the legendary Bob Marley’s son, ridiculed the state’s commodification of his father’s lyrics in his Grammy-winning song ‘Welcome to Jamrock’. His lyrics provide another view of Jamaica. He warns guests in all-inclusive resorts like Sandals, who are unaware that even these gated spaces are now vulnerable to violence brought on by the narcotrade, alerting them to the possibility of getting shot by the very ‘thugs’ they seek drugs from. The submerged menace in Rhone’s and Walcott’s plays and in Kincaid’s sharp but polite admission to the apparently unsuspecting tourist (‘They do not like you’) has now intensified to death threats. Damien Marley implicates well-heeled, pleasure-seeking tourists in the global drug trade that has ravaged poor countries in the Americas, and puts the visitors at risk for the murders that routinely kill the locals. Mimi Sheller astutely identifies ‘this connection between Edenism and hedonism’ as the trope through which Jamaica functions as ‘a “pleasure island” of laid-back escapism and the dangerous terrain of drug dealers and political warfare’. Drugs are not the only pursuit of thrill seekers. While both Ian Strachan and Krista Thompson note the conflation of tropical flora with lush, inviting, nubile girls and warm, motherly, native women, Thompson’s study on the photographic turn from terra to acqua complicates the gendered dynamics from familiar beach girls in bikinis cavorting on the sands to Black beach boys who are recruited for their sexual service. Although Thompson does not address the sexualized aspects of the diving boys that she mentions, the perils of the unknown ocean attach themselves to the erotic adventures with strangers, and several literary texts depict the consequences of such dangerous liaisons. Oonya Kempadoo’s novel Tide Running () begins with a beautiful Creole eulogy to the ‘sea breathing’, told from the perspective of Cliff, an unemployed Black youth from Plymouth on the island of Tobago. He and his younger brother Ossi
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attract the attention of Bella, a mixed-race, middle-class native of Trinidad, who is married to Peter, an affluent lawyer and a white Englishman. Switching between Creole when Cliff is the narrator and mainly Standard English when it shifts to Bella’s point of view, the narrative develops in sometimes elliptical fragments the clandestine ménage à trois that Cliff is drawn into with the holidaying couple. The dreamscape of the island is differently experienced by the locals, especially Cliff and his sister Lynette, who seem to spend their time idly watching American soap operas and drama series like Baywatch, and Ossi, who whiles away hours on his undersized bicycle: ‘Gone. Off roaming’ (). And yet, when Cliff tells someone, ‘I gone’, he admits to himself, ‘But wasn’ nowhere to go’ (). Just like the boys, then, the sea, so relished by Bella (much to Cliff’s bemusement over what is for him an everyday setting rather than an extraordinary ‘view’), becomes ‘aimless’, ‘going out, coming in, going out and coming back in’ (). The Sisyphean repetition of movement here contrasts with the more expansive mobility of tourists who want to ‘come in’ as against natives who can’t wait to be ‘gone’ but lack the means to do so. The fantasies of leisure, freedom of movement, economic security, and consumerist pleasure that keep Cliff and Lynette glued to American TV shows and induce women like Miss Brandon in Rhone’s play to entice American tourists to take them to the United States are ultimately beyond reach. While both the boys seem street smart and sexually precocious, Cliff’s status in the couple’s sex lives is left in no doubt when he sees a life-size wooden carving of a naked Black boy in their house, and notices that ‘the crotch bump out’ (). Tellingly, the piece is referred to as ‘De Black Dallie’, perhaps signifying on actual dolls of the kind that are sold as raunchy souvenirs of the ‘rent-a-dread’ market, but also situating Cliff as the boy toy here. While Peter occasionally offers verbal ‘sexual ruderies’ regarding Cliff’s genitals, the plot does not make explicit the nature of their interactions when things get heated, since Bella is the main node of this threesome. And while she wavers between guilt and pleasure (she is herself the mother of a young boy), neither Cliff nor Ossi is presented as an ingénue. Their ‘Mudda’, in fact, is vastly amused to learn of Ossi’s affairs with other women, and seems too busy to pay attention to her children. Several stereotypes are in play here, with the overburdened working mother and the ‘sweet men’ or ‘saga/swagger boys’ that her sons could become. As Bella rather hypocritically points out to Thomas, her domestic servant: Work? According to them, construction work is ‘slave wo’k,’ Thomas. Working in hotel is ‘slave wo’k.’ Fishing too hard, too much hot sun. Farming is ‘old-time wo’k.’ Hear nuh, in Immortelle Valley Restaurant the
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. other day, a young waiter stand up – in front of women working there and the customers – stand up and say, ‘I can get more money working on the beach.’ He means hustling tourist women! When a woman asked him if he ain’ shame, he say, ‘No. Is money.’ Stand up bold-face saying that! ()
Despite Bella’s outrage, her illusion that her own sexual encounters with Cliff are not sullied by commerce is abruptly and predictably shattered when he flees with a large sum in cash and ‘borrows’ her car, ultimately getting thrashed by the police and leaving Peter and Bella appalled not just by the thefts but by the other costs of their erotic adult games. As Bella muses in the end, deciding whom exactly is the ‘t’ief’ and what precisely is stolen leads to the unsettling conviction that they are all guilty. By incorporating domestic tourism, Kempadoo disrupts the white– black, North–South binary that Rhone, Walcott, Kincaid and Senior emphasize, and reveals the collusion of native elites in contradictory racial stereotypes. While at ease with the drunken nightclub revelry that V. S. Naipaul and Walcott bemoan in their critique of the islands’ commercialization, Bella’s friend Small Clit is rather nervous about the intrusion of Black bodies into the comfortable white and brown contours of their lives. Ironically, her fear of the ‘black-black’ is precisely what seems to incite Bella’s and Peter’s sexual drive. Bella notes that a restaurant site and nature centre used to be an Amerindian settlement, and many of the hotels, one may add, were former plantations. ‘Like in the rest of this beautiful island, the bitter taste of slavery is in the earth itself, drawn up by the trees into their leaves, a rot in the seed of their fruit. [. . .] Now tourism is the trade, the new crop’, she piously reflects, agreeing with those who believe that tourism is too infected to be healthy on the islands (). But while Bella conveniently blames this disease on the service industry catering to nonnative white consumers and lining the pockets of local politicians, Kempadoo shows us that Kincaid is right: every native can also be a tourist elsewhere. Kincaid’s own later travels to Nepal as a US citizen provide an ironic interface with her critique of Caribbean tourism. Although Bella’s insincere disapproval of sex for hire is shared by the ‘respectable’ Caribbean communities, ‘notwithstanding the immense stigma attached to it and the dangers for unprotected workers, [sex work] easily remains among the most economically viable options for poor women with limited education’. While Guyanese Indigenous, African and Indian women may be less engaged in tourism-related prostitution, they participate in the sex trade and more informal sexual alliances in urban spaces and mining camps for many of the same reasons as their compatriots in island resorts.
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Rahul Bhattacharya’s travelogue The Sly Company of People Who Care () changes direction when Bhattacharya engages in one such relationship with Janaki, a woman of partly East Indian descent he becomes acquainted with while living in and travelling through Guyana. Until that point, he largely succeeds in immersing himself in the community even as an outsider from India, wittily describing his relationships with the eccentric locals and discussing the history of the places he visits with the sharpness of Naipaul. Unlike the latter’s vaunted disillusionment with the Caribbean, Bhattacharya convincingly expresses his affection for the location of his yearlong sojourn, until he pursues Janaki, subsequently implying a shallower relationship with Guyana than he realizes. The ‘romance’ between Bhattacharya and Janaki quickly dissolves as they travel together to Venezuela and she expects him to buy her clothing, support her economically and even take her back with him to India. Increasingly resentful of her demands and uneasily conscious of taking advantage of her vulnerability, he blurts out, ‘You’d go away with any fool if he gave you a couple of things.’ The affair promptly goes sour and Janaki falsely accuses him of drug peddling, leading to a frightening encounter with Guyanese police at the border and almost preventing his return to India. It is at this point that he discovers how dissoluble the porous boundaries between traveller, researcher, writer and tourist are, as the police sneer at his explanation of a ‘holiday’ in Guyana and his interest in its ‘culture’. Their cynicism is a sad commentary on the more expected native flight outward and the superficial nature of tourism which, in contemporary postmodern form, involves spending less time on land than on the Disneyfied cruise ship that conveys one there. Unlike Janaki, though, who is led away by the police and disappears forever from his sight, Bhattacharya’s economic and cultural capital allows him to buy his freedom, although he is haunted by the alarming experience that concludes his stay in Guyana. The officer’s contempt for the Indian national echoes the shocking ending of a ‘native’ tourist contretemps related in Robert Antoni’s Carnival () after the seasonal gaiety in Trinidad ends in violence that detonates on a young Black man recruited for sex. The literal castration of this young man falsely accused of rape suggests that Rhone’s cautionary title implying emasculation has a point. ‘Go on back to wherever you come from, England or America or wherever the fock it is!’ the policeman in charge orders, indifferent to the distinction between the returning native and white tourists from ‘wherever’. Despite his attachment to Guyana, Bhattacharya finds himself equally unwelcome by the police. The initially
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humorous tone of his narrative ends in melancholy, and the single final word of the text, ‘Gone’, condenses the morning-after syndrome of naïve tourist behaviour as well as the privilege of the non-resident who sometimes gets to escape the consequences, just as we see in Kempadoo’s and Antoni’s novels. Female prostitutes are either demonized or victimized in conventional moral panic discourses of decency, morality, hygiene and fears of disease, while the increasing role of men in such exchanges are more ambivalently identified. As Kamala Kempadoo notes, hegemonic masculinity and hypersexual raced identity authorize the men to reject terms like ‘prostitute, puta, whore or sex worker’, for ‘“beach boy”, “island boy”, “player”, “gigolo”, “sanky panky”, or “hustler”’. The white and/or wealthy women who pay these men ‘combine economic power and authority with sexual submission and subordination’ (). While metropolitan men express dissatisfaction with women at home and exoticize seemingly submissive native women on islands, women may seek sexual danger in tropical locales, where they can temporarily cut loose from vexing restrictions at home, as the predatory female tourists in Dany Laferrière’s short story cycle Heading South () demonstrate. However dubious the actual power of the ‘island boy’ may be, the battle for mastery is located within racial, class and sexual conflicts in Heading South. A fictional extreme of Frantz Fanon’s controversial study of mutually manipulative black–white psychosexual dynamics, the stories, set in Haiti in the s and first published in French (with a film version), subscribe a little too enthusiastically to serial typecasts of insatiably lustful white women and devious black studs. Many of the males are little more than teenagers calculatingly dominating older women or spoiled, rich white girls desperate for sex with their racialized fantasies. With titles like ‘Even Nice Girls Do It’, ‘Woman of Prey’ and ‘Magic Boys’, the sexually explicit stories revolve around the struggle for control between wealthy, mixed-race and light-skinned Haitians, privileged white visitors and tourists, and the Black poor, with sex between them mapping uneven political and economic terrain. ‘In the end, everyone sleeps with everyone else’, confesses Madame Sainte-Pierre, one of the local elites caught up in the erotic round robin. When Mauléon Mauléus, a returning migrant from New York, has the brainwave of using the predictable throng of underemployed youths liming at the beach to save his bankrupt hotel, things do indeed go south, one of the potential meanings of the book’s title. The short story titled ‘Heading South’ jumps from one lonely, middle-aged, sexually frustrated
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female tourist’s perspective to another, ultimately adding up to an exploitative portrait of the ‘magic boys’, also referred to as ‘the children of the sun god’ and the ‘gold mine’ in another story (). The legend of El Dorado, invoked in Senior’s poem to describe hordes of sunbathers pursuing a bronzed tan, is transferred here to the youth compelled to sell their bodies. The desirable teenager Legba, whom the women compete over, is also suspected to be a drug dealer and, not surprisingly, is found murdered. The police never solve the crime, but the inspector in charge of the case concludes cryptically in a later story, ‘A tourist never dies’ (). While tourists obviously do get assaulted and even die, as in Rhone’s play, the figurative meaning of the inspector’s evasive verdict explains why Caribbean literature veers towards a more negative portrayal of tourism. As in Tide Running and Sly Company, the predator and prey keep exchanging places, and legal justice seems impaired by the absence of social justice. Mayra Santos-Febres’s Sirena Selena () and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun () focus on scheming, unscrupulous characters grittily determined to escape their poverty, but their choices seem restricted by their rapacious, morally bankrupt societies. These contemporary literary accounts of tourism are darker and even more cynical than the earlier texts, and they make it difficult to idealize them as postindependence accounts in which trickster figures have some potential for resistance. Both novels go beyond the heterosexual plot and gender binaries, but neither Santos-Febres’s transgender protagonist nor the same-sex desires of Here Comes stimulate postcolonial epiphanies of an ‘awoke’ social collective. The potential for individual liberation constrained by intransigent social inequalities seems limited. If the novels are read as national allegories they provide a rather bleak scenario, since they both significantly miniaturize direct white tourist presence and foreground local politics and power struggles, yet seem unable to shed earlier colonial formations. The adopted name of Sirena in Santos-Febres’s text expresses the ambivalent status of the adolescent who straddles gender identities, using their divine voice, transvestism and performative shtick to seek freedom from the streets. Sirena’s magical vocals allude to the Greek myth of partly human sirens, reputed to be prostitutes and notorious for tempting hapless heroes with their songs and killing them. But in the novel, the melodies stream forth when Sirena is forced into sex with much older male customers, rendering suspect the process of seduction and linking creativity and voice with violence and the struggle for survival. The narrative traces inter-island trajectories between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, locating Spanish-speaking communities in the Caribbean transgender and
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transsexual sex trade. Charges of paedophilia and pederasty have long been levelled against homosexuals, but, as Joseph Boone notes of Orientalist versions, the agency of the child and the age of the ‘boy’ are not simple calibrations. While ‘polymorphous perversity’ and the homoerotic provide a space for gay self-affirmation, they complicate facile readings of race, class, nation, deviance and desire. Scholars like Kamala Kempadoo and Anthony Carrigan advocate a more nuanced approach to the issue of the child sex trade that both Sirena and Here Comes also adopt. Just as with the moralizing discourse against prostitution, reducing the children who engage in the sex trade to solely dehumanized victims negates their desperate struggles to provide an income to their families. But it is also impossible to be blind to the rupture of the social fabric, the multiple levels of exploitation that tourism enables as it works its toxic tentacles into family breakdown, structural and cultural decline, and a fragmented sense of community. As Albert, the bartender of a tourist hotel, alluding to the US invasions of Haiti, observes in Heading South: This new army of occupation isn’t armed, but it has packed its suitcase with a scourge much worse than cannons: drugs. The Queen of Crimes, and she always comes with her two sidekicks: easy money and sex. There’s nothing here, sir, that hasn’t been touched by one or the other of these plagues. There was a time when we had morals. Now I look around me and I see that everything has come crashing down. ()
Albert’s nostalgia for lost morals, especially since he is not above exploiting Legba and is one of the suspects for his murder, is rather disingenuous. But it allows an ironic reversal of the sinful pleasures of the Caribbean embedded in colonial slippages from ‘Edenism to hedonism’, in Sheller’s phrase. The threat of corruption and degeneracy hovering over foreign visitors is transferred to the decadence and corrosion of the islands as a result of mass tourism. All the writers I mention here map this cascading series of ‘plagues’ in the same way Albert does. ‘God Nuh Like Ugly’, the dark-skinned Thandi is told as she is encouraged to lighten her skin with creams, but in Dennis-Benn’s stringently critical perspective of Jamaican society from top to bottom, Here Comes reverses the charge of ugliness. Raped as a child and pressured by Delores, her ambitious mother, and Margot, her even more ruthless sister, to become middle-class through her education and liberate them from their poverty, Thandi eventually ends up prostituting herself like Margot has secretly been doing all along at the Montego Bay resort. The novel is
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startlingly unsentimental, even caricatured, in its depiction of subaltern populations, but it also makes their anger and frustration understandable. Unlike Rhone’s comedic portrayal of local collusion and corruption in the s, the novel has a bleaker vision of contemporary Jamaican society and a less forgiving sense of trickster figures doing what they believe they must do in order to survive. There are few redeeming characters, and the bulldozing of the entire village to allow for more hotel development, along with the disintegration of Margot’s family, provide the novel’s last word on Jamaican involvement with tourism, balefully hovering over the characters and corrupting almost all of them. Although Thandi does not engage with romance or sex tourism, she offers herself to the rich pimp for ‘love’, an emotion her mother demeans since it has no value in the dog-eat-dog world they cannot seem to escape. The societal collapse that Albert mourns and Thandi’s family endures becomes even more literal when confronting the environmental effects of tourism. Senior’s poem ‘Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure’ reveals another landscape that lies concealed or overlooked in brochure imaginaries. It is an elegy on the grievous losses that threaten not just human but ecological futurity. Soil is stolen, the coast is eroded, mountains are mined, rivers run dry, coral reefs, fauna, and flora perish, yet, the narrator caustically implies, the general attitude seems to be ‘No Problem, Mon’. Similarly, at first it seems that Esther Figueroa’s novel Limbo () could just as well move Dante’s dictum on abandoning hope from the gates of hell to the island of Jamaica. The novel begins with two epigraphs, the first from Dante’s Inferno where the ‘pallid’ Poet looks compassionately upon those yearning souls suspended in Limbo. The second epigraph is from Kamau Brathwaite’s more affirmative lines in his poem ‘Limbo’ on the slaves making it out of the Middle Passage and into the New World. The somewhat obviously named Flora Smith is the struggling Executive Director and founder of Environment First. Facing an indifferent public, inadequate funds, greedy developers, threatened lawsuits, sinister drug and money laundering cartels, and crooked bureaucrats, she is initially overwhelmed by the precipitous fall of the New World into environmental disaster and social anomie. In contrast to DennisBenn’s dystopian novel, and despite Figueroa’s characterization of her novel as a ‘satire’, Flora and her companions idealistically rise above the corruption and nihilism. The community fights back, and Flora’s media savvy, academic credentials, and powerful connections in the United States, and the dedication of those on the island who fight alongside her, suggest that transnational calls for cleaner technologies and ‘new’ or ‘slow’
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tourism might possibly halt the slide. Such a call to arms in the novel is an urgent task, given the high risks of climate change, rising oceans and sinking land on island archipelagos that are more vulnerable to tourist pollution and less able to recover from hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Although Figueroa is more interested in environmental protection than in reforming the tourism industry, she acknowledges both the deleterious effects of the latter as well as the local dependence on foreign visitors. If the ‘fatal impact’ story for indigenous peoples seems premature, so, too, Carrigan claims, is the stance that ‘tourism is whorism’, a universally toxic monolith that cannot be redeemed. Any homogeneous notion of ‘the tourist gaze’ does not hold, since such a diverse collectivity across time, space and context cannot be reduced to a singular arc of aggressive sightseeing. Several scholars and authors reveal resistance to tourist incursions and present contested rather than static gazes. Besides, as Flora observes, the residents themselves are quite complicit in the degradation and exploitation that are entrenched in the system at its worst. While paying attention to the locals’ need for employment opportunities is imperative, some of them have difficulty in not consuming the ‘myth reality of paradise’ and uncritically support tourism. But when places, people and relationships are ethically negotiated, there is some potential to learn from and transform each other. Carrigan has faith that the literature will provide not just fictional perspectives but also an anticipatory ethical project, offering insights that ‘can play an important role in the industry’s ongoing diversification and decolonization’. In A Small Place, Kincaid speaks approvingly of the people who stayed at home as against those who imposed themselves on other countries. But from a different point of view, ‘it is not such a bad idea that we should return home a little wiser and more knowledgeable about the world than we were when we left home’. Even Walcott, who was a staunch opponent of tourism in St Lucia, moderated his stance in his later years, and Polly Pattullo concludes her denunciation of tourism by admitting that ‘a compatible future must be found’. But Figueroa remains sceptical of tourist presence and adopts a combative stance against what has been called ‘leisure imperialism’. Flora’s decision to buy a former plantation named Hope Gardens and use it as an independent base for environmental education and advocacy suggests, however formulaically, that the seeds for radical transformation can be sown in the most unpromising soil and the paralyzing effects of the tourist gaze might yet be immobilized.
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Notes Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Plume, ). Steven Gregory, ‘Men in Paradise: Sex Tourism and the Political Economy of Masculinity’, in Donald S. Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian (eds.), Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, . Gregory adds that the submissive characterization of the service industry ‘finds structural expression in the sexual division of labor’ where women are disproportionately represented in low-skill and lowwage jobs (). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Middlesex, Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), . Malcolm Crick, ‘Representations of International Tourism in the Social Sciences: Sun, Sex, Sights, Savings, and Servility’, Annual Review of Anthropology, (), –, . Elizabeth A. Mackay and Andrew Spencer, ‘The Future of Caribbean Tourism: Competition and Climate Change Implications’, Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, . (), –, . Frank Fonda Taylor, To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, ). Taylor borrows his title from a speech by Sir James Mitchell, former Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, who insists that there never was a paradise to begin with, so there should be none to sell (ix). See in particular Taylor, To Hell with Paradise, Chapter (‘Ratooning of the Plantation’). Trevor D. Rhone, Old Story Time and Smile Orange (London: Longman Caribbean, ), ix. Subsequent references given parenthetically. Tresa Baldas, ‘Jamaica Resorts Covered Up Sexual Assaults, Silenced Victims for Years’, Detroit Free Press, Dec , www.freep.com/story/news/local/ michigan////jamaica-resort-sexual-assault-sandals/. Derek Walcott, Pantomime, in Helen Gilbert (ed.), Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology (Oxford: Routledge, ), –, . Ibid., . Olive Senior, ‘Meditation on Yellow’, in Gardening in the Tropics (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, ), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Kei Miller also uses the ‘you’ to address island visitors in his essay ‘These Islands of Love and Hate’, in Writing Down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), –. Here Miller draws on the tone and style of Kincaid’s earlier writing while also referencing the discourse of love associated with Jamaica as captured in Michael Manley’s s political slogan ‘The world is love’. Miller’s essay was written in response to two tourist murders in . Kincaid, A Small Place, .
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Stewart Brown, ‘Whales’, in Jane Bryce (ed.), Caribbean Dispatches: Beyond the Tourist Dream (Oxford: Macmillan, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Stewart Brown, ‘Peace an’ Love’, in Bryce (ed.), Caribbean Dispatches, –. Jamaican Tourist Board, ‘Jamaica Home of All Right: Home’, jtbonline.org. Neki Mohan, ‘Alicia Keys Recreates Iconic Jamaica Tourism Poster Cover’, Local.com, August , www.local.com/news/alicia-keys-recreatesiconic-jamaica-tourism-poster-cover. Summarizing Damien Marley, Welcome to Jamrock, CD, Tuff Gong and Universal Records, . Kincaid, A Small Place, . Mimi Sheller, ‘Demobilizing and Remobilizing Caribbean Paradise’, in Mimi Sheller and John Urry (eds.), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (London: Routledge, ), –, . Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ); Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Oonya Kempadoo, Tide Running (Boston, MA: Beacon, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Naipaul complains in The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch – in the West Indies and South America, (New York: Vintage, ) that calypso is a witty ‘purely local form’ now ‘debased’ by artists who ‘take pleasure in living up to the ideals of the tourist brochure’. He adds, ‘nothing pleases Trinidadians so much as to see their culture being applauded by white American tourists in the night-clubs’ (, ). Walcott’s essay ‘What the Twilight Says’ has some echoes of Naipaul’s indictment of cultural commercialism, whatever the animosity between the two writers. The former links such capitulation to ‘the old colonial grimace of the laughing nigger, steelbandsman, carnival masker, calypsonian, and limbo dancer’, and accuses the state of marketing folk arts to outsiders for profit; Derek Walcott, ‘What the Twilight Says’, in What the Twilight Says (London: Faber and Faber, ), –, . Jackson Phillip’s rejection of such roles in the service of the metropole in Pantomime is thus an overdue declaration of Caribbean sovereignty. Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, ). Red Thread Women’s Development Programme, ‘“Givin’ Lil’ Bit fuh Lil’ Bit”: Women and Sex Work in Guyana’, in Kamala Kempadoo (ed.), Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, ), –, . Rahul Bhattacharya, The Sly Company of People Who Care (London: Picador, ), . Ibid., .
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Robert Antoni, Carnival (New York: Black Cat, ), . Kamala Kempadoo, ‘Continuities and Change: Five Centuries of Prostitution in the Caribbean’, in Kempadoo (ed.), Sun, Sex, and Gold, –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, ). Dany Laferrière, Heading South, trans. Wayne Grady (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Mayra Santos-Febres, Sirena Selena, trans. Stephen Lytle (New York: Picador, ); Nicole Dennis-Benn, Here Comes the Sun (New York: Liveright, ). For a Cuban context, see Mette Louise Berg, ‘“Sleeping with the Enemy”: Jineterismo, “Cultural Level” and “Antisocial Behaviour” in s Cuba’, in Sandra Courtman (ed.), Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana (Kingston: Ian Randle, ), –. In the racialization of otherwise gendered binaries, Afro-Cuban women are associated with sex and white Cuban women with romance tourism, claims Berg (). The rhetoric of imported capitalist degeneracy circulated by the socialist regime ignores the economic constraints forcing Cuban women and men into the tourist sex trade. Joseph A. Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism’, in John Charles Hawley (ed.), Post-Colonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections (Albany: State University of New York Press, ), –, n. . Ibid., . Anthony Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism: Literature, Culture, and Environment (New York: Routledge, ). Olive Senior, ‘Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure’, in Bryce (ed.), Caribbean Dispatches, –, . Esther Figueroa, Limbo: A Novel about Jamaica (New York: Arcade, ). Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism, , . Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), . See also George Gmelch, Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ). Carrigan, Postcolonial Tourism, . Martin Mowforth, Clive Charlton and Ian Munt, Tourism and Responsibility: Perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean (London: Routledge, ), . Polly Pattullo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean (London: Cassell, ), .
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Caribbean Subjects in the World Kezia A. Page
The Caribbean has long been understood to extend beyond the curved spine of the archipelago – stretching from Bermuda down to Trinidad, and still beyond the Guianas, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao, to the Central American nations, which are not only washed by the Caribbean Sea, but shaped by a common history of plunder and creole victory, as well as a shared present wracked by neoliberal imperatives. In a region formed by multiple displacements across continents, as well as many migrations between extended Caribbean spaces, it is no surprise that elsewhere has always been on the minds of Caribbean writers. This relation between Caribbean writings and a complicated global geography has been further compounded by the way in which professional authorship has most often involved migration out of the region to the metropolises of the global North. The few who have stayed, such as Erna Brodber, Earl Lovelace, Karen Lord and Sharon Millar, have written a world familiar and strange and essential. Yet, in the s, the canon of West Indian literature was formed by the literary activities in London of male novelists – George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer, V. S. Naipaul, Andrew Salkey and Sam Selvon to name a few – who saw their art as integral to conceiving of the respective nations to which they belonged. In the context of a history in which, as the Jamaican cultural critic Stuart Hall noted, ‘the Caribbean is already the diaspora of Africa, Europe, China, Asia, India, and this diaspora re-diasporized itself’, Caribbean writers have left the region just as much as other Caribbean people. From the s onwards, the United States and Canada became places where significant numbers of Caribbean writers migrated, often initially for the higher education that preceded their writing careers. In this phase, women writers were prominent, including Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Ramabai Espinet, Shani Mootoo and M. NourbeSe Philip; and writers sometimes settled in the US as a second migration after a career in the UK, as with Merle Collins and Caryl Phillips. The complex character of transnational
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belonging both continued and shifted again as second-generation Caribbean writers were born to migrant parents. In the twenty-first century, the shared North American space has come to host Caribbean diasporas from all the region’s language zones writing and publishing in English, as the generation of Haitian-American Edwidge Danticat, Dominican-American Junot Díaz and Canadian-Trinidadian David Chariandy testifies. This growth and the attendant recognition of transnational Caribbean writers and writings has also sparked the growth of translations and writing across mother tongues. All the same, the contemporary scholarly impetus of Caribbean writing has been dominated by attention to writers based in North America and in Britain mainly, with some acknowledgement of France, Spain and the Netherlands – these being the metropoles and crannies where Caribbean peoples have made home in the largest numbers in tandem with the language zones from which they or their families came, though this is not always the case. The body of literature that I address here departs from the creative and critical contours of Caribbean literature as predicted by the residual place of empire and the carving up of a Caribbean literary tradition according to language groups to consider a different dimension of the relationship between Caribbean writings and the world. In these works, Caribbean subjects move beyond imperial designations of language and culture to explore the globe and test the ideas and limits of their freedom to be in and to claim the globe. First, their journeys are not mapped solely by the Black Atlantic and the kala pani that have been so defining in Caribbean history. In Jacqueline Bishop’s Snapshots from Istanbul () and Ana Menéndez’s The Last War (), there are a Jamaican and a second generation Dominican, respectively, in Istanbul; in Angela Barry’s Gorée () a St Lucian in England, France and Senegal; and Jamaica Kincaid walks the Himalayas in Among Flowers (). In Gisèle Pineau’s Exile According to Julia (), France is a relentless disappointment to the protagonist, for she, like Caryl Phillips in The European Tribe (), realizes that her blackness disqualifies her from belonging and she must still look elsewhere or to multiple elsewheres. Second, writing outside of the communities as we have known them causes Caribbean subjects right across the region and its diasporas to rethink what is necessary and what marks authenticity in the narration of a Caribbean story or self. The writing considered here often pushes the limits of transnationality/locality and belonging. These works no longer hold the relationship between the Caribbean and narrative interests together in set ways. They thereby open up the possibilities for new canons and for their place on new syllabuses, and with new
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readerships. Third, the term diaspora has much less relevance in relation to these texts than it might in another discussion about Caribbean writing beyond the geography of the region. There are no communities of Caribbean peoples, living and speaking in Caribbean ways and longing for home in these works. In this way, this essay engages literature – fiction, poetry and travel narrative – of this century and the last, which considers the Caribbean subject beyond the diasporas of North America and colonial Europe. It considers subjects that are multi-placed and multi-identified, thus challenging traditional ideas of Caribbean community and traditional ideas of Caribbean diaspora and the writings that give these ideas meaning. This essay considers seven texts: Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe (); Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (); Gisèle Pineau’s Exile According to Julia (); Jamaica Kincaid’s Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (); Jacqueline Bishop’s Snapshots from Istanbul (); Ana Menéndez’s The Last War (); and Angela Barry’s Gorée: Point of Departure (). These works present Caribbean subjects across the world, from Europe – Gibraltar, Munich, Paris, the south of France, Oslo, Venice, Moscow, Amsterdam – to Istanbul and Afghanistan; in Curacao, St Lucia, Guadeloupe and Martinique; in Senegal and other parts of French-speaking Africa. More than the fact that the countries and cities on this list are not often considered the likely setting for Caribbean literature, the texts included here sometimes press against the limits of what makes a story Caribbean or a person Caribbean. They inspire fresh perspectives and provoke questions of established critical paradigms. These questions include: are the themes of migrancy and diaspora experienced differently for Caribbean people outside of North America and colonial Europe? How do double-crossings impact our idea of Caribbeanness? Is Caribbeanness distinctive – perhaps unspoken but clearly evident? How connected is Caribbeanness to notions of place and space when movement, migration and displacement, particularly beyond anticipated sites of arrival, function as theme and form in our writings? Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon collapses many of the assumptions around travel and history in Caribbean literature. Brand’s narrative suggests that travel, like the history of the Caribbean, is marked by violence. The novel begins with the enslaved Marie Ursule sending the other slaves on De Lambert’s plantation to the beyond (she gives a potent death potion to each slave, except for her daughter Bola and Bola’s father, Kamena) and Bola being sent away on Kamena’s back singing the chant,
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‘Marie Ursule, Marie Ursule [. . .]’. Violent travel is the legacy of this opening scene, which is followed by Marie Ursule’s own limbs being torn apart as punishment, and Bola’s psychic and emotional dismemberment that is never healed, but rather passed down as her progeny is scattered from the shores of Culebra Bay. Marie Ursule sharply retards the power of empire to define her, but she and all the others must die for this to be so. There is a stark and pressing brutality in her choice, and because the narrative begins with these deaths, death and sending Bola away are part of the same strange tragedy. Brand’s novel presents a new and marked perspective on Caribbean subjects in the world; and we might read the stories of Marie Ursule and Bola as provenance narratives or beginning stories. The enslaved woman, Marie Ursule, is only known to us as rebel, seeker of freedom by any means, ‘Marie Ursule, queen of the Convoi Sans Peur; queen of rebels; queen of evenings, queen of malingerings and sabotages; queen of ruin [. . .]’ (). Though it is likely that she is African or of African descent, it is noteworthy that she learns her magic from the Caribs. And after perfecting the power and potency of woorara, Marie Ursule administers it to all the enslaved on the plantation. That the African Marie Ursule finally finds full success in an indigenous potion supports the theory that this is a narrative about beginnings, about the making of myths that seem both to bind and to release people to and from a particular place. And of course, that it is the fated/freeing morning that begins the novel and Bola’s being sent away, ‘but sending Bola far into the hills and the impenetrable bush beyond, beyond the reach of De Lambert and his like, that was her one conceit now, her one little ambition’ (). We know that Marie Ursule’s sending of Bola is not just the first ‘beyond’ of the quote, but the second ‘beyond’ too. Bola’s first escape is from the plantation, and then we come to see just how much further her conceit will fly; she like her mother sends many from her own loins away from herself. The idea of migration as escape and rebellion is not new to Caribbean literature, but dispersal as self-indulgence, self-care and resistance is another thing. As the orchestrator of the death-rebellion, Marie Ursule allows herself the possibility to fulfil her ambition. While she assures the other enslaved a kind of freedom, their only ambition is in death; without names, conceit or temporal future, all is at an end for them. The expanse of Marie Ursule’s death-plot is wide and staggering; to deny De Lambert his property, she must finish them completely and she must live long enough to look him in his distraught eye. Her decision to allow Bola escape, on the other hand, facilitates perpetuity. As Bola sets out on Kamena’s back, her
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mother gazes into Bola’s eyes: ‘She saw the big ragged map of the world. She saw something fierce in Bola, a need to strain the ocean between her teeth like a rorqual swallowing flying fish, xiphias and baracouta, she saw Bola swimming into the future [. . .] cities and syringes and ships and windows of pictures [. . .]’ (). Bola’s eyes are a prophetic window. The ‘big ragged map of the world’ is a wonderful portend of the journeys her children will take even as it implies the unseemliness of them. The map also recalls the broken cartography that plunged the Caribbean into being in the European imagination and the Caribbean subjects’ reclaiming of cartography. The cities and syringes that are part of their shared pupillary vision suggest the limited choices available to Bola’s children and the destruction and violence that is always close at hand. Maya Dovett is one of Bola’s children and at the same time a reincarnation of Marie Ursule and Bola. Like her foremothers, she abandons her children and anyone who might hinder her desperate desire to live free. While her blackness is not made the centre of her discomfort in Toronto and Amsterdam, we know that part of her bid for freedom is to escape the narrow ideas white people have of her, and the narrow ideas that her immigrant family and friends have of their lives in diaspora and in the world. In Amsterdam, the Curaçao-born woman surrenders the sure immigrant-work of nursing the elderly for a place in a window in the Red Light District. In this window, she resists her pimp’s instructions perhaps as forcefully as she resists her mother’s deep dependency on her father, Mr Dovett, and the domesticity her mother uses to fill the constant void of him. In one of the final chapters, ‘Blue Airmail Letter’, the child writes a letter to her dead mother. The letter itself must journey from Canada to Curaçao, but its contents go much farther and beyond. The symbolic track initiated by the window and the letters highlights the novel’s refusal of traditional diaspora discourse. Maya’s vantage point in the window opens out the vista of another world that is aslant the one her equally yet differently recalcitrant forbears had envisaged: while her radical recalcitrance recalls theirs and roots her in their genealogy (both bloodline and resistance), ultimately her choice of the Red Light District renders their immigrant choices conservative and limited. Similarly, the meandering journeys, ‘deaths’ and reincarnated lives of the letters remind us that words themselves travel and have a curious life in the world, often in ways that surpass their intended meaning. Insofar as the epistolary word is the expression of a voice that is alive in its moment of articulation but acquires different sounds in the various contexts in which it is read, so Maya carries both memory and connection on one hand, and loss and
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departure on the other, in relation to her forbears and the world-space they inhabited and conceived. Caryl Phillips’s narrative of his travels through Europe in the late s does not suggest that race is simple nor that blackness is desired for the most part. Born in St Kitts only to be migrated to Britain at six months old, Phillips’s travels prove that the racist culture of Britain he grew up in is not specific to that island alone. If Brand’s novel functions as a kind of origin narrative, Phillips’s travel narrative theorizes the Caribbean traveller as raced subject in a world where few other defining options are possible. While it seems already reductive to call Phillips simply Caribbean or to narrow how he is perceived in this way, what is clear from Casablanca to Gibraltar, from Provence to Venice, from Paris to Amsterdam, from Belfast to Munich to West Berlin, in Warsaw, Oslo, Tromsö, and all the way to Moscow, is that his blackness is luggage he just can’t stow. In Venice, he recalls Shakespeare’s Othello and what it must have meant for him, an accomplished military man, to lose his self-assurance in the manner that he does. Phillips notes how, ‘Othello has married into the society, the commonest form of acceptance. It is now that the tragedy commences. But it can only do so because it is precisely at this moment of “triumph” that Othello begins to forget that he is black.’ Phillips begins his narrative with a kind of hyper awareness of his blackness when his African American friend at Oxford, Emile Leroi Watts, encourages him to travel to the United States. We know from his journey what this brand of racism looks like. In the US it does not matter that he is mostly British. It is not under-your-breath racism; it is open and vile. Phillips’s visits with James Baldwin confirm this; Baldwin’s doubled affliction as Black and homosexual makes the US noxious to him. Phillips’s journey, like Baldwin’s, asks the question: where does the Black (man) belong? Phillips had been to the Caribbean first, ‘but still felt like a transplanted tree that had failed to take root in foreign soil’ and this disappointment ‘heightened an already burning desire to increase [his] awareness of Europe and Europeans’ (). Yet his European travels show that the answer is not Europe, neither is it a country nor a region. In these works by Brand and Phillips, the centrality of race not space, in particular, as a kind of coming to terms with blackness and what it means in the world for Caribbean people is key. My hunch is that what it means is not new, but rather that the impact of blackness, in particular, is experienced anew in the process of dispersal that Brand narrates and in the multiple movements and crossings that constitute Phillips’s journeys. In literature, especially of the contemporary moment, blackness is often
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connected to the African American experience in the US and the experience of blackness there, more generally, subsumes the complexity of black identity globally. This is not simply in the outsiders’ interpretation of a person, but the persons’ understanding of her/himself. When blackness is not in question or when it is not a defining characteristic, identity is set adrift. In the work of Brand and Phillips, however, the experience of blackness is largely detached from a typical African American experience. In fact, Phillips’s journeys in Europe, like the journeys of Bola’s children, are so far from this dominant discourse that, even though race is at the forefront of their experiences, we could miss it because we are expecting it to produce an African American discourse and response. In Snapshots from Istanbul, a collection of poems by Jacqueline Bishop, and the novels Gorée: Point of Departure and The Last War by Angela Barry and Ana Menéndez respectively, the impositions of African American identity on Caribbean characters is also evident, alongside the idea that Caribbean subjects unmarked by racial classification, in particular blackness, can elude a Caribbean identity altogether. Bishop, who migrated from Jamaica to the US for higher education and now lives in New York, also spent a year in Paris and another in Morocco. More recently, she has also written about her travels to Venice and South America. Bishop’s commitment to expanding the field of Caribbean literature is also shown in her founding of Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Arts and Letters, which places a special emphasis on publishing works from under-represented parts of the Caribbean: ‘Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles, Maroon societies, and the Asian and Amerindian societies of the region’. For Barry, a Bermudian writer, who now lives and writes from her birthplace after more than two decades studying in the UK and France and living in The Gambia, Senegal and the Seychelles, the global canvas of her fictional and life stories correspond. Her creative exploration of what it means to be of African descent and to be in Africa and the historical traumas/catastrophes of the black Atlantic that connect Africa, the Caribbean, the US and the UK began in her short story collection, Endangered Species and Other Stories, and continues in Gorée. Menéndez’s story is differently transnational as she was born to Cuban parents who moved to Los Angeles in but who did not anticipate a permanent migration. Menéndez spoke only Spanish until her schooling, and her writings have consistently engaged with Cuba from her collection of short stories, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, and her first novel, Loving Che, published in , to her second short story collection, Adios, Happy Homeland! in . She also spent a year in Cairo, and The Last War
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() narrates her time in Iraq while married to a reporter based there, drawing on her lived experience with her ex-husband. Bishop’s Snapshots is divided into two sections: the first section where the speaker experiences Istanbul and the second where the speaker longs for her lover Hasan who cannot be with her in the way she desires because she is not Muslim, because she is not Turkish. In the first section, we learn that the speaker navigates Istanbul as a double crosser. She is often referred to as the American, she makes mention of home in New York, but home is Jamaica too. In the poem, ‘Reading Sylvia Plath in Istanbul’, Bishop reaches the core of this hurt: Of course one hopes that wherever she was so in a hurry to get to, has opened its arms wide to her; has arranged its veil in a welcoming shape. Two days ago we celebrated New Year’s in this place. I felt so far away from home – even when I no longer know what that word means.
