Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories [1 ed.] 9781781386040, 9781781381182

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines 16

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines Series Editors Graham Huggan, University of Leeds Andrew Thompson, University of Exeter Postcolonialism across the Disciplines showcases alternative directions for postcolonial studies. It is in part an attempt to counteract the dominance in colonial and postcolonial studies of one particular discipline – English literary/ cultural studies – and to make the case for a combination of disciplinary knowledges as the basis for contemporary postcolonial critique. Edited by leading scholars, the series aims to be a seminal contribution to the field, spanning the traditional range of disciplines represented in postcolonial studies but also those less acknowledged. It will also embrace new critical paradigms and examine the relationship between the transnational/cultural, the global and the postcolonial.

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Lucy Evans

Liverpool University Press

First published 2014 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2014 Lucy Evans The right of Lucy Evans to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-78138-118-2 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78962-345-1

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories

Typeset in Amerigo by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

For Ellie

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

35 1 Rural Communities Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace and the short story form 35 Village life in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories 47 From country to city in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories 66 85 2 Urban Communities Downtown worlds 90 Uptown worlds 101 Writing Kingston in Kwame Dawes’ A Place to Hide and Other Stories and Alecia McKenzie’s Satellite City and Other Stories 113 3 National Communities Fugal voices in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom The journey upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement

121 126

4 Global Communities The diasporic family in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon Mobile readerships in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales

156

141

160 180 vii

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories

Conclusion 201 Appendices I: ‘Saint Jerome in his Study’ II: At the Full and Change of the Moon family tree III: My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales front cover image

209 210 211

Bibliography 212 Index 225

viii

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

T

his book could not have been written without the help of a number of people. First of all, I am extremely grateful to John McLeod for his input into the shaping of the PhD project where this book began. John’s influence has been crucial to the development of my skills as a literary critic and has transformed my approach to research. I have benefited greatly from his support over the last few years. I would also like to thank Stuart Murray and Gemma Robinson for their questions and comments as examiners, which helped with the transition from PhD to monograph, and Martin Halliwell for his advice on the planning of the new project. I owe much both to my fellow postgraduates in the School of English at the University of Leeds and, more recently, to my colleagues in the School of English at the University of Leicester. Thanks are due to Caroline Herbert, Emma Smith, Anthony Carrigan, Clare Barker, Catherine Bates, Agnes Woolley, Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Louisa Hodgson, Corinne Fowler, Holly Furneaux and Mandala White for reading drafts at various stages. Additionally, I wish to thank Jeremy Poynting and Hannah Bannister at Peepal Tree Press for introducing me to Caribbean literature, and Shirley Chew for her advice and encouragement during the early stages of this project. I am grateful to Mark McWatt and Lawrence Scott for taking the time to talk to me about their writing, and to Kwame Dawes and Alecia McKenzie for providing information about their experiences of Kingston, used in Chapter Two. I am also obliged to the students who participated in my seminar series on the Caribbean short story as part of the MA in Modern Literature at the University of Leicester for stimulating discussions on some of the texts explored in this book. I am grateful to the School of English at the University of Leeds for granting me a Postgraduate Research Scholarship, to the University of Leeds Brotherton Trust for an award which funded a research trip to Trinidad and Barbados in July 2007, and to the British Academy for a Small Research Grant which funded ix

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories a research trip to Jamaica in April 2012. Spending time in Kingston helped me to develop my argument in Chapter Two, and enabled productive exchanges with academics at the University of the West Indies, Mona. I would like to thank Alison Welsby and her colleagues at Liverpool University Press, and Sue Barnes and her colleagues at Carnegie Publishing, for their support and efficiency. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers of the book proposal and the manuscript for their very useful comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to my parents, John and Toni Evans, for their support (in particular during the final stages of completing this book), to Chee Kay Cheung for his love, patience and belief in me, and to my daughter Ellie, whose early arrival energised the final revisions. Earlier versions of parts of Chapter Four have been published in the following places: ‘Tidal Poetics in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon’, Caribbean Quarterly, 55:3 (2009), 1–19; ‘Local and Global Reading Communities in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales’, in Postcolonial Audiences: Readers, Viewers and Reception, ed. By Bethan Benwell, James Procter and Gemma Robinson (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 140–153. I would like to thank the editors and publishers for permission to reproduce some of this material. Thanks also to Christopher Cozier for allowing me to use images from his Tropical Night sequence on the cover of this book, to Grove Atlantic for permission to include the cover image of Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales and the family tree in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon, and to the UK National Gallery Online Picture Library for permission to include Antonello da Messina’s ‘Saint Jerome in his Study’.