Here, we see that the speaker’s place in relation to home is about distance and about culture. It is made clear that living in a place does not signify an embrace of or by that place. The collection is ultimately about a love that cannot be, despite the direct and petulant questioning of tradition/expectation. It proves that if the Caribbean (-American) person travels freely as if the world is hers that, in fact, there are limits, and facing these limits often means coming to terms with loss. We could also say that facing these limits also means a full-on interrogation of what blackness means in the world. In the poem ‘Hasan Tells His Side of the Story’, Hasan does not simply call the ‘American’s’ position and her desires entitled; he stays away from judgement even as he responds to her judgement of him. What he does do, however, is to read her and her ways as foreign. Consider these three lines, ‘I was born here in Istanbul, have no desire / to go anywhere else; always translating one’s self – / I have heard the stories’ (). Hasan sees himself as grounded, local. He suggests that the narrative of his life might not appear attractive to those who desire to see the world and be in the world outside of their place of birth. He has ‘heard the stories’ as he says, but he does not wish to be one of them or he simply cannot be one of these stories. Set against Hasan, the poem’s Caribbean persona is not a travelling local; she takes on the identity of her most recent home – New York. Blackness translates and locates her. In Angela Barry’s Gorée: Point of Departure, we spend the novel learning why it is that Saliou Wade and his ex-wife Magdalene divorced and why
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their daughter Khadi is so intent on avoiding any real contact with both her parents. The mystery surrounding the end of their love is revealed in a kind of reverse triangular journey beginning in the United States and the Caribbean, returning in memory to Europe, specifically England and France, and finally ending in Senegal, West Africa. The novel might be approached in any number of ways, but for this essay, where the narrative focuses on the lives of St Lucian born Magdalene and her many-placed daughter, Khadi, we witness Barry fleshing out what it means to be identified in this way; Magdalene and Khadi are clearly marked as different from the other rooted characters – especially those of Saliou’s household in Senegal. The distinction I am making is not between travelled and untravelled characters. In Gorée, there is no perspective quite like Hasan’s, which is marked by his unwillingness to leave Istanbul and a kind of narrow respect for traditional views of home and culture. Hassim, Sailou’s wife’s cousin, is a local doctor and family member who arrives late and marginally to family events. But Barry is purposeful about not simply making him local and marginal. Not only has he seen ‘the gleaming steel and glass palaces in America and remembered the intoxicating power of being in a place where science at its most advanced was placed in the service of human health’, he has seen it and chosen his clinic in Senegal. Even more than this, Hassim’s Lebanese father, Monsieur Charbel, is missing from his life, but has clearly left his genetic evidence on his face and his body (). Hassim is an orphan, with a large hole in his heart for his mother, and he is at home in a place that is his home, but where he does not completely fit. He is obviously in contrast with Khadi, who has orphaned herself emotionally from her parents and arguably from any emotionally meaningful relationship. Khadi’s circumstance is clearly different: she has lived in Senegal, France and England, and then chooses New York – with a St Lucian mother living in St Lucia and a Senegalese father in Senegal. While her mother argues that Khadi is at home nowhere, not even in her New York City apartment that feels like an art gallery, it is not that Khadi is homeless or rootless, it is rather that she chooses a life without connections that might harm her or render her needy or dependent. Her New York City life as an attorney is perfect for that. More than this, she chooses connections where she is not needed. Her rootlessness is not tempered, unlike Hassim’s, in any dedication to something or someone who depends on her – especially emotionally. Khadi acts as an individual unfettered by community. Even in her most giving situations, she is primarily concerned with herself. To return to Gorée, a tiny island off
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the coast of Dakar in Senegal that was a slave-trading location on the African coast from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, and where the last photograph of her family as a unit was taken before things fell apart, is unsurprisingly difficult. It is also unsurprising that she steals her newfound love, her sister – Maimouma – away to Gorée and does not see the danger in her actions until it is too late. Here again, a Caribbean author takes us to the moment of dispersal. In Gorée, to return to the place of dispersal is to return to a crucible of identity. And Khadi is unprepared for the heat. When Maimouma is terribly hurt, Khadi must be more than a rootless traveller; she must be rooted and present. If Maimouma’s comatose state is a physical rendering of Khadi’s spiritual death and detachment, we come to see just how integral the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, are to her living again. There is a steep fall-off from physical and emotional distance from home for the protagonist in Ana Menéndez’s The Last War. In the designation Caribbean literature, we expect to see some essence of the Caribbean in the physical or cultural landscape. Somewhere in the aesthetic of the text, in language, memory or history, we expect to see some sustained engagement – overt or subtle – with a Caribbean identity or experience. Instead, Flash, a war photographer, revels in her life in a foreign language and culture in Istanbul. Even wine, which she loves, is unpalatable there. Her work capturing images of damage, displacement and death is suitably paired with her husband’s work as a war correspondent, now in Iraq. They are well suited indeed, yet even this primary relationship is in rubble when Flash receives a haunting, anonymous letter, that her husband – Wonderboy – has been unfaithful. It is not, of course, the case that this novel is a moment to question Menéndez’s Caribbeanness. That is not a question I find useful or intriguing. The protagonist’s rootlessness does, however, stretch the limits of what we have considered Caribbean. Early in the novel, we learn Flash’s real name and with it her roots: ‘Margarita Anastasia Morales, American daughter of a broken Dominican father, only child of divorce, spic, illegal, quiet loser. Flash, the remade sensualist who escaped all that old-country bullshit in exchange for the rest of the world.’ How is it that Flash can make this exchange so seamlessly? What is it that she can negotiate that other Caribbean subjects cannot? Is exchange the only possibility for dealing with the ‘old world’ and does the old world include the banalities of cities like Miami where her mother lives? Of course, a more profound paradox is that Flash switches the old and the new. Since Columbus and his crew arrived in the established civilizations of the Antilles and beyond
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they were considered part of the new world. Flash’s reversal underscores the randomness of the designations. What is old world for her is the Caribbean; what is new world for her is life in Turkey. She is the centre axis, not a region nor a place. Jamaica Kincaid also stretches the borders of the world, albeit in a less elastic, more traditional way. In Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya, Kincaid repeatedly identifies herself in relation to her homes: Vermont and Antigua. Like Flash, Kincaid revels in the isolation of being far away from home. Kincaid has spent many decades creating this distance, but always as an uneasy Caribbean subject: ‘This account of a walk I took while gathering seeds of flowering plants in the foothills of the Himalayas can have its origins in my love of the garden, my childhood love of botany and geography, my love of feeling isolated, of imagining myself all alone in the world and everything unfamiliar [. . .].’ These sentiments are indeed consistent with Kincaid’s fiction. Her mother, her father, her brother and Antigua have been lurking interruptions to her quest for isolation where she at once desires and denies herself alone in the world. For Flash, however, free from the labels of the Caribbean, there is a more complete sense of aloneness and isolation. The words ‘spic’ and ‘illegal’ used to describe her father are part of this isolation, because in these words, we see evidence of disavowal and state-imposed unbelonging. Unlike Flash, who seemingly leaves parts of her identity out of her everyday life, Kincaid cannot or will not. Even in the Himalayas and far from bias in Western societies, Kincaid’s difference as a Black woman causes special attention to be paid to her. A local woman marks Kincaid’s difference in her fascination with the author’s braided hair extensions, and Kincaid notes with some fascination the times she sees women’s hair being combed for lice. In Kincaid’s narrative, she includes photographs, and we cannot help but process racial difference and how this plays out in power relations, perhaps especially towards the ancillary members of their expedition. In other ways, though, Kincaid, as a double-crosser, does add another perspective on being a Caribbean subject in the world. With her American and British seed-gathering compatriots, Kincaid sets out, quite literally, to a foreign land to gather spoils for her garden. While she does not take anything from Nepal of great worth to others, she and her peers travel fully imbued in the privilege of the West. If, in Snapshots, Hassan notes the speaker’s ability to be translated, to live in many places and to be many things as her privilege allows, we cannot help but wonder if the reason he cannot give up his life and traditions for her is not only that she is American, but that she is Black. That is, she carries the label of entitled
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American, but hers is not full entitlement. Kincaid occupies a different position as explorer. While she attaches herself to the beauty of the land, she has no other attachments. We could say that her primary relationship with Nepal and the Himalayas, more specifically, is that it has things she desires and which she has come to collect. While Gisèle Pineau’s novel, Exile According to Julia, might at first glance be seen to return this discussion to locations that have been understood as traditional diasporic spaces for Caribbean people, Pineau importantly shows that being French from Guadeloupe is not being French at all in France. This (non) position is confirmed through the grandmother figure, Man Ya, whose perspective is crucial to the family seeing France for what it is and what it cannot be for Guadeloupeans. Man Ya provides another perspective in relation to the question of the grounded local signalled in Bishop’s work and urges further interrogation of what blackness might mean in the world. Through Man Ya, Pineau rejects the assumption that nation provides guarantees, whether in France or Guadeloupe. Man Ya’s move to France is supposed to be an escape from The Torturer, her husband, Asdrubal, the father of her children, including Julia’s father Maréchal. Very early in the novel we are told that Man Ya encourages Maréchal to join de Gaulle’s army in the hope that he will leave Guadeloupe and not raise his hand to his abusive father. Eleven years later, he returns to Guadeloupe having seen many wars and the world. This narrative of military departure as one aspect of Caribbean journeys in the world recalls Brand’s novel and the story of Bola’s descendant, Samuel Sones and his misadventures during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War as part of the Second West India Regiment. Upon Maréchal’s return, he ‘saves’ his mother from The Torturer by rescuing her away to France, a hand raised in a nonviolent way to his father and a hand outstretched in expectation to France. However, for Man Ya and for young Julia her granddaughter, France is never a sanctuary and it is never home. Man Ya’s character, in particular during her time in France, is consistent with a trend in contemporary Caribbean women’s writing, which challenges belonging at home and in various elsewheres. Neither life with Asdrubal nor the ‘liberation’ of the metropole are spaces where her blackness and womanness can thrive. She upsets a cartographic mapping of freedom, which is often looked for in narratives of exile and diaspora. She never feels at home in France and, perhaps even more noteworthy, she never feels liberated. The insufferable cold, a life without her garden, without use, shut-up in a stone house in Sarthe and then in an apartment
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in Paris and shut out of French. The community’s response to Man Ya’s act of independence is noteworthy. One rainy afternoon, she drags on her son’s military overcoat and cap to brave the cold and rain to collect her grandchildren from school, and she receives full consternation of the French villagers who have never seen her before and who feel ‘invaded’ as they witness her Black, creole-speaking body in an official French uniform. They mock and stare, more concerned for the uniform than the body in it. Julia recognizes this trend in school; she moves from invisible to threat to under Madame Barron’s table or the doghouse. And they call the police on Man Ya in the military coat. Man Ya never desires France. Even before she journeys there unwillingly, she understands that de Galle and Asdrubal are similar poisons. Perhaps it is that we expect with Maréchal and his family that the bigness of France will woo Man Ya, that her world in Guadeloupe will diminish in its shiny tri-coloured glare, but this is not the case. Man Ya’s intuitive (and maybe experiential) knowledge can tell beyond her family’s expectations what France will be. What they do not expect, however, is how much they will learn from her and how much France – the world – will change in their estimation during her time with them. Migration into the world is still a rebellion, of sorts, and it is an escape for a little while, but the world is too strange to be home. In Caribbean literature homes are still built around language, a legacy of colonialism that has continued to divide the region, in ways long accepted. For instance, the Windrush generation and the nationalists of the anglophone Caribbean are walled off from Aimé Césaire’s discourses on colonialism and his struggle with return to Martinique. It is notable that many of the texts considered here skip around and across languages as though colonial divides were no longer a pertinent concern or a barrier to knowledge and belonging. Flash navigates Istanbul with very few words and phrases, and the speaker in Snapshots is petulant that her Kurdish lover will not claim her Jamaican (by-way-of-New-York) body. The texts discussed here occupy the globe differently from other Caribbean writing. Not only is there an expanded view of where the Caribbean subject can be at home, but there is also an expanded view of how such a story is told.
Notes These authors saw their art as participating in nation-building and national identity in the context of the political project of independence and asserting what it meant to be Caribbean and from particular nations in the Caribbean.
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While critical discourse has focused on the ways in which Windrush writers produced a regional/West Indian consciousness, the investment of the individual writers in the shaping of their particular nations is very apparent in the attentions to specifics of territorial history and culture in their work. Stuart Hall, ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual’, in David Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, ), –, . By traditional I mean communities of Caribbean people who lived in the Caribbean and settled elsewhere. These communities are often multigenerational and proximate to cultural, political and social institutions that give meaning to expressions of Caribbeanness. Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon (New York: Grove Press, ), , . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Rinaldo Walcott discusses the early twenty-first century tensions within Black Studies, particularly the relationship between African American Studies and Africana Studies, and revisits the struggles between W. E. B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey. The issue of the narrow conception of blackness is taken up in a variety of ways in Walcott’s essay, ‘Beyond The “Nation Thing”: Black Studies, Cultural Studies, and Diaspora Discourse (Or the Post-Black Studies Moment)’, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ), –. See Jacqueline Bishop, ‘Travels with Jacqueline Bishop’, Jamaica Observer, July , www.jamaicaobserver.com/style/travels-with-jacqueline-bishop_ ?profile=. ‘About’, Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean Art and Literature, www.nyu.edu/ calabash/about.shtml. Jacqueline Bishop, Snapshots from Istanbul (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Angela Barry, Gorée: Point of Departure (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. For an examination of the significance of this place but also the rootlessness and impossibility suggested by this place, see Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, ). Ana Menéndez, The Last War (New York: Harper Collins, ), . Jamaica Kincaid, Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, ), .
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Critical Transitions
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Dialogic Connections in Caribbean Literature and Visual Art Marta Fernández Campa
There is a long and rich tradition of shared influences, cross-dialogue, and collaborative production across Caribbean visual art and literature, a cross-pollination that has shaped each art form in powerful ways, often creating new and shifting vocabularies, distinctive aesthetic configurations and poetics. This essay offers an overview of some significant aspects that have marked the relationship between Caribbean literature and visual arts practice from the s to the present. The focus is on collaborations and shared influences among writers and artists, and on visual vocabularies, aesthetics and poetics, with the purpose of demonstrating some of the varied ways in which both disciplines have informed and shaped each other. This chapter only covers part of the extensive and complex connections between Caribbean literature and the visual arts.
Shared Critical Spaces, Publications, Artistic Cross-Dialogue and Collaborations A creative synergy between writers and artists sparked by encounters, dialogue and collaborations began decades before the s and s; however, this period, marked by the declaration of independence in many Caribbean territories, resulted in an even greater yearning for new strategies, vocabularies and languages to articulate Caribbean experiences, histories and cultures. These decades saw a renewed sense of urgency, already anticipated in George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (), where the act of seeing anew became a central trope for anticolonial interventions across the Caribbean region. This search was also one of the significant objectives for the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM). According to Anne Walmsley, ‘In London in the mid-s major writers and artists were seeking and developing new forms and language for
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Caribbean arts.’ Members and friends of CAM were ‘reacting against generations of European cultural domination. They sought to discover their own aesthetic and to chart new directions for their arts and culture.’ As one of its founding members, Barbadian writer and historian Kamau Brathwaite had a clear vision for the movement’s creative breadth both across the arts and across the wider Caribbean. The movement was envisioned by Brathwaite, Trinidadian John La Rose and Jamaican Andrew Salkey as an opportunity for writers and artists to meet and start a critical conversation around their work that would strengthen connections and a pan-Caribbean network. CAM was pivotal in opening up this creative and critical space where, as Kobena Mercer points out, ‘artists and writers from various island origins came together in London to formulate a pan-Caribbean outlook in the optimism of the s ferment driven by the politics of decolonization’. CAM’s scope aimed to cross disciplines but also linguistic areas. In a letter, La Rose, on March , writes: ‘What I would like, if it were at all possible would be a meeting of Caribbean spirits, English speaking, French speaking, Spanish speaking, Dutch speaking.’ Walmsley situates CAM as part of the tradition that J. Michael Dash contextualizes within ‘a sequence of literary movements since World War I, from the New Negro Movement in Harlem in the s, through Afro-Cubanism, Haitian indigenism, and negritude in Paris’. Walmsley further notes that it ‘was also the first genuinely Caribbean-wide cultural movement’, exploring both Amerindian and African heritage. Although all these movements are manifest in the fields of visual art and literature and create bridges between them, there are two aspects particularly distinctive of CAM: its more explicit articulation of an artistic sensibility and identity that connects the writer and artist, and a serious consideration of developing a critical language to address each other’s mediums. As happened with Drumblair in Jamaica and at the residence of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire’s in Martinique, the London-based members of CAM, particularly its founding members, met regularly. Although unrecorded, these conversations and others over the phone were often defining for the movement. Writers and artists gathered to address each other’s mediums and work at events as well as monthly meetings, conferences, symposiums, art exhibitions and readings. Over its main years of activity (–), CAM brought together writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Jamaican writers Evan Jones, Andrew Salkey and Orlando Patterson – among others – and visual artists, including Aubrey
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Williams from Guyana, Althea McNish from Trinidad, and Clifton Campbell and Ronald Moody from Jamaica. They were joined by literary critics such as Kenneth Ramchand (Trinidad) and Louis James (UK), as well as cultural critic Gordon Rohler (Guyana and Trinidad) and historian Elsa Goveia (Guyana and Jamaica). After the first three literary sessions, CAM organized an art symposium in June , where artists Aubrey Williams (working mostly in painting), Ronald Moody (working in sculpture), Karl ‘Jerry’ Craig (painter and lecturer), Errol Lloyd (sculptor and painter) and Althea McNish (textile designer) exhibited and spoke about their artwork. In ‘The Predicament of the Artist in the Caribbean’ (), Guyanese abstract painter Aubrey Williams makes a claim about the significant role of visual art in Caribbean cultural production and the need to embrace abstract art confronting ‘the prevalent conception that good art, working art, must speak, it must be narrative’. Williams insisted on the need for writers and artists to speak to each other more, to connect and avoid isolation: ‘We should have more interchange, we should have a bigger dialogue between the novelist and the painter.’ Williams’s invitation has materialized in different forms since. Some of CAM’s writers, particularly Brathwaite and Wilson Harris, developed a literary style highly influenced by visual experimentation and by Williams’s art itself. Harris’s influence of Amerindian visuals and cosmogonies around time and space, particularly through the work of Williams, has characterized the complex style of his writing, filled with visual imagery in descriptions of the Guyanese landscape in novels such as Tumatumari (). Meeting Aubrey Williams in , ‘underscored and intensified Harris’s interest in indigenous arts’. In his lecture ‘The Theatre of the Arts’ (), Harris spoke of the necessity of embracing the ‘language of art in fiction’ and exploring other forms beyond realism. Similarly, Brathwaite’s poetry and innovative poetics, its demotic language, his inclusion of visual symbols and the typographic creativity of his ‘Sycorax Video-style’ shows a concern with new languages and sensibilities influenced by visual signs and musical rhythms, particularly those of jazz. In an interview with writer and critic Kwame Dawes, Brathwaite explains how his experimentation with fonts ‘takes [him] across Mexico and Siqueiros and the Aztec murals and all the way back to ancient Nilotic Egypt to hieroglyphs – allowing [him] to write in light and to make sound visible as if [he is] in video’. This idea of making sound ‘visible’ reinforces the creative force of cross-cultural dialogue to highlight the ways
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in which visual and textual experimentation both transcend and nurture each other. Visual art has also been highly influential in literatures of the hispanophone and francophone Caribbean from the s through the s, as evident in theoretical and literary movements such as the Neo-Baroque, the marvellous real, magical realism, and Spiralism. The conceptual framework of art and art styles, particularly architecture and painting, has provided writers from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean with an important means of articulating individual and collective experiences of place. Theorizations of the ‘Neo-Baroque’ artistic style by Cuban writers José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy address Eurocentric visions of artistic production and reception to resignify an interpretation of reality that, while engaging with the influence of European art, applies to the geographic, cultural and historical specificity of the Caribbean. Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant has also discussed baroque forms in a pan-Caribbean context, where a ‘baroque abroad in the world’ underscores the global nature of baroque’s questioning drive towards dogmatic classicism. The Haitian literary movement known as Spiralism, conceptualized by writers René Philoctète, Jean-Claude Fignolé and Frankétienne in , demonstrates the influence of a highly visual language and aesthetic sensibility. In the essay-poem Vœu de voyage et intention romanesque (), Fignolé, as Kaiama Glover notes, ‘rejects transparency, narratives of progress, formulaic fiction, and adherence to extra-insular traditions, calling instead for “signs, interpretations, suggested visions, intelligent understandings that find their own value far from overly transparent, overly intellectual explanations”’. Other visual elements, through experimentation with typeface, spacing and composition, also figure in Frankétienne’s novels Ultravocal (), Dézafi, in Kréyol, () and Les affres d’un défi, in French, (). A renowned visual artist, as well as writer, Frankétienne’s paintings capture the energy of the spiral, most notably in his Untitled oil on canvas painting, cover of the English translation of Mûr à crever (), translated by Kaiama Glover as Ready to Burst in (see figure .). In this novel, both protagonists suffer the scars of unrequited love while struggling to survive (Raynand) and write a masterpiece (Paulin). Paulin, who appears in the novel as a self-identified Spiralist writer, offers a series of metanarrative reflections on craft during a conversation with Raynand: ‘The painter has before him his palette and the whole range of colours. The musician his instrument, and the panoply of scales and registers. As for the writer, he must constantly risk an
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.. Frankétienne, Untitled (). Oil on canvas. Cover image of Ready to Burst (), English translation of Mûr à crever () by Kaiama L. Glover. Courtesy of Frankétienne and Archipelago Books
incursion into the interior volcano, in order to extract, burned by lava, even the simplest word.’ In this sense, similar to Brathwaite’s, Harris’s and Williams’s investment in evocative and non-descriptive artistic production, the Spiralists create a layered and suggestive art that invites a careful yet fluid engagement with the work. The ‘whirlwind’ of the spiral is represented linguistically, formally and thematically in the Spiralists’ writing, as well as visually. Through visual and symbolic references to the spiral and the non-linear patterns in Haitian oral storytelling, they explore life in Haiti, past and present (viii). As with Cuban Neo-Baroque or the marvellous real, which is grounded in the everyday experience, context, and object, the aesthetic mark of the spiral is
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rooted in Caribbean lived reality, in ‘the bands of the hurricane winds that regularly ravage the island, and it makes up the structure of the conch shell, an object that functions symbolically to recall the rallying cries of Haiti’s revolutionaries’ (viii). In the s, as Caribbean women writers gained much greater visibility through increased publishing and other factors, they addressed and revised constructs of history, gender, race and sexuality often from a feminist perspective. In M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (), the juxtaposition of a variety of poems and texts throughout its pages configure a heterogeneous bricolage of sources and highly visual experimental aesthetics. Visually, the collection presents textual fragments from strikingly different registers: legal documents, poetry, prose, fiction, the Bible, dictionary entries and fictional mock-test samples. However, this arrangement, often considered a modernist technique, is refashioned through a relational poetics forming a distinctively Caribbean aesthetic. It invites readers, and audiences when the poem is performed, to explore and question the ways in which all fragments connect. In the collection’s epilogue, Philip offers a definition of the concept ‘i-mage’ that brings the role of the writer and artist together, stating: The power of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new images that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself, and eventually, its collective consciousness.
Through the i-mage, art has the potential to unmask inherited representational modes, thus allowing new modes and vocabularies of experience to emerge. Philip’s use of form strategically calls upon elements outside the text, thus unveiling the context that once produced them, as also happens in her work Zong!. In this long elegiac poem, Philip dis-members the language in the legal document Gregson v. Gilbert, regarding the dispute in between the underwriters and the ship owners of the slaver Zong after the captain murders enslaved Africans by drowning in the Atlantic, with the intention of claiming insurance monies. Through new word-combinations from African and European languages, speech in tongues, and a naming of those Africans aboard the ship, the poem invites an examination of the violence of historical amnesia. The linguistic, philosophical and discursive interrogation in Zong!’s elegiac memorialization of the massacre configures a visual language that complicates a narrative retelling of the event, for, as Philip notes, the story must be mourned
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and told, yet there is no telling it. Through its pages, performance, and collective readings, Zong! investigates the possibilities of affect, provided by the very witnessing of the erasure, much of its violence and silencing made visible in a visual explosion of linguistic fragmentation. In Picasso, I Want My Face Back (), Grace Nichols challenges the eurocentric practice of erasure in the visual arts. ‘Guyana Dreaming’ poignantly confronts the exoticization of Africa and the Black body in Western and European art. Written for Aubrey Williams, ‘Guyana Dreaming’ retells the moment when Picasso, upon first meeting Williams in Paris in the s, tells the artist ‘You have a fine head. You must pose for me’, to which the poetic persona states: And as you [Aubrey] moved away, all the old gods of the New World closed ranks, forming a ring of fire around you – young, proud, already carrying the seeds of your own masterpieces.
Rita Indiana Hernández’s La mucama de Omicunlé (), translated into English as Tentacle, offers a nuanced critique of the strictures and hierarchies of the market driven art world. It also highlights the ways in which art schools like Altos de Chavón have shaped the critical lens and interdisciplinary vision of artists whilst reflecting the existing racial and class inequalities in the Dominican Republic. As Carlos Garrido notes, Rita Indiana’s work reflects the plasticity of art mediums that also takes place in the work of Dominican writer Frank Báez and visual artists including Jorge Pineda, Colectivo Shampoo and Belkis Ramírez. The work across media and self-reflective writing of Caribbean writers who are also artists provides a unique perspective on this interdisciplinary relationship. In Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write (), Jamaican visual artists and writers Jacqueline Bishop, Earl McKenzie and Ralph Thompson reflect on the interconnection of their craft and art. They all stress the rich ways in which writing and making visual art inform each other, in terms of influence, subject, composition and even language. Writing about the dialogue between arts, Bishop observes that ‘they cross-fertilize each other’ and describes how the evocativeness of space in the experience of exile that emerges from her series of photographs, Childhood Memories, is also explored in the poem ‘Jamaican Birds’, which allegorically maps out different Caribbean routes of exile and migration. Exile is a major theme in Bishop’s creative work: ‘My experiences as a Jamaican woman and an exile/immigrant are always at the centre of what
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I do, whether in my written or visual works – that are always in conversation’ (). For McKenzie, the close relationship between his poetry and painting also informs his philosophical work, and he identifies ‘as a philosopher who regards writing and painting as ways of philosophizing’. His poem ‘Against Linearity’ and its visually evocative and conceptually charged statement, ‘We reject the straight line’, underscores an aesthetic element of Caribbean writing and visual arts with important philosophical implications. McKenzie adds in one of the final stanzas: ‘We fear the straight line / for it is as rigid as death.’ As the essay highlights, McKenzie’s line speaks to the artistic styles that privilege non-linearity in Caribbean artistic production, that write and create against European modernity’s fixed notion of progress and linearity. The writings of Lorna Goodison, another Jamaican writer and painter whose artwork is featured on the cover of her poetry collections, also reveal the artistic sensibility of a painter. In the poem ‘The Pictures of My New Day’ (), Goodison makes reference to painting techniques such as tempera: The pictures of my new day will now be coloured, drawn, by the tempera of first light stored for me by a thoughtful dawn who knew of my love for late sleeping.
The poetic persona speaks of wearing a new light, and of witnessing its epiphanic apparition on a Sunday evening. As the light descends, its motion (from ‘floor to ceiling to floor’, which then spirals) is evoked through ekphrastic strokes. In ‘Ways of Seeing: Visual/Verbal Expressions – Caribbean Writers Who Paint’ (), Kim Robinson-Walcott provides a critical analysis of cross-media creative influence and identifies in the highly visual imagery of ‘The Pictures of My New Day’ strong painterly echoes with the cover painting of its collection Heartease (). Collaborations between writers and artists have also contributed to a productive cross-media dialogue, as in the collaborative work of Dominican poet Sherezada Chiqui Vicioso and visual artist Tony Capellán in Un extraño ulular traia el viento (), where the art of Capellán complements Vicioso’s poetry, or in Isaac Julien’s installation video Paradise Omeros () inspired by Derek Walcott’s Omeros (), and featuring Walcott’s voice over the images. Similarly, for her multimedia installation Ghosting (), British-Guyanese artist Roshini Kempadoo worked collaboratively with Guyanese dub poet Marc Matthews in an interactive engagement with the historical archive of the plantation in Trinidad. More recently, Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres and visual artist José Arturo Ballester have joined creative forces to celebrate the
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community of Campo Alegre with the visual poetic performance Ofrendas de Luz () at the Plaza de Santurce and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Puerto Rico. This video-poetry performance consists of a projection of images from the artist’s landscape and portrait photography of the community, and a reading of poetry and short stories excerpts that resulted from conversations and interviews that Santos-Febres carried with neighbours from the area for her novel La amante de Gardel (). The work is the result of conversations that both artists established while working with the community through photography and literary workshops in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Also emerging out of conversations, Trinidadian writer and art critic Shivanee Ramlochan and Bahamian writer visual artist Sonia Farmer have collaborated to produce The Red Thread Cycle (), which was included in the exhibition NE: The Fruit and the Seed, curated by Holly Bynoe at the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas. Inspired by ‘The Red Thread Cycle’, a poem sequence in Ramlochan’s Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (), Farmer conceived of an art book project, a limited edition series of seven fold books responding to Ramlochan’s seven poems in the series, which Farmer published with her independent press, Ponciana Paper Press (see figure .). The writing and design of Farmer’s own poetry collections, Infidelities () and The Best Estimation in the World (), reflect the creative influence of visual forms and language. In NE: The Fruit and the Seed, a recording of The Red Thread Cycle by Ramlochan accompanies the viewing of the fold poem books (see figure .).