x

Introduction Introduction

K

enneth Ramchand begins his essay ‘The West Indian Short Story’ (1997) with the provocative statement: ‘There are no West Indian novelists, only short story writers in disguise; no West Indian novels, only fabrications taking their shape and structure from the transfigurated short stories they contain’.1 While I would not go so far as to claim, as Ramchand does, that all Caribbean fiction writers are short story writers, this book nevertheless presents the phenomenon of interconnected stories as a significant feature of contemporary Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. The short story played a crucial role in the emergence of an Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition. In the first half of the twentieth century, local newspapers and small magazines provided an outlet for the publication of short fiction and poetry. In a region which lacked the facilities and distribution channels necessary for the publication of longer works, the short story flourished, providing an initial platform for some of the Caribbean’s best-known literary writers. Building on Ramchand’s statement, which relates to novels of the 1950s and 60s, this book argues for the continuing prevalence of the short story form within late twentieth and early twenty-first century Anglophone Caribbean writing, despite the fact that the short story’s mode and context of publication have changed. Having made their name and attracted the attention of publishers outside the Caribbean region, writers such as Olive Senior and Alecia McKenzie have chosen to produce short story collections rather than writing novels.2 Others, 1 Kenneth Ramchand, ‘The West Indian Short Story’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 1:1 (1997), 21–30 (p. 21). 2 Olive Senior has published three short story collections: Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986), Arrival of the Snake Woman and Other Stories (1989) and Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories (1995). Alecia McKenzie has published two short story collections: Satellite City and Other Stories (1992) and Stories from Yard (2005).

1

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories such as Lawrence Scott and Dionne Brand, have produced texts made up of interconnected stories, marketed as novels. The tendency since the 1980s for short stories to be published within single-author collections or cycles rather than as stand-alone items invites us to look beyond the narrative structure of individual stories and pay attention to resonances between stories, whether these are overt or implicit, deliberate or accidental. In his Tropical Night sequence, displayed as part of the Tate Liverpool Afro Modern exhibition in 2010, 3 Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier translates the form of interconnected stories into a series of separate images, each with its own individual title, positioned above, below and alongside each other, their proximity inviting viewers to make connections between them. The form of interconnected stories, adapted into visual art, offers Cozier a means of conveying his childhood perceptions of a 1960s post-independence Trinidad alongside his adult perceptions of a twenty-first century globalised Trinidad without resolving the tensions between the two. He comments in an interview that ‘in the Caribbean I was born into a world of differences’, where ‘[e]very other person was a complex, diverse part of a whole that we called our community’.4 These reflections suggest that the form of interconnected images also allows him to paint himself into a socially and ethnically diverse community without erasing the differences between himself and those surrounding him. Cozier’s sequence illustrates the suitability of interconnected stories as a means of engaging creatively with the Caribbean region, and – more specifically – as a means of articulating community. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories explores representations of community in eight short story collections and cycles published by Anglophone Caribbean writers between 1986 and 2005. Bearing in mind Cozier’s vision of community as connections across difference, it highlights the relationship between the structural dynamics of interconnected stories and the sociocultural dynamics of Caribbean communities. My study contends that the short story collection, cycle and sequence, literary forms regarded by genre theorists as necessarily concerned with representations of community, are particularly appropriate and enabling as a vehicle through which to conceptualise Caribbean communities. Its core argument is that the form of interconnected stories is a crucial part of these writers’ imagining of communities which may be fractured, plural and fraught with tensions, but which nevertheless hold together.

McKenzie’s recent novel Sweetheart (2011) is episodic and multiply narrated, and as such its narrative structure resembles the earlier short story collections. 3 See book cover. 4 Annie Paul, ‘Christopher Cozier’, Bomb, 82 (Winter 2003) [accessed 23 December 2010].