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Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan, The Red Thread Cycle, Book I (). Artist book. Photo credit: Dominic Duncombe. Courtesy of Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan
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.. Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan, The Red Thread Cycle, Book V (). Artist book. Photo credit: Jackson Petit-Homme, The National Gallery of the Bahamas. Courtesy of Sonia Farmer and Shivanee Ramlochan
Verses from the sequence, such as the following from the first poem, appear across the folded pages of the art books designed by Farmer: I am in mud and glitter and so far steeped that going back is not an option. Don’t say rapist. Say engineer of aerosol deodorant because pepper spray is illegal, anything is illegal Fight back too hard, and it’s illegal, >your nails are illegal.
Bearing witness to stories of sexual assault, the poems in The Red Thread Cycle challenge through language and striking imagery the taboos around confronting sexual violence and the attempts at censoring and silencing survivors. Another example of poetry that bears witness is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (). This prose poetry collection participates in a form of cross-media dialogue that takes apart the role of individuals, society and the media in perpetuating anti-Black racism. Interspersed through the pages of Citizen are reproductions of artwork by African and African American artists, including Glenn Ligon, Wangechi Mutu and Carrie Mae Weems, that
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respond to this history and conceptually critique dominant visual languages in Western media, sports and popular culture. The vital role of visual narratives in Rankine’s poetry is further manifest in the collaborative work ‘situation’ videos with her husband, multi-media artist John Lucas. Engaging with the individual and socio-political erasure and surveillance of Black people raised by Rankine’s Citizen, Invisible Men: Work on Paper (), an artist book by DutchSurinamese visual artist Patricia Kaersenhout, establishes a critical dialogue with Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (). The alteration of photographs of Black men and an old biology textbook through drawing, mixed media and collage results in a mixed-media reminiscent of the artwork and artistic tradition of Ligon, Mutu and Weems. There is a growing body of interdisciplinary Caribbean critical studies. The foundational work undertaken by Mary Lou Emery’s Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature () continues in texts such as Myriam J. A. Chancy’s From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic (), Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic () and Flora González Mandri’s Guarding Cultural Memory: Afro-Cuban Women in Literature and the Arts (). The artwork of various Caribbean visual artists, including Ebony G. Patterson, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Nadia Huggins, Christopher Cozier and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, illustrates the covers of critical texts, which – often in an interdisciplinary spirit – offer an insight into how current Caribbean writing and the visual arts are engaging with key contemporary issues. This extends to works of fiction, as is the case of Naomi Jackson’s novel The Star Side of Bird Hill (), which features the painting Too Much Makeup on Her Face by Barbadian artist Sheena Rose. The painting, part of Rose’s Sweet Gossip series (), features a young Black woman wearing makeup in bold colours. In an article, Jackson discusses the powerful impact of seeing images of Black girls and young women on the covers of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John () or Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (). One of the most recurrent images used in book covers of Caribbean studies is The Castaway, a mixed media drawing from the ongoing series Tropical Night (–present), by Trinidadian artist, critic and curator Christopher Cozier. The Castaway appears on the cover of Malachi McIntosh’s Emigration and Caribbean Literature (), Lucy Evans’s Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories (), and Globalization and the PostCreole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation () by Michaeline A. Crichlow and Patricia Northover, where the authors explain that the artist’s work served as critical departure for the book’s arguments (figure .).
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Christopher Cozier, The Castaway, from the Tropical Night series (–present). Mixed media drawings. Courtesy of Christopher Cozier
Authors stress the array of critical interrogations around issues of mobility, citizenship and sovereignty evoked in – and sparked by – Cozier’s image, and in Travel & See () Kobena Mercer identifies the visual polyvalence of The Castaway as its source of critical force in forming vocabularies that articulate the present in the aftermath of colonialism and slavery. Writing on Cozier’s
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Dialogic Connections in Caribbean Literature and Visual Art
.. Christopher Cozier, Hop, Skip, Jump, from the Tropical Night series (-present). Mixed media drawings. Courtesy of Christopher Cozier
work, Trinidadian writer and critic Nicholas Laughlin and Jamaican cultural critic Annie Paul adroitly articulate how destabilizing, complicating and widening the semiotic and conceptual potentialities of visual languages is central to Cozier’s work, and is present in much Caribbean contemporary artistic production (see figure .). This contemporary critical tradition
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engaging with fluid understandings of cultural signifiers has been hugely influenced by Stuart Hall’s writing on visual culture, particularly with regards to identity and representation as processes in-flux, conveying the spirit of the s and s that Alison Donnell refers to as ‘the questioning generation’, keen to explore and expand the grounds and articulations of representation. Equally vital in the cross-disciplinary dialogue has been the labour of conferences, literary festivals, magazines and journals, including Caribbean Beat, Anales del Caribe, Anthurium, Caribbean Review of Books, Caribbean InTransit, Interviewing the Caribbean, the Journal of West Indian Literature and Small Axe. Following the tradition established by Focus and SAVACOU, these journals have provided a productive critical space for all art forms. They also capture a shift. In an article discussing the work of Jamaican artist Ebony G. Patterson, Patricia J. Saunders identifies in Caribbean contemporary visual art an attempt to shift ‘visual and discursive representations and interpretations of the Caribbean’ that extend to the work of many writers. At the core of this emphasis on drawing attention to and diversifying visual literacy lies an important dialogue across art forms. Writers are engaging with and looking closely at the work of visual artists, and vice versa. For example, in ‘after Ebony Patterson’s “while the dew is still on the roses”’ (), Kei Miller responds to Patterson’s immersive night garden installation (of the same name) at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. The poem’s careful look at the work’s aesthetic of bodice and bodies ‘spectacularly jewelled’ and hairpins that ‘glitter like dew on the roses’ underscores the way in which Patterson creates a visually striking memorialisation and portraiture of Jamaican youths. As in Miller’s poems, the act of looking closer reveals ‘harder truth[s]’ that delve into issues of visibility, invisibility and systemic violence. Andre Bagoo’s Pitch Lake () also includes poetry responding to works by artists Andil Gosine, Richard Fung, Jean-Ulrick Désert and Leasho Johnson. Bagoo’s ‘After Andil Gosine, Portrait no. from (Made in Love)’ () responds to Gosine’s portrait of two young Indo-Caribbean men posing closely together before a studio photograph of a sugar cane landscape, and imagines a moment of erotic intimacy between them, extending the possibilities of the photographic image. Equally, literary works are proving to be an important creative source for the visual arts. The curation of Caribbean group exhibitions such as Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (–), curated by Tatiana Flores, or The Sea is History (), curated by Selene Wendt, were inspired by Édouard Glissant’s relational poetics and Derek Walcott’s seminal poem ‘The Sea is History’ (),
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respectively. The group arts exhibition Get Up, Stand Up Now, curated by Zak Ové, integrated in its walls text from works by Jay Bernard, Marlon James, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Grace Nichols, among others, and included books and literary manuscripts by Kamau Brathwaite, C. L. R. James, Caryl Phillips and Michael Smith, conveying a wide focus on Caribbean artistic production. Cultural centres and spaces are also playing a vital role in furthering the conversations among writers and visual artists. Alice Yard in Trinidad, Fresh Milk Platform Inc. in Barbados, NLS (New Local Space) in Jamaica, Instituto Buena Vista in Curaçao, Fondation Clément in Guadaloupe, Beta Local in Puerto Rico, Image Factory Art Foundation in Belize, Quintapata in the Dominican Republic and Centre d’Art in Haiti, among others, have fostered and mentored the work of local and international artists, writers and critics.
Contesting Visuality, Visual Strategies and Ekphrasis Through an anticolonial lens, George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile () engages in a symbolic act of revising Caribbean history and highlighting new ways of seeing, refiguring the relationships between colonizer and colonized to challenge the colonial status quo, highlighting the regional and worldwide impact of Caribbean peoples’ multiple acts of resistance and revolutionary politics. Caliban’s act of seeing and confronting Prospero’s colonial gaze in Lamming’s Pleasures confronts and subverts the discourse of eighteenth-century European theories around modernity and aesthetic judgement. Simon Gikandi stresses ‘that the mass of African slaves who drove the European economies of the time were not free was not a matter that bothered Kant or his British interlocutors, such as David Hume, because the black was excluded from the domain of modern reason, aesthetic judgment, and the culture of taste.’ Therefore, the act of seeing differently, as a response to that eighteenth century tradition of visuality became key in decolonial praxis. The vital role of ekphrasis in Caribbean literature is not surprising considering the political significance of new ‘ways of seeing’ and the power of ekphrastic writing in evoking landscape and place that remains so central to Caribbean artistic production. The search for, and representation of, light or changing light, a concern that Walcott believed was central to both the work of writers and artists, characterizes his ekphrastic writing, as evident in the following verses from the opening stanza of The Prodigal (), and abounding in Another Life (), Omeros () and Morning, Paramin ():
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a´ Italian light on the factories, October’s motley in Jersey, wild fans on trees, the blue metallic Hudson, and in the turning aureate afternoon, dusk on rose brickwork as if it were Siena.
Lawrence Scott’s fiction also makes use of ekphrastic devices to vividly capture the landscape in Witchbroom () and in multiple painterly passages of Light Falling on Bamboo (), a novel based on the life of Trinidadian painter Michel Jean Cazabon. The narration of landscape is filtered through descriptions of Cazabon’s painting and in its references to focal points of light: The fountain fizzed like champagne. White pigment caught the streaming light from high above. [. . .] The accurate proportions of the whole where made authentic by the height of the hills, bathed in light, catching the blur of the yellow poui trees.
Equally influenced by painting, Loretta Collins Klobah’s Rincantations () engages with, and repositions, Spanish baroque portraits in poems like ‘La Monstrua Desnuda’, which is in direct conversation with Juan Carreño de Miranda’s nude painting of Eugenia Martínez Vallejo. Emory identifies a tension and interplay of power dynamics as characteristic of Caribbean ekphrasis and in that vein discusses the ways in which Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound (), which intertwines autobiographical sketches of Walcott with the life of Camille Pissarro, captures his complex relationship with a European art tradition that he admired, but in which he often perceived an erasure or a pervasive representation of blackness. Similarly, reflecting upon the fractures and silencing of colonial histories in European painting, David Dabydeen’s Turner () responds to J. M. W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) () by imagining and bringing forward the absent histories that the painting both evokes and reproduces. Gradually, from the s, but more specifically from the s, a significant increase in the publication of both Caribbean literature and cross-media texts has meant that more and more publications started to reflect an explicit form of ekphrasis, where the artwork engaged by the writing is also reproduced. Some of the publications that reflect this shift are Nancy Morejón’s With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba (), where the poems respond to Milton Rogovin’s s photographs of the island, and Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (), edited by Kwame Dawes and Matthew Shenoda, which includes poems by Fred D’Aguiar, Kwame Dawes and Geoffrey Philp among others. Dawes
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suggests that Bearden’s Odyssey can be read ‘as a fascinating exploration of the dialogue that can happen between art and poetry’, an idea echoed by Philip Nanton and Adisa ‘Aja’ Andwele in Canouan Suite & Other Pieces () and Painting Poetry: Poetic Interpretations of Art (), in a direct interaction with the work of Caribbean visual artists. Recent conceptualizations of ekphrasis also acknowledge its plasticity. Cuban-American poet Mia Leonin refers to the word’s Greek etymology as description of a work of art, usually in detail, and she adds: ‘I believe ekphrasis offers possibilities that go beyond just description. For me, ekphrasis is a way of unearthing – “unearthing” in the sense of looking, investigating and exploring something a/new.’ In Chance Born (), Leonin reacts to the work of Cuban artists Carmen Herrera and Ana Mendieta, and a dramatic monologue in Mendieta’s voice responds to the artist’s Silhouette Series (–). Nancy Morejón’s ‘Ana Mendieta’ is another powerful poem within the rich canon of Caribbean women’s writing and feminist praxis that has productively engaged with the artist’s work.
Cameras, Postcards and Caribbean Visual Economies By dismantling and drawing attention toward technologies of surveillance and visual representation that have historically attempted to misrepresent and erase Caribbean peoples’ subjectivity, experiences, and history, writers and artists have fundamentally shifted the focus and altered the frame. The role of the photographic camera plays a special part in this radical tradition. In the opening of Derek Walcott’s Omeros (), Philoctete ‘smiles for the tourists’ who ‘try taking / his soul with their cameras’. But Philoctete’s smile masks a less complacent attitude, as he is both very much aware and involved in the workings of the economy of consumption that, as Mimi Sheller argues in Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (), also extends to a visual currency framing the region as ready for tourists’ enjoyment. The visual currency and the historical role of the photograph and the postcard in constructing what Krista Thompson has defined in An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque () as a tropicalization of the Caribbean also mark the opening of Dominican-American author Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints (). The novel opens with a description of a ‘white-border-style’ postcard that depicts Graciela and Silvio, a young couple in the Dominican Republic, who are posing nude, reclining ‘on a Victorian couch surrounded by
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cardboard Egyptian pottery, a stuffed wild tiger, a toy drum, and glazed coconut trees. An American prairie looms behind them in dull oils.’ The postcard, with all its exoticizing elements, reflects a type of staged studio photography used in postcards in the first half of the twentieth century as a means to stage and control certain narratives of the region, as picturesque, safe, desirable, prosperous and/or erotic. The data placed above the description: ‘COUNTRY UNKNOWN, CA. ’ renders the two people and their lives completely anonymous and, in turn, interchangeable as part of coloniality’s project and what Donette Francis terms as the postcard’s ‘visual grammar for reading the Caribbean’. Positioning the postcard as the first entry into the text and into the lives of Graciela and Silvio (and particularly of Graciela and the women in her family), during and after the American invasion, allows readers to see the violence of the invasion through that first scene. According to Francis, the use of the postcard ‘provides a different
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Kevin A. Browne, Tracey Sankar admonishes the photographer, or whoever she imagines will see the image. Photography. Port of Spain, . Courtesy of Kevin A. Browne
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Kevin A. Browne, Stephanie Kanhai and Jonadiah Gonzales. Photography. Usine-Ste. Madeline Cooling Towers, Ste. Madeline, July . Courtesy of Kevin A. Browne
angle of vision in reading this imperial image, and finally, it moves to subvert the history of postcards’ (). In High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (), winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean literature, Kevin Adonis Browne contextualizes a Caribbeanist photographic tradition and offers a new artistic and photographic documentation of contemporary carnival mas in Trinidad. Browne’s photography and his writing on a Caribbeanist photographic aesthetic centres around an ethical engagement with the photographed subject (see figures . and .). This encapsulates a position of resistance towards an assumed transparency of representation in the photographic lens, which, as Browne underscores, has always been an important weapon of empire. As well as reminding
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readers ‘Empire is a camera’, Browne acknowledges the influence of artistic movements including Realism, Surrealism, Modernism and Postmodernism but also points out how ‘none of these traditions can satisfactorily account for the Caribbean subject’ (). Glissant’s notion of opacity in its resisting the imposition of an assumed knowing transparency of the Caribbean that does not consider local/regional knowledge production and social realities is a helpful concept that connects with what Brown defines as ‘the strategies of misdirection that have typically defined our oral traditions’ (). This spirit of opacity and of complicating and revising a prescriptive lens through which to frame the Caribbean and Caribbean (and diasporic) experience lies in much of the visual and critical vocabularies shared across the literary and the visual.
Notes Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement –: A Literary and Cultural History (London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books, ), xvii. Ibid., xvii. Kobena Mercer, ‘Aubrey Williams: Abstraction in Diaspora’, British Art Studies, (), https://doi.org/./issn.-/issue-/kmercer/. John La Rose to Edward Kamau Brathwaite, George Padmore Institute ( March ): GB , LRA //. Michael J. Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, ), –. Walmsley, The Caribbean, . Ibid., xviii. Aubrey Williams, ‘The Predicament of the Artist in the Caribbean’, Caribbean Quarterly, ./ (), –, . Ibid., . Mary Lou Emery, Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), . Wilson Harris, ‘Theatre of the Arts’, in Bénédicte Ledent and Hena MaesJelinek (eds.), Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi: ), –. Kamau Brathwaite, ‘Interview with Kwame Dawes’, in Kwame Dawes (ed.), Talk Yuh Talk: Interviews with Anglophone Caribbean Poets (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), –, . Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, ), . Jean-Claude Fignolé quoted in Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, ), .
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Frankétienne, Ready to Burst (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, ), . Glover, Haiti Unbound, viii. Subsequent references given parenthetically. M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Ottawa: Gynergy Books/Ragweed Press, ), . M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ). Ibid., –. Grace Nichols, Picasso, I want My Face Back (Tarset, UK: Bloodaxe, ), . Carlos Garrido Castellano, ‘“La elocuencia que su entrenamiento como artista plástico le permitía.” Subalternidad, cultura e instituciones en La mucama de Omicunlé de Rita Indiana Hernández’, Hispanic Research Journal, . (), –. Jacqueline Bishop (ed.), Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write: Jamaican Artists (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ). Jacqueline Bishop, ‘IN CONVERSATION: Writing and Painting’, in Bishop (ed.), Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write, –, . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Earl McKenzie, ‘Earl McKenzie: A Philosopher Who Also Writes and Paints’, in Bishop (ed.), Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write, –, . Earl McKenzie, Against Linearity (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Ralph Thompson, ‘On Writing and Painting’, in Bishop (ed.), Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write, –, . Lorna Goodison, ‘The Pictures of My New Day’, in Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, ), . Ibid., . Kim Robinson-Walcott, ‘Ways of Seeing: Visual/Verbal Expressions – Caribbean Writers Who Paint’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, ), –. Mariela Fullana Acosta, ‘Ofrendas de luz: Fusión de arte y versos en el MAC para celebrar a Santurce y su gente’, Nuevo Día, September , https://www .pressreader.com/puerto-rico/el-nuevo-dia//. Shivanee Ramlochan, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Leeds, Peepal Tree Press, ), . See Naomi Jackson, ‘The Perfect Covergirl: How a Painting Ends Up on a Book Cover’, Literary Hub, June , https://lithub.com/the-perfectcovergirl/. See Annie Paul, ‘Christopher Cozier’, BOMB, (), https:// bombmagazine.org/articles/christopher-cozier/; Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Working Notes: On Christopher Cozier’s Tropical Night Drawings’, in Little Gestures: From the Tropical Night Series (Dartmouth, NH: Capital Offset Company, ), –; and Nicholas Laughlin, ‘Notebook’, The Caribbean Review of Books, (), –.
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Alison Donnell, ‘The Questioning Generation: Rights, Representations and Cultural Fractions in the s and s’, in Bucknor and Donnell (eds.), Routledge Companion, –. Patricia Saunders, ‘Gardening in the Garrisons, You Never Know What You Will Find: (Un)Visibility in the Works of Ebony G. Patterson’, Feminist Studies, . (), –, . Kei Miller, ‘after Ebony Patterson’s “while the dew is still on the roses”’, in In Nearby Bushes (Manchester: Carcanet, ), –, . Andre Bagoo, ‘After Andil Gosine, Portrait no. from (Made in Love)’, in Pitch Lake (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ), . Emery, Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature, , –. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), . Derek Walcott, The Prodigal, (New York: Faber and Faber, ), . Lawrence Scott, Light Falling on Bamboo (London: Tindal Street, ), . Kwame Dawes and Mathew Shenoda (eds.), Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden (Evanston, IL: TriQuarterly Books and Northwestern University Press, ), xix. Mia Leonin, ‘Chance Born – El Ekphrasis como excavación’, Nagari Magazine, January , www.nagarimagazine.com/chance-born-elekphrasis-como-excavacion-mia-leonin/. Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), . Nelly Rosario, Song of the Water Saints, (New York: Vintage Books, ), n.p. Donette Francis, Fictions of Feminine Citizenship: Sexuality and the Nation in Contemporary Caribbean Literature (New York: Palgrave, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Kevin Adonis Browne, High Mas: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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From Countertextuality to Intertextuality: Continuing the Caribbean Canon Emily L. Taylor
The intertextual use of canonical colonial texts in postcolonial literature is by now a well-recognized feature and is found globally throughout decolonizing cultures. Across the Caribbean, this act of writing back to the colonial centre also marked the beginning of a recognized Caribbean literary canon that defined itself as separate from the literature of the metropole and represented the colonized and formally colonized subjects in their own image – no longer English, or French, or Spanish, or Dutch, or Danish, or American. Other decolonial and postcolonial literary texts attempted to fill in silences in the record, especially in historical accounts that erased the experiences of the majority populations of the region, the enslaved and the indentured, the poor, and those not deemed worthy of historical attention, such as women and children. This intertextual strategy was important in taking up and dismantling colonial discourses, including literary discourses, which perpetuated white heteropatriarchal supremacy. In the case of the Caribbean, taking up canonical European texts was also a way for writers to reject their colonial education that compelled them to read about daffodils and snow, the white man’s burden and Prospero casting spells to suit his ends. Importantly for nation-building and the development of decolonized subjectivities, the first major wave of Caribbean writers who represented the majority populations of the region (Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean writers) took up these texts and reworked them for their own, often revolutionary ends. While the timeline for these decolonial texts differs depending on the processes of colonization and independence in different parts of the region, it can be observed that once educational opportunities were no longer limited to a small, usually white, elite creole class, the rejection and rewriting of colonial texts began. New literary forms and subjects emerged as new regional and national subjectivities were being imagined and shaped. Indeed, imaginative writings played an important role in articulating these new identities.
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The importance of these canonical transformations is by now apparent in the work of subsequent generations of Caribbean writers who can shape their own literary work in response to, and as a continuation of, other Caribbean stories. While more contemporary Caribbean writing still engages in countertextual practices, especially as the region is subject to different forms of colonial power in an age of globalization and multinational capitalism, the focus has shifted away from a need to battle literary text with literary text, as educational systems, publishing outputs and local literary ecosystems have changed the landscape of writings available to Caribbean reading publics. This essay focuses on how Caribbean writers engage with each other’s work through literary intertexts and explores how this creative practice serves to honour the work that has come before; to critique or correct the ideologies of previous works, especially in cases of patriarchal representations of gender and sexuality or in the repetition of colonial ideas of racial hierarchies; to establish the Caribbean identities of the new authors, especially in the case of authors living and working in the diaspora; to develop the literary visibility and value of Caribbean Englishes and Creoles; to add to the historical record or to fill in silences; or to validate a set of localized stories or mythologies. In this essay, I focus on a few representative examples. In the first section, I consider how Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé uses Martinican poet Aimé Césaire as intertext in her novels, focusing specifically on her text Célanire cou-coupé (translated as Who Slashed Celanire’s Throat? A Fantastical Tale, ). In the second section, I look at how Puerto Rican writer Mayra Santos-Febres responds to fellow Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré, specifically taking up Ferré’s short story ‘Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres’ (translated as ‘When Women Love Men’, ) and rewriting it in her novel Nuestra señora de la noche (translated as Our Lady of the Night, ). In the third section, I examine the literary legacy of Jean Rhys, whose countertextual novel Wide Sargasso Sea () rewrote the life of Jane Eyre’s () Bertha Mason. Both Michelle Cliff, in her novel No Telephone to Heaven, () and Elizabeth Nunez, in her novel Prospero’s Daughter (), use Wide Sargasso Sea as an intertext. In the final section, I analyse the importance of Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Schooner Flight’ () as intertext and epigraph for Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (). More than just allusion, intertextuality involves the direct importing of one text into another, usually whole pieces of text. While certainly not a
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new practice, or unique to contemporary or postmodern literature, the amount and frequency does seem to have increased, across all art forms, with sampling in music being perhaps the most ubiquitous. Graham Allen’s book Intertextuality () offers a useful overview. He reminds us that intertextuality is about networks and relations, so that reading a text in isolation becomes impossible. Allen traces the concept from its beginnings in Saussurean linguistics and the work of M. M. Bakhtin through to its poststructuralist meaning as developed by theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes. The key aspects of the concept for this essay include the importance of connecting texts through relational significance, or the way that intertextuality is used to position and call out a specific literary canon. Other key ideas come from Julia Kristeva’s work, which allows us to understand that intertextuality does not have to be deliberate or intentional on the part of the author but rather can be a manifestation of the discourses the author is immersed in, surfacing unconsciously as authors produce their own works. We should also keep in mind the importance of intertextuality for language use, especially in the Caribbean, where forms of language have been brutally repressed in attempts to ensure colonial dominance. Bakhtin’s work reminds us that all language is connected to previous forms of language, and is dependent on the community that speaks to interpret its meaning. This interdependence is key to understanding the work of the writers that follow.
Maryse Condé sur Césaire Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé is prolific and internationally recognized. Born in , she didn’t begin publishing her fiction until middle age, and has since published over twenty novels, as well as nonfiction and literary criticism. While much of her work is in intertextual dialogue with writers from outside of the Caribbean, she does take up a number of Caribbean literary concerns, mainly with other francophone writers, most notably Martinican poet Aimé Césaire. Although she has much in common with Caribbean writers, in particular her critiques of colonialism, she is nonetheless an iconoclast who rejects wholesale attempts to unify through ideas of ‘Mother Africa’ or by recovering oral art forms. The highly intertextual nature of her work is no surprise, insisting, as she does, that orality is not the key to her work, but rather other books: ‘I don’t believe that you become a writer by listening to someone telling stories or singing. It seems to me that you become a writer because you are in touch
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with books. Myself, that is how I became a writer. My family had a huge library, full of all sorts of books.’ Unlike many postcolonial writers who take up the canon of the colonizer and rewrite it, Condé is more interested in responding to writers who inspire and influence her work. She rewrites Wuthering Heights () and sets the story in Guadeloupe in La migration des cœurs (); she draws inspiration from Portnoy’s Complaint () in her first novel Heremakhonon (); she uses the plot structure from As I Lay Dying () in Traversée de la mangrove (). But the writer with whose work she most deeply engages is Aimé Césaire. As she explains in an interview: It is strange that when I think of intertextuality, I have in mind two American writers. I don’t have any French writers in my mind. I don’t have any Latin American writers in mind either. And I don’t have any West Indian writers except Césaire, who is in everybody’s mind. When you write you always have something to say against Césaire or for Césaire.
Perhaps the most radical postcolonial move Condé makes is to ignore the French colonial canon altogether, and to take up Césaire and other radical writers as her interlocutors. A. James Arnold explains that Condé’s treatment of Césaire and his search for African roots is an extended intertextual dialogue throughout her fiction, beginning with Heremakhon: We can take the novel to be a first fictional interrogation of the Négritude movement by a representative of a later generation of French West Indians. Careful readers will find Césaire cited frequently [. . .] This is to say that Césaire and his vision of Négritude are at the starting point of a hermeneutic process that Maryse Condé will carry out in her fiction over a tenyear period.
This hermeneutic process continues in Condé’s Célanire cou-coupé. The title is a rewriting of Césaire’s poetry collection entitled Soleil cou coupé (itself an intertextual reference to Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem ‘Zone’). In his collection, Césaire mythologizes Africa through abstract, fantastical imagery filled with spiritual, religious and magical references to nature, gods and demons. As Arnold explains in his introduction to the collection: ‘All these poetic devices, which delve deeply into a shared cultural memory, serve a transcendent, apocalyptic vision. A solar divinity presides over this collection, appearing at critical junctures [. . .] to provide a loose structuring device that suggests a narrative of creation, destruction and recreation.’ Arnold maintains the main goal of the collection is spiritual: ‘After the apocalyptic cataclysm, after transformation and
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metamorphosis, humankind will have realized the promise of the “New Year”.’ Condé’s work takes this apocalypse and moves it from the abstract to the very specific: Célanire is a baby that survives a ritual sacrifice that attempts to trade her life for the profit of others. With her throat cut as a baby and left for the gods at a crossroads in Guadeloupe, she survives by chance, and spends her life as an adult seeking revenge on those that would end her life. She comes to embody all of the forces in Césaire’s poetry: she is so seductive that all desire her (men and women alike), she is the personification of nature, and she uses all of her magic and demonic forces to advance her own agenda and to take advantage of the colonial hierarchies in the novel. Her power is not abstract: her power is the female body that refused to be sacrificed for material gain. She is not searching for roots, or a place to call home.
Sex, Race and National Space: Mayra Santos-Febres Revises Rosario Ferré Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré was born a year after Maryse Condé, and into a similar colonial context with the island under US rule. Unlike Condé, she was born into the family of local ruling elites: her father Luis Ferré served as governor of the island. As a white upper-class writer Ferré is scathing in her criticism of the patriarchal structure of Puerto Rican society, but less attuned to the complex intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality. Coupled with her shifting positions on independence for the island or statehood (corresponding with her decision to write in Spanish, and then later in English), she has enjoyed both widespread acclaim and criticism. One of Ferré’s earliest pieces, and by now one of her best known, is the short story ‘Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres’ (‘When Women Love Men’). The central characters are a white woman of society named Isabel Luberza and a Black sex worker named Isabel la Negra. The Black woman is modelled after an infamous madam, Isabel Luberza, who was gunned down in at the age of in Ponce, after a life spent becoming prosperous and powerful in the sex trade. Her death sparked numerous accounts in newspapers, two short stories and a film in the s. Here, I consider how a more contemporary representation of her life in Mayra Santos-Febres’s novel Nuestra señora de la noche writes back to Ferré’s work and argues for a more inclusive formulation of the Puerto Rican national space. While Ferré’s story is often lauded as a feminist critique of marriage, in that it equates the sexual labour of white wife and Black sex worker, it
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nonetheless reproduces the dehumanizing effect of objectifying Black bodies to shore up white subjectivities. The interesting narrative structure of the story, written in the second person as a direct address to the dead husband/lover Ambrosio, blends the women’s voices, so that by the end of the story it is impossible to separate the two. This blending is not, however, a platform to deconstruct racialized subjectivity; rather, it serves to erase the Black woman as she becomes symbolically anonymous – losing her name Isabel Luberza to the white woman, and becoming Isabel la Negra. This loss of identity explains, at least in part, Santos-Febres’s motivation to rewrite the story as a way to reclaim Black women’s subjectivity and write a more inclusive Puerto Rican national space. In the novel, Santos-Febres, a Puerto Rican writer of African descent, expands the white/black doubling of Ferré’s story to a trinity, setting up three main characters: the protagonist Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer (here restored to her full, historical name); Doña Montse, who cares for a Black Virgin of Montserrate and who raises Isabel’s child; and Cristina Rangel, a white woman who marries Isabel’s lover, the lawyer Fernando Fornarís. These women all pray to the Virgin Mary, and the three parts of the novel are structured around their prayers to different forms of the Virgin, including African-centred Santería incarnations. The timeline of the novel is structured around Isabel Luberza’s birth and death, and this work is really her life story. Two of the women are driven insane by the social conditions that constrain them: Doña Montse by the conditions of poverty and servitude she is forced into as a Black woman, and Cristina by the maddening social mores and constraints placed on white women, and the jealousy and rage she feels at Fernando’s love affair with Isabel. Isabel is the only character that manages to thrive in these conditions, turning the tragedy of Fernando’s abandonment (he marries Cristina after getting Isabel pregnant) into a business empire, capitalizing on the land he gives her out of guilt by turning it into a brothel that sells sex and illegal liquor. Like Ferré, Santos-Febres uses the figure of Isabel to narrate Puerto Rican national space. But unlike Ferré’s representation, where Isabel la Negra is the victimized site of male desire (she becomes the sexualized space of national unity because all men use her), Isabel in Santos-Febres’s novel is the agent of her own salvation, becoming a successful business woman who vies for power with the local white elite. Santos-Febres herself explains that the brothel is an apt metaphor for the Caribbean, subject to colonial power that uses bodies for profit. In this retelling, Isabel’s brothel becomes a microcosm for the state, a place where all sectors of Puerto Rican society intersect under her control.
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While Ferré’s short story is focused almost exclusively on women’s sexual labour, Santos-Febres offers a much more expansive account of women’s labour, especially the labour of Black women in Puerto Rican society. As Rubén Ríos Ávila comments, Isabel’s many jobs (as washerwoman, maid, seamstress, rum runner, brothel operator) become a way to represent the labouring women that fuelled Puerto Rican society in the twentieth century. Indeed, the focus on restoring dignity and honour to the historical legacy of Black women’s labour is an important addition to the many literary accounts of Isabel Luberza’s life, as critic Jerome C. Branche explains. Instead of feeling shame or a sense of inferiority, this Isabel is proud of her labour and refuses the position of Other. When the young white woman she is forced to serve denigrates her blackness, Isabel thinks to herself that they are not equals because she (Isabel) is superior because she can do more than this useless white girl. This rewriting of Isabel’s life also intervenes in the literary representation of the gran familia puertorriqueña, a colonial concept of the Puerto Rican nation as founded on white women’s wifely, virginal virtue. This metaphor erased Black people and local kinship structures from the Puerto Rican national imagining. In this work, Santos-Febres rewrites the family with Black women at its centre. The novel is full of godmothers, adoptive mothers and mother figures. Few characters have happy, traditional marriages, and the nuclear family is an almost non-existent structure. The novel ends with two brothers (the children of Fernando Fornarís, Cristina and Isabel), one white and one Black, bearing the remains of Isabel to her funeral. The novel suggests that these new family relations that acknowledge and celebrate racial plurality are the more accurate and ethical Puerto Rican national family. As Branche explains, the novel offers a counter narrative that is conscious of the ontological aggregate to which it stands in opposition, both in terms of gender and race, yet is firm in its national/istic stance. Nuestra Señora articulates another gran familia; one that has emerged out of black diasporan relocation but which is potentially reconciled with the rest of the Puerto Rican nation on the grounds of equality, as emblematized in the mutual recognition of the two sons of Fernando Fornarís, as they bear, together, the remains of Isabel Luberza at her funeral.
In this way, Santos-Febres both critiques the way that whiteness and classism operate in Ferré’s work and continues the feminist work she began. Santos-Febres writes an intersectional intertextuality that affirms Black female subjectivity in Caribbean writing.