2

Introduction Caribbean communities: historical and cultural background This book begins with the premise that the idea of community is a major concern of Caribbean writers and cultural practitioners, and is at the same time a concept full of complications. Writing in 2004, Shalini Puri observes that ‘[t]he Caribbean’s cultural, economic, and geopolitical coordinates make it both urgent and difficult to imagine Caribbean community identity’. She identifies as obstacles the fragility of the region’s nation-states, neocolonial dependency, mass migration, environmental damage, global tourism and the unequal distribution of wealth.5 Celia Britton similarly emphasises the concurrent urgency and difficulty of this task in the context of Francophone Caribbean societies. Britton first looks back to the colonial era, considering how the ‘Caribbean’s history of transportation, slavery and migration has created a situation in which the question of community becomes particularly urgent’ and yet at the same time ‘generates a deep-seated anxiety’.6 She then points out that the ‘more recent massive growth of tourism’ in Martinique and Guadeloupe, added to the ‘establishment of large communities of Antilleans in Metropolitan France’, has rendered the ‘question of defining “the French Caribbean community” far more problematic’.7 The difficulties associated with the articulation of community in Caribbean societies are partly due to their demographics. Due to the region’s history of colonialism, slavery and indenture, Caribbean nations are composed of various social and ethnic groups. In Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana, the main focus of this study, differing historical conditions have led to diverging ethnic configurations. Trinidad and Tobago consists of two islands of 1,978 square miles which became a single British colony in 1899, and gained its independence from Britain in 1962.8 According to the 2000 census, Trinidad had a population of 1.26 million, where 40% were of African descent, 37.5% of East Indian descent, 20.5% of mixed heritage, 0.63% Caucasian, 0.34% of Chinese descent, and 0.1% of Syrian and Lebanese descent.9 At 4,000 square miles, the island of Jamaica is larger than Trinidad and Tobago.10 It became a British colony in 1655, acquired self-government under crown supervision in

5 Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 12. 6 Celia Britton, The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 1. 7 Ibid., pp. 1, 2. 8 Kirk Meighoo, Politics in a Half Made Society: Trinidad and Tobago 1925–2001 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2003), p. xxi. 9 CARICOM National Census Report, Trinidad and Tobago (Georgetown, Guyana: the CARICOM Secretariat, 2009), p. 3 [accessed 6 August 2013]. 10 Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English (London and New York: Longman, 1999), p. 46.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories 1944, and gained its independence from Britain in 1962.11 According to the 2001 census, Jamaica had a population of 2.61 million, where 91.61% were of African descent, 0.89% of East Indian descent, 6.21% of mixed heritage, 0.20% of Chinese descent and 0.18% Caucasian.12 Unlike Trinidad, then, where the ethnic majority is shared between those of African and East Indian descent, Jamaica’s population is predominantly of African descent, and a lower proportion of people are of mixed heritage. Jamaica’s population also contains a less complex combination of races and ethnicities than Trinidad’s. As a country located on the South American mainland rather than an island, Guyana differs from Jamaica and Trinidad in terms of its geography and landscape, and has generated a distinctive literary tradition in which the country’s vast interior is a dominant feature, as is explored in Chapter Three. At 83,000 square miles, Guyana is significantly larger than either Trinidad and Tobago or Jamaica, but its population is concentrated mainly in its narrow coastal strip.13 It became a British colony (British Guiana) in 1831 and gained its independence from Britain in 1966.14 The country’s ethnic composition in some ways resembles Trinidad’s, with some key differences. According to the 2002 census, Guyana had a population of 751,223,15 43.5% of which was of East Indian descent, 30.2% of African descent, 16.7% of mixed heritage, 9.2% of Amerindian descent, 0.20% of Portuguese descent, 0.19% of Chinese descent and 0.06% Caucasian.16 As in Trinidad, then, the ethnic majority is shared between those of East Indian and African descent, but unlike Trinidad’s and Jamaica’s, Guyana’s population contains a significant proportion of Amerindians, an ethnic group whose presence in Guyana predates that of the European colonisers. The varying ethnic composition of Trinidad, Guyana and Jamaica is a result of their differing experiences of colonialism and the plantation economy. After the abolition of the British slave trade in 1808, the importation of Africans to Caribbean colonies declined.17 In the nineteenth century, following the emancipation of African slaves in the British Caribbean in 1834, East Indians were transported to all three colonies as part of the indenture system which provided labour for the sugar plantations, but the numbers emigrating to 11 Ibid., pp. 46, 54, 61. 12 CARICOM National Census Report 2001, Jamaica (Georgetown, Guyana: The CARICOM Secretariat, 2009), pp. 14, 35 [accessed 6 August 2013]. 13 Brackette F. Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 33. 14 Ibid., p. 34. 15 CARICOM National Census Report 2002, Guyana (Georgetown, Guyana: The CARICOM Secretariat, 2009), p. 16 [accessed 6 August 2013]. 16 Ibid., p. 25. 17 Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism, 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 112.

4

Introduction British Guiana and Trinidad far exceeded those emigrating to Jamaica.18 This led to a much lower proportion of people of East Indian descent in Jamaica as compared to Guyana and Trinidad, and this in turn impacted on community dynamics in each society and on their political history in the build-up to and following independence. In British Guiana in the 1960s, the People’s Progressive Party split into two competing parties, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) led by Forbes Burnham and the People’s National Congress (PNC) led by Cheddi Jagan. These parties became associated with Guyana’s largest ethnic groups, the African and East Indian communities respectively, generating racial polarisation and racially motivated violence which continued into the post-independence period.19 Similarly, in Trinidad, Eric Williams’ dominant People’s National Movement (PNM), in power both preceding and following independence, was identified with the interests of African Trinidadians despite its public image as a ‘multiethnic party’.20 Equally, the opposing United National Congress (UNC) is perceived as representing the interests of East Indian Trinidadians.21 Puri observes that in Trinidad, ‘most political discourses have consistently posed African and Indian economic advancement in mutually exclusive terms’.22 In Jamaica, tensions between social and ethnic groups have taken a different form; the two dominant political parties, the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), although ideologically opposed, are both associated with the predominantly brown middle classes, and perceived as being out of touch with the black majority whose political support they seek.23 As a result of these three Caribbean nations’ distinct but overlapping histories of colonialism, slavery and indenture, and ensuing divisions along the intersecting lines of race, class and ethnicity, the imagining of community 18 According to one source, 238,909 Indian migrants went to British Guiana under indenture between 1838 and 1918, while 143,939 went to Trinidad and 36,412 went to Jamaica within the same period. See G. W. Roberts and J. Byrne, ‘Summary Statistics on Indenture and Associated Migration Affecting the West Indies, 1834–1918’, Population Studies, 20:1 (1966), 125–34 (p. 127). 19 Williams, Stains on my Name, p. 35. 20 Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), p. 59. 21 Puri, Caribbean Postcolonial, p. 257. 22 Ibid., p. 172. 23 Don Robotham, ‘How Kingston was Wounded’, in Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, ed. by Jane Schneider and Ida Susser (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 111–28 (p. 117). Deborah Thomas similarly argues that the ‘creole nationalism’ which emerged after the 1938 labour rebellions and developed in the decades leading up to independence, which purported to bring Jamaicans of all backgrounds together, in fact obscured ‘the conflation of class with race’ and ‘knotted anticolonial mobilization to middle-class respectability’. See Deborah Thomas, Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 54–57.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories has never been a straightforward process. The complexity of these societies at once opens up multiple possibilities for communal identifications, and renders social cohesion difficult to achieve and sustain. If community is a problematic concept within Caribbean nation-states, the collapse of Federation (1958–62), which aimed to unite politically Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean, indicates how attempts to construct a Caribbean community extending across the region were complicated by political divisions and by the archipelago’s geographical fragmentation. Writing in 1964, C. L. R. James commented: A federation meant that the economic line of direction should no longer be from island to London, but from island to island. But that involved the break-up of the old colonial system. The West Indian politicians preferred the break-up of the Federation.24

James viewed the failure of Federation as part of colonialism’s legacy in the Anglophone Caribbean, and in a later study, Alvin O. Thompson makes a similar argument, regarding the ‘excessive political fragmentation of the region’ as a ‘far-reaching effect of European colonial rule’.25 Attempts to unite the Anglophone Caribbean politically, culminating in the short-lived Federation, coincided with efforts to construct an Anglophone Caribbean community in cultural terms. Ramchand comments that despite the breakdown of Federation, ‘the name [the West Indies] has remained to signal a reality stronger than any political institution’, and continues to exist in ‘cultural institutions’ such as the University of the West Indies, the West Indian cricket team and West Indian literature.26 In the decades leading up to the independence of Caribbean nations, many of the region’s writers, critics and cultural organisations were concerned with community building in a cultural sense, working to develop a regional consciousness. Many of the literary magazines which appeared in the first half of the twentieth century, such as The Beacon, Bim and Kyk-over-al, were ‘West Indian’ in outlook, despite being based on particular islands.27 Their circulation between as well as within the islands anticipated a reading public which exceeded national boundaries, initiating ‘an exchange of creative work and cultural information across the region that facilitated cross-fertilization of ideas and interests’.28 This process was strengthened in later decades by the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), 24 C. L. R. James, ‘Parties, Politics and Economies in the Caribbean’ [1964], in Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), pp. 151–56 (p. 155). 25 Alvin O. Thompson, The Haunting Past; Politics, Economics and Race in Caribbean Life (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1997), p. 61. 26 Kenneth Ramchand, ‘West Indian Literary History: Literariness, Orality, and Periodization’, Callaloo, 34 (Winter, 1988), 95–100 (p. 95). 27 Reinhard W. Sander, ‘The Thirties and Forties’, in West Indian Literature, ed. by Bruce King, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 38–49 (p. 40). 28 Rhonda Cobham, ‘The Background’, in West Indian Literature, ed. by Bruce King, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 11–26 (p. 18).