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Wide Sargasso Sea, Continued Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea is now one of the most wellknown examples of countertextual postcolonial literature. In the novel, Rhys, a white creole woman raised in Dominica, rewrites Jane Eyre (), seeking to redress the colonial stereotypes of whites living in the British Empire as decadent, unstable, racially suspect and sexually lascivious. The novel famously rewrites the story of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s first wife, renaming her Antoinette and detailing her struggles coming of age as a poor Creole woman sold off in marriage to the colonizer, an Englishman who remains unnamed in the narrative but who represents the Rochester character. Part one and three of the novel are narrated from Antoinette’s perspective, and recount Antoinette’s search for a sense of home and the tragedy of being unable to have a relationship with her mixed-race lover, Sandi. Part two, forming the majority of the novel, is told from the Rochester character’s perspective and scathingly captures the result of patriarchal and colonial ideologies, expressed in his disdain for the Caribbean landscape and its people and his abuse of Antoinette, culminating in her imprisonment and death back in England at Thornfield Hall. Although initially Rhys’s place in the Caribbean literary canon was debated because she was a white woman writing outside of the region for most of her life, Wide Sargasso Sea is now firmly entrenched as a foundational Caribbean novel, both for its description of life under colonial rule and for its countertextual impulses. Rhys’s work has been particularly important for Caribbean women writers, because she was among the first to narrate the fraught and complex intersections of race, gender and sexuality in relation to both colonialism and nascent nationalisms. Two of the many women writers who use Rhys intertextually are Jamaican-American writer Michelle Cliff and Trinidadian-American writer Elizabeth Nunez. Both writers take up Rhys’s characters, with Antoinette’s reinscribed in Cliff’s novels Abeng () and No Telephone to Heaven () and the Rochester character in Elizabeth Nunez’s novel Prospero’s Daughter (). Cliff’s novel No Telephone to Heaven continues the story of Clare Savage, the light-skinned Jamaican protagonist of her earlier novel Abeng. The novel is highly intertextual, with epigraphs from a wide range of African, European and Caribbean sources. Like Condé, she cites Césaire on multiple occasions, drawing from both Notebook of a Return to My Native Land () and from his poem ‘Autre Saison’ (). She also draws on Derek Walcott, most notably from his poem ‘Jean Rhys’
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(). As Paula Morgan argues, Cliff continues Antoinette’s story from Jane Eyre, taking up the figure of Bertha to revisit the same questions of race, gender, sexuality and national belonging that Rhys poses in her novel. While Rhys’s protagonist is a white Creole woman, Clare Savage is mixed race, although light enough to pass in Jamaica, the US and England. For both women, their identities condemn them to a placelessness as they search for belonging. Morgan argues that Rhys’s Antoinette is reincarnated in Clare Savage and thus haunts the novel: ‘Rhys’s ghost is free to wander in an infinite seeking, an infinite knowledge of homecomings without home.’ It is interesting to consider this haunting not as revenge but as a liberation into writing which itself becomes a place to belong. On first read, one could assume Cliff is only in dialogue with Jane Eyre, but closer examination shows that Cliff is referencing both Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. Clare’s imagined affinity for Bertha is really only possible after Rhys rewrites her character to save her from the colonial depiction of her as an inhuman, sex-crazed savage. Cliff’s description of Clare in London as a lonely exile also echoes Rhys’s earlier fiction, almost all centrally concerned with the alienation of colonial women in Europe. The language itself is also an homage to Rhys’s short, clipped sentences, as in this description of Clare’s realization that she is not English: ‘No, she could not be Jane. Small and pale. English [. . .] No, my girl, try Bertha. Wild-maned Bertha [. . .] Yes, Bertha was closer to the mark. Captive. Ragôut. Mixture. Confused. Jamaican. Caliban. Carib. Cannibal. Cimarron. All Bertha. All Clare.’ In this sequence, Clare rejects a colonial identity for a national one, using Rhys’s formulation to claim her creole identity as a light-skinned Jamaican woman. Rhys’s novel thus functions as a foundation from which Cliff narrates the struggles and possibilities of a more inclusive national space. Prospero’s Daughter similarly is concerned with rejecting colonial ideology and narrating the nation. Like Cliff’s novel, it is highly intertextual, most notably as a rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (). Nunez sets her novel just before Trinidadian independence on the small island of Chacachacare off the coast of Trinidad, the site of a leper colony. Prospero becomes the corrupt and exploitative Englishman, Dr Gardner, Miranda his daughter Virginia, Caliban the handsome mixed race Carlos, and Ariel their servant Ariana. The story, like Rhys’s, is told from the multiple perspectives of Gardner, Virginia and Carlos. To this intertext Nunez adds an additional narrator, Mumsford, not from The Tempest but rather a variation of the Rochester character from Wide Sargasso Sea. Mumsford is a working-class Englishman made good in the tropics. A detective in the
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soon-to-be-defunct colonial police force, he enjoys the feeling of superiority over the locals and despises Trinidad: But, as he had resigned himself to accepting, he was not in his beloved England. He was here, on this mixed-up, smothering, suffocating, sultry island, on this stifling, god-forsaken, mosquito-ridden, insect-infected, sweat-drenched outpost, with its too, too bright colours, its too, too much everything: too much rain in the rainy season, too much sun in the dry season, too much blue in the sky, too much green in the grass, too much red in the creeping flowering plant, too much turquoise in the sea, too much white on the sand. Too, too many black people.
Mumsford’s revulsion at the excess of the landscape, and the hybridity of the culture and people echo the Rochester character’s same abhorrence after he has married Antoinette. He thinks as they travel to their honeymoon house in Dominica: ‘Everything is too much, I felt as I rode wearily after her. Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger’ (). His rejection of the landscape is also a rejection of Antoinette, and her perceived strangeness and racial impurity. Mumsford, likewise, is horrified by all the mixing on the island, and tries to convince Virginia to deny her love for Carlos on account of his imperial anxiety that kind ‘should stay with kind’ (). Although Mumsford never relinquishes his racist and colonial ideology, his investigation of Dr Gardner (revealing his physical abuse of Carlos, and sexual abuse of Virginia and Ariana, all children under his care) forces him to recognize that the real savage in the story is the Englishman. Interestingly, his attitude towards the landscape begins to shift along with his attitude towards Dr Gardner, and he recognizes its sublime beauty: Not for the first time since he had come to live in Trinidad was he forced to admit that there were some compensations, that besides the social advantages, sometimes the landscape pleasantly surprised, sometimes it was reward enough. In front of him was a breathtaking panorama of shapes and colours tumbling down the hillside and spreading wide across green plains to the sea. ()
The investigation shakes him but does not fully dislodge his dedication to the colonial cause. Dr Gardner has accused Carlos of the attempted rape of Virginia (following the plot of The Tempest) until Ariana, their servant, comes to the police station to testify to both Carlos’s innocence and Dr Gardner’s own abuse of her. The French creole police matron, who initially scolds Ariana for not wearing a slip and is disdainful of her class/
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race position, is sympathetic as Ariana details the sexual abuse she’s suffered under Gardner. Shocked, she asks ‘“He touched you?” She came closer to Ariana. Mumsford put his finger to his lips and with a nod of his head, he warned her to be silent. When trouble comes, they close ranks. But it was his job, not hers, to question Ariana’ (; italics in original). The borrowing here is from the first line of Wide Sargasso Sea, told in Antoinette’s voice: ‘They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks.’ This brilliant first line conveys Antoinette’s crisis of identity and homelessness as her poverty places her outside of the ranks of the rich white elite. The irony of Mumsford’s echo here is that he imagines the Trinidadian people closing ranks, as the light-skinned French creole police matron sympathizes with the darker Indo-Caribbean Ariana, while his plan is to close white ranks by devising a scheme to let Gardner off. Ultimately, Gardner himself undoes the plan, as he throws himself off of a cliff despite Mumsford’s attempts to save him. These intertextual appearances of Wide Sargasso Sea continue the story Rhys began. Clare, although sharing with Antoinette many of the same psychic dislocations, is able to die for, and in, her country, joining a rebel group composed of many ethnicities that comprise the Jamaican people. Mumsford returns to England after Trinidad becomes independent, unable to relinquish the ideology of the colonial enterprise. The intertextual use of Wide Sargasso Sea allows both novels to decentre the necessity of writing back to the colonial text (already accomplished by Rhys) and instead to focus on continuing a story of building a community from the diversity of Caribbean peoples.
Junot Díaz Writes the Blank Page Junot Díaz opens his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, with two epigraphs: one from the s comic book the Fantastic Four and the other from Derek Walcott’s poem ‘The Schooner Flight’. It is the first epigraph that signals the main thrust of Díaz’s intertextuality in the novel: a cornucopia of science fiction and fantasy references that set up a magical realist setting and establish Oscar as an uber-nerd whose outsider status as a Dominican American growing up in New Jersey allows Díaz to narrate the history of the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic and US– Dominican relations. His use of Walcott’s poem is far less evident. Walcott himself was a master of intertextuality, most famously in his rewriting of Homer in his epic poem Omeros (although also in his
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play The Odyssey: A Stage Version). In one sense, Díaz’s nod to Walcott is a fitting homage to a mastery of intertextuality, but it also allows Díaz to position his work as a Caribbean novel, and to build on Walcott’s work establishing oral languages as literary languages, his anticolonial poetics that celebrates ancestral and cultural mixing, as well as his work questioning the abuse of power by local Caribbean elites and dictators. Perhaps Díaz was drawn to Walcott’s collection The Star-Apple Kingdom () because of the appearance of the Dominican Republic, both in ‘The Schooner Flight’ and in the title poem. In the title poem, Walcott imagines the Revolution as a woman who had once offered up the Caribbean Sea ‘to be the footbath of dictators, Trujillo, Machado’ but who now craves a violent resistance. In ‘The Schooner Flight’, the poem’s narrator and protagonist, Shabine, is in love with a woman from the Dominican Republic. His love for Maria Concepcion becomes an extended metaphor for his love for the Caribbean, and this conflation of intimate desire with national and regional identification aligns with a key theme for Díaz’s novel, mirrored in the love Oscar has for a Dominican sex worker, Ybón. This connection is apparent in the choice of the epigraph, selected from the second verse after Shabine has sorrowfully left the bed he shares with Maria Concepcion to set sail on his journey from Trinidad to St Lucia to Barbados to Dominica to the Bahamas. This love for a woman and for the Caribbean drives both the poem and novel. From Díaz’s epigraph: ‘if loving these islands must be my load, / out of corruption my soul takes wings’. Díaz is similarly motivated to narrate the abuses of power by local elites, and the way Trujillo’s dictatorship is connected to the erotics of colonial and neocolonial power in the region. Fleeing the corruption motivates Shabine to set sail, but he turns his journey into the poem itself, and instead of escaping the corruption, ends up creating a meditation on history, power, love and longing. The epigraph continually undoes and remakes Shabine’s authority: I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.
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Walcott rejects national discourses based on purity and instead insists on a national, and regional, identity as grounded in mixture, all factors important in Díaz’s representation of Oscar’s struggles to find a space of belonging between the US and the Dominican Republic. Both Shabine and Díaz’s narrator, Yunior, are also concerned with history and deep memory. Díaz, like Walcott, uses the fantastic to explain the world of the Caribbean and the fate of Oscar’s family. Yunior explains that the Americas suffer a curse (fukú) unleashed when Columbus landed on Hispaniola and ushered in the beginning of the slave trade and the genocide of indigenous Americans. The counter-spell, or zafa, is linked in the novel to resistance, writing and love. A key figure of the zafa is a magical mongoose that appears to save both Oscar and his mother, Beli, from the violence of the state. We see the mongoose first when it appears to save Beli from Trujillo’s henchmen that have tried to kill her in a cane field: ‘So as Beli was flitting in and out of life, there appeared at her side a creature that would have been an amiable mongoose if not for its golden lion eyes and the absolute black of its pelt.’ It leads her out of the cane field as she follows its eyes: ‘Sometimes she saw the creature’s chabine eyes flashing through the stalks’ (). When she drags herself to the road, it is the mongoose reincarnated as a chabine musician that saves her: ‘Silence, and then the lead singer lit a match and held it in the air and in that splinter of light was revealed a blunt-featured woman with the golden eyes of a chabine. We’re not leaving her, the lead singer said in a curious cibaeña accent, and only then did Beli understand that she was saved’ (). The mongoose also saves Oscar when he tries to commit suicide in college, and appears to him in a dream that pulls him through his own recovery from a beating in a cane field, this time by Dominican police officers (, ). Although Oscar does die at the end, because he refuses to give up on pursuing his relationship with Ybón (the girlfriend of a police captain), the future of his family remains hopeful, as before he dies he imagines them boarding a bus with the mongoose as the driver. The mongoose also connects back to ‘The Schooner Flight’ in the repeated description of the Mongoose’s chabine eyes Shabine is reincarnated in the magical figure of the Mongoose, but most importantly his identity as a poet links Walcott’s work with Díaz’s argument that the only way to fight the fukú is with writing. Yunior tells us this at the beginning of the novel: ‘Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell’ (). Shabine, railing against the local elites: ‘I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, / I who have no
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weapon but poetry and / the lances of palms and the sea’s shining shield!’ Although Oscar also writes his book, it is never found, and the real tragedy of the novel seems to be the blank page. In fact, Sean O’Brien argues that the blank page in the novel theorizes how the reader will encounter its intertextuality: unrecognized references create a different experience of the novel. Ignoring the epigraph is to erase the canon of Caribbean writers who have come before, and to miss the importance of a mixed race sailor, an everyman, singing to us from the depths of the sea, as the last line of the poem describes.
Conclusion Attention to how Caribbean writers are interfacing with their literary predecessors from within the region transitions the creative and critical conversations from the colonial–postcolonial binary that has locked Caribbean literary criticism into a protracted discussion of colonizers. While the history of colonialism in the region will remain a defining tenet for understanding the literature of the Caribbean, these works widen the lens to see how the literary canon is shaping itself in relation to antecedent texts and marking a heritage of expressing Caribbean subjectivities in their own terms. In this way, intertextuality between Caribbean writers offers an opportunity to recognize and to reshape stories and representations in relation to each other instead of in defiance of being positioned as the Other.
Notes Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, ). Julia Kristeva, ‘“Nous Deux” or a (Hi)Story of Intertextuality’, Romantic Review, .– (), –. Mikhail M. Bakhtin and Helene Iswolsky, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge: MIT Press, ). Mohamed B. Taleb-Khyar, ‘An Interview with Maryse Condé and Rita Dove’, Callaloo, . (), –, . For more on Condé’s intertextual use of these texts see Derek O’Regan, Postcolonial Echoes and Evocations: The Intertextual Appeal of Maryse Condé (New York: Peter Lang, ). He argues that ‘the fundamental thrust of Condé’s intertextuality is the creolization of the text through the presence of and exchange with other texts within it. While she engages with West Indian writers, her preponderant communion concerns the texts of writers who are emblematic of the literary canon. By choosing intertexts in such works as Wuthering Heights, As I Lay Dying, The Scarlett Letter and, indeed, La
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Mulatresse Solitude, Condé’s intertextual purpose is also to decolonize literature and culture through a subversive, creolized rewriting of the former coloniser’s text and, in so doing, to open up dialogue with, and write back to, him/her as a writing Other’ (–). Taleb-Khyar, ‘Maryse Condé and Rita Dove’, –. The use of Césaire in her fictional work is a continuation of the dialogue she begins in her essays that reject and reformulate key tenets of Césaire’s concept of négritude (‘Négritude Césairienne, Négritude Senghorienne’ []; ‘Notes sur un retour au pays natal’ []; ‘Pourquoi la négritude? Négritude et revolution’ []). A. James Arnold, ‘The Novelist as Critic’, World Literature Today: A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, . (), –, . A. James Arnold, ‘Introduction’, in Aimé Césaire, Solar Throats Slashed: The Unexpurgated Edition, trans. and eds. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshelman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, ), ix–xx, xviii. Ibid., xx. Santos-Febres in an interview with Nadia Celis: ‘Para mí el burdel es la gran metáfora del Caribe. Por razones históricas, dolorosas, y por razones de negociación [. . .] Siempre somos cuerpos y na’ más, y cuerpos a la venta y cuerpos accesibles’ (Nadia V. Celis, ‘“Mayra Santos Febres: El Lenguaje de Los Cuerpos Caribeños”: Conversación on Nadia V. Celis’, in Nadia V. Celis and Juan Pablo Rivera (eds.), Lección Errante: Mayra Santos Febres y El Caribe Contemporáneo [San Juan: Isla Negra, ], –, ); ‘For me the brothel is the grand metaphor for the Caribbean. For painful, historical reasons and for reasons of negotiations and business [. . .] We’re always bodies and nothing more, bodies for sale and bodies always available [. . .]’ (translation mine). Rubén Ríos Avila, ‘La Virgen Puta’, in Celis and Rivera (eds.), Lección Errante, –, –. Jerome C. Branche, ‘Disrobing Narcissus: Race, Difference, and Dominance (Mayra Santos Febres’s Nuestra Señora de La Noche Revisits the Puerto Rican National Allegory)’, in Jerome C. Branche (ed.), Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, ), –, –. Mayra Santos-Febres, Nuestra señora de la noche (Madrid: Espasa, ), . Branche, ‘Disrobing Narcissus’, . As Rhys explains in an interview for The Paris Review: ‘When I read Jane Eyre as a child, I thought, why should she think Creole women are lunatics and all that? What a shame to make Rochester’s first wife, Bertha, the awful madwoman, and I immediately thought I’d write the story as it might really have been. She seemed such a poor ghost, I thought I’d write her a life’; Elizabeth Vreeland, ‘Jean Rhys: The Art of Fiction LXIV’, Paris Review, (), –, . See Kamau Brathwaite’s Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona: Savacou Publications, ) for the
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debate about excluding white creoles from the Caribbean canon. Arguing for its place in the canon, see Kenneth Ramchand’s The West Indian Novel and its Background (London: Faber and Faber, ) and Evelyn O’Callaghan's Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (New York: St Martin’s Press, ). Abeng also interfaces with Wide Sargasso Sea and could be read as a continuation of the Tia/Antoinette relationship. See Lucía Stecher, ‘Afiliaciones electivas: Familia y relaciones de amistad interracial en Abeng de Michelle Cliff’, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, . (), –. In No Telephone to Heaven (New York: Plume, ), Michelle Cliff also cites Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land as the epigraph to section two ‘No Telephone to Heaven’ () and also Césaire’s ‘Autre Saison’ as epigraph to section four (), and uses lines from Walcott’s ‘Laventille’ as epigraph to the novel, then uses first two verses from Walcott’s poem ‘Jean Rhys’ as epigraph for final section XI. Paula Morgan, ‘Homecomings without Home: Reading Rhys and Cliff Intertextually’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, . (), –, . Ibid., . Cliff, No Telephone to Heaven, . Elizabeth Nunez, Prospero’s Daughter (New York: Ballantine, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Rhys’s attention to the Rochester character’s view of the landscape is a rewriting of Rochester’s disdain for the Jamaican environment in Jane Eyre: ‘One night I had been awakened by her yells [. . .] it was a fiery West Indian night; one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates [. . .] I got up and opened the window. The air was like sulphur-steams [. . .] Mosquitoes came buzzing in and hummed sullenly around the room; the sea [. . .] rumbled dull like an earthquake – black clouds were casting up over it; the moon was setting in the waves, broad and red, like a hot cannon-ball’ (Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea: A Norton Critical Edition [New York: W.W. Norton, ], ). Ibid., . For more on Díaz’s intertextual use of science fiction and fantasy, see Sean P. O’Brien, ‘Some Assembly Required: Intertextuality, Marginalization, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao’, Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, . (), –. Derek Walcott, ‘The Star-Apple Kingdom’, in The Poetry of Derek Walcott -, ed. Glyn Maxwell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), –, . Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Walcott, ‘The Schooner Flight’, in Poetry of Derek Walcott, ed. Maxwell, –, . O’Brien, ‘Some Assembly Required’, .
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Caribbean Eco-Poetics: The Categorial Imperative and Indifference in the Caribbean Environment Keja L. Valens
Eco-poetics, as described in A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, engages the ‘relation between humankind and nature’, positing that relationship as both constructed through and reflected in our imagination of it. Eco-poetics emerged in the American and European academy at the turn of the twenty-first century in the context of the recognition of impending ecological disaster and movements to ‘protect the environment’. Caribbean critics and writers quickly pointed out that ecological disaster has been a concern in Caribbean writing since at least the seventeenth century and that facile conceptions of ‘the environment’ as devoid of people have been significant contributors to the decimation of Caribbean environments from the early colonial period through to the present. Thus Caribbean eco-poetics, as Wiebke Beushausen specifies, ‘not only engages in ecological themes and strategies to aestheticize nature in fiction, but also takes into account the specific contexts of dispossession of the land and human bodies as well as colonial exploitation and the making of the postcolonial state’. Formulations of eco-poetics that rely on lines of demarcation that separate (even if to creatively reunify) human and nature, human and animal, wilderness and civilization, endorse what I call the categorial imperative: the culmination of the long history of Western separation of human and nature in the Enlightenment/colonial mandate to categorize, to identify/discriminate and systematically organize, to collect and enclose, to divide and conquer. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of the categorial imperative is Linnaean taxonomy, what Elizabeth DeLoughrey describes as ‘a new taxonomy that contributed to the erasure of indigenous knowledges while erecting a hierarchy of racial “species”, gendered difference, and a pathologization of the hybridity of the tropics’. The categorial imperative underlies the naturalization of colonial demarcations in the Caribbean environment. Caribbean eco-poetics takes the categorial imperative as itself part of the violence of colonialism that misunderstands and tries to deny the endless transitions, the perpetual
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revolutions, and the inextricable imbrications of humans with not only nature, animals and things, but also of all those with spirits, folk figures and divine forces that are endemic in the Caribbean. Caribbean ecopoetics offers not just a reconsideration of the spaces between human and nature, but ways of articulating the indifference of human and nature. This indifference does not become sameness; it is not a move of collapse or unification, but rather a refusal of the terms and the stability of the colonial classificatory system. In difference with and/or indifferent to the colonial categorial imperative, Caribbean eco-poetics articulates the manifold and mobile interactions within and among Caribbean environments. This essay traces several characteristic moves of contemporary Caribbean eco-poetics. Grounded in the theoretical and poetic frameworks offered by Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poétique de la relation’ (‘Poetics of Relation’) and Wilson Harris’s ‘Music of Living Landscapes’, Caribbean eco-poetics as a field in the twenty-first century has been most extensively named and described by DeLoughrey. The broad reach of eco-poetics – which understands ecos to include all aspects of the environment, the world as dwelling and all that dwells in it, the many and intersecting ecosystems of the Caribbean and its diaspora – makes it a compelling critical approach. From the colonial impact on the land and its rhetorical use as a colonized space (often gendered as female in colonial narratives) through the historical recovery of indigeneity and slavery, speciesism and the question of humanity in the long path toward emancipation, the critical evaluation of tourism, and the exploration of the spaces and places of dwelling and crossing, Caribbean eco-poetics reflects diverse explorations of the natural environment and Caribbean subjectivities in the tropics and the diaspora. This essay examines moves in Caribbean ecopoetics that reconsider lines of demarcation by rewriting them with indifference: returning to the colonial archive to examine the naturalization of the categorial imperative and to recuperate its victims; reconfiguring the garden and gardening as ways to reinhabit and reconfigure the categorial imperative; writing worlds where the categorial imperative does not hold, where indifferences of human, animal, spirit, genre are manifest; following the ways that indifference to the categorial imperative includes indifference to binary gender and heteronormativity, making space for what might be called queer. In the development of contemporary literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora, the returns to the colonial archive, especially in search of traces of marginalized voices and stories, remind that ‘the history of colonization, which foregrounds the relationship between landscape and power, is [. . .]
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vital to any discussion about literary inscriptions of Caribbean ecologies’. I focus on two particularly productive sites for eco-poetic moves in the colonial archive: Crusoe’s island and the plantation. The voyages of ‘discovery’ and the emptying of the ‘discovered’ Caribbean to create the terra nullius in which colonial cultivation served as the mark and product of ownership, operate on the principle that Jamaica Kincaid associates with Carolus Linnaeus: ‘to name is to possess’. Jill Casid argues that while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘to plant was to make colonies’, in the eighteenth century the need to balance increasing slave labour with maintaining an image of the Caribbean as paradise required ‘the idea of husbandry’ to become ‘a new ideology of empire’; thus, ‘the most influential imperial relandscapings of the eighteenth century were the island gardens of narrative fiction, particularly Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe’. Returning to the site of inscription (like Derek Walcott earlier), Olive Senior takes up the voice of ‘Crusoe’s Parrot’, reconfiguring the tropes of virgin earth and innocent animal to reposition Crusoe’s domination and taming of Caribbean flora and fauna as strategically orchestrated by them. As Aimé Césaire recasts Shakespeare’s Caliban in Une tempête, Senior positions ‘Crusoe’s Parrot’ as true ‘ruler’ of the island, for ‘this island kingdom was Parrot’s from time immemorial’, and he ‘could have told where the fresh springs / were; how to bake bread, set traps, fire pottery. Where best / to build the boat’. Time of habitation and understanding of the island’s ecology authorize the parrot’s rule and position Crusoe as a usurper. Crusoe comes to represent the colonizer who thinks that, as Ian Strachan writes, ‘he sets nature in motion’ but is mistaken in his presumption that only thanks to him ‘the resources of paradise are processed and harvested so as to produce value’. In Senior’s pen, Crusoe’s inability to recognize the indifference between the bird and himself, Crusoe’s categorization of the bird as a different species and his speciesism combine to make the fool of Crusoe. Senior’s parrot performs ‘all pretence, mimicry’ in order to ‘catch wise’, both to capture the supposedly wise Crusoe in the trap of his own hubris and to take for himself Crusoe’s speech. The parrot’s learning of Crusoe’s speech is not, however, without impact. Senior’s is not a revisionist poem that suggests the parrot watches unscathed as Crusoe, and a long line of ‘cannibals, pirates, / buccaneers, delirious castaways’ come and go (–). Indeed, the very language whose acquisition enables the parrot to speak in this poem may be inherently a tool of power over nature. The parrot’s indifference from Crusoe includes his own yearning for mastery, differentiation, ‘words addictive as grain cracked / open on the tongue’ so
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that ‘The Secret of Crusoe’s Parrot’ is not only that he is catcher mimicking caught, but also that he is infected (). Senior’s return to the colonial archive helps us to reconsider the divide between human and animal, but also requires us to relinquish any absolute distinction between colonizer and colonized. Though in Defoe’s story Crusoe’s shipwreck foiled his plans to purchase slaves in Africa to grow his plantation, like Crusoe’s island and garden, the plantation emblematizes the categorial imperative: its divisions between wild and cultivated, savage and cultured, slave and master, implant colonial control of the Caribbean in the landscape and economy. New stories of slavery, like Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière. . . () and Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (), return to the colonial archive to, with creative irreverence to its male- and plantocracy-centred qualities, examine how women survived, escaped and challenged the plantation. Condé and James bring out the roles of women not only as rhetorical parallels to islands and plantations, raped and sown with colonial seed, but also as bearers, as users, of knowledge about medicinal and magical plants, plantation landscapes, and modes of affinity that transmit knowledge among women to foment both overt and covert rebellion. Their stories draw on this alternative eco-poetics to rewrite the dehumanization and deracination of enslaved subjects in the plantation period. Confused with landscape, livestock and monster, Condé’s Tituba and James’s Homer and Lilith posit the problem of the dehumanization of slaves not as one of miscategorization but rather of categorization (as epistemology). In Casid’s words, ‘classifying’ involves demonstrating ‘the visual display of continuity or unity in nature’ and also managing ‘the “threat” that assumed differences not only between human, animal, and vegetable, but moreover between humans as morphological types would blur to the point of being visibly untenable’. As Condé’s Tituba and James’s Homer embrace their ‘witchcraft’ and its connections to their African ancestors and Caribbean and American environments, and as James’s Lilith accepts her possession by and of the spirit of murderous slave women, they show that the demand for recognition as human can be made not in distinction from being non-human but against being subjected to the categorial imperative. The slave women’s connection to medicinal plants in Moi, Tituba sorcière. . . and The Book of Night Women contrasts with the ways that they are forced into mutually harmful relationships with plantation environments while the ability to learn, preserve and share plant knowledge amongst generations of women and across oceans contrasts with the
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decimation of ancestral and family ties wrought by slavery. In James’s novel, the slave-owners’ outsider status in Jamaica is embedded in their endless, and never fully successful, battles to control and manipulate the lands and products of the plantation. The enslaved, however, become integrated into the Jamaican environment through their modes of inhabiting and knowing the landscape, from the ability of the ‘night women’ to find the caves hidden in the cane fields to that of the Maroons to live in the mountain forests that surround them. Condé’s series of plantation and slave owners are similarly embattled with the elements under their supposed control while the titular Tituba ventures safely into the forests of Guadeloupe, and later Massachusetts, to collect the plants that she needs. She also forms alliances with indigenous women that entwine African and indigenous Caribbean and American plant work. The ability of Condé’s Tituba and James’s Homer to practice their medicinal knowledge in the Caribbean and its diaspora connects African, Caribbean and North American plants to evidence the deracination of plants as well as people from Africa to the Americas and at the same time marks the indigenization of Afro-Caribbeans through their connection to the flora ‘of’ the Caribbean. The relationship to plants and place in these stories exemplifies what Sarah Phillips Casteel identifies as recent critical moves to ‘challenge the persistent, often delocalizing identification of the Caribbean with deterritorialization by suggesting that greater attentions needs to be given to the process of reterritorialization in which Caribbean diaspora cultures are perpetually engaged’. As Caribbean writers ‘struggled with how to represent the postplantation landscape of an incipient nation in the literary structures of inherited colonial genres’, DeLoughrey argues, they sought ‘to uncover Caribbean history through geography’, turning to ‘the trope of the island garden’. Dovetailing with the return to imperial gardening through the colonial archive, the trope of the contemporary island garden in Caribbean fiction marks the ongoing interactions of the categorial imperative and its others: the unclassifiable, the hybrid, the sentient plant and the gardener who talks with it. Writing as both a gardener and a critic of the coloniality of gardening, Kincaid asks in regards to both the colonial archive and her own practices at the turn of the twenty-first century, ‘What is the relationship between gardening and conquest?’ In many ways, as Kincaid explains, gardening is conquest: ‘This [Linnaean] naming of things is so crucial to possession – a spiritual padlock with the key irretrievably thrown away – that it is a murder, an erasing’ (). Under the long reach of colonialism, Kincaid recognizes, her mother is not a gardener but
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‘someone who puts a few things here and there for her own use’, and knowledge about indigenous Caribbean plants and gardens is undocumented: ‘I do not know, I can find no record of it’ (–). Pragmatic and contingent interactions of people and plants, that eclipse the categorial imperative, are also erased by it. However, Kincaid herself, along with writers like Senior, Lorna Goodison, Shani Mootoo and Rita Indiana (like the earlier Elma Napier of Dominica, Dulce Maria Loynaz of Cuba and Françoise Ega of Martinique), also offer another response to the question about the relationship between gardening and empire: the garden can reconfigure botanical knowledge in Caribbean eco-poetic epistemology and repossess Caribbean environments in practices of decolonial gardening. The transmission of botanical information not recognized as ‘record’ survives in the work of Caribbean eco-poetics. Kincaid herself notes that ‘the botany of Antigua exists in medicinal folklore’ that she continues to learn from her mother: My mother and I were sitting on the steps in front of her house one day and I suddenly saw a beautiful (to me now; when I was a child I thought it ugly) bush [. . .] she called it cancanberry bush and said that years ago when people could not afford to see doctors, if their children had thrush, they would make a paste with this fruit rub it inside the child’s mouth, and this would make it go away. ()
The calling of names is a practice of eco-poetic gardening and transmission of plant knowledge that Goodison also uses throughout the poems in To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (). Prosopopoeially calling on as much as calling out the name of the nut, Goodison’s ‘Song of the Fruits and Sweets of Childhood’ opens: O small and squat with thin tough skin containing the slick flesh of mackafat which makes fillings like putty between the teeth.
In Rita Indiana’s post-apocalyptic La mucama de Omicunlé (; Tentacle, ), the preservation of indigenous names is the secret and sacred task of Nenuco, ‘the gardener’, and essential to the hope that ‘the men of the water, who came every so often to help them’ would arrive in time to reverse the pollution spreading from a spill in the Caribbean Sea
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across the world’s oceans. In the epistemology of Caribbean eco-poetics, myth, religion, gossip, storytelling and poetic recitation not only record but form gardening knowledge. Nenuco’s ability to preserve Arawak gardening by working day jobs as a hotel gardener exemplifies how plant names and knowledge survive both in the margins of colonialism and the categorial imperative and also in their midst. Like Nenuco, who repopulates his family’s cove with ‘almond trees, roses, bromeliads, dwarf palms, and ferns, which Nenuco took from the gardens he tended so beautifully in the houses and hotels where he found work’, Goodison’s creative gardeners practise repossession as ‘In the City Gardens Grow No Roses as We Know Them’, the people planted what they could. In paved yards with no lawns they planted. In discarded paint pans that they filled with fertile soil they transported in bags from the green growing yards of St. Andrew.
Goodison’s gardeners repurpose the detritus of colonization and its aftermath not only by plantings that allow an old chamber pot to be ‘elevated to the level of a respectable receptacle’, but also by creative renaming that repossesses the colonial discourse and mixes it in with local lore: In the city gardens grow no roses as we know them. So the people took the name and bestowed it generic, on all flowers, called them roses. So here we speak a litany of roses that grow in the paint-pan chamber-pot gardens of Kingston.
Similar to Goodison’s repurposing of colonial discourse, Kincaid uses Linnaean taxonomy as a practice of resistance. Repeating throughout My Garden (Book) the ways that ‘Latin names came later, with resistance’, Kincaid sets up her use of Latin names as a mode of resisting the categorial imperative from within. She masters Linnaeus, able to summarize his Philosophia Botanica as the story of the invention of Linnaean taxonomy and to implant a question at its centre: ‘Its narrative would begin this way: In the beginning, the vegetable kingdom was chaos, people everywhere called the same things by a name that made sense to them, not by a name arrived at by an objective standard. But who has an interest in an objective standard? Who needs one?’ (). Rather than pose rhetorical questions, these queries ask for serious consideration. Kincaid’s use of Latin plant names keeps those questions open at the root of any gardening project. Gardening becomes a work of endlessly making and remaking ‘a map of
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the Caribbean and the sea that surrounds it’ (); perusing botanical gardens allows for such observation as: ‘It was not hollyhock at all but Gossypium, and its common name is cotton’ that entails the recognition that ‘cotton all by itself exists in perfection, with malice toward none; in the sharp, swift, even brutal dismissive words of the botanist Oakes Ames, it is reduced to an economic annual, but the tormented, malevolent role it has played in my ancestral history is not forgotten by me’ (). In other works, gardens and their plants and animals step out of rows and take over colonial structures and orders, sometimes with malice, as in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night () and Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics (). Mootoo’s Mala Ramchandin works with ‘carcases of a bachac, a spinner ant, two red ants and black-red cockroach as long as her thumb [. . .] every visible corpse off her property’ and ‘a vibrating carpet of moths, centipedes, millipedes, cockroaches, and unnamed insects that found refuge in Mala’s surroundings’ () to protect her from the remains of her father’s desire to enter the position of colonial power – as Christian minister, husband to a white woman, rapist of Indo-Caribbean girls – and when her late mother’s ‘well-ordered, colour-coordinated beds’ () become an ‘impenetrable sea of brambles and stinging nettles’ (), Mala finally enjoys the safety of being easily mistaken not for her father’s wife, but for a shrub (). As Mootoo’s Mala becomes a brambly, cooing garden inhabitant, Senior’s poems show the indifference of garden and gardener in a Caribbean environment alive with sentient plants like the ‘Pineapple’ whose pineal eyes watch and wait, counting down.