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Introduction active in the 1960s and 70s, and described by Anne Walmsley as ‘the first genuinely Caribbean-wide cultural movement’,29 which for the first time brought together writers, artists and critics from diverse social, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, enabling them to make connections between their various cultural practices and work collaboratively towards the creation of a pan-Caribbean aesthetic. The ideal of a shared West Indian consciousness, envisaged by the editors of cultural organisations such as the region’s literary magazines and the Caribbean Voices programme, and embodied in cultural movements such as the CAM, gave way in the post-independence period to alternative configurations of community which emphasised the African heritage of many Caribbean people. Alison Donnell notes that the period immediately following the independence of Caribbean nations was characterised by an intensification of communal identifications along racial lines which coincided with the spread of the Black Power movement from the US. 30 Gordon Rohlehr describes how this increase in racial awareness led to a heightening of tensions between Trinidad’s ethnic groups. He reflects that since the mid-1960s, ‘[f]ar from achieving dialogue and communion among the oppressed, Caribbean societies have deepened the divisions of class and race’. 31 The discord described by Rohlehr is also addressed by Sam Selvon, who explains in a 1979 essay how the collapse of Federation in 1962 led to ‘constant disagreement’ between Caribbean people, 32 and the influence of Black Power ‘widened the gulf and emphasised the displacement of the Indian’. 33 Rohlehr’s and Selvon’s observations illustrate that while the Black Power movement may have been for some Caribbean people a cohesive force, generating opportunities for communal identifications, at the same time its effect was divisive, undermining the shared ‘cosmopolitan’ consciousness achieved in some parts of the region. 34 Through the twentieth century, then, community in the Caribbean has been conceptualised by writers, cultural 29 Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History (London and Port of Spain, Trinidad: New Beacon Books, 1992), p. 315. 30 Donnell comments that the mid-1960s to early 70s was a period ‘marked by political unrest and demonstrations of dissatisfaction with the direction of post-Independence governance in many of the islands’. She then goes on to identify as key events riots against the Jamaican government’s refusal to allow historian Walter Rodney back into the country in October 1968 and protests against the Trinidad government’s banning of Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael in the same year, observing how these generated a focus on ‘communal black consciousness’. See Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 28–29. 31 Gordon Rohlehr, ‘Articulating a Caribbean Aesthetic: The Revolution of Self-Perceptions’, in My Strangled City and Other Essays (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Longman, 1992), pp. 1–16 (p. 12). 32 Sam Selvon, ‘Three Into One Can’t Go’ (1979), in Foreday Morning: Selected Prose 1946–1986 (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 211–25 (p. 217). 33 Ibid., p. 218. 34 Ibid., p. 213.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories practitioners, politicians and activists in a variety of often conflicting ways. The question of what constitutes a Caribbean community has long been, and continues to be, open to debate. Unity in diversity models of community In 1960, George Lamming discussed the significance of the West Indian novel as ‘a way of investigating and portraying the inner experiences of the West Indian community’. 35 He later reflected on his own novel In the Castle of my Skin (1953) as an example of this: The book is crowded with names and people, and although each character is accorded a most vivid presence and force of personality, we are rarely concerned with the prolonged exploration of an individual consciousness. It is the collective human substance of the Village, you might say, which is the central character […] It is this method of narration, where community, and not person, is the central character, things are never so tidy as critics would like. There is often no discernible plot, no coherent line of events with a clear causal connection. 36

Here Lamming suggests that the form of his novel has been shaped by its content, and he makes the broader point that a thematic focus on community necessarily results in an episodic and non-linear narrative structure. Simon Gikandi questions Lamming’s assertion that there is no central ‘individual consciousness’ in his novel, and that it is instead structured around ‘the collective human substance of the Village’. He argues that ‘it is doubtful whether the character of the village is collective, given the class and racial divisions within it’. 37 Dismissing Lamming’s point, he goes on to assert ‘the centrality of notions of selfhood’ in the novel. 38 Lamming’s reading of his novel and Gikandi’s objection to it draw attention to the challenge facing Caribbean writers, critics and cultural theorists dealing with the question of community: how to reconcile differences along the lines of race and ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, language and cultural heritage. While Gikandi regards the class and racial divisions in the village as a problem which cannot be overcome, and thus rejects the concept of community in order to focus on selfhood, others have envisaged models of community which work with and through these differences. In his sociological study Contradictory Omens (1974), Kamau Brathwaite analyses creolisation in Caribbean societies. He describes how each ethnic group has had to adjust itself both to other 35 George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Pluto Press, 2005 [1960]), p. 37. 36 George Lamming, ‘In the Castle of My Skin: Thirty Years After’ [1983], quoted in Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English, pp. 34–35. 37 Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 74. 38 Ibid., p. 75.

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Introduction groups and to a new landscape, becoming part of a larger social system, and contributing to the formation of a ‘plural society’. 39 Brathwaite concludes his study with the phrase ‘The unity is submarine’,40 suggesting that beneath the region’s plurality of cultures and ethnicities lies the unifying experience of migration. Derek Walcott’s vision of Caribbean culture as a ‘shipwreck of fragments’ places a similar emphasis on the unification of disparate parts.41 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Édouard Glissant and Wilson Harris are equally concerned with the fragmented and plural character of Caribbean societies, but they approach the question of community differently to Brathwaite and Walcott. In various ways, they reject the concept of unity in diversity, developing instead more complex models of association across difference. Despite dissimilarities in the cultural background and methodology of these three writers (Benítez-Rojo is Cuban, Glissant is Martinican and Harris is Guyanese), the common features of their work invite a comparative reading. Caryl Phillips questions the tendency of critics to regard Harris as ‘unique’, ‘extraordinary’ and ‘enigmatic’. He proposes that in order to better understand his work and his achievement, readers might ‘look around the Caribbean world at “displaced” writers such as Glissant, Benítez-Rojo, and […] Fanon’, placing Harris for the first time ‘among a community’. Phillips recommends that we ‘begin the process of emphatically stitching Wilson Harris into this larger tradition’, arguing that in doing so, we might generate ‘a full recognition of the communal – regional – significance of his art’.42 Following Phillips, I position Harris alongside Glissant and Benítez-Rojo as part of a multilingual community of Caribbean literary writers and cultural theorists active in the post-independence period but resistant to the ‘vogue’ of Black Power.43 A number of critics have made links between their work.44 For example, J. Michael Dash argues that the ‘deterritorializing imperative’ of Glissant’s concept of creolisation is ‘shared by such theorists as Antonio Benítez-Rojo 39 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974), p. 11. 40 Ibid., p. 64. 41 Derek Walcott, ‘The Antilles’ (1992), in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 65–84 (p. 69). 42 Caryl Phillips, ‘Wilson Harris’, in Theatre of the Arts: Wilson Harris and the Caribbean, ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek and Bénédicte Ledent (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 43–44. 43 Selvon, ‘Three Into One Can’t Go’, p. 218. 44 Examples of critics dealing with the work of two out of the three writers are Barbara J. Webb, Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Édouard Glissant (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Eimer Page, ‘Historical Consciousness in the Writings of Wilson Harris and Édouard Glissant’, in Bridges Across Chasms: Towards a Transcultural Future in Caribbean Literature, ed. by Bénédicte Ledent (Liège: Liège Language and Literature, 2004), pp. 293–301; Keith Alan Sprouse, ‘Chaos and Rhizome: Introduction to a Caribbean Poetics’, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol. 3, ed. by A. James Arnold (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997), pp. 79–86.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories and Wilson Harris’.45 My own reading emphasises what Phillips calls the ‘regional’ significance of these writers; I suggest that rather than embracing a ‘deterritorializing imperative’, their work is culturally specific, and that in spite of – or even due to – its global resonance, it is firmly located within the Caribbean region. Community is one of several interrelated issues in their work, embedded within intersecting discussions of a distinctively Caribbean aesthetic and the specifics of place. Benítez-Rojo acknowledges that ‘it has been said many times that the Caribbean is the union of the diverse’, but he regards this way of thinking as too much of a ‘precise reduction’,46 offering in its place the concept of ‘discontinuous conjunction’.47 Whereas Brathwaite defines Caribbean creolisation as ‘a process not a product’,48 Benítez-Rojo proposes that ‘creolization is not merely a process (a word that implies forward movement) but a discontinuous series of recurrences, of happenings, whose sole law is change’.49 This version of creolisation as a state of continual flux does not, as Brathwaite’s version does, anticipate an end point of an effectively creolised society. Drawing on chaos theory, Benítez-Rojo sees Caribbean identities and cultural forms as products of the plantation – ‘the big bang of the Caribbean universe’ – whose ‘prolonged explosion has projected everything outward’. The resulting identities are decentred and incoherent, but are simultaneously drawn together in unpredictable ways; his model of Caribbean space is structured around this double movement of ‘the coming together and pulling apart of fragments’.50 Unlike Brathwaite’s model, which works towards a ‘creole synthesis’,51 for Benítez-Rojo Caribbean creolisation is not a synthesis but an ‘interplay of supersyncretic signifiers’ whose ‘centers’ are located outside the Caribbean region, and whose juxtaposition results in a ‘play of differences’ rather than their resolution.52 Like Benítez-Rojo’s notion of ‘discontinuous conjunction’, the figure of the rhizome in Glissant’s work enables him to develop a model of connections