These gardens have minds of their own, and they do not operate according to human reason, colonial or Caribbean. They resist colonial and neocolonial efforts ‘to separate our flowers / from weeds, woods from trees’. Senior’s is not a simple revolutionary garden that is magically able to revolt against the categorial imperative; its insistence on remaining ‘convoluted’ leads in ‘The Knot Garden’ to destruction by fire. But in the wake of the fire, the fertilized soil (nothing like fire to do it) bursts into new and twisted growth of such profusion,
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that corrupt leaders are put off, if not put out. The moves of Caribbean eco-poetic gardening reconfigure plants, earth and gardeners as the tenders of Caribbean past, present and future. The indifference of garden and gardener represents one way that Caribbean eco-poetics heeds Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s call that ‘if the wrongs of colonialism – its legacies of continuing human inequalities, for instance – are to be addressed, still less redressed, then the very category of the human, in relation to animals and environment, must also be brought under scrutiny’. As it refuses the categorial imperative to ward off the impending chaos Linnaeus saw in an unsystematized nature, Caribbean eco-poetics moves to question the classification of Linnaeus’s homo sapiens in a wide variety of manners. When Senior’s ‘Bamboo’ (that won ‘the argument for eternity’ because it was a better debater than Stone) tends Man as much as it is tended by Man, when Ooonya Kempadoo’s eponymous Buxton Spice () speaks, when Kincaid’s ‘Girl’ learns to see a blackbird that ‘might not be a blackbird at all’, then the differences between human, plant, animal and thing are confused in the etymological sense: they are poured together (mixed; disorderly; promiscuous; or in William Withering’s An Arrangement of British Plants According to the Latest Improvements of the Linnaen System, not arranged in order). These creations echo and integrate figures and features of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean religion and folklore, like Grace Nichols’s ‘Keeper of the Green Cathedral’, the ‘old deer-footed, leafbearded / curator himself, Papa Bois’ and Patrick Chamoiseau’s mentô Man-L’Oubliée in Biblique des derniers gestes (), who hold little regard for boundaries that distinguish not only human, plant and animal, but also kingdoms of this world and that, differences between the metaphorical and the material, or divisions of gender and genre. While these confusions appear throughout contemporary Caribbean literature (as in the work of many before, from Jean Rhys of Dominica to Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy of Cuba to Joseph Zobel and Simone Schwartz-Bart of Martinique), they intensify in environments associated with the escape from or resistance to the categorial imperative: the forest, the mountains, the mangrove, the ocean, the hurricane. Deep in the mountain forests of Haiti the protagonists of Mayra Montero’s Tú, la oscuridad (; In the Palm of Darkness, ), tracing the disappearance of frog species across the globe, understand their connection to the great flight called by Damballah Wedó and what Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert refers to as the hope of ‘a retreat to waters that are still capable of hierophany the land has lost through abuse and mismanagement’.
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High in the mountains of Guadeloupe, the women of Gisèle Pineau’s Morne Câpresse () heed what may or may not be a divine call whispered by the spirits of slaves to save themselves and the polluted former plantations. The protagonists of Chamoiseau’s Esclave vieil homme et le molosse (; Slave Old Man, ), increasingly indistinct from one another, become the very mangrove forest in which they play out their long battle. And it is the sea itself that Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s poetic criticism brings out in Ezili’s Mirrors (), and that, in Kincaid’s ‘Wingless’, poetically undoes grammatical and other orders to mix up times, places and peoples, in a genre-bending section that ends with ‘the sea, following me home, snapping at my heels, all the way to the door, the sea, the woman’. It is tempting to see these creatively crafted spaces and places as the wild, natural, indigenous opposite of the categorial imperative, but that would be to miss that they eschew the categorial imperative all together precisely by refusing and confusing the violence of division. Environments like forests, mountains, mangroves and the sea host plantspirit-animal-people, not by being the categorial imperative’s untouched other, but by intertwining with it. That this intertwining is material as well as metaphorical – as are the environments and the beings that they host – is insisted upon in texts like Dionne Brand’s Inventory (), Chamoiseau’s Les neufs consciences du malfini () and Anacristina Rossi’s La loca de Gandoca (), which not only hold up the transformative history and promise of these spaces, but also note their pollution and ongoing decimation by tourist enterprises and other forms of ‘progress’. The category human is unstable because of its indifferences with plant, animal, spirit, place, and because all are nearing the brink of extinction – which might of course itself be, like a hurricane, the final leveller of distinctions. Where there is hope in the levelling of distinctions, it is often not only mythic but also queer. Indeed, what can be called queerness moves throughout Caribbean eco-poetics – I somewhat hesitatingly use ‘queer’ to designate that which exceeds or refuses heteronormativity, mindful of its place in Euro-American configurations of normative gender and sexuality and also of the ways that Caribbean writers including Thomas Glave have made it their own. Linnaean taxonomy, as Mary Louise Pratt points out in Imperial Eyes (), bases the divisions in its classes on sexual categories, most specifically on a clear division of male and female sex organs and their necessary interaction with one another. Caribbean eco-poetics move colonial constructions and the categorial imperative ‘against nature’ and naturalize gender indifference and desires that include and exceed multiple and
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shifting genders. As Pineau’s narrator explains, ‘in Morne Câpresse, no law prohibited love between women’: the interdiction relates to the ‘law’ embodied by the French-trained police force that eventually invades the refuge. In the texts of Caribbean eco-poetics, indifference to the Linnaen divisions of class, kingdom and species includes indifference to binary gender and sexuality, so that a child with a ‘slender penis of startlingly delicate green’ can give birth to ‘a race of brazen dolphins’. Some novels, like Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter () and Moving Forward Sideways like a Crab () and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (), address directly how the colonial construction and the postcolonial codification of ‘crimes against nature’ lead to the dispersal and enclosure of some Caribbean subjects. Others, like Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (), repatriate those subjects in the Caribbean environment both as the nurses who heal the victims of colonial violence and its legacies and as the lovers of those nurses who root their beings in Caribbean nature. Glave, in his own work and in the space he provides in Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (), represents contemporary Caribbean authors who eco-poetically plant queerness, as a term and as a practice, in the Caribbean environment. Under an epigraph from Kamau Brathwaite, ‘the unity is submarine’, Glave traces in ‘Jamaican, Octopus’ a series of journeys under the water in which the narrator is able to unify with a variety of sea creatures, exemplifying the mobility of gender, genre, species, family, kingdom and the queerness of Caribbean eco-poetics. The unity of the narrator and the octopus is presented at the outset of the story, first as a question, then as an idea, then as a reality – ‘Octopus? But yes. The idea, or rather reality, of myself as an octopus’ () – as if the narrator himself might mistake the idea and the reality, for the reality does raise questions. The idea of the narrator as an octopus suggests a metaphorical link, relying on both similarity and difference: the narrator is like an octopus, and the similarities show something about the narrator precisely because he is at the same time not really an octopus. However, the narrator insists that the unity between himself and the octopus is real, that he is materially as well as imaginatively an octopus. That the unity is submarine reminds both that it often remains hidden – the reality of himself as an octopus may not be fully visible at all times – and that it is deep, connected to ‘the sea of my ancestors’ (). This sea hosts not only the octopus, but also the ‘sort-of-men’ under the sea who appear in the answer to Glave’s question: ‘What has any of this discussion of octopuses and their ink [. . .] to do with the Caribbean that I know?’ (–). The ‘sort-of-men’ are not, like the narrator, octopuses,
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but share their colour and submarine habitat, and link to octopuses homonymically through their pussies. Glave’s narrator explains, ‘Each of the more-or-less men had a – had an actual pussy: a male pussy, some would say; a (depending on your geographical origin) manpussy or man’s pussy, or whatever else so many above the waves might choose to call it’ (–). This description of the men under the sea uses standard forms of natural history – lists of local names and physical descriptions of newly discovered creatures with emphasis on their sex organs – eco-poetically so that the distinctions between the imaginary and the real, the metaphorical and the material, falter, the indifferences of human and animal, man and woman, life and death become apparent, and sort-of-men can live under the ‘Sea of We’ where the narrator has ‘drowned repeatedly, over a lifetime’ (). Queer eco-poetics, or the queerness of eco-poetics, brings together differences within and differences between as it embeds indifference to binary gender and heteronormativity in the indifference of human and nature, breaking the hard lines of the categorial imperative into so many transformative possibilities. In its insistence on poetics, eco-poetics can be taken as a purely linguistic mode, one that even in its confusion of the metaphorical and the material operates at the level of the imaginary. Caribbean eco-poetics’ insistence on the indifference of human, spirit, animal, plant thus belongs to the Caribbean imagination much like folklore and mythology, or to a Caribbean aesthetics that is limited to the realm of feeling and judgement and is about the interpretation of reality rather than about reality itself. But Caribbean eco-poetics insists that the interpretation of reality and reality itself are as indifferent as are the human and the environment: not necessarily the same, but necessarily intertwined in ways that resist any neat, clear or absolute distinction. At the end of ‘Jamaican, Octopus’, Glave explains: I do not, and will not ever, write anything in a book that is not grounded and proven by hard, incontrovertible fact: the sort of concrete ‘truths’ without which the West, for example, cannot long survive, or at least continue envisioning itself as ‘the West’. The sort of incontrovertible facts and ‘truths’ which have no doubt contributed to our existences today. The sort of facts that make octopuses and melanin-filled ink possible; that make evisceration, automatization, and public beheadings possible. ()
The idea that certain ‘truths’ make octopuses and melanin possible points to the circularity of natural science: it bases its tenets on its observations and its observations on its tenets. Octopuses are made possible by Linnaeus and Corbier not because they invented the octopus but because
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their discovery – like all discovery – could only be of something they already knew, because ‘hard, incontrovertible fact’ and ‘concrete truths’ are epistemic matters. ‘The West’ in as much as it ‘discovered’ the Caribbean and brought it to knowledge, has made it possible only through its own categorial imperative, and ‘the West’ is itself not ‘true’ or ‘right’ in any absolute terms other than those of the universality through and of which it is constructed. Writing it in a book is what makes it true, the ecos is poetic, and the Caribbean eco-poetic can reconfigure not only the relationship between human and environment, but also the distinction human– environment. Eco-poetics and the environmental sensibility offer an epistemic category for the theorization of resistance to the ongoing naturalization of domination and exploitation, and a mode of rearticulation of community, being.
Notes Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, th ed. (London and New York: Routledge, ), . Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures’, in Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley (eds.), Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –; Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, ‘Introduction: Toward and Aesthetics of the Earth’, in DeLoughrey and Handley (eds.), Postcolonial Ecologies, –. Wiebke Beushausen, ‘“Making Eden a Reality”: Caribbean Eco-Poetics and Ethnic Environment in Andrea Gunraj’s The Sudden Disappearance of Seetha’, Forum for Inter-American Research, . (), –, . Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ), . Elizabeth DeLoughrey, ‘The Politics of Place’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (London and New York: Routledge, ), –, –. Ibid., ; Sarah Phillips Casteel, ‘Location: The Language of Landscape’, in Bucknor and Donnell (eds.), Routledge Companion, –, . Édouard Glissant, ‘Poétique de la relation’, in Le discours antillais, (Paris: Gallimard, ), –; Wilson Harris, ‘The Music of Living Landscapes’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A. J. M. Bundy (London: Routledge, ), –. DeLoughrey, ‘Politics of Place’, . Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), .
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Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), . Walcott engages Robinson Crusoe in the play Pantomime (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ); in the poems ‘The Castaway’, ‘Crusoe’s Island’, and ‘Crusoe’s Journal’, all found in The Poetry of Derek Walcott –, ed. Glyn Maxwell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ); and in the speech ‘The Figure of Crusoe’, delivered in and reprinted Robert D. Hamner (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, ). Olive Senior, ‘The Secret of Crusoe’s Parrot’, in Over the Roofs of the World (Ontario: Insomnia Press, ), –. Ibid., . Strachan, Paradise and Plantation, . Senior, ‘The Secret of Crusoe’s Parrot’, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Casid, Sowing Empire, –. Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba sorcière. . . (Paris: Mercure de France, ); Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (New York: Riverhead Books, ). Casid, Sowing Empire, . Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished manuscript ‘Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World’ offers the most thorough discussion of Black indigenization in the Caribbean. For a discussion of Wynter’s manuscript, see Aaron Kamugisha, ‘“That Area of Experience that We Term the New World”: Introducing Sylvia Wynter’s “Black Metamorphosis”’, Small Axe, (), –. Sarah Phillips Casteel, ‘Reterritorializing Caribbean Diaspora Literature’, American Literary History, . (), –, . DeLoughrey, ‘Politics of Place’, –. Kincaid, My Garden (Book), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Lorna Goodison, ‘Song of the Fruits and Sweets of Childhood’, in To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, ), –, . Rita Indiana, Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas (Sheffield: And Other Stories, ), . Ibid., . Lorna Goodison, ‘In City Gardens Grow No Roses As We Know Them’, in To Us, All Flowers Are Roses, –, . Ibid., . Kincaid, My Garden (Book), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Shani Mootoo, Cereus Blooms at Night (New York: Grove Press, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Olive Senior, ‘Pineapple’, in Gardening in the Tropics, (Ontario: Insomniac Press, ), –, . Olive Senior, ‘The Knot Garden’, in Gardening in the Tropics, –, . Ibid., .
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Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London and New York: Routledge, ), . Carl Linnaeus, Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica, trans. Stephen Freer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –. Olive Senior, ‘Bamboo (In Five Variations)’, in Gardening in the Tropics, –, . Oonya Kempadoo, Buxton Spice (New York: Dutton, ). Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Girl’, in At the Bottom of the River (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, ), –, . Grace Nichols, ‘Keeper of the Green Cathedral’, in Startling the Flying Fish (London: Virago, ), ; Patrick Chamoiseau, Biblique des derniers gestes (Paris: Gallimard, ). Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, ‘Extinctions: Chronicles of Vanishing Fauna in the Colonial and Postcolonial Caribbean’, in Greg Gerrard (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), –, . Jamaica Kincaid, ‘Wingless’, in At the Bottom of the River, –, –. Shalini Puri examines hurricanes as ‘crises that called forth community rather than destroyed it’ in ‘Memory Work, Field Work’, in Bucknor and Donnell (eds.), Routledge Companion, –, , emphasis in the original. Gisèle Pineau, Morne Câpresse (Paris: Mercure de France, ), (my translations). Thomas Glave, ‘Whose Caribbean?’, in Thomas Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, . Thomas Glave, ‘Jamaican, Octopus’, in Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh (New York: Akashic Books, ), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically.
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Sexual Subjects Faizal Deen and Ronald Cummings
Although sexual themes appear earlier in twentieth-century Caribbean literature, it is in the s that a critical body of innovative writing addressing Caribbean sexual pluralities gains momentum. This body of texts offers readers sexual themes and situations not usually addressed in writings structured through patriarchal heteronormative imaginations, which dominate the thematic concerns of earlier Caribbean literature and which Caribbean women’s writings published in the s began to challenge. Often told through themes, paradigms and poetics already characteristic of Caribbean literature, these texts excavate dissenting and particular modes of nonheteronormative sexual experience and practice from the submerged regions of Caribbean historical memory. Through depictions of Caribbean sexuality in the intersections of race, nationalism, culture and imperialist critique, this literature also, at the same time, diversifies the fields and concerns of ‘queer commentary’ from the global North. Therefore, this writing stages its own ripostes to overarching theoretical comparatist studies that often subsume decolonial Caribbean literature under well-intentioned – but totalizing – overviews and categories of dissenting global-South writing. This essay attends to some of the specificities of these texts and their critiques to position them as Caribbean literary texts that propel both a sense and a politics of place and enact epistemological and ontological ruptures of Judeo-Christian Western heteronorms. Through their particular literary remittances of plural sexual subjectivity to the public archive of Caribbean historical memory, these writers engage in a shared advocacy for the interrogation, removal and dismantling of heteronormativity as the defining framework for contemporary Caribbean discourse.
Man’s Episteme Thomas Glave, in his efforts to cohere a critical mass, or what he calls ‘A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from The Antilles’, proposes a
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revanchist democratic humanism that serves to contextualize the anglophone Caribbean’s criminalization of anal sex within the identitarian folds of Enlightenment humanism. Glave himself retrospectively describes his anthology, Our Caribbean, as ‘a book of dreams’, ‘a libation of quiet words’, and underscores the pedagogical importance of representational visibility in the possible alleviation of acts of physical harm and of systemic political, cultural and economic discrimination targeting sexual minorities. Through pedagogies of the erotic – writing ‘centred in desire’ – Glave’s ‘gathering’ presents meditations and songs of sexual identitarian dissension that rupture the boundaries of what Sylvia Wynter refers to as ‘Man’s episteme’. ‘Man’s episteme’, as Wynter contends, presupposes ‘the incorporation of all forms of human being into a single homogenized decolonial descriptive statement that is based on the figure of the West’s liberal monohumanist Man’. The sexually nonconforming Caribbean emerges as a series of counter-epistemes that resist the totalizing and essentializing grasp of ‘Man’s episteme’. Glave describes his ‘gathering’ as a historical corrective, as the recovery of the unwritten and unrecorded experiences of ‘the erotic-emotional desire’ of ‘women for women, men for men, women and men for women-men’. But such entries have always carried the threat and consequences of physical annihilation. As evidenced in Britain’s extraction of its own sexual anxieties into colonial subjectivity, through its deployment of anti-sodomy provisions under Sections , , and of the Offences Against the Persons Act and Section of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, ‘Man’s episteme’ nominally prohibits homosexuality as a divergence from the God-fearing, procreating and proselytizing heterosexual nation. This manifests not only as a consequence of ingrained firebrand religious discourse but also proceeds according to the secular doctrines of masculine sexual agency that operate in the ideological production of the state. These colonial anxieties around sex and sexuality return but become differently and complexly enacted a century later, as Nadia Ellis usefully notes, in her examination of how ‘the legal inclusion of the [white] male homosexual into the national body politic [of Britain] through the decriminalization of “buggery” [. . .] proceeded alongside the legal exclusion of the black colonial immigrant’, in the context of the Windrush migrations in the middle of the twentieth century. The force of ‘Man’s episteme’ continues to structure Caribbean postcolonial state formations as M. Jacqui Alexander has pointed out in her critical reflections on law and citizenship in relation to Trinidad’s Sexual Offences Act of , and the laws regarding ‘the crime of lesbianism’ in
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the Bahamas. Alexander asks, ‘Why has the state marked these sexual inscriptions on my body?’ (). Attending to the specific question of gendered outcomes, she writes, ‘Women's bodies have been ideologically dismembered within different discourses: the juridical; profit maximization; religious; and the popular’ (). We might also note how the state structures of heteronormativity have complicated effective public health and social work responses to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the anglophone Caribbean. Within public discourse, same-sex and gender variant erotic desire is also stripped of its agential interiorities by an almost pornographic fixation on the moral and social graves of anal penetration and other sexual practices. The postcolonial homophobic retentions of colonial imaginaries of antisocial ‘buggery’ – heteropatriarchy’s perceived ‘dead end’ – reinstates empire’s racial ‘thingification’ of Black and brown human bodies as a population of, as Glave states, sexual ‘Unpersons. Not-people. Things.’ In his essay collections, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent () and Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh (), Glave locates the imaginative drives of Jamaican homophobia within Judeo-Christian Enlightenment epistemes of ‘the Human’ and its heteronormative moral inculcations into supposedly secular political administrations of postIndependence Jamaican governance. Rather than retreat from his own faith-based upbringing, Glave tasks the confessional spaces of Christian prayer, and the language of Christian redemptive inclusion with ‘the pursuit of liberation’ for queer sexual ‘Unpersons’. This turn to the possibilities of the spiritual as site of intervention differently echoes and extends the writings of Audre Lorde (), H. Nigel Thomas (), M. Jacqui Alexander (), d’bi.young anitafrika (, ), and Lyndon K. Gill () and their attempts to renarrate the ‘quotidian intimacy of spirituality’ and to ‘think the political, spiritual and sensual together’ as one way of unsettling the rigid entrenchment of particular cultural-political logics and rhetorics of Judeo-Christianity in the Caribbean. In Glave’s work, this critical move can be seen particularly in his essays ‘Towards a Queer Prayer’ () and ‘Fire and Ink: Toward a Quest for Language, History and a Moral Imagination’ (), with each title echoing Wynter’s repeated use of the concept of ‘toward’ as a way of ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom’ and engaging a praxis of rethinking the human or, as Wynter phrases it, moving ‘Towards the Human, After Man’. In his ‘Open Letters’ to ‘the People of Jamaica’ () and to Bruce Golding (), the then Prime Minister of Jamaica, Glave seeks to dismantle the intertwined spiritual and political homophobias of both
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Levitical Law and the anti-sodomy provisions through an existential reverence for the blessed grace of his own imagination. Glave elaborates what it means to write new modulations of the human. He proposes that Jamaican society – and, by extension, all Caribbean societal formations – ‘must work toward a nobility of the imagination, and spirit’, which is expansive and inclusive, and where ‘all of us, heterosexual and homosexual, deserve equal, loving places in society’. Like Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s essay ‘Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic’, Glave persuasively revisits the scenes of the Middle Passage. Here he attends to the African ‘bodies packed thousandfold into ships, black hands manacled at the wrist’ () – to remind ‘the People of Jamaica’ of their own historical place as slaves in ‘Man’s Episteme’, with ‘flesh ripped, feet broken, brands steamed whitehot into skin’ (). In his subsequent letter to Bruce Golding, Glave charges Golding with having ‘evidently learned nothing’ from this violent history, positing that Jamaican homophobia is a collectively experienced form of self-hatred, a violence ‘against each other and ourselves’, which colonialism and ‘its oppressions’ entrench in regional imaginations. Therefore we need not look any further than Caribbean histories of post/neo/colonial commodification and exploitation to arrive at a defence of an inclusive imaginative, social and political vision of ‘the human’ that celebrates the presence of sexually non-normative citizens. What is also salient about Glave’s interventions is the coming together of both theme and form. He scripts new ‘Epistles’ repurposing the Biblical practice and style of epistolarity, while also appropriating the form of the letter with its direct appeal to an addressee in the service of reimagining the human. Glave’s epistolary interventions do not need to abandon the Caribbean in his efforts to forge his own ‘nobility of the imagination’.
Erotic Praxis One of the first examples of the imaginative recovery of non-normative Caribbean sexuality is Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (), a ‘biomythography’ that holds the litany of indivisible identities she claims as her own: Black, feminist, lesbian, poet, socialist, warrior. A founding figure in contemporary African American feminist women’s writing and activism, Lorde, through her inclusion in Piece of My Heart () and Our Caribbean (), as well as the notable engagement with her work through essays and texts by Carol Boyce Davis (), Wesley Crichlow (), Gloria Wekker () and Angelique Nixon () and through d’bi.young anitafrika’s () development of the form of the
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‘biomyth monodrama’, emerges as an influential figure in the theorization of Caribbean sexualities. In her speeches, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ () and ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ (), collected in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (), Lorde addresses the interlinkages of racist, sexist and homophobic violence and exclusion, an analysis which goes missing in heteronormative Western and American social thought, including white middle-class feminist scholarship. Lorde troubles the absence of ‘poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians’ from these spaces (). Borne of ‘the crucibles of difference’, these women stand ‘outside the circle’ of the ‘definition of acceptable women’ (). Thus, Lorde seeks ‘new ways of being’, through an ‘interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences’ because ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ (). Lorde’s ‘biomythography’, Zami, recovers the creative potential of the erotic through a new approach to life writing, which fuses autobiography and mythology. The erotic supplies ‘the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person’ because it ‘forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference’ (). Through its ‘measure of an internal sense of satisfaction’ (), it opens up ‘a deep capacity for joy’ and feeling that does ‘not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife’ (, emphasis in original). In Zami, Lorde locates ‘linguistic self-identification’ in ‘the cultural and historical specificity of a Caribbean same-sex identity’. Through the imaginative remittances of her immigrant Grenadian mother’s stories of Carriacou, Lorde coheres, for the first time, the divisible litany of her identities in America. She excavates ‘a new spelling’ of her name: ‘zami’. ‘Zami’ – a ‘Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers’ – signifies ‘a cluster of meanings, associations, issues, concerns, and structures of identification’ that resists ‘lesbian’, ‘with distinct origins and associations in white Western culture’. In the ‘work’ of ‘Zami’, Lorde reads her life ‘as a bridge and field of women’, as a legendary practice, where, in the Caribbean/Grenadian diaspora, ‘the desire to lie with other women’ is mythologized ‘as a drive from the mother’s blood’ (). Caribbean literary diasporizations of Western sexuality studies underscore their own affective retrievals of such regional and indigenous cultural and historical practices, formations and paradigms. This strategy can be seen, for instance, in Makeda Silvera’s ‘Man-Royals and Sodomites’, which like Lorde’s work enacts its own practice of life writing and memory-work.
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Silvera’s strategic reclamations of outcast subjectivity can be read as reactivations of a quest for specific Caribbean sexual identities, even from within the dread configurations of Christianity which Silvera names through the use of the term ‘sodomites’. The work of Wesley Crichlow (), Timothy Chin (), Rosamond S. King () and Colin Robinson (), all variously theorize what it would mean to reclaim despised creole sexual identities: ‘buller’, ‘battybwoy’ ‘Jamette’, ‘maricón’. These works offer a rich methodological resource. In The Politics of Passion (), for instance, Gloria Wekker provides an influential – and concrete – account of ‘Mati Work’ in Suriname, which involves the frequent practice of ‘having sexual relations with men and with women, either simultaneously or consecutively’. It is socially situated ‘work’ shared between working-class Afro-Surinamese women (). Wekker’s ethnological human subject is Misi Juliette Cummings, whose recollections of her life, at eighty-four, function as ‘verbal artifacts’ that may or may not be embroidered (). Wekker’s ‘gathering’ of Misi Juliette’s ‘verbal artifacts’ of doing ‘Mati Work’ – voiced in Suriname’s English-based creole, Sranan Tongo – offers an account of Afro-Surinamese women’s sexuality with deep West African historical routes/roots. Where dominant identitarian constructions impose degrees of bio-political power over abused and marginalized bodies, Wekker melds a social constructivist approach with political economy to draw a conjunctive critical analysis between ‘the sexual experiences and meanings’ of ‘Mati Work’ and ‘material practices’ (). Wekker’s work informs Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s restorative scholarship on the role of ‘Mati’ and ‘Zami’ in Black female reimaginations of the topographies of empire. Tinsley analyses the interpretive strategies Black Antillean women employ to insert themselves into physical Caribbean landscapes, which they first come to know through their New World arrivals. They do so through strategies of feeling where the building of erotic bonds challenges the imperial empiricism of Europe’s colonizing missions abroad. They sensually sow their own submerged epistemological continuums of pain and joy into the cane fields of their labour. Their erotic rescriptions undermine representations of themselves in a torrent ‘of imperial writs’ as ‘hypersexualized and unwomaned’. Together as ‘shipmates’ in the hold of slave ships, and as chattel slaves in cane fields, their rescriptions of sensual ‘womanness’ contest ‘colonial machineries’ that systematize ‘Africans’ violent ungendering’ in the eyes of their kidnappers (). Against these fictive differentiations – concoctions of ‘Man’s episteme’ – the erotic transactions of Black women loving women unleash
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capacities of and for feeling that rupture the projection of discursive animality onto their bodies. Imperial discourses of monstrosity expansively inform the representations of sexual subjects in Antillean literature, with particular historical, social and linguistic resonances that distinguish the hispanophone and francophone Caribbean from their anglophone counterparts. For a region defined by its brute genesis in the historical movement of multifaceted populations, historical memories, and cultural formations, the efforts of nonheteronormative Caribbean writers to negotiate complex heritages of creolization refocuses the so-called miracle of creolization to ‘the violent process of becoming through/in modernity’. The interstitial spaces of the creole, the mestizo, and the process of métissage should be regarded as encoded evidence, held in Caribbean linguistic imaginations, of deep histories of ‘racialized modernity’. They are not mere alchemical signposts of utopic ethnocultural ‘mixing’ or hybridity. Therefore, ‘Zami’ – a calque from Creole French (the elision of ‘s’ from ‘les’ with ‘amis’) – and ‘mati’ – a loan transaction from either English (‘shipmate’ or ‘mate’) or Berbice Dutch (‘maatji’) – inscribe subversive Caribbean practices of making and unmaking categories of the Human. The lexical remittances of diasporic Caribbean sexual non-normativity, bridged by the submerged knowledge of the Middle Passage, also characterize much of the work of antiheterosexist Caribbean thinkers. Standing at the vanguard of this methodological and theoretical work are Carole Boyce Davis (), Wesley Crichlow, (), M. Jacqui Alexander (), Omis’eke Tinsley (), Jafari S. Allen (), Rosamond S. King (), Rinaldo Walcott () and Lyndon K. Gill (), all of whom have made significant contributions to the recuperation of Black Atlantic genealogies of erotic memory. Their work avers an explicit indebtedness to Audre Lorde. Of her more recent Pedagogies of Crossing, for example, Alexander charts the shift from her scholarly ‘I’ to the pluriversal ‘I’ of the Lordean poet: ‘an opening up that permits us to hear the muse, an indication of how memory works, how it comes to be animated’. These writers often compose their own ‘biomythographies’ – creative nonfiction, diary entries, prose vignettes, poems, lyrics, meditations – as creative responses to hydraulic Caribbean historical memory, which escape canonical approaches to historiography. Blending ‘biomythical’ writing with the prose of scholarship cathects ‘a new theoretical architecture’ where ‘the erotic’ is achieved by ‘fostering deep connections with others across a range of political, sensual, and spiritual desires’.
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Sexual Genres Since the publication of Our Caribbean, there has been a torrent of theoretical, social scientific and polemical texts that continue Glave’s call ‘to work’, through a Lordean sense of self-invention and collective recovery, toward ending the silence and invisibility of gender and sexually nonconforming Caribbean-identified people. Much of this writing – because it is transnational – exists at the conjunctures of Western queer theory and global diaspora studies. This conversation between intellectual traditions, which often trades in complex and difficult ideas, due to the inherent concatenations of Caribbean identity, produces cultural mediations that effect both the ‘queering’ of diaspora and the diasporization of ‘queerness’. Consider the elliptical biracial poetics of Claire Savage in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (); Asha Ramchandin’s letters ‘home’, which hold diaspora’s memory, in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night (); the transgender entries of Lowe into Jamaica’s luminescent tropical sun and moonlight in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (); and the mythical and prophetic coordinates of maps in Dionne Brand’s At The Full and Change of the Moon (). These incantatory novels expansively reflect the Caribbean’s multiple ethno-cultural routes and ‘roots’ through their respective elaborations of the potentiality for prospective worlds. Sex and gender indeterminacies in these oft-cited texts operate among a gamut of repeating and recombinant conceptualizations of Caribbean material and psychic space, transfigured by entrenched syncretic aural, cultural, ethnographic, political, religious, racial, sonic, sociological imaginations, borne of unities in disunities and disunities in unities of global crossings. In their lyrical and formal capacities to rhetorically legitimize Caribbean queerness, these texts imagine and recover representations of nonconforming sexual fulfilment and reflect a distinct openness of the imagination that reveals what Wilson Harris theorizes as the ‘enormous heritage’ of the Caribbean’s ‘broken parts’. It is in the coherence of such shards of memory – borne of a succession of ancient and modern conquests – that the recovery of ‘the native life and passion of persons known and unknown in a structure of time and place’ is more fully realized. The exilic writing of Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas reveals the potential of the syncretic spaces of the Neo-Baroque and Santería to accommodate sexual difference and dissidence. These literary and spiritual inheritances transgress the moral and political boundaries of statesanctioned violence against sexually nonconforming people. Their work
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yields textual and thematic nuances that richly complicate any overview of sexual themes in Antillean imaginative writing. Sarduy’s remarkable but difficult literary transvestism, where the text itself reclaims its identity as textile, tissue – permeable, repeating, plagiarizing, and quoting itself ‘without limits’ – provides revelatory points of entry into, and departures from, the sexual and psychic excesses of successive generations of Cuban writers. In Sarduy’s Cobra (originally published in Spanish in , English translation in ), the titular drag queen and her transvestite compatriots – Scorpion, Totem, Tiger and Tundra – embark on voyages of corporeal ornamental modifications that are Neo-Baroque in exceeding the boundaries of the evolutionary dualism of ‘Man’s episteme’. Their transformative quests are rendered as a poetics of relation to Columbus’s diary and to the concomitant efforts of figures like Bartolomé de las Casas to approximate the sensory ‘newness’ of the Americas to the figurative containments of analogy and metaphor. In Sarduy’s text, Cobra and her troupe of drag queens create and perform a cabaret, aptly titled, ‘The Gallant Indies’, which commits to subversive theatre Columbus’s belief that he had indeed found his ‘passage to India’. Sarduy’s inclusion of a portion from Columbus’s diary, which prefaces ‘The Gallant Indies’, not only establishes Cobra as a NeoBaroque mestizo text, a location of mixed narratives and fragments, but makes the claim that transvestism erupts from the very first moment Europe encounters the enigmatic ornamental, decorated diversities of the inhabitants of the Caribbean basin. This encounter epistemically troubles a ‘peculiar articulation between dualism (capital–precapital, Europe–Non-Europe, primitive–civilized, traditional–modern, etc.) and a linear, one-directional evolutionism from some state of nature to modern European society’. Cobra’s transvestism interrupts such ‘a map of Man’. Her own voyage to India, where she reincarnates as a consort of Shiva, tears Columbus’s analogical strategies from their own textual moorings to suggest a non-teleological recharting of the Human after Man. Indeed, Cobra’s ‘semen’ yields concentric multitudes where ‘syllables knotting syllables: anklets the ankles, letters the knees, sounds the wrists, mantras the neck’ (). By the end of Cobra, written in exile from Castro’s Cuba, Sarduy provides a sense – in his aestheticization of transvestism – of a politicization of sexual difference that is anathema to the intensifying homophobia that followed the awakening revolutionary doctrine of the ‘New Man’ at the dawn of the Cuban Revolution in .