45 J. Michael Dash, ‘Anxious Insularity: Identity Politics and Creolization in the Caribbean’, in A Pepper Pot of Cultures: Aspects of Creolization in the Caribbean, ed. by Gordon Collier and Ulrich Fleischman (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 287–99 (p. 296). 46 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. by James E. Maraniss, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 [1989]), p. 2. 47 Ibid., p. 2. 48 Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, p. 6. 49 Benítez-Rojo, ‘Three Words toward Creolization’, trans. by James Maraniss, in Caribbean Creolization: Reflections on the Cultural Dynamics of Language, Literature and Identity, ed. by Kathleen M. Balutansky and Marie-Agnès Sourieau (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 53–61 (p. 55). 50 Ibid., p. 55. 51 Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens, p. 11. 52 Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, p. 21.

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Introduction across difference which does not entail unity or stability. Glissant describes the rhizome, a concept he appropriates from the theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as ‘an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently’.53 This image illustrates the way in which ‘each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other’ within Glissant’s poetics of Relation.54 The mangrove plant, a species local to the Caribbean region and found in swamps and on shorelines, with a complex root system growing in water, across land, and in the air, helps to visualise Glissant’s idea of intertwined and entangled peoples and cultures. With his claim that, after the ‘massacre’ of the region’s indigenous Amerindian population, ‘Antillean soil’ became a ‘rhizomed land’,55 Glissant creates a version of Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract concept which is historically as well as geographically situated. For Glissant, the near extermination of Amerindians and importation of new populations ‘is precisely what forms the basis for a new relationship with the land: not the absolute ontological possession regarded as sacred but the complicity of relation’.56 This sense of non-exclusive connections between communities and places is an example of the ‘multiple series of relationships’ which, according to Glissant, constitute the Caribbean.57 He thus envisages community in the Caribbean region as a mobile network of identities which interact without merging. In his essay ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’ (1998), Harris similarly deals with the creative potential of cross-cultural encounter. The essay opens with an account of Harris’ own mixed ancestry, and a childhood memory of having the term Creole ‘hurled at us like a metaphoric brick’ by his father’s ‘pure-blooded tenants’.58 The attempt to make contact across a gulf of interracial tension, seen in Harris’ childhood response to the ‘fictional stone’,59 sets the scene for an essay which stresses the ‘recuperative powers and vision’ of creoleness ‘within a scale of violence that is dismembering societies around the globe’.60 Central to his argument is the role of the imagination in forging connections, or revealing unacknowledged associations, between cultures which seem, on the surface, divided and distant. Harris develops this argument by introducing the ideas of ‘involuntary association’ and ‘bridges 53 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]), p. 11. 54 Ibid., p. 11. 55 Ibid., p. 146. 56 Ibid., p. 147. 57 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989 [1981]), p. 139. 58 Wilson Harris, ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Andrew Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 237–47 (p. 237). 59 Ibid., p. 238. 60 Ibid., p. 239.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories across chasms’.61 The word ‘chasm’ is in Harris’ use double-edged; on the one hand it denotes ‘the gulfs that divide cultures’, implying a break in continuity and an empty space. On the other hand, he suggests, these ‘chasms’ contain within them a ‘storage of creative possibility’ out of which ‘eclipsed bridges and potential bridges exist between divorced or separate or closed orders and worlds’.62 In other words, discontinuities and breakages create opportunities for alternative, unexpected and often ‘involuntary’ associations which work against established patterns of thought; the violence which is ‘dismembering’ Caribbean societies is potentially at the same time a source of creative energy. Comparable debates about the problems and possibilities of community formation in the Caribbean region have long been and remain prominent in the social sciences. A conflict that emerged in the 1960s, which continues to influence contemporary debates in the field, was the opposition between M. G. Smith’s ‘plural society’ model, which viewed the various cultural and ethnic groups constituting Caribbean societies as irretrievably separate, ‘lacking any foundation in a system of common interests and values’,63 and the ‘stratification society’ model, developed by Lloyd Brathwaite in sociology and R. T. Smith in anthropology, which emphasised the ‘common values’ of Caribbean societies.64 This debate was and is still contained within the social sciences, in that the terms ‘plural society’ and ‘stratification’ continue to be employed by anthropologists, sociologists and geographers, but are not commonly used within Caribbean literary and cultural studies.65 Nevertheless, the conflict resonates with the thinking of the literary writers and cultural theorists discussed above, where ‘unity in diversity’ models of community are promoted by some and challenged or complicated by others. In the social sciences, there has been to date very little overlap between the ‘plural society’ and ‘stratification’ models; scholars tend to adopt a position that identifies them with one side of the debate.66 Like the theoretical writing of 61 Ibid., pp. 238–39. 62 Ibid., p. 239. 63 M. G. Smith, ‘Social and Cultural Pluralism’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 83 (1960), 763–916 (p. 769). 64 Lloyd Brathwaite, ‘Social Stratification and Cultural Pluralism’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 83 (1960), 816–36 (p. 832). 65 Barry Chevannes discusses the continuation of this debate within the social sciences in ‘Those Two Jamaicas: The Problem of Social Integration’, in Contending with Destiny: the Caribbean in the Twenty-first Century (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000), pp. 179–84. Brian Meeks also draws attention to the persistence of this debate 50 years on in his introduction to M. G. Smith: Social Theory and Anthropology in the Caribbean and Beyond, ed. by Brian Meeks (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2011), pp. ix–xii. 66 In a recent review essay, anthropologist Rivke Jaffe reflects on these two seemingly incompatible positions, and identifies the ‘enduring dilemma’ in the study of Caribbean societies: ‘Is it possible to conceive of a situation in which the absence of consensus between different social segments does not necessarily indicate crisis or insurgency, nor does it imply permanent, unbridgeable divides?’