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The Dissident Book In Before Night Falls (), Reinaldo Arenas offers a recollection of Cuban homosexual culture during the first decades of the Revolution that, in its excessive erotic propulsions, interrupts the ‘exalted’ masculinity of the ‘New Man’. Arenas points to the early years of the Revolution as a time of relative tolerance for homosexual relations, especially in Havana, which he describes as having an ‘underground’ but ‘visible’ and ‘powerful homosexual scene’ (). Completed in exile, while battling AIDS, Before Night Falls is a record of resistance, through erotic proclivity and the beauty of literary creation, to ‘the dull daily existence’ of Castro’s regime (). Arenas contends that ‘beauty is a territory that escapes’ Castro’s ‘control’ because it is ‘always a dissident force’ (). Authoritarian militarism seeks to stifle ‘the rhythm of poetry and life’ because it is deemed as ‘an escapist or reactionary act’ (, ). Sensibilities of the beautiful threaten any dictatorship because ‘it implies a realm extending beyond the limits a dictatorship can impose on human beings’ (). Arenas’s memoir attains its mythic dimension through descriptions of sexual pleasure that also serve as celebrations of Cuba’s natural splendour. Santería, a syncretic complex of religions imported into Cuba by enslaved West Africans, where ‘energies of nature and spirit, divinity and body’ are ‘entangled in diffracted waves of knowledge and power’, provides Arenas with the intersectional capacities to read both his literary and sexual pleasures as modes of ‘survival by way of resistance to a dominant culture’. In Arenas’s descriptions of bathing in the Rio Lirio, ‘naked’ boys ‘come out of the water’ with their ‘penises shining’, they ‘run among trees’ and ‘climb rocks’ (). Arenas conjures them as the river’s ‘gift’ to him (). As an adult, Arenas makes love to men ‘up in the almond trees’, ‘luxuriant tropical trees of dense foliage’ in the witness of the erotic potential of the Caribbean Sea (). There are scenes of men ‘masturbating looking at the sea’ amidst ‘nooks and crannies’ populated with ‘fish of unexpected colors’ (). Through Arenas’s sensual renderings – of rivers, the sea, trees, bushes, coral reefs, sandbanks, birds, fish – the heterogeneous ornamentations of natural landscape script the proliferations of a queer desire that dissolves the boundaries of the possible and the impossible. The political significance of Before Night Falls, to a large degree, resides in Arenas’s revision of ‘the Book’ – ‘the Book’ of bodies/the bodies of ‘the Book’ – as proxy for exiled, contaminated, resisting, diasporic nonheteronormative bodies. Cuban writing continues to negotiate
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counterrevolutionary formal, philosophical and political functions of ‘the Book’. In its feminist interventions, Zoé Valdés’s anti-Communist picaresque I Gave You All I Had () follows the lives of Cucu Martinez and fellow ‘picaras’, La Mechunguita and La Punchunguita, as they witness the transformation of Havana from pre-revolutionary ‘sugared city’ of sexual, intellectual and gastronomic delights to post-revolutionary decay, hunger and treachery. Castro, recast as ‘the XXL’ of dictatorial ego, sires the material and moral depravities of ‘the Special Period’, which serve to further contain the sexual freedoms of women who still hold the memory of pre-revolutionary Havana. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s Dirty Havana Trilogy (, trans. ), through graphic and spectacular depictions of hunger, shit, sex and drugs, also forges a counter-revolutionary poetics that presses against the deep poverties of the Cuban Revolution. The social relevancy of Gutiérrez’s scenes of the desires and pleasures of impoverished Havana bodies – the opposite of what the Revolution promises – gains momentum through the transnational publication of his work, which allows him to speak to the pre-revolutionary memories of anti-Castro Cuban exile diasporas. Through the foil of ‘dirty realist’ pornographic depictions of Havana’s destitute, depraved circumstances, Gutiérrez performs the work of mourning ‘in situ’ a lost Havana of abundance and promise not unlike the Havana of Valdés’s elegiac litanies in I Gave You All I Had. Castro is the common denominator of suffering in these texts. Arenas’s final act of writing is a letter, published internationally, which holds Castro accountable for the ‘sufferings’ and ‘pain’ of exile, ‘and the diseases contracted in exile’.
Within HIV/AIDS Assotto Saint’s literary oeuvre remains critically underappreciated. Born Yves Lubin in Haiti in , Saint’s prolific body of work in America under his own Lordean litany of identities – Haitian, migrant, homosexual, American, HIV+ – is situated at several critical Black activist, intellectual and cultural intersections. His anthologies, poetry, memoirs, short stories, political essays, plays, obituaries, audio recordings, and films, as well as his work as a founding member of the writing collective, Other Countries, establish Saint as central to the historical record of Black LGBT art and activism in the s. Staged against the necropolitics of the s (Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush) and the s (Bill Clinton), Saint’s lyrical colonies of men who have sex with men – ‘on their knees / or bent over / in an open chorus / of viral wails’ – choreograph, through the
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already-dead sexual pleasures of their infected untreatable HIV+ bodies, the spiritual anguish of personal mourning. In the ‘death-world’ of HIV/AIDS – of ‘the Reagan-Bush-SHIT government’ – the epidemiological seropositivity of orgasm reactivates, for Saint, buggery’s episteme. After an anonymous erotic liaison, Saint writes of his sex partner: i tried to see anything but his casket gorged by the ground the tears were for myself [. . .] one day i shall be in this darkness.
Here, the metropolitan ‘temporal logics’ of HIV/AIDS momentarily resonates: the rectum is a Levitical grave that annihilates possible futures. But Saint’s elegiac lyrical choreographies of gay men of colour within ‘darkness’ interrupt such compressed dread temporalities. Saint delineates the compounded marginalization of people living with AIDS (PWAs) in Black queer migrant bodies, already subaltern, unavailable to – and within – the categorical ‘Unpersons’ of white sovereign patriarchy. As a gay Haitian migrant, Saint finds himself a dual member of the ‘H Club’, the Centre for Disease Control’s biopolitical designation of homosexuals, Haitians, haemophiliacs and heroin users as the chief hosts of HIV/AIDS, incubators and disseminators of viral extinction. Against the violence of such representational and material intersections, and through the spectral accumulations of ‘nou mache ansanm’, the spiritual enlargements of Saint’s work rescripts the Euro-American narrative of HIV/AIDS and diminishment. In his obituarial rituals, Saint enacts the Vodou epistemology of ‘nou mache ansanm’, of walking together with ancestral and divine spirits, widening the Kreyol pronoun ‘nou’/‘we’ to embrace his queer comrades, to walk with their spirits. Within HIV/AIDS, Saint configures erotic and conjugal bridges that cultivate deep alliances, across cultural, economic, social, and racial differences, between sexually nonconforming men of colour. After burying his friends, Saint goes ‘to the piers’ – the iconic gay cruising space of his adopted New York City – ‘to hear their voices’ and ‘commune with the language of symbols shared by the community’. Revealing Saint’s work of mourning through ‘the unfathomable continuum of Iwas, spirits, ancestors, contemporaries, and successors’, through its Haitian diasporicities, engenders ‘a sense’, rather than ‘a politics’, of the proximities of community, where identitarian equivalences and disparities dissipate.
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This radical work of mourning in Saint’s oeuvre might be meaningfully contrasted with Godfrey Sealy’s play ‘One of Our Sons Is Missing’, which also, through its title, announces the dynamics of mourning and loss as central. Yet in contrast to Saint’s documented assertion that ‘dying of AIDS is not estimable in itself [. . .] fighting AIDS publicly is’ and his admonition to be ‘Not just like shadows inconspicuously dropping’, in Sealy’s work the knowledge of the main character Miguel’s diagnosis and hence the rituals of loss, mourning and care remain largely confined to the domestic space of the Alonzo’s family home. The play is domestic drama, set in the world of a middle-class, nuclear family. In this way it presents a queer disruption of the scene of heteronormative domesticity and demonstrates how queerness exists in relation to the social constraints of heteronormativity. In its penultimate scene, the play offers a small opening to imagining other intimacies of relation as radical possibilities of care through a letter written by Miguel to his friend Conrad. The letter is read after the last time that Miguel is seen on stage and thus offers a connecting line between the living and the dead. Here we might imagine Saint’s memorial praxis of ‘walking with their spirits’. Yet while the letter functions to disrupt the text’s inscription of the inevitability of death, it is also, at the same time, ultimately a text of loss which can only imagine Conrad’s future in relation to final rites of care by blood-family: ‘My only worry is you [. . .] Conrad. There will be nothing worse than having to face this alone.’ Miguel’s letter attempts a restorative intervention in the ‘death-world’ of the play by urging the possibility of a reconciliation with Conrad’s blood family: ‘Tell your parents. If they really love you they can’t suddenly hate you because you are honest with them’ (). While offering possibilities for an alternative network of care, the play’s ultimate appeal to the structures of blood and family as the primary way of imagining belonging, and hence loss, forecloses some of the radical possibilities glimpsed for erotic, conjugal and social intimacies made vividly present in Saint’s work. Theorizing HIV/AIDS in Caribbean literature, especially anglophone texts, through Saint’s incommensurable sense of ‘nou mache ansanm’ enacts a critical ‘sharing-out’, which lifts intra-regional literary activism from/beyond the moral prohibitions and punishments of Christian doctrine. For example, through its own narrative ‘temporal logics’, Patricia Powell’s A Small Gathering of Bones () resists both the politics of Euro-American queer futurity and the firebrand homophobic rhetoric of Jamaican Christian fundamentalism. Published in , after the viral morbidity of the s, Powell’s text reaches back to when the virus
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first manifests itself as a mysterious and untreatable ailment in the body of Ian Kaysen, protagonist Dale Singleton’s best friend. Powell’s text invites a range of critical and theoretical historicizing, such as particular social relationships between Jamaican mothers and sons in the absence of dependable fathers; state- and church-sanctioned homophobias within the wider contexts of Kingston’s economic and political precarity; and the emergence of a closeted urban homosexual community that functions as an internal colony of sexual exiles. In , it would have been impossible not to consider the compassions of Powell’s text against the brash and bombastic ‘murder lyrics’ of Jamaican Reggae-Dancehall culture, which locates homosexual identity as anathema to the procreative utility of heteronormative erotic desire in the service of the nation. Through her depiction of Kingston’s homosexual community as one also engaged in emotional, religious, social, domestic affiliation, Powell interrupts homophobic discourses that fixate on the procreative ‘dead-ends’ of sodomy, the condemnation of the sex and sexuality that Saint celebrates as erotic epistemology. But in order to persuasively make her case for the humanity of her principal characters – Dale, Nevin and Ian – Powell must write them through the ‘darkness’ of the late s and s, which, given the unavailability of effective medical interventions, would likely have meant their collective deaths. The novel is, therefore, from its opening sentences and its description of Ian’s ‘offensive dry cough’, a novel of ghosts. Powell’s obituarial text initiates a revolutionary approach to social realism in the sense that the temporal economy of the novel itself ‘mothers’ and prescribes the memory of Jamaica’s unwritten homosexual sons. In tragic irony, it is also Ian Kaysen’s mother who pushes him down the stairs of their family home to his final death. It is not the virus that kills him but rather his mother’s enactment of Biblical sacrifice; reifying Dale Singleton’s awareness that God’s beneficence lies strictly in the either-or construct of choosing ‘between Salvation and the love between men’ ().
Towards/After: Queer Caribbean Futures and Histories Collectively, these works exemplify new epistemic formulations to hold imaginations of sexual dissidence and remind sexually nonconforming readers that they also belong to meaningful populations of sexual minorities scattered throughout the Caribbean archipelago, as well as within its generations-old transnational and diasporic iterations and manifestations in the metropolitan global North. These writings in many ways engender
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speculative social justice worldings that exceed the subjective legislative delimitations of Caribbean polities. Widening the imaginative focus of Caribbean experience through a proliferation of sexual nomenclatures forges, along with earlier antiracist gains of colonial struggle, more complete portraits of decolonial intervention and more inclusive human futures. The expansive politics of this writing also shifts the thematic focus away from dominant depictions of anglophone homophobia and hispanophone ‘machismo’ to the multiple significances of women’s erotic agencies within the quotidian; the irruptions of transgender and gender nonconforming subjectivities; the performance poetics of transvestism and crossdressing; and the passionate corporeal reversals of Antillean carnival and masquerade. Their proliferations of sexually riotous post-binary bodies disrupt the immutable humanist calculations of heteronormative governance. This complementarity then, of the arts of the imagination and activism, strengthens the rhetorical force of queer Caribbean texts to transcendently effectuate even speculative historical shifts where ‘what remains is for Caribbean laws and hierarchies to catch up with the broad Caribbean imagination’.
Notes For a discussion of some of these earlier texts, see Rosamond S. King, ‘Sex and Sexuality in the English Caribbean Novels – A Survey from ’, Journal of West Indian Literature, . (), –, and Jennifer Rahim, ‘The Operations of the Closet and the Discourse of Unspeakable Contents in Black Fauns and My Brother’, Small Axe, . (), –. Consider: spiritual gateways in H. Nigel Thomas’s Spirits in the Dark (); nature’s visual splendour in Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls (); Lawrence Scott’s transgender poetics of archipelago in Witchbroom (); Shani Mootoo’s tropical metamorphosis in Cereus Blooms at Night (); Dionne Brand’s fragments of personal and historical memory in A Map to the Door of No Return (); and, Michelle Cliff’s lesbian Caliban in If I Could Write This in Fire (). In a string of influential scholarly interventions, distinct Caribbean texts from Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Derek Walcott and Joseph Zobel, among others, have been included and celebrated for their revanchist ‘writing back’ to the dishonest equations of Europe’s ‘master’ narratives. But these comparatist projects often elide the aesthetical, cultural, geographical, historical and psychological specificities of Caribbean thinkers in their formal and thematic interrogations of Europe’s ‘narratives of empire’. Some examples include: Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (), Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The
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Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature (), Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism () and Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (). Thomas Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from The Antilles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Thomas Glave, Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh (New York: Akashic Books, ), . Thomas Glave, ‘Desire through the Archipelago’, in Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean, –. Sylvia Winter and Katherine McKittrick, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations’, in Sylvia Wynter, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, . Ibid., , emphasis in the original. Glave, ‘Desire through the Archipelago’, . Nadia Ellis, ‘Black Migrants, White Queers and the Archive of Inclusion in Postwar London’, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, . (), –, . For one narration of the experiences of migration in the context of Windrush and the sexual anxieties of the state, see Andrew Salkey’s Escape to An Autumn Pavement (London: Hutchinson, ). M. Jacqui Alexander, ‘Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas’, Feminist Review, (Autumn ), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Lyndon K. Gill, Erotic Islands (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ). Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, , trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review, ), . Glave, Among the Bloodpeople, (emphasis in original). Ibid., . Lyndon K. Gill, ‘Chatting Back an Epidemic: Caribbean Gay Men, HIV/ AIDS, and the Uses of Erotic Subjectivity’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, ./ (), –, , . See Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, , ed. Cheryl Clarke (Berkeley: Crossing Press, ), –; H. Nigel Thomas, Spirits in the Dark (Oxford: Heinemann, ); M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); d’bi.young anitafrika, Blood.claat. (Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, ); d’bi.young anitafrika, Oya. (Toronto: Sorplusi publishing, ); Gill, Erotic Islands. Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial Review, . (), –. Thomas Glave, ‘Toward a Nobility of the Imagination: Jamaica’s Shame (An Open Letter to the People of Jamaica)’, in Words to Our Now: Imagination
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and Dissent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –; Thomas Glave, ‘An Open Letter to the Prime Minister of Jamaica (June )’, in Among the Bloodpeople, –. Wynter and McKittrick, ‘Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?’, . Thomas Glave, ‘Toward a Nobility of the Imagination: Jamaica’s Shame (An Open Letter to the People of Jamaica)’, in Words to Our Now, –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Thomas Glave, Among the Bloodpeople, . Thomas Glave, ‘Towards a Nobility of the Imagination: Jamaica’s Shame (An Open Letter to the People of Jamaica’, in Words to Our Now, –. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley: Crossing Press, ), front cover. Also see Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, ed. Cheryl Clarke, (Berkeley: Crossing Press, ). Throughout Sister Outsider, Lorde lists her identities: ‘I am standing here as a Black lesbian poet’ (); ‘I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist’ (); and, ‘as a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two’ (). See Makeda Silvera (ed.), Piece of My Heart (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, ); Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean; Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migration of the Subject (London: Routledge, ); Wesley Crichlow, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ); Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, ); Angelique V. Nixon, ‘Searching for the Erotic: Boundaries of Male Same-Sex Desire in Caribbean Film’. Black Camera: An International Film Journal (The New Series), . (), –; d’bi.young anitafrika, ‘r/evolution begins within ’, Canadian Theatre Review, (), –. See Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ and ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in Sister Outsider, – and –, respectively, and specifically see . Subsequent references for both given parenthetically. Crichlow, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys, –. Lorde, Zami, . Crichlow, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys , –. Lorde, Zami, . Crichlow, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys; Timothy Chin, ‘“Bullers” and “Battymen”: Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture and Contemporary Caribbean Literature’, in Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean, –; Rosamond S. King, ‘More Notes on the Invisibility of Caribbean Lesbians’, in Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean, –; Colin Robinson, ‘Unfinished Work’, in You Have You Father Hard Head (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, ). Wekker, The Politics of Passion, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically.
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Rinaldo Walcott, ‘Genres of Human: Multiculturalism, Cosmo-Politics, and the Caribbean Basin’, in Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis, ed. McKittrick, –, . Ibid., . Richard Allsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), . Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity; Crichlow, Buller Men and Batty Bwoys; Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing; Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar; Jafari S. Allen, Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ); Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ); Rinaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora and Black Studies (Toronto: Insomniac Press, ); Gill, Erotic Islands. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, . Gill, Erotic Islands, . Wilson Harris, ‘Tradition and the West Indian Novel’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A. J. M. Bundy (London: Routledge, ), –, –. Ibid., . Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Neplantla: Views from the South, . (), –, –. Severo Sarduy, Cobra and Matreiya, and , respectively, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls, , trans. Dolores M. Koch (New York: Penguin, ), . Subsequent references given parenthetically. Aisha Beliso-De Jesús, Electric Santeria (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . Miguel A. De La Torre, ‘Ochun: (N)either the (M)other of All Cubans (N)or the Bleached Virgin’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, . (), –, . Zoe Valdés, I Gave You All I Had, , trans. Nadia Benabid (New York: Arcade Publishing, ), . Arenas, Before Night Falls, . Assotto Saint, ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue’, in Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essays and Plays of Assotto Saint (New York: Masquerade Books, ), –, . Subsequent references given parenthetically. J.-A. Mbembé, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture, ., (), –, . For example, the Center for Disease Control’s ‘H Club’ determined four special risk groups that were primarily responsible and at risk for the spread of HIV/AIDS: homosexuals; Haitians; hemophiliacs; and heroin addicts. Additionally, Saint is especially critical of the US governmental policy that ostensibly claims to be ‘saving’ Haitian refugees while actually
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holding them in tent camps at Guantánamo Bay. In ‘False Starts’, from Spells of a Voodoo Doll, he writes: ‘what’s the deal bill with those HIV positive haitians granted political asylum but isolated in guantanamo’s roach & ratinfested tents under mean eyes of armed & gloved soldiers’ (). Assotto Saint, ‘No More Metaphors (Part One)’, in Spells of a Voodoo Doll, –, . Assotto Saint, ‘De Profundis’, in Spells of a Voodoo Doll, . J. Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgendered Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and London: New York University Press, ), . Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, ). Saint, ‘De Profundis’. For a discussion of this concept and its critical and memorial possibilities, see Dasha Chapman, Eric Durban-Albrecht and Mario LaMothe, ‘Nou Mache Ansamn (We Walk Together): Queer Haitian Performance and Affiliation’, Women and Performance, . (), –. Also see Assotto Saint, ‘Sacred Life: Art and AIDS’, in Spells of a Voodoo Doll, –. Saint, ‘Sacred Life: Art and AIDS’, . Mario LaMothe, ‘Our love on fire: Gay men’s stories of violence and hope in Haiti’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, . (), –, . See José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, ). Quoted in Dagmawi Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), . Godfrey Sealy, ‘One of Our Sons is Missing’, in Judy S. J. Stone (ed.), You Can Lead a Horse to Water and Other Plays (Oxford: MacMillan Caribbean, ), –, –. Subsequent reference given parenthetically. For one discussion of this relationship as a time and space of marronage, see Ronald Cummings, ‘Queer Theory and Caribbean Writing’, in Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature (London: Routledge, ), –. Patricia Powell, A Small Gathering of Bones, (Boston, MA: Beacon Books, ), . Subsequent reference given parenthetically. King, Island Bodies.
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Caribbean Literature and Literary Studies: Past, Present and Future Alison Donnell
The future of Caribbean literature could not appear more secure or promising. There has been a monumental transition from the headline plea, ‘Wanted: writers and publishers’ for a column in the Jamaican political weekly Public Opinion written by the now-celebrated Jamaican Una Marson in , to the playful ‘Readers Wanted’ slogan printed on the must-have t-shirts that have come to emblematize the triumph of the Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Caribbean writers have achieved substantial recognition in recent decades. Major international accolades and prizes for individual writers include Nobel Laureates Derek Walcott and V. S. Naipaul; Andrew Carnegie Medal-winners Edwidge Danticat and Elizabeth Acevedo; Forward Prize-winners Raymond Antrobus, Vahni Capildeo, Kei Miller, Claudia Rankine and Tiphanie Yanique; and Windham Campbell Prizewinners Erna Brodber, David Chariandy and Lorna Goodison. Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau and Simone Schwarz-Bart have all won The Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde, with Condé also winning the New Academy Prize in Literature. Macarthur Foundation so-called genius grants have been awarded to Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Junot Díaz, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Claudia Rankine, and the Pulitzer Prize to Junot Díaz. In , Marlon James won the Man Booker Prize and Roger Robinson has just been announced as the T. S. Eliot Prize-winner as this volume goes to press. Many of these writers also teach at universities and some, like Chariandy, Danticat and Miller, are accomplished essayists and critics themselves, which means that their linkage to Caribbean literary studies is seamless and strong. Across the region, a blossoming literary festival culture is generating prizes and writer development programmes, and small houses as well as transnational and translational publishing initiatives are enabling more writers based in the Caribbean to explore the possibilities of professional authorship and to win major prizes. This investment is already showing
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returns in terms of talent development, although the conditions for achieving a notable career as a writer within the region are still challenging. Indeed, the infrastructure underpinning contemporary Caribbean writing represents a colossal transformation from the turn of the twentieth century, when the writer and journalist Thomas MacDermot published just five volumes in his All Jamaica Library, written for and about his fellow Jamaicans. Equally, the reach and recognition of the rich seam of Caribbean literary talent amongst publishers, individual researchers and academic programmes would have been unimaginable to Antiguan Freida Cassin when she took the bold initiative to edit six slim volumes of her West Indian literary ‘little magazine’, Carib, from her island base in the late nineteenth century. The development of more robust structures to identify and nurture writers in the present and thereby futureproof what has been a long and extraordinary tradition of literary talent is a very positive indicator for the field. It is, however, still important to recognize the real ongoing challenges in terms of structural support, such as those facing writer Mayra Santos-Febres, who directs the Festival de la Palabra en Puerto Rico. Also, there remains a notable unevenness of opportunity between small and large island societies and among communities with limited access to the now requisite digital technologies for writers to bring their writing to attention and to the market. Somewhat ironically, while the future success of Caribbean writers and writing looks bright, the future of Caribbean literary studies may arguably be diminished by the increased mainstream profiling and commercial credibility of its feted contemporary and predominantly diasporic writers. The celebrated presence of contemporary Caribbean writing within the global literary scene may mask the still pressing need to address significant gaps in its literary histories that continue to obscure a more complete and pluralized understanding of the field. The forceful profiling of the successful few that characterizes literary publishing in the twenty-first century can too easily create a narrow literary lens in any field, but Caribbean literary studies is arguably more vulnerable to this constrained perspective on account of the partiality of existing accounts of its literary history. One of the main objectives of the larger three-volume project of Caribbean Literature in Transition, to which this is the concluding chapter, has been to challenge this halo version and brush against the grain of a celebrated few to insist on the much longer and fuller literary history of the region than is commonly professed or acknowledged. If the twenty-first century finally affords the visibility and recognition merited by Caribbean literature, then it is vital to use the opportunities afforded by its greater
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prominence in literary and educational structures to document, theorize and properly acknowledge Caribbean writings in their most extensive, heterogeneous and transnational formations. Of course, the project of championing, preserving and acknowledging Caribbean literary history has never been and will never be purely material or structural – however vital it is to provide support preservation projects and to limit the quantifiable destruction of literary archives from hurricane, flood, fire and termites. The contestations over who counts as a Caribbean writer, who is worth remembering and who is worth acclaiming have, from the start, been entangled with the thick histories of oppression and resistance that ensued from centuries of enslavement, indenture, the plantation economy and its imperialist capitalist afterlives, including tourism. It took great exertions to imagine and realize Caribbean literatures – against the abjurations of colonialism, the repudiations of racism, and the scars of their creeping legacies and injuries over centuries on those of African, South Asian, Chinese, Irish and Portuguese descent brought to the region by force or deception. These wounds, which extended to the languages and the natural environments, as well as the indigenous peoples, inevitably marked the possibilities for cultural self-definition. Yet in their healings and transformations they provoked revolutionary creativities that reimagined ideas of storytelling, of people-making and of belonging. Given the contested colonial contexts in which Caribbean literatures developed, debates about the bona fide Caribbean subject, literary language and modes of writing have animated the tradition since it began to describe itself and be described by others. In writing and publishing projects, this endeavour became discernible at the start of the twentieth century but the stakes of self-definition grew in intensity during the decolonizing, nationalist phase of the s through s, when cultural independence and the project of reimagining Caribbean colonial subjects of African, South Asian, Chinese, European and mixed ancestries as sovereign citizens and self-determining peoples prefaced, and arguably prepared for, shifts in governance. In scholarly and critical projects, Caribbean literatures began to be described, and heatedly redescribed, by critics reaching towards analytical paradigms that had both value and relevance to local, decolonizing worldviews in the s. Institutions like the University of the West Indies, the Caribbean Artists Movement, Cuba’s Casa de las Américas and the Nuyorican movement in the United States played a vital role, as did the earlier Négritude movement for francophone writers. The appearance at this time of anglophone anthologies was also significant, as it signalled both the proximity of Caribbean literature and Caribbean education,
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which remained close allies throughout the twentieth century, as well as the inescapable gestures towards selection and canon-making. At every iteration, these efforts to describe have also become, mainly unwittingly, a means to circumscribe. The brightly lit and cherished inclusions of a growing canon of Caribbean literature have shifted markedly over time, with the ascendancy of women writers since the s almost overturning the gendered profiling of the Caribbean novelist. But it is the nature of consecutive illuminations to cast shadows. What remained in shade as a result of this spotlighting effect now constitutes a substantial penumbra of Caribbean writers, genres and locations that have become increasingly hard to access as time, political and cultural agendas, and scholarly priorities have moved on. To pay attention to the extensive record of the diverse literary traditions and cultures that can be seen to comprise Caribbean literature since in the fuller context of its regional differences necessitates moving in many scholarly directions at once. It involves recognizing the intricate and creative intersections between oral, performative, and literary cultures and heritages, alongside the complex patterning of local and global diasporas and migrations that have shaped both literary production and reception, at the same time as overcoming the deep linguistic divides of imperialism. This is an ongoing challenge that even the seventy-plus essays within this series cannot come close to delivering. What these essays do make more visible though, and what they look to establish as the suitable terrain of the field going forward, is the still unfolding multiplicity and variety of literary voices, forms, interests and locations that have shaped transitions in Caribbean literary works across the period –. While the focus remains on anglophone writings, for an English-speaking readership, there is a clear recognition throughout of the ways in which writings, peoples, events and ideas from other places, both within and beyond the region, have influenced and permeated Caribbean creative writings in English. A number of essays accomplish fully comparative readings and thereby signal the transition to a more ambitiously transversal, transnational Caribbean literary studies in the making. The project of Caribbean Literature in Transition has been deliberately to fray the edges of Caribbean literature as a body of work, rather than to neaten the seams. It aims to demonstrate the need to keep returning to what remains unknown and seemingly unknowable, as well as to what has been disavowed, even as it traces transitions in an extended forward chronology. This two-way movement both increases future knowledge of primary sources and provokes fresh critical engagements that can generate
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a richer and more comprehensive, although always unfinished, account of the past and the present. Although no other single essay makes this claim, the collective, confidently evidenced and spirited interpretive gesture at the heart of this ambitious critical endeavour is the contention that the most familiar and authoritative version of Caribbean literature, certainly within the anglophone region, is also probably the least representative. What is called upon to stand for Caribbean literature from the s boom of male writers publishing novels in London through to the s boom of women writers publishing novels in the United States and Canada is but a fraction of the imaginative writing that was being produced, although nonetheless remarkable in the concentration of its creative and cultural influence. The relative cohesion this body of writers and writings presented in terms of location, language, genre and subject matter meant that they were culturally and politically legible in their own historical moment and had an immediate readership which ensured a powerful afterlife for their work. Indeed, the development of Caribbean Writers’ series by educational publishers across the s to the s that channelled certain writings into the emerging localized curricula for schools and higher education within the region quickly cultivated an inventory of almost exclusively male, principally anglophone, writers whose works were repeatedly anthologized and prefaced quite literally as ‘text book’ Caribbean writings. Challenging this body of writings as the definite version of literature written in the Caribbean or by Caribbean writers is not to diminish the significance of these works, which were often importantly experimental and uncomfortable narratives in their own right and shunned easy incorporation to the colonial canon. It is, however, to argue that if the contemporary character of Caribbean literature and literary study is to be apprehended in the fluid attachments between place, language, and ancestry and the irreverence to generic orthodoxy, then restoring the region’s literary beginnings enables a recognition that this is not a sequential move towards increasing complexity, mobility and non-conformity. Rather, the present vision of an expansive literary future that is discussed within this volume is mirrored by the rounder version of the literary past (presented in volumes and ) that makes intelligible the inherent elasticity and eclecticism of Caribbean literary cultures that have emerged through creative responses to the distinctive, unrivalled intensity of cultural encounter and exchange that has characterized the region, often experienced under conditions of oppression and violence. While it is impossible to summarize the genuinely manifold findings within these essays, there are some trends to be noted in terms of the major
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contributions to rethinking Caribbean literature that these volumes provide. One revelation certainly comes from being able to see connections across the freshly extended period and make links that not only recognize the Caribbean writer’s established preoccupation with history but also distinctive forms and tropes that have emerged in isolation and yet hold interest in their connectedness, as will be discussed later. Another substantial enrichment is the acknowledgement, following recent research, of Caribbean writers’ substantial engagements with and within Europe and the United States significantly before the late twentieth century, which importantly redraws the scope and nature of literary historical enquiry, as well as expanding the list of noted writers. This move brings previously peripheral voices, such as Guyanese Eric Walrond, to unexpected prominence. It also allows for a more developed recognition of the influence of Caribbean writers and writings on established global literary histories and genres, such as modernism in the case of Jean Rhys and Edgar Mittelholzer, or the gothic in the case of Michel Maxwell Philip in the mid-nineteenth century and H. G. de Lisser in the early twentieth – a connection that we already recognize in relation to contemporary writers such as Nalo Hopkinson, Shani Mootoo and Marlon James. Establishing a longer view also enables a fuller chronology of creative and critical concerns to come into view. For example, we may think of postcolonial ecopoetics as a recent theoretical paradigm championed in relation to the Caribbean by Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s work in the s, and a mode of reasoning that has since emerged as the necessary global logic in the era of the Plantationocene, climate change and extinction threats. Reading for this concern across the centuries reveals how attention to land and cultivation has been part of an ongoing anti-capitalist, anticolonial, ecological Caribbean sensibility from H. D. Carberry, Una Marson, Alfred Mendes, Claude McKay, Elma Napier, Nicolás Guillén and others of the s (as discussed by Erin M. Feshkens in volume ) through Patrick Chamoiseau and Gisèle Pineau, to Thomas Glave’s and Rita Indiana’s queer submerged ecologies of the twenty-first century (discussed by Keja Valens earlier in this volume) and Esther Figueroa’s scathing depictions of tourist ruin in her documentaries and of environmental scandal in her novel Limbo. It is also the case that looking at different sources enables different works and creators to come to light. The passionate enquiry into little magazines across the region has been an important focus for archival scholarship, but it may also have obscured the importance of newspapers as literary venues that published very many writers whose lives and works remain unknown. While their literary capacities may vary enormously, these writers tell us a
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great deal about ideas of literature in their choice of subject and language, and their numbers alone indicate the presence of virtually unacknowledged informal literary cultures and platforms. More serious attention to the overlap between journalistic and creative writers in the early twentieth century would also bring a different transitional context to the early writings that appeared as and in journals, as well as linking to the recent documentary work of Caribbean writers. Another critical challenge to a more comprehensive Caribbean literary history comes from the ephemerality of staged and performance works, and their associated playscripts and programmes. This has resulted in the influence and import of dramatic works often passing unnoticed and being less susceptible to recovery. The bias toward print that creeps in because of the challenges of accessing and recording performance matters not only to how we can now reread the past but also as a cautionary tale for the present and the challenge of preserving the creative brilliance of performance poets and poetry slams. Addressing what I consider to be three of the most pertinent issues facing Caribbean literature and literary studies as it moves further into the twenty-first century, the remainder of this essay draws attention, first, to how the future of Caribbean literary criticism will be shaped as much by what we rediscover about its past as by what is yet to come; second, to how critical models might evolve as we reach the limit point of cascading inclusions; and third, to the questions of accessing and preserving literary sources (past, present and future), with a cautious appraisal of the promise of digital humanities.
Restoring a Fuller Past: Recovery and Re-Evaluation In many ways, conceiving of Caribbean literature as a body of writings that can be studied from to the present day is already a bold move towards recovering the literary past. Critical dialogues between Caribbean literary scholars and those working in Early American Studies have generated productive conversations about sources and approaches to imaginative writings in the nineteenth century. To date, however, early writings have largely been regarded as, at best, an appendix to the later flourishing of anticolonial and nationalist writings that still come to most minds when the term Caribbean literature is invoked, or, at worst, dismissed as unwelcome, because uncomfortable, reminders of the overwhelming racialized injustices and human harms of colonial cultures. Volume of this project makes a strong case for integrating the nineteenth century into the history of Caribbean literature as it brings important
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works into critical discussion, such as the memoir of Jamaican Akeiso/Florence Hall (discussed by Nicole Aljoe) known to Early American Studies since the s, and valuable fragments of a growing indenture archive including Lal Bihari Sharma’s holi songs (discussed by Atreyee Phukan). All the same, bringing the writings of Europeans and Eurocreoles into view and dialogue alongside those of enslaved Africans, indentured Indians, and an increasing Caribbean population of mixed ancestry is not to shadow or to avoid the life-defining differences made by the racialized and dehumanizing world of the plantation premised on the disparities between white and Black Atlantic modernity that are both recorded and resisted in the colonial archive. What might be less obvious, and therefore in some ways more likely to remain obscured, are the losses closer to our own time, even overlapping with what is acknowledged as the high period of West Indian literary prominence in the s. Of course, recovery would be much easier and expanded literary histories more sustainable if bringing a writer or writings back into view were a one-time event. But, as a critical act, reclamation is inevitably shaped by the demands of its agent and own critical moment, and often writers who have been restored according to nationalist or feminist agendas can then recede from view as those critical paradigms transition. Sometimes, it is an academic champion who helps to restore areas of neglected work – such as Kaiama Glover’s important critical and translation work on the Haitian Spiralists; Rhonda Frederick and Olive Senior’s work on Panama; Vanessa Valdez’s work recovering and recentring Puerto Rican writer Julia de Burgos; and Brent Hayes Edwards’ work on the Nardal sisters of Martinique. Other times, it can be an anniversary or event that brings writers out of the shadow and illuminates new critical perspectives. The British Library’s acquisition of Andrew Salkey’s archive has coincided with a number of rereadings of his work for its queer character and characters, including Thomas Glave’s and Nadia Ellis’s. Salkey was positioned at the heart of Caribbean literary culture in the s through his activities with the Caribbean Artists Movement, the BBC Caribbean Voices programme and his work as a keen book reviewer. The scheduled academic conference, postponed because of the Covid- pandemic, interrogating as well as celebrating his work would have offered an important moment to mark his varied literary contributions across children’s writing, politically inflected travel journals, and novels. More popular channels of contemporary notoriety can also catalyse retrospective literary interests, as in the recent case of Alfred Mendes, the Trinidadian radical who was both a writer and co-editor (with C. L.
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R. James) of the short-lived little magazine Trinidad in –, and whose WWI experiences Sam Mendes, his grandson, re-imagined in his blockbuster film . It is important to note too that the work of reconsideration does not only extend to restoring writers who have slipped from view. It is not uncommon for those writers whose names are most familiar to be identified only in relation to part of their work leading to incomplete understandings. The almost excessive visibility of Samuel Selvon’s novel Lonely Londoners has led to him being commonly conceived as a Black British writer when some of his most animated and searching work focuses on shaky but vital solidarities in his homeland of Trinidad. Work on Frantz Fanon, the Caribbean revolutionary thinker of choice who died in , has undergone significant transition recently. A critical reconsideration of Fanon’s comments relating to same sex desiring men, whom he both names as macomère and denies, has been advanced by Rosamond S. King, and Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley has challenged his reading of Je suis Martiniquaise, the semi-autobiographical novel by Lucette Ceranus to restore its expression of latent female queer desire. Furthermore, a large proportion of Fanon’s previously unpublished writings are now available in a new volume, Alienation and Freedom (), edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J. C. Young and translated by Steven Corcoran. The work made accessible in this volume allows for fresh attention to Fanon as the hopeful playwright, with the publication of his early theatrical works that were thought to be entirely lost. The restoration of Caribbean women writers’ place in a comprehensive literary history continues to be a significant task, and although decades of feminist endeavours in criticism, publishing and teaching have now made a gendered-balanced version of Caribbean literature more easily realizable, there remains a notable gap in the anglophone tradition in relation to the s and s – with just a few works mentioned, usually by Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Jean Rhys and Sylvia Wynter. Given that we know this period coincided with the flourishing of West Indian male writers, the absence of anglophone women writers until the s in the majority of critical accounts is anomalous. Important work by Evelyn O’Callaghan on the nineteenth century and Leah Rosenberg on the early twentieth century have brought back into view significant numbers of women who wrote and then fell, or were cast, into the shadows once a body of work emerged that was more yielding to the concerns of the day. That the s remains strangely quiet in terms of women’s writing is particularly concerning since we now know that the much-celebrated Caribbean Voices BBC radio
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programme founded by Una Marson, which [Edward] Kamau Brathwaite claimed as ‘the single most important literary catalyst for Caribbean creative writing in English’, broadcast the creative work of very many women writers. It is clear then that this seeming gap marks an absence of literary recognition rather than an absence of writing itself. I have written elsewhere about the historical, material and cultural factors that appear to have contributed to this serious loss to Caribbean literary historical accounts. My interest now has moved to trying to recover some of these talented women writers, such as Eula Redhead, Inez Sibley, Monica Skeete and Edwina Melville, and to restore and critically discuss their works and their writing lives so as to challenge definitively the masculinist account of the s boom. Edwina Melville proves a fascinating example that Henry Swanzy, the producer of the Caribbean Voices programme, first brought to my attention through his (unwittingly patronizing) praise for her as ‘a particular favourite of mine, a girl called Edwina Melville’. Melville had four short pieces broadcast on the BBC between and , but her lively correspondence with Swanzy indicates that she had serious ambitions as a writer. I was hopeful that I could find her work elsewhere even though she was seemingly isolated from literary networks and institutions in Swanzy’s account, and by any glance at a map. Melville had settled in the Rupununi Savannah from the capital Georgetown when she married. She became greatly concerned with recording and preserving the culture of the Wapishana Indians, whose language she learned and for whom she acted as the member of Parliament in the final decade of her life. To date, I have located work that Melville published in the Guyana-based little magazine Kyk-Over-Al and for the Government Information Services in Guyana. Yet much more intriguingly, and entirely against the grain of assumptions that Caribbean-based women writers of this period were unconnected to metropolitan venues that supported the professional careers of their male counterparts, I also discovered that Melville published three creative pieces in Blackwood’s Magazine between and , a venue recognized for supporting serious literary talent. Her story ‘The Girl in Green’ was awarded second prize in their annual writing competition in . Melville’s writings are compelling in their attention to and embedded sensibility of place, their playful approach to life writing, and their engagement with indigenous culture and language. Positioning Melville alongside a figure like Egbert Martin, the prolific nineteenth-century Georgetown poet who wrote under the pen name Leo, reveals a pattern of writers falling into obscurity. Restoring her alongside Edgar Mittelholzer creates a much more textured view of the Guyanese mid-century writer,
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and reading her alongside Aubrey Williams and Wilson Harris reveals her promotion of indigenous cultural knowledge as an integral part of the Caribbean worldview a full decade ahead of theirs. As more scholars look backwards to look forwards, the future of Caribbean literary criticism and history will be shaped as much by what we rediscover about its past as by what is yet to come. For Caribbean women writers, this work of reconstruction restores a genealogy that has been obscured for decades, if not centuries. This important sense of marking female literary ancestors extends across the region with the recovery of Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos, the renaissance in critical work about Martiniquan Suzanne Césaire, as well as attention to the earlier Puerto Rican activist Luisa Capetillo, who was a radical writer and feminist labour leader in the early twentieth century.
The Limits of the Cascading Canon and the Politics of Inclusion If the example of Edwina Melville clearly illustrates the need to reconsider the gaps formed and still forming by the gendering of literary histories as an ongoing critical imperative, then it is significant to note that there were more than seventy women writers broadcast during the fifteen years of the Caribbean Voices programme who, with the exception of Louise Bennett and Sylvia Wynter, are now nearly entirely absent from literary histories. If we scale this up, even modestly, across the whole first half of the twentieth century and the entirety of the region, the loss is monumental. Even a glance at the index of well-known little magazines like BIM or the Beacon readily illustrates the wealth of women writing and in print at this time. Their omission is clearly sanctioned by an imprint of literary legitimacy on the part of subsequent editors and researchers, and not simply due to issues of accessibility. The way in which hundreds of women writers from across the whole region have been assumed to be negligible, literally overlooked, remains a disfigurement on the tradition’s sense of itself and on critical agendas that have developed in response to a predominantly male tradition of writing, reified as the canon. Yet is it enough to identify, acknowledge and include recovered writers in an established literary history when their presence and imaginations may have led to a different history of literary networks, institutions, and locations being written and a different inventory of critical approaches being developed? We already know that emancipatory criticism in the s and s was urgently, necessarily focused on the politics of racial and economic exploitation and the project of cultural restitution, and was expressed in
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the terms of struggle and contestation. The Great Tradition inherited from the colonial establishment’s idea of Literature was challenged by, as [Edward] Kamau Brathwaite named it, the Little Tradition, nurtured from folk traditions, vernacular languages and the politics of social engagement. Prospero’s world view and entitled claim was challenged by Caliban’s assertion of self-recognition, nurtured from and in revolt – as represented in works by George Lamming (), Aimé Césaire (), Roberto Fernández Retamar (), Kamau Brathwaite () and Sylvia Wynter (). Lamming’s theory that ‘Caliban can contribute to widening that same horizon which belongs equally to him and his contemporary Prospero’ is telling in its explicitly masculine skirmish for localized literacy. From the perspective of the s and s, these discourses, that had achieved the vital task of advocating for national subjects to be apprehended where colonial subjects had been inscribed, had unintentionally become articulate orthodoxies of their own, establishing male heteropatriarchal writers and their imagined postcolonial identities as the norm. Caribbean women’s writing flooded the creative field with what seemed like newly possible subjectivities from the s and was bolstered by Caribbean feminist projects that enabled dedicated critical studies, conferences, collections, and publishing houses and ensured a swift transition to visibility and more sensitive critical approaches. While this disrupted one orthodoxy and successfully shifted the centre of critical attention, a number of feminist writers and critics called for a more plural version of the field in terms of ethnic and erotic affiliations rather than simply an alternative canon of women writers that celebrated Jean Rhys and Jamaica Kincaid, Olive Senior and M. NourbeSe Philip. The model of an expanded canon cascading outwards towards the millennium to embrace women’s writings, and Indian-Caribbean, Chinese-Caribbean, Irish-Caribbean, Jewish-Caribbean writings, has itself now been challenged in the twenty-first century by calls for refreshed modes of enquiry that reach back to what was overlooked alongside timely calls to attend to how indigeneity, spirituality, and sexuality, particularly non-heteronormative sexualities, have shaped historical and literary legitimacy and visibility. Accounting for these differences within the already entangled creole mix of the Caribbean involves more than accommodating lost and excluded voices to existing critical paradigms. The most influential theorizations of the Caribbean – Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant and José Martí – all gesture towards the plurality and
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plasticity of the region’s sensibility. As do many influential women thinkers and writers whose work has not tended to cross linguistic boundaries so easily to date, including Dionne Brand, Maryse Condé, Ines Maria Martiatu, M. NourbeSe Philip and Sylvia Wynter. In keeping with their collective focus on the region’s productive multiplicity and mobility, a tradition of writings unravelling in its past securities and entangled in its present proliferating contexts, genres and markets is perhaps paradoxically more fully Caribbean for being less categorically so. Certainly, some of the most exciting thinking alongside creative works that resist accommodation to established epistemic structures has been motivated by queer, postcolonial and eco-humanities approaches, which are all premised on a repudiation of invented “heterocolonial orders” that manage difference to sustain hierarchy. In a context created by monumental historical injustices and persisting inequalities, it is only fitting that debates about what constitutes a Caribbean subject cannot find easy resolution. While ideas of what might comprise Caribbean literature are possibly most volatile and vivid in relation to writings of the nineteenth century, they are also the most problematic. Not only did the questions of what counts as the Caribbean, as a Caribbean writer and as a piece of Caribbean writing have no precedents to call on or contest, but those writing with most proximity and legitimacy were also those with the least social power, and many works were penned at a far distance from the Caribbean sensibility we have conceptualized today. At present, the debates around which version of Caribbean literature will achieve recognition appear much quieter than in the decolonizing phase of the mid-century when what Edward Baugh memorably termed the West Indian writers’ ‘quarrels with history’ raged. Indeed, many readers of contemporary Caribbean novels published by mainstream houses in the UK, such as Claire Adam’s Golden Child and Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton of , or Ingrid Persaud’s Love after Love and Curdella Forbes’s A Tall History of Sugar of may never associate these exhilarating works as Caribbean literature. The same could be said of Edwidge Danticat, Cristina Garcia, Ana Menéndez or even a figure like Roxane Gay in the US context. And if their readers are unlikely to locate them within a wider tradition of Caribbean writings from the twenty-first century, there is little chance that they will appreciate how the success of these Caribbean and Caribbean-British women writers has come after a century of struggle for visibility for women’s writing within and from the region, and follows the almost complete disappearing act of their mid-century predecessors.
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Of course, the connections made from and between these novels in relation to contemporary international literature, women’s writing, historical fiction and genre-based paradigms are significant and welcome, and will allow a valuable amplification for Caribbean literary works in a global writing scene. In the contemporary moment when Caribbean writers and writings are dispersed across the globe and struggles to decolonize are more diffuse, if no less urgent, it is fitting to ask what the continued value and usefulness of the term Caribbean literature might be? While any serious reflection on what constitutes either or both the ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Literature’ results in intense complication if not complete unravelling, I would still argue for expansive work that traces this prodigious body of writing as it migrates across platforms, genres, mediums, and languages, and connects back to works that have been reread and recovered in its contemporary orbit. Indeed, the range of literary sources now accessible for study and the variety of critical dialogues within this volume clearly illustrates the creative impact of a constellation that remains loosely and openly gathered, an assemblage which shows how women, peoples of various and mixed ethnicities and of diverse sexualities were always already represented in Caribbean writings (and were Caribbean writers) throughout the twentieth century, and emerging in the nineteenth century too. The benefit and purpose of holding together ‘Caribbean’ and ‘Literature’ does not lie in identifying works that most fully satisfy the conventional descriptions of either or both, but rather in surfacing the genuinely diverse and pluralizing ways in which writings conceive of Caribbean place, space, and identity, as well as the elaborate and complex relationships between these. In this model of Caribbean literature, embracing works like Marlon James’s fantasy epic of , Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which draws on African cultural resources, can helpfully bring us closer to earlier Africancentred works such as V. S. Reid’s The Leopard or writers like Neville Dawes. The same principle can apply to genres such as speculative fiction, with Barbadian Karen Lord’s novel The Best of All Possible Worlds and Grenadian Tobias Bucknell’s novel Halo: The Cole Protocol, leading us back to Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World, ) and Guadeloupean Simone Schwarz-Bart’s Ti Jean L’Horizon (Between Two Worlds, ). Similarly, tracing non-binary writings moves us from Trinidadian-Canadian Shani Mootoo’s novel of transsexuality, Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab, back to the gender-creative Leonard Side who opens the narrative in V. S. Naipaul’s – Mootoo’s ostensibly uber-conservative relative – memoir
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of his return to Trinidad, A Way in the World. Reading across periods and places enables a compelling and challenging assemblage of Caribbean literary imaginings to emerge. These might cluster around thematics like religion and encompass works as diverse as the nineteenth-century handwritten interviews of ‘Ashy’, an enslaved Barbadian, Cynric Williams’s Hamel, the Obeah Man of , Orlando Patterson’s novel The Children of Sisyphus, Joyce Gladwell’s Brown Face Big Master of , Loida Maritza Pérez’s Geographies of Home of , and Kei Miller’s The Last Warner Woman of . It allows for an interrogation of the persistent trope of the plantation from Marie-Joséphine Augustin’s novel Le Macandal: Épisode de l’Insurrection des Noirs à St. Domingue through Joseph Zobel’s La Rue Cases-Nègres (Black Shack Alley) published in , Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière. . . in , and Clem Maharaj’s The Dispossessed of , to Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women in and Tessa McWatt’s memoir Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging in . Continued inclusions will always be important and bring new modes of critical attentiveness. To take just two recent examples, Raymond Antrobus’s poetry collection The Perseverance brought forward an astonishing sense of what is lost to the hearing world through its illiteracy of deafness, and Njelle W. Hamilton’s study of Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel offered a fresh way of tuning into the sonic dimensions of literary works. The current renaissance of poetry generated by the luminous work of Raymond Antrobus, Vahni Capildeo, Ishion Hutchinson, Vladimir Lucien, Canisia Lubrin, Shara McCallum, Kei Miller, Shivanee Ramlochan and Roger Robinson casts different shadows to the longestablished dominance of prose and of novelists and renews the intimacy between oral and scribal sensibilities. Linguistic inclusivity remains a persistent challenge to Caribbean scholarship, especially given the multilingual, transnational nature of the region. Attention to the distinctive linguistic suppleness and permeability of Caribbean expressive cultural forms is increasingly supported within literary studies by the shift towards multi-lingual literacies. This is crucial to a future in which the connectivity between the anglophone, francophone and hispanophone transitions towards polyglot creative and critical dialogues that can elaborate and nurture pan-Caribbean imaginations and build rapport with the still more evidently dislocated Caribbean Dutch territories. Without comprehensive translation projects the critical endeavour of preventing a small number of writers being mistaken for the much larger whole will be seriously compromised, as just a few metropolitan-
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based writers writing in English, such as Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat, can mistakenly become the representatives of their entire language area. Translated literary works and support for bilingual editions, such as The Sea Needs No Ornament / El mar no necesita ornamento (), the first bilingual anthology of contemporary poetry by anglophone and hispanophone women writers for more than two decades, edited by Loretta Collins Klobah and Maria Grau Perejoan, enables readers, critics and writers to appreciate a wider Caribbean and provides an immensely valuable opportunity for expanded readerships, curricula, festivals and prizes. Jamaican writer Alecia McKenzie’s Caribbean Translation Project, which has been active in advocating for literary translation and has published a collection of Jamaican short stories in Chinese, keeps this important conversation alive on Twitter (@CaribTranslate). The University of Virginia Press has also made a significant contribution to trans-lingual study through its published translations of francophone literature, including works by a number of Caribbean women writers: Évelyne Trouillot, Yanick Lahens, Lilas Desquiron, Suzanne Dracius and Gisèle Pineau. What appears most vital is to foster and to promote, with a developed critical awareness, the existence and significance of diverse, dissimilar, importantly incompatible and expressively fragmented Caribbean literatures that move around and collide with each other, always aware that everything that is in circulation is already contingent on shifting cycles of evaluation that create new forms of recovery and loss, of championing and disavowal. In this way, literary studies can acknowledge that the place writers claim as their Caribbeans are not the same, even when they may be a single place. Writing in and of the Caribbean has described irreparable gulfs of experience and understanding that remain as a permanent reminder of the violence and trauma underpinning the region’s beginnings. This divided sense of being and belonging to the Caribbean may be the most extreme, explicit and irretrievable when reading works by slaveowning creoles such as radical-turned-reactionary Eliza Fenwick (discussed by Lissa Paul in volume ) alongside those of formerly enslaved people, such as Mary Prince and Juan Francisco Manzano. Yet, separated belonging and unbelonging has persisted and also transitioned as other breaches in mutual recognition have taken hold. Thomas Glave’s introduction to his landmark anthology of gay and lesbian writings, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, published in , which declares itself as ‘a book that I and others have been waiting for and have wanted for all our lives’, provides a striking illustration of
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diverse, unequal yet parallel conditions of belonging created by state, popular and religious homophobias still aggressively present in the anglophone Caribbean.
The Challenges of Accessibility and Preservation As part of a wider conversation around literary heritage and the future of the Caribbean’s literary past, the question of accessibility, to both current and historical sources, has a particular relevance for readers and potential, as well as actual, scholars based in locations without access to wellresourced libraries. It is also a live question for libraries and repositories in the region who are competing for Caribbean literary materials against wealthy British and North American knowledge institutions seeking to ‘diversify’ their collections. A number of ambitious and now invaluable digital humanities interventions have created the conditions for a fuller Caribbean literary genealogy through user-friendly open resources, but they have also drawn attention to the risks of technologies that may appear to democratize, expand and preserve knowledge. The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC.com), launched in , is the standout digital humanities project in the field and has transformed access to rare and hard to reach primary materials, including little magazines, published volumes, maps, and newspapers across the anglophone, francophone, hispanophone and Caribbean Dutch territories. dLOC’s wealth of searchable collections helps overcome information biases against small islands, and the organization has also modelled strong ethical principles in terms of cooperative working with archives, libraries and private collections by establishing partnerships in which all rights are retained by the material’s owners. They have also supported exhibitions and innovative pedagogic collaborations that bring Caribbean literary materials and scholarly frameworks into a public humanities environment. Other notable open access digital humanities initiatives have focused on bibliographic work, creating resources for researchers that remain renewable over time. The Centre d’enseignement et de recherche en études postcoloniales (CEREP) at the University of Liège maintains comprehensive bibliographies on Caryl Phillips and Wilson Harris. Alex Gil’s Aimé Césaire and the Broken Record, a collaborative literary bibliography, explicitly establishes its methodology as a Caribbeanized poetics of information management in its insistence on openness and provisionality: ‘The following is a work in progress, a public draft. Call it an exuberance of echoes on Aimé Césaire and innominate text for now.’ While this resource is free,
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Gil insists on an important caveat about new capitalist opportunities associated with discoverability that constantly mitigate against the symbolic freedom of writing into the world and the social capital of gifted intellectual labour, ‘Aimé Ferdinand David Césaire – now canonized, pantheonized, just Césaire – had to navigate many different editorial waters before his texts opened to a world market for literature and ideas. His words are now carried in bytes crossing the oceans by submarine cable, often fragmented beyond repair in the password protected coffers of global finance.’ Sharing the same Zotero platform and similar in intellectual spirit is the ‘Kamau Brathwaite SX Bibliography Project’ initiated and directed by Kelly Baker Josephs. This ongoing scholarly collaboration has created a ‘living library’ that continues to capture the extraordinary range of primary and secondary sources relating to Brathwaite’s considerable artistic and critical outputs as they accrue and the @KamauRemix, a collaborative twitter feed, keeps Brathwaite’s writings in circulation and dialogue with other Caribbean writings. The challenge of curating primary sources created in the context of the colonial Caribbean is far more demanding as it involves negotiating with the historical record generated by and for the colonizer. ‘The Early Caribbean Digital Archive’, co-directed by Nicole Aljoe and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon and hosted at Northeastern University, provides a creative solution by mining pre-twentieth-century Caribbean texts, maps and images to recover voices of ‘enslaved African and Indigenous American people whose lives, labor, and land shaped the culture and development of the Atlantic world’ and then remixing these archival fragments to ‘foreground the centrality and creativity of enslaved and free African, Afrocreole, and Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean world’. The overt emphasis within these projects on their decolonial ethics and participatory and democratizing methods is a timely reminder of how susceptible digital literacies are to replicate the hierarchies and exclusions of print cultures and extractive models of knowledge exchange. Open access sources offer important channels to extend knowledge but are not necessarily egalitarian. While Wikipedia’s robust notability criteria might be an important safeguard to reliability, they also make it almost impossible to create entries for lesser known figures, and currently only eighteen per cent of Wikipedia biographies are of women, which again signals the tendency to replicate existing information bias. It is also important to recognize that while paper is a fragile material subject to climactic degradation, the digital has its own precarity, and work can be lost in the virtual environment just as easily and often more immediately. These projects
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represent modest, though exciting, models of responsible Caribbean digital scholarship that engage with the knowledge inequalities of the past and seek not to reproduce them in the future, but they are resource intensive in terms of intellectual labour and time. Indeed, although Caribbean literary studies is still grappling with the consequences of its incomplete literary history, it already needs to be thinking of the future of its past. Within the present context of born-digital creativity, the future of the Caribbean’s literary past requires a collective conception in which writers, researchers and archivists share their sense of what, how and where to keep the manuscripts, correspondences, social media archives and notebooks of the present, such that they become a rich seam supporting yet more diverse critical engagements. Caribbean literatures from to have provided an extraordinary reserve of creative brilliance in their political revisionings, its validating lifestories and its historical counter-narratives of being and belonging. As yet more works are crafted and flourish across the region, the possible configurations of this literary history and future continue to grow. Transition and transformation are not only inevitable, but also invaluable. Caribbean literature has a long history of writing for justice, for the humanization of the oppressed and for the right to self-determination. It also has a long history of creative inventiveness, of crafting aesthetic conduits for nonEurocentric, indigenous, spiritual, and ancestral knowledge, and of voicing subjectivities that are otherwise unheard. Its history stands it in good stead for the future approaching, and all the signs point to its readiness.
Notes Una Marson, ‘Wanted: Writers and Publishers’, Public Opinion ( June ), . Caribbean-based emerging writers can now compete for The Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize, and writing for children and young adults has been boosted significantly by the CODE Burt Award for Caribbean Young Adult Literature (previously the Hollick Arvon Prize). Most particularly Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, eds. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, René Gosson and George Handley (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, ). See the introduction to this volume. Rosamond S. King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, ); Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ).
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Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, ), . See Alison Donnell, ‘Rescripting Anglophone Caribbean Women’s Literary History: Gender, Genre, and Lost Caribbean Voices’, in J. Dillon Brown and Leah Reade Rosenberg (eds.), Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, ), –. Henry Swanzy, Private correspondence with author, March . Edwina Melville, ‘The Girl in Gren’, Blackwood’s Magazine, Edinburgh . (), –. For a detailed discussion of the context in which Brathwaite developed his theory of the Little Tradition, see Peter J. Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters: British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –. George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, ); Aimé Césaire, A Tempest, , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Ubu Repertory Theatre Publications, ); Roberto Fernandez Retamar, ‘Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America’, Massachusetts Review, ./ (), ; Kamau Brathwaite, ‘A PostCautionary Tale of the Helen of our Wars’, Wasafiri, (), –; Sylvia Wynter, ‘Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the “Demonic Ground” of Caliban’s “Woman”’, in Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine SavoryFido (eds.), Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, ), –. Lamming, Pleasures of Exile, , italics mine. As Keja Valens explains ‘The heterocolonial order enforces an interlocking series of divisions and connections between civilized and savage, white and black, man and woman, chaste and perverse, normal and abnormal, among other things, which derive from the combination of the norms of heterosexuality and the principles and practices of colonialism and subject the Caribbean to their (often contradictory and destructive) orders even as they create the Caribbean and its subjects as we know them’; Keja Valens, ‘Excruciating Improbability and the Transgender Jamaican’, in Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Sarah Tobias (eds.), Trans Studies: The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, ), –, –. Edward Baugh, ‘The West Indian Writer and his Quarrel with History’, Tapia, . (), – and . (), –. ‘CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French’, The University of Virginia Press website, www.upress.virginia.edu/series/ caraf-books-caribbean-and-african-literature-translated-french-. Thomas Glave, ‘Desire through the Archipelago’, in Thomas Glave (ed.), Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), –, .
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Caribbean Literature and Literary Studies
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Index
Á l’angle des rues parallèles (At the Corner of Parallel Streets) (Victor), – Abeng (Cliff ), –, –, Aching, Gerard, Active Voice blog, affects, –, – Afra-Hispanic women, –, African Americans, –, –, –, The African Origins of UFOs (Joseph), Afrocentrism, in Caribbean performance, –, – Afro-Creolization. See creolization Afrofuturism, , , , – Agard, John, –, – Agnant, Marie-Célie, –, Ahmed, Sara, –, – Alexander, M. Jacqui, , –, Alexis, André, –, , alien, – All that Glitters (Anthony), – Allen, Graham, – Allen, Lillian, –, , dub poetry and, , , –, , , – Women Do This Every Day, , , Allen-Agostini, Lisa, , – alternate landscapes, Canadian, –, – Alvarez, Julia, , , Álvarez Tabio-Albo, Emma, – Among Flowers (Kincaid), , –, – Anansi(y) stories, – Anderson, Benedict, anitafrika, d’bi.young, – dub poetry and, –, , –, , –, – performance and, –, –, , –, –, – Anthony, Michael, – Anthurium (digital publication), – Antigone (Sophocles), – Antigua, , Antoni, Robert, , , , , –, –
Antrobus, Raymond, –, –, , Archipelago (Roffey), – Arenas, Reinaldo, , , – Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, Arnold, A. James, – Arthur, Kevyn Alan, –, –, , As Flies to Whatless Boys (Antoni), , – Asian-Americans, – assemblages, –, – At the Bottom of the River (Kincaid), At the Corner of Parallel Streets (Á l’angle des rues parallèles) (Victor), – At the Full and Change of the Moon (Brand), , –, Atta, Dean, audiences, –, –, Augustown (Miller, K.), –, , authenticity, – authors, –, –, commodification and, , , , workshops, education of, –, –, autobiographical. See life writing b current, , Bagoo, Andre, , , Bahadur, Gaiutra, –, , , – Bakhtin, Mikhail M., – Baksh, Imam, Baldwin, James, Ballester, José Arturo, – Balme, Christopher, baroque, , . See also Neo-Baroque Barry, Angela, , –, – Baugh, Edward, , – Before Night Falls (Arenas), , – belonging, –, –, –, – of Caribbean British, , – of Caribbean Canadians, , – un/belonging, , – Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, –, –, , Benny’s Song (Cumper), –
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Index Bérard, Stéphanie, – Berlant, Lauren, –, Bernard, Jay, –, – The Best of all Possible Worlds (Lord), –, – Bharath, Rhoda, – Bhattacharya, Rahul, – biomythography, –, , –, Birthday Suit (Senior), – Bishop, Jacqueline, –, –, –, – Black British, –, –, The Black Jacobins (James, C. L. R.), – Black Power, , –, , – Black Power Revolution (Trinidad), , – blackness, , – Barry on, – Bishop on, Brand on, – Kincaid on, – Phillips on, – Pineau on, – Bleeding Wound/Sangra por la Herida (Yánẽ z), – blogosphere, Caribbean, –, –, Chin in, – social media and, –, – blood.claat (anitafrika), –, – Bocas Lit Fest, , –, , Henry Swanzy Award of, –, OCM Bocas Prize of, –, , –, , , – on social media, , Bonilla, Yarimar, – The Book of Night Women (James, M.), –, –, –, – Bovell, Seth ‘Xcel’, –, Brand, Dionne, –, , , , –, – At the Full and Change of the Moon, , –, creative nonfiction of, – on diaspora, , – documentary film and, – on feminism, – In Another Place, Not Here, , A Map to the Door of No Return, – prizes won by, , Thirsty, Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, –, , , , , – on calypso, CAM and, , –, – digital archiving of, – epigraphs from, , –
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on The Harder They Come, Hulme debate with, , , on Little Tradition, Caribbean, – ‘Springblade’, –, Trench Town Rock, – on violence, –, visuality of, , , –, – on yard, , –, – Bread Out Of Stone (Brand), – Breath, Eyes, Memory (Danticat), , –, Breeze, Jean ‘Binta’, , , – Breiner, Laurence A., , A Brief History of Seven Killings (James, M.), –, –, , –, – Marley, B., and, –, – soundtrack for, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Díaz), –, , – British Commonwealth, – British Subjects (D’Aguiar), – Britishness, –, – Brixton Riots, , , – Brodber, Erna, –, , –, –, Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home, –, – Louisiana, – Myal, –, , nonfiction and, –, – Brontë, Charlotte. See Jane Eyre Brontë, Emily, , , , – Broox, Klyde, –, –, Brother, I’m Dying (Danticat), –, – Brown, Stewart, – Brown, Wayne, – Brown Girl, Brownstones (Marshall), –, –, Brown Girl in the Ring (Hopkinson), –, – Browne, Diane, –, – Browne, Kevin Adonis, –, –, – Buckell, Tobias S., , –, , , – Bucknor, Michael, –, Burgos, Julia de, , Butler, Octavia, – Butterfly in the Wind (Persaud), – The Butterfly’s Way (Danticat), –, Cabiya, Pedro, Caine Prize, Calabash (journal), – Calabash International Literary Festival, , , , –, , –
Index
Caliban (fictional character), –, , –, –, – calypso, –, , –, – Lord Kitchener, –, –, Trinidad and, , –, CAM. See Caribbean Artists Movement Cambridge (Phillips), –, – The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Hogle), Campbell, Hazel D. , , , Canada diaspora and, –, –, – dub poetry of, –, , – francophone Caribbean writing in, –, – identity of, –, –, – multiculturalism in, , –, , , –, – prizes in, –, queer sexuality in, –, –, racism in, , –, , – speculative fiction of, – women’s publishing, writing in, –, – Yonge Street Riot in, , The Cancer Journals (Lorde), –, canon, , Caribbean, making of, –, – Caribbean performance adapting, –, –, – intertextual use of, –, – Kincaid and English, Phillips and, , Rhys in Caribbean, , Capildeo, Vahni, , –, , – Carew, Jan, – Caribbean, as term, , Caribbean aesthetics, – CAM on, – Neo-Baroque, – of Philip, – Spiralist, – visual strategies of, – Caribbean Americans, US, , –. See also Puerto Rico; United States; Virgin Islands, US African Americans and, –, Asian, – diaspora and, –, –, –, – Jamaican, –, – speculative, fantastic, and literature of, –, , – Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), , , –, –, , – Caribbean British, –, , –, . See also Black British
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belonging, un/belonging of, , – Britishness interrogated by, –, – as diasporic, , –, – generations of, , –, , –, – independent presses of, –, – New Cross Massacre and, , – poetry of, –, –, –, , publishing and, –, –, – on queer sexuality, – racism and, , –, –, – revisionist history of, – transnationalism of, –, –, – Windrush and, , –, –, –, , , –, Caribbean Discourse (Le Discours antillais) (Glissant), –, Caribbean resistance. See cultural resistance Caribbean Review of Books (CRB) (journal), – Caribbean Translation Project, Caribbean Voices (radio show), , , – Caribbean Women Writers (Cudjoe), Caribs, – Carnival (Antoni), , , , – carnival culture, –, , Afro-Cuban, Browne, K. A., on, –, –, – Caribbean novel and, –, , performance and, , – in Trinidad, –, –, , , –, –, – Carrigan, Anthony, , Carter, Martin, –, , – The Cartographer Maps a Way to Zion (Miller, K.), – Carty-Williams, Candice, Caruso, Enrico, – Casa de las Américas, , , , Castaway (artwork), – Castro, Fidel, , –, , – categorial imperative, –, – environments resisting, – Linnaean, – plantation and, – queerness critiquing, – Cazabon, Michel Jean, Cazenave, Odile, – Célanire cou-coupé (Who Slashed Célanire’s Throat?) (Condé), –, , – Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Etudes Postcoloniales (CEREP), – Cereus Blooms at Night (Mootoo), , –, Césaire, Aimé, , , –, – intertextual use of, –, –, –
Index Une Tempête, –, –, – The Chalice Project (Allen-Agostini), Chamoiseau, Patrick, –, –, – Chancy, Myriam, –, , Channer, Colin, –, – Chariandy, David, –, –, Chaviano, Daína, –, – Cheddie, Janice, – Chen, Kriston, – Cherry Natural, Chick (Lowe), – child narrator, , – Children of the Spider (Baksh), Children’s Literature, , –, – colonialism and, –, education-driven model of Caribbean, – folktales and, – francophone Caribbean, –, , – growth of Caribbean, –, – hispanophone Caribbean, , , –, identity in, , – Jamaica in, – picture book in, – Senior and, , –, slavery in, , sociocultural contexts of, – Trinidad in, – women’s writing and, – Chin, Staceyann The Other Side of Paradise, –, , performance of, –, , –, – Chineseness, – The Chip Chip Gatherers (Naipaul, S.), –, – Chochueca’s Strategy (La estrategia de Chochueca) (Indiana Hernández), – The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (Marshall), – Christian, Barbara, –, Citizen (Rankine), – Clarke, Austin, – Clarke, George Elliott, – CLH project, –, Cliff, Michelle, –, – Abeng, –, –, Free Enterprise, If I Could Write This in Fire, –, – No Telephone to Heaven, –, , –, –, , –, , Cobra (Sarduy), – Coleman, Daniel, –, Collins, Merle, – Collins Klobah, Loretta, , colonial archive, –, –
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colonialism, Children’s Literature and, –, leisure imperialism, personal and, prizes and, – US neocolonialism, , – visuality and, The Colour of Forgetting (Collins), – Columbus, Christopher, , –, Kincaid on, –, letter of, –, , commodification, publishing and, –, , , Commonwealth Writers prizes, – Condé, Maryse, , –, – Célanire cou-coupé, –, , – intertextuality of, –, –, –, – Moi, Tituba sorcière. . .Noire de Salem, –, –, – Congrès des Écrivains Caribéen (Congress of Caribbean Writers), Conquistadora (Santiago), –, , –, Consuming the Caribbean (Sheller), contemporary literature, US. See Caribbean Americans, US conuco. See plot Coolie Woman (Bahadur), –, , , – Cooper, Afua, – Cooper, Carolyn, , –, A Cow Called Boy (Palmer, C. E.), – Cozier, Christopher, – CRB. See Caribbean Review of Books Creole Afro-Creole, –, –, –, identity, –, –, , –, language, , –, –, , , – nationalism, , – white Creole, , , , – creolization, –, – Afro-Creolization, –, – Canadian, – Chineseness in, – dougla identity, –, , – Indo-Creolization, –, , , – of sexuality and erotics, , – Crick Crack, Monkey (Hodge), , – crime fiction, cruise, Crystal Rain (Buckell), , – ‘Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres’ (‘When Women Love Men’) (Ferré), , – Cuba, –, – Afro-Cuban carnival culture,
Index
Cuba (cont.) Casa de las Américas, , , , Grupo Teatro Escambray in, , Havana, –, Neo-Baroque of, – queer sexuality in, –, – revolution in, , –, – Salkey on, – sex trade in, sexuality and gender in, –, – speculative fiction of, –, – talleres literarios in, US and, , – Cudjoe, Selwyn, cultural resistance, calypso and, in carnival culture, –, – in dancehall, – of dub, – Cummings, Ronald, , –, , , Cumper, Patricia, – Dabydeen, David, – D’Aguiar, Fred, –, – Dambury, Gerty, – dancehall, , – dub poetry and, gender, sexuality, in, , –, – oral culture of, – Danticat, Edwidge, –, –, , –, –, . See also Haiti Breath, Eyes, Memory, , –, Brother, I’m Dying, –, – The Butterfly’s Way edited by, –, Haitian diaspora and, –, –, nonfiction of, –, – dark waters (kala pani), –, – Das, Mahadai, , – Daughters of the Diaspora (DeCosta-Willis), – Davies, Carole Boyce, –, – Davis, Mike, – Dawes, Kwame, , , , –, – Calabash International Literary Festival and, –, on reggae aesthetics, –, – D’Costa, Jean, –, – de Lisser, Herbert G., gothic and, –, The White Witch of Rosehall, –, –, , – deafness, – deCaires Narain, Denise, , DeCosta-Willis, Miriam, – Defoe, Daniel, –, –,
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Deleuze, Gilles, – DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, –, –, Dennis-Benn, Nicole, –, – diaspora, –, –, –, Asian, US Caribbean, – Brand on, , –, – Canadians and, –, –, – Caribbean British and, , –, – Caribbean feminisms and, – double and triple, –, –, – dub poetry in, , –, Haitian, –, –, –, –, , – performance in, –, – Pineau on, – queer sexuality and, –, – revolution and, , – US and Caribbean, –, –, –, – Díaz, Junot, , –, , – difference, –, – Difficult Women (Plante), – digital archives, –, – digital intertextuality, – Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), –, , digital literary publications, , , –, – digital platforms, , –, , , digital publishing, , , –, – digital yard, Caribbean blogosphere as, , – social media as, –, – Dirty Havana Trilogy (Gutiérrez), Le Discours antillais (Caribbean Discourse) (Glissant), –, Disney, , – Distant Palaces (Los Palacios distantes) (Estévez), – dLOC. See Digital Library of the Caribbean documentaries, – dogs, – Dominican Republic, –, , , , , – Donnell, Alison, , , , , Douen Islands project, –, dougla identity, –, , – Douglas, Marcia, – The Dragon Can’t Dance (Lovelace), –, –, – Dream on Monkey Mountain (Walcott, D.), – Dreaming in Cuban (Garcia, C.), – Drucker, Johanna, dub aesthetics, , –
Index dub poetry, , , –, Afrofuturism in, , , Allen, L., and, , , –, , , – anitafrika, –, , –, , –, – Antrobus, – Broox, –, –, Canadian, –, , – diaspora and, , –, on gun violence, – Johnson, L. K., and, , , – Kellough, , – Miller, K., on, –, –, on sexual abuse, –, – Dutch Caribbean, , , – Duvalier regime, Haitian, –, –, , – dyaspora. See diaspora Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA), –, , eco-poetics, , categorial imperative critiqued in, – garden in, – of Glave, –, indifference and, –, – of Kincaid, – Linnaeus and, – plantation and, –, – of Senior, –, , – editors, , –, Edmondson, Belinda, Eight Days (Danticat), ekphrasis, – empathy, – English, Standard, – environment, , –, – ecological crisis, –, –, –, tourism impacting, –, erotics, – creolization of, , – queer, –, , –, –, – Escape to Last Man Peak (D’Costa), – Espinet, Ramabai, –, –, – Estévez, Abilio, – La estrategia de Chochueca (Chochueca’s Strategy) (Indiana Hernández), – The European Tribe (Phillips), –, – Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (Ramlochan), –, , – Exile According to Julia (Pineau), –, – Facebook, –, –, family, Alvarez on, Danticat on, –
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Goodison on, – Kincaid and, –, in Lionheart Gal, Fanon, Frantz, , –, , , Farmer, Sonia, – female planter, white, , , – Arthur on, –, –, , de Lisser on, –, , , – Levy on, –, , – masculine authority and, –, Palmer, A., , , – rehearsal of, –, – Santiago on, –, , –, feminisms, Caribbean, –, – in anthologies, –, –, – Christian on, –, cross-disciplinary feminist scholarship and, –, diaspora and, – Dutch, , of Ferré, – francophone, –, –, – Indo-Caribbean, –, , , –, , – intersectional, –, – intertextual, – Lorde in, –, , –, , , –, –, –, –, on masculinity, –, O’Callaghan on, – Pan-Africanism and, , – practice and theory in, –, rehearsal and, , –, of Santos-Febres, –, –, , , Ferré, Rosario, , –, festivals, literary, –, –, , – Bocas Lit Fest, –, , , , , –, –, –, –, in Brooklyn, , Calabash, , , , –, , – La fiesta vigilada (The Surveilled Party) (Ponte), – Fifteen Dogs (Alexis), – Fignolé, Jean-Claude, – Figueroa, Esther, –, –, film, –, , –, – fish woman, folklore Children’s Literature and, – speculative fiction and, –, – Ford-Smith, Honor, –, –, , – for(u)m, , Francis, Donette, , – francophone Caribbean writing, –, –
Index
francophone Caribbean writing (cont.) in Canada, –, – Children’s Literature, –, , – feminism and, –, –, – visual art and, , – Frankétienne, – Free Enterprise (Cliff ), The Fullness of Everything (Powell), – future, Caribbean literary, –, –, –, digital platforms in, – past and, visual culture in, – Garcia, Cristina, – Garcia, R. S. A., – garden, Creole. See plot garden, in eco-poetics, – Gardening in the Tropics (Senior), – gender. See also feminisms, Caribbean Afra-Hispanic women, –, calypso and, – Canadian women’s writing, publishing, –, – in Caribbean performance, –, – on Caribbean Voices, women writers, – carnival culture and, , – categorial imperative and, –, – Children’s Literature, women’s writing and, – in Cuba, –, – in dancehall, , – Danticat on, in dub poetry, – enslaved women, reclaiming, The History of Mary Prince and, in Lionheart Gal, – little magazines and, – male writers, dominance of, –, – Man’s episteme, –, –, masculinity, interrogation of, , , –, nonfiction and, , , – speculative fiction and, –, – transgender, , –, –, –, , –, –, – US Caribbean American women writers, – in visual representation, – white female, as fictional character, – white female planter, –, –, –, – white female planter, masculine authority and, –, women writers, restoration of, –
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women’s writing, growth of, –, , –, – Gender in Caribbean Development (Mohammed and Shepherd, C.), –, – Gendered Realities (Mohammed), –, generationalism, of Caribbean British, –, , – anthologies and, Britishness and, un/belonging and, – Windrush generation, , –, –, , , – Georgetown Journal (Salkey), – Gibbons, Rawle, Gil, Alex, – Gilroy, Paul, , Glave, Thomas, –, – eco-poetics of, –, Our Caribbean edited by, –, –, –, –, , – Glissant, Édouard, –, –, , –, –, on baroque, Caribbean Discourse, –, exhibition inspired by, – Golding, Bruce, – Goodison, Lorna, –, , – Gorée (Barry), –, – gothic, de Lisser and, –, speculative fiction and, – Grand Prix littéraire caribéen, –, , Gregory, Helen, Grenada Carib resistance in, – revolution in, , – US war in, Grenada (Carew), – Grenfell fire (), Grupo Teatro Escambray, , Guadeloupe, –. See also Grand Prix littéraire caribéen Guattari, Félix, – Guerrillas (Naipaul, V. S.), , Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, – Guillén, Nicolás, gun violence, – Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan, Guyana, – Bahadur on, –, cultural revolution, upheaval in, , – Guyana Prize, , – Habekost, Christian, , Haiti, –, –
Index dyaspora of, –, –, –, –, , – Kreyol, –, revolution in, –, Haiti Cherie (Condé), – Hall, Stuart, , –, , –, – Hamilton, Njelle W., –, The Harder They Come (film), – Harriet’s Daughter (Philip), Harris, Wilson, –, , –, , Harvey River (Goodison), – hashtags, – Havana, Cuba, –, Havana Journal (Salkey), – Hazel Hummingbird (Rochester), Heading South (Laferrière), – Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, , Henzell, Perry, – Her True-True Name (Mordecai and Wilson), Here Comes the Sun (Dennis-Benn), –, – heritage writing, – High Mas (Browne, K. A.), , –, – Hill, Errol, –, – Man Better Man, –, The Trinidad Carnival, , – hispanophone literature children’s, , , –, visual art and, – history, – archival, , –, , – Caribbean British revising, – dub aesthetics as, – heritage writing, social histories, – novels countering, –, – quarrels with, –, , – stereotypes in, writerly bodies in, , The History of Mary Prince (Strickland), , –, , – HIV/AIDS, –, –, – Hodge, Merle, , –, Hogle, Jerrold E., Holgate, Michael, homophobia, –, –, – in Cuba, – in Jamaica, , –, – Hopkinson, Nalo, , , , Brown Girl in the Ring, –, – The Midnight Robber, –, , , The New Moon’s Arms, Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root edited by, , Hosein, Gabrielle, –
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Hulme, Peter, , , Hunt, Peter, hybrid literatures, Chick as, – Coolie Woman as, – The Messenger, – I am Nobody’s Nigger (Atta), I and I, , I Gave You All I Had (Valdés), identity, –, – blackness and, – in Children’s Literature, , – dougla, –, , – in performance, independent Caribbean, –, – identity, national, , –, , – Canadian, –, –, – Caribbean performance and, –, – intertextuality and, –, –, – If I Could Write This in Fire (Cliff ), –, – Ikael Torass (Williams, N. D.), – immigration British anti-immigrant environment, –, to US, Caribbean, –, –, In Another Place, Not Here (Brand), , In the Morning Yah (Shepherd, S.), –, In the Palm of Darkness (Tú, la oscuridad) (Montero), – indentured labor, , , – Indiana Hernández, Rita (also Rita Indiana), –, , –, indifference, –, –. See also difference Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thoughts (Hosein and Outar), – Indo-Creolization. See creolization Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities (Reddock), –, intersectionality, –, –, –, – intertextuality, , –, –, –, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, , – in Cambridge, – with canon, Caribbean, with canon, European, , – with Césaire, –, –, – of Condé, –, , –, –, – of film and literature, –, , – of No Telephone to Heaven, , , –, of Prospero’s Daughter, , – of Santos-Febres, , – Walcott, D., used in, –, –, Wide Sargasso Sea and, , , –
Index
Intertextuality (Allen, G.), – intimacies, –, – intimate publics, –, , Invisible Men (Kaersenhout ), – Is Just a Movie (Lovelace), – The Island of Eternal Love (Chaviano), –, – Istanbul, Turkey, , –, Jackson, Naomi, Jackson, Shona, – Jaffe, Rivke, –, Jain, Ravindra K., – Jamaica, –, –, Calabash International Literary Festival in, , , , –, , – in Children’s Literature, – homophobia in, , –, – Kingston, , –, – Miller, K., on, –, patois of, , plantation and urban in, –, – political parties in, , –, –, Rodney Riots in, , – tourism in, –, –, US Caribbean Americans from, –, – Jamaica (Salkey), – James, C. L. R., –, , – James, Marlon, –, , , –, The Book of Night Women, –, –, –, – A Brief History of Seven Killings, –, –, –, , –, – John Crow’s Devil, –, prizes and, –, , , –, –, social media, blogging of, , , Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (Brodber), –, – Jane Eyre (Brontë, C.), – No Telephone to Heaven and, , , –, Prospero’s Daughter and, , – in Wide Sargasso Sea, , , , , –, – John Crow’s Devil (James, M.), –, Johnson, Albert, Johnson, Erica, –, Johnson, Linton Kwesi, –, –, –, – dub poetry and, , , – New Cross Massacre and, , – Joseph, Anthony, –, –, Julien, Isaac,
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Kaersenhout, Patricia, – kala pani (dark waters), –, – Kellough, Kaie, , – Kempadoo, Kamala, , Kempadoo, Oonya, –, , –, Kincaid, Jamaica, , , –, –, , awards for, popularity of, –, – At the Bottom of the River, Brontë, C., and, – eco-poetics of, – fantastical, speculative, and, , – Among Flowers, , –, – life writing of, –, Lucy, – My Brother, – nonfiction of, –, , – on private and public, –, See Now Then, –, self-making and, – A Small Place, –, –, , , A Kind of Antigone (Une Manière d’Antigone) (Chamoiseau), – Kingston, Jamaica, , –, – Kitch (Joseph), –, – Knowles, Ric, Konsett, Delia C., Kreyol, –, Kristeva, Julia, – Kubrick, Stanley, La Rose, John, –, , – Laferrière, Dany, –, –, Lamming, George, , –, , – Land of Love and Drowning (Yanique), –, – language belonging and, Canadian writers on, – inclusivity and, – Rastafarian, , , The Last War (Menéndez), –, –, –, Laughlin, Nicholas, –, , – A Leaf in His Ear (Das), , Lee-Loy, Anne-Marie, A Legend of the Future (Rojas), leisure, , , Leonin, Mia, Levy, Andrea, – The Long Song, –, , –, – Small Island, , , –, – Lex Talionis (Garcia, R. S. A.), – life writing, –, , – of Brand, –
Index of Chin, –, , of Cliff, –, – of Danticat, –, – family in, , , –, – of Goodison, – The History of Mary Prince, , –, , – of Kincaid, –, – of Lorde, –, – of Manley, R., – of Marshall, – Philip and, –, – public, private, and, –, , – of Rhys, –, – of Silvera, – on writing, – Limbo (Figueroa), –, –, Linnaeus, Carolus, , – gender and taxonomy of, –, – Kincaid on, – Lionheart Gal (Sistren and Ford-Smith), – literary debates, , –, , literary discourse, Caribbean, , literary public, Caribbean, literary studies Caribbean Americans in US, –, – future of Caribbean, –, past and, –, – present and, –, literature, as term, little magazines, , –, – Caribbean British, – women in, – The Long Song (Levy), –, , –, – A Long Way from Home (Plummer), Looking for Livingstone (Philip), Lord, Karen, , –, , –, , –, – Lord Kitchener, –, –, Lorde, Audre, , – The Cancer Journals, –, in Caribbean feminism, –, , –, , , –, –, –, –, Sister Outsider, , , –, Zami, , – The Loss of El Dorado (Naipaul, V. S.), The Lost Child (Phillips), , Louisiana (Brodber), – Lovelace, Earl, –, –, –, – The Dragon Can’t Dance, –, –, – Is Just a Movie, – The Schoolmaster, – Loving Che (Menéndez), –, – Lowe, Hannah, –
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Lucien, Vladimir, , , , Lucy (Kincaid), – The Lyrical Contortionist (Cherry Natural), magic realism, – Maha Sabha, , Makward, Christiane, – Man Better Man (Hill), –, Man Booker Prize, –, , , , –, mandiela, ahdri zhina, , , Une Manière d’Antigone (A Kind of Antigone) (Chamoiseau), – Manley, Michael, , , , Manley, Rachel, –, , – Man’s episteme, –, –, A Map to the Door of No Return (Brand), – Maple Leaf Rag (Kellough), – Marley, Bob, –, –, –, , –, Marley, Damien, Marshall, Paule, , –, , –, – Brown Girl, Brownstones, –, –, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, – Praisesong for the Widow, Triangular Road, – Marson, Una, , , , Caribbean Voices and, , – Pocomania, – Martinique, –, The Marvellous Equations of The Dread (Douglas), – mas, –, masculinity. See gender Masking and Power (Aching), Matura, Mustapha, , ‘Maybe I Could Love a Man’ (Antrobus), McCallum, Shara, McCauley, Diana, – McKenzie, Earl, – McKittrick, Katherine, –, – McWatt, Tessa, –, –, – Meeks, Brian, – Melville, Edwina, – memory, –, dub and, – gender and, , , – revolution in cultural, Men at Risk (Miller, E.), Mendes, Alfred, – Mendieta, Ana, Menéndez, Ana, –, –, –, –, Merchant of Feathers (Shirley ), – mermaid,
Index
The Messenger (Montero), – meta-dub, – Miami Book Fair, The Midnight Robber (Hopkinson), –, , , Mighty Sparrow, – migrancy, –, – Barry and, , – Bishop and, –, –, – Brand on, – Kincaid on, – Menéndez on, –, Pineau on, – Miller, Errol, Miller, Kei, –, –, , , Augustown, –, , The Cartographer Maps a Way to Zion, – on dub poetry, –, –, Lucien debate with, , , prizes won by, –, , misogyny, , – Mittelholzer, Edgar, –, – Mohammed, Patricia, –, – Moi, Tituba sorcière. . .Noire de Salem (Condé), , –, – Moko (digital publication), Montero, Mayra, –, – Mootoo, Shani, , Cereus Blooms at Night, , –, Moving forward Sideways Like A Crab, , –, – Mordecai, Pamela, Morgan, Paula, Morne Câpresse (Pineau), – Morris, Mervyn, , – Morrison, Toni, Moving Forward Sideways Like A Crab (Mootoo), , –, – La mucama de Omicunlé (Tentacle) (Indiana), , – multiculturalism, Canadian, , –, , , –, – Mutabaruka, , –, My Bones and My Flute (Mittelholzer), –, My Brother (Kincaid), – My Father, Sun-Sun Johnson (Palmer, C. E.), – My Garden (Book) (Kincaid), – Myal (Brodber), –, , Naipaul, Shiva, –, – Naipaul, V. S., , –, , – Guerrillas, , nonfiction of, –, –
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on tourism, –, Naniki (online project), –, nationalism. See identity, national Natural Mysticism (Dawes), – Nehru, Meesha, Neo-Baroque, – neocolonialism, , –, New Cross Massacre, , – The New Moon’s Arms (Hopkinson), New World, Old Ways (Lord), – Nichols, Grace, , – Night of the Indigo (Holgate), No Telephone to Heaven (Cliff ), – intertextuality of, , , –, queer sexuality in, –, –, Nobel Prize for Naipaul, V. S., , for Walcott, D., –, , –, , , Noises in the Blood (Cooper, C.), – The No-Maddz, – nonfiction, Caribbean, , –, –. See also life writing of Brand, – Brodber and, –, – of Browne, K. A., –, –, – of Cliff, –, – of Danticat, –, – gender and, , , – heritage writing, social histories, – of Kincaid, –, , – of Manley, R., –, , – of Naipaul, V. S., –, – ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation’ (Wynter), , , , – Novel Niche (website), Nuestra señora de la noche (Our Lady of the Night) (Santos-Febres), , – Nunez, Elizabeth, –, , – O’Callaghan, Evelyn, , , – OCM Bocas Prize. See Bocas Lit Fest octopus, – Ofrendas del Sur (performance), – Omeros (Walcott, D.), , –, – Omotoso, Kole, –, –, ‘One of Our Sons Is Missing’ (Sealy), oral cultures, , , , – Othello (Shakespeare), The Other Side of Paradise (Chin), –, , Our Caribbean (Glave), –, –, –, –, , – Our Lady of the Night (Nuestra señora de la noche) (Santos-Febres), , –
Index Out of the Kumbla (Davies and Savory-Fido), – Outar, Lisa, – Over Our Way (Pollard and D’Costa), Los Palacios distantes (Distant Palaces) (Estévez), – Palmer, Annie, , , – Palmer, C. Everald, – Pan-Africanism, , –, – Pantomime (Walcott, D.), –, , paradise, , – Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, –, –, , – past, Caribbean literary, –, accessibility, preservation of, – recovering, – women writers, restoring, – patois, French, patois, Jamaican, , Patreon, –, Patterson, Ebony, Paul, Annie, –, , , –, – Péan, Stanley, –, Peepal Tree Press, –, , , – People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG). See Grenada Perfected Fables Now (Rohlehr), performance, Caribbean, –, anitafrika, –, –, , –, –, – canonical works adapted in, –, –, – carnival culture and, , – Chin, –, , –, – Hill on, , –, –, – independent Caribbean identity in, –, – national identity and, –, – queer, –, , –, –, , –, –, – syncretism of, –, –, Persaud, Lakshmi, – personal, –, , –, Philip, M. NourbeSe, , – A Genealogy of Resistance, – Harriet’s Daughter, Looking for Livingstone, She Tries her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, Zong!, –, –, –, , – Phillips, Caryl, – Cambridge, –, – The European Tribe, –, – The Lost Child, ,
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Philp, Geoffrey, , photography, – Picasso, I Want My Face Back (Nichols), picong, , Pineau, Gisèle, –, –, – Pirbhai, Mariam, – A Planet for Rent (Yoss), – plantation, , , –, , – eco-poetics and, –, – after emancipation, labor on, , in Jamaican literature, urban and, –, – James, M., on, –, –, – machine of, –, plot conflict with, , , , , – tourism and, –, , Wynter on, , , , – Plante, David, – The Pleasures of Exile (Lamming), , –, plot (agricultural system), , , , , , – Plummer, Janet, Pocomania (Marson), – podcasts, poetics, Caribbean British, –, –, –, , of carnival culture, of childhood, –, –, , – of popular culture, visual culture and, , –, –, –, – Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, – political, life writing on, – political literacies, Pollard, Velma, –, – Ponte, Antonio José, – popular culture, , , , –, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, – postcolony, – post-plantation, –, – Pouchet Paquet, Sandra, – Powell, Patricia, –, , – Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall), PREE (digital publication), present, Caribbean literary, –, PRG. See Grenada Prince, Mary, , –, , – Pringle, Margaret, , – Pringle, Thomas, , – private, public and, –, , – prizes, –, – Canadian, –, Caribbean, –, , , –, –, –, –, –
Index
prizes (cont.) colonialism and, – festivals and, James, M., and, –, , , –, –, Man Booker, –, , , , –, Nobel, –, , –, , , , OCM Bocas Prize, –, , –, , , – as promotional, , –, – UK, –, , , , –, –, US, , – Prospero’s Daughter (Nunez), , – Puar, Jasbir, public Caribbean literary, intimate, –, , private and, –, , – publishing, , , – Canadian, – Caribbean British and, –, –, – commodification and, –, digital, , , –, – of dub poetry, , , – little magazines, , –, –, – small, –, –, –, – US, – Puerto Rico, , – Santiago on, –, , –, , – mass demonstrations in, – Queenie (Carty-Williams), queer sexuality, –, –, , . See also homophobia; sexuality in Canada, –, –, categorial imperative critiqued by, – Cliff on, –, –, –, –, creolization of, , – in Cuba, –, – diaspora and, –, – erotics of, –, , –, –, – Glave on, , –, –, , , –, – HIV/AIDS and, –, –, – in life writing, –, Lorde on, , , –, –, –, –, Man’s episteme and, –, –, in nonfiction, –, in performance, –, , –, –, , –, –, – Powell on, , –
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revolution and, – Saint on, –, – Sarduy on, , , – transgender, , –, –, –, , –, –, – queering in dub poetry, – in eco-poetics, of indifference, , – of masculinity, racisms in Canada, , –, , – Caribbean British and, , –, –, – Radical Caribbean (Meeks), – Ramayana, – Ramchand, Kenneth, , – Ramlochan, Shivanee, –, , – Rampaul, Giselle, Rankine, Claudia, – Rastafarian language, , , Rastafarianism, , , –, – readers, The Red Thread Cycle (art project), – Reddock, Rhoda, –, Redemption in Indigo (Lord), reggae aesthetics, –, , –, . See also dancehall dancehall, –, dub in, – of Marley, B., –, – rehearsal, , –, –, Reid, Victor Stafford, – The Repeating Island (Benítez-Rojo), – The Restless (Dambury), – revolution, Black Power, in Trinidad, , – Canadian Yonge Street Riot, , Caribbean literature as, –, , – Cuban, , –, – gender and subject of, Grenadian, , – in Guyana, cultural and political, , – Haitian, –, in Jamaica, Rodney Riots, , – Rastafarianism and, –, – UK uprisings, , , – Rhone, Trevor, –, – Rhys, Jean, –, , , , –, in Caribbean canon, , intertextual use of, , , – life writing of, –, – Smile Please, – Voyage in the Dark, –
Index Wide Sargasso Sea, , , , , , , –, – Riggio, Milla, Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), –, –, Rochester, Natalie, Rodney, Walter, –, – Rodney Riots, , – Roffey, Monique, Archipelago, – The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, , –, , Rohlehr, Gordon, –, , –, –, Rojas, Agustín de, Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), – Rosario, Nelly, – Ross, Jacob, – Rushdie, Salman, Saint, Assotto, –, – St Martin, – Salkey, Andrew, –, , –, , –, – Georgetown Journal, – Havana Journal, – Jamaica, – Santiago, Esmeralda, –, , –, , – Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, – Santos-Febres, Mayra, –, –, , , , – Nuestra señora de la noche, , – Sirena Selena, – visual art collaboration of, – Sarduy, Severo, , , , – Sartre, Jean-Paul, Savacou (magazine), , , Savory, Elaine (also Elaine Savory-Fido), , , – The Schoolmaster (Lovelace), – Schwarz-Bart, Simone, , –, –, – Caribbean feminism and, –, Ton beau capitaine, – science fiction, , –, Buckell, , –, , , – Cuban, – Hopkinson, , –, , , –, , , –, , Lord, , –, , –, , –, – Scott, David, , , –, Scott, Dennis, – Scott, Lawrence, Sealy, Godfrey, See Now Then (Kincaid), –,
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self-making of Brand, – of Chin, – of Cliff, – Kincaid and, – Selvon, Samuel, –, Semaj-Hall, Isis, – Senegal, , –, – Senior, Olive, –, children and, , –, eco-poetics of, –, , – Summer Lightning, –, on tourism, , , , sex trade, Bhattacharya on, – in Cuba, Dennis-Benn on, – Díaz on, – Ferré, Santos-Febres on, –, –, Kempadoo, O., on, –, Laferrière on, – tourism and, , –, sexual abuse, –, , –, –, – sexual violence, tourism and, sexuality in Cuba, –, – in dancehall, –, – Shakespeare, William, –, adaptations of, –, –, – Othello, Romeo and Juliet, – The Tempest, –, , –, –, – Shame on Me (McWatt), –, – The Shape of that Hurt (Rohlehr), She Tries her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Philip), Sheller, Mimi, Shepherd, Catherine, –, – Shepherd, Keith, –, Shepherd, Sheldon, –, Shirley, Tanya, – Silvera, Makeda, –, – Sirena Selena (Santos-Febres), – Sister Outsider (Lorde), , , –, Sister Vision Press, –, Sistren Theatre Collective, –, , – slavery, , , , –, –. See also female planter, white; plantation Barry on, – in Children’s Literature, , emancipation from, labor after, , The History of Mary Prince, , –, , – James, M., on, –, –, –
Index
slavery (cont.) life writing and, –, –, –, – Philip on, –, –, –, , – in speculative fiction, –, – tourism and, , The Sly Company of People Who Care (Bhattacharya), – Small Axe (journal), , A Small Gathering of Bones (Powell), – Small Island (Levy), , , –, – A Small Place (Kincaid), , – Manley, R., compared with, tourism in, –, , , Smartt, Dorothea, – Smile Orange (Rhone), , –, Smile Please (Rhys), – Smith, Michael, – Smith, Zadie, , , –, Smorkaloff, Pamela Maria, Snapshots from Istanbul (Bishop), –, –, – social media, –, –, –, . See also digital yard blogosphere and, –, – Bocas Lit Fest on, , Caribbean British Instagram poetry, , , Facebook conversations, –, – hashtags, – microblogging on, –, Ramlochan on, – YouTube, Something to Declare (Alvarez), Song for Simone (Ross), – Song of the Water Saints (Rosario), – Sophocles, – soucouyant, –, – soundtracks, literary, – The Spaces between Words (digital archive), speculative fiction, , –. See also science fiction of Alexis, –, alien in, – anthologies of, –, , Brodber and, –, – Buckell, , –, , , – in Canada, – Cuban, –, – folklore and, –, – francophone Caribbean, –, – gothic and, – Hopkinson, , –, , , –, , , –, , Lord, , –, , –, , –, –
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magic realism and, – science fiction and, –, , – slavery in, –, – US Caribbean, –, , – vampire in, –, – Young Adult Fiction and, , , , zombie in, –, – Spiralism, – spoken word, , , , ‘Springblade’ (Brathwaite), –, ‘Spurn Babylon’ (Buckell), The Star-Apple Kingdom (Walcott, D.), – stereotypes Caribbean British and, –, plantation and, Strickland, Susana, , –, , – structural adjustment, –, , – Summer Lightning (Senior), –, Surge (Bernard), – Suriname, The Surveilled Party (La fiesta vigilada) (Ponte), – Susumba’s Book Bag (digital publication), Swanzy, Henry, , – The Swinging Bridge (Espinet), – sx salon (digital platform), , , , . See also Small Axe syncretism, –, –, Taylor, Frank Fonda, , Teatro Escambray. See Grupo Teatro Escambray The Tempest (Shakespeare), –, , –, –, – Une Tempête (Césaire), –, –, – The Ten Days Executive (Bharath), – Tentacle (La mucama de Omicunlé) (Indiana), , – testimonial, –, , – testimonio genre, Thirsty (Brand), Thompson, Krista, , – Tide Running (Kempadoo, O.), – Ti-Jean and His Brothers (Walcott, D.), – Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha, –, –, To Hell with Paradise (Taylor), , To Us, All Flowers Are Roses (Goodison), – Ton beau capitaine (Your Handsome Captain) (Schwarz-Bart), – tongues of the ocean (digital publication), – tourism, environmental impact of, –, in Jamaica, –, –, Kempadoo, O., on, – Kincaid on, –, , –, ,
Index Naipaul, V. S., on, –, paradise and, , – plantation and, –, , queer sexuality and, – Rhone on, –, Senior on, , , , sex trade and, , –, structural adjustment and, – Walcott, D., and, –, , , Town (journal), – transgender, –, –, – Cliff on, –, – Sarduy and, , , – transgression, Canadian literature and, , – transitions cultural and political, – literary and generic, transnationalism, , – Barry and, – Bishop and, –, –, – Brand on, – Caribbean British literature and, –, –, – Menéndez and, –, –, Phillips on, – Pineau on, – Trench Town Rock (Brathwaite), – trespass. See transgression, Canadian literature and Triangular Road (Marshall), – Trinidad and Tobago, , , –. See also calypso Arthur on, –, –, , Black Power Revolution in, , – Bocas Lit Fest in, , , , –, –, , calypso and, , –, carnival culture in, –, –, , , –, –, – creolization in, –, – OCM Bocas Prize of, –, , –, , , – Tobago, Walcott, D., on, – Two Cents Movement in, , , The Trinidad Carnival (Hill), , – Tropical Night (art series), – Trujillo, Rafael, , , , – Tú, la oscuridad (In the Palm of Darkness) (Montero), – Tubman, Harriet, Turner, J. M. W., – twentieth century, turn of, – twenty-first century Caribbean literary studies in, – eco-poetics emerging in, –
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Two Cents Movement, , , (film), UK. See United Kingdom un/belonging. See belonging United Kingdom (UK), –, – CAM, , , –, –, , – New Cross Massacre, , – prizes in, –, , , , –, –, uprisings in, , , – Windrush, , –, –, –, , , –, United States (US), , African Americans, –, –, –, Cuba and, , – diaspora in, –, –, –, – Jamaica and, –, – neocolonialism of, , – prizes in, , – urban, , Havana, –, in Jamaica, – mass movements in, – plantation and, –, – Pointe-à-Pitre, Dambury on, – Port-au-Prince, Victor on, – Santo Domingo, Indiana on, – US. See United States Valdés, Zoé, vampire, –, – Verbal Riddim (Habekost), Victor, Gary, – The View from Belmont (Arthur), –, –, , violence, –, – in Jamaica, – Pointe-à-Pitre, Dambury on, – Port-au-Prince, Victor on, – Santo Domingo, Indiana on, – tourism and, , , Virgin Islands, US, , , – visual art, –, , on book covers, – CAM and collaborations with, – francophone Caribbean literature and, , – hispanophone literature and, , – literature as source for, – Spiralism, – Walcott, D., and, , – visual culture, –, – Caribbean poetics and, , –, –, –, –
Index
visual culture (cont.) interdisciplinary Caribbean critical studies in, – visual representation of Caribbean, – Caribbean journals on, Caribbean women writers on, – visuality of Brathwaite, , , –, – colonialism and, ekphrasis, – of Philip, – Vodou, , , –, Voyage in the Dark (Rhys), – Walcott, Derek, , , –, – Defoe and, –, Dream on Monkey Mountain, – intertextual use of, –, –, Nobel lecture of, –, , –, Omeros, , –, – Pantomime, –, , The Star-Apple Kingdom, – syncretism and, – Ti-Jean and His Brothers, – tourism and, –, , , visual art and, , – Walcott, Rinaldo, –, Walmsey, Anne, – Warner-Vieyra, Myriam, –, – The Water between Us (McCallum), Wekker, Gloria, West Side Story (musical and film), – Weston, Mark Jason, – ‘Whales’ (Brown, S.), – ‘What the Twilight Says’ (Walcott, D.), – Wheatle, Alex, –, – When I was Puerto Rican (Santiago), – ‘When Women Love Men’ (‘Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres’) (Ferré), , – Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root (Hopkinson), , white Creole, , , , – The White Witch of Rosehall (de Lisser), –, –, , – The White Woman on the Green Bicycle (Roffey), , –, , Whitlock, Gillian, Who Slashed Célanire’s Throat? (Célanire coucoupé) (Condé), –, , – Wicked Weeds (Cabiya),
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Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys) Brathwaite and, , , intertextual use of, , , – Jane Eyre in, , , , , –, – Wikipedia, – Williams, Aubrey, –, Williams, N. D., – Wilson, Betty, Windrush, –, generation of, , –, –, , , – scandal of, , Woman Version (O’Callaghan), – Women Do This Every Day (Allen, L.), , , women’s writing. See gender Woolf, Virginia, The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon), Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write (Bishop), – writing, life writing on, – Wuthering Heights (Brontë, E.), , , , – Wynter, Sylvia, , , –, , – on plantation, plot and, , , , – urban novel and, – Yáñez, Mirta, – Yanique, Tiphanie, , –, – yard, , –, – Yonge Street Riot, , Yoss, – young, d’bi. See anitafrika, d’bi.young Young, John, – Young Adult Fiction, –, – education-driven model of Caribbean, – Lovelace, – Reid, – speculative fiction, science fiction, and, , , , women’s writing and, – The Young Warriors (Reid), Your Handsome Captain (Ton beau capitaine) (Schwarz-Bart), – Zami (Lorde), , – Zephaniah, Benjamin, –, – zombie, –, – Zong! (Philip), –, –, –, , –