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Introduction Benítez-Rojo, Glissant and Harris, the literary texts analysed in this book offer more nuanced methods of negotiating difference, and in doing so they move beyond the antagonism between seemingly incompatible positions which has fuelled many discussions within the social sciences. As my readings in the following chapters demonstrate, the texts’ generic mode plays an important role in this process. The Caribbean short story: from literary magazines and radio to anthologies, collections and cycles Ramchand asserts that ‘the history of West Indian prose fiction before 1950 is essentially the history of the short story’.67 The strong tradition of short story writing in the Caribbean region, highlighted in his comment, was initially made possible by a number of literary magazines and newspapers which provided an outlet for the publication of short fiction and poetry. Louis James makes a direct link between the predominance of short stories in Caribbean writing before the 1950s and publishing practicalities: There are good reasons why the short story was a particularly fruitful form within Caribbean writing. Geographically, the area is made up of small, disparate territories that have had neither the publishing facilities nor the reading public to support the publication of lengthy novels. It was the shorter pieces that could be ensconced in the columns of local newspapers and magazines that, from the eighteenth century onwards, created the beginnings of an indigenous literature.68

James suggests here that the lack of publishing infrastructure and distribution channels necessary for the publication of novels was partly due to the geographic fragmentation of the region, as an archipelago of islands divided by the sea and functioning as ‘disparate territories’. The minimal communication between these various territories, he implies, prevented the emergence of a substantial readership receptive to literature from across the region. However, a glance at editorials from the 1940s and 50s indicates that the aim of the region’s small magazines of the first half of the twentieth century was precisely to build up the kind of supportive, inter-island reading public which, according to James, was non-existent. Editorials in early issues of these magazines demonstrate attempts to foster a West Indian cultural consciousness among contributors and readers.69 For example, an See Rivke Jaffe, ‘Notes on the State of Chronic: Democracy and Difference after Dudus’, New West Indian Guide, 85:1/2 (2011), 69–76 (p. 73). 67 Ramchand, ‘The West Indian Short Story’, p. 27. 68 Louis James, ‘Writing the Ballad: The Short Fiction of Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace’, in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. by Jacqueline Bardolph (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 103–08 (p. 104). 69 The term ‘West Indian’, used by the editors of these magazines, concerns only the

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories ‘Editor’s comeback’ written in 1944, two years after the founding of the Barbados-based literary magazine Bim, requires stories which reflect their writers’ local landscape and society, rather than attempting to replicate foreign literary models. John Wickham asks contributors: ‘Why worry to write about the rigour of Alaskan winter when you can spend the month of February in St. Joseph’s parish?’70 A later issue shows that in their selection of contributors, Bim’s editors looked beyond Barbados in order to encourage the development of a broader regional aesthetic: they draw attention to the presence on the contents page of ‘the names of many contributors who dwell beyond these shores’.71 The contents page of the following issue displays even greater variety, and the editors have altered its format to emphasise this; groups of writers from Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, St Lucia and British Guiana are divided by territory. Similar patterns can be found in the editorials of Guyana-based Kyk-Over-Al. Although A. J. Seymour’s 1953 ‘Comment’ sets out the magazine’s intention to nourish the ‘spirit of Guyana’,72 two years later he reflects upon efforts made by editors to ‘think of the West Indies as an organic region’, and in doing so ‘link hands across the seas with writers in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica’.73 These examples illustrate how the region’s literary magazines of the first half of the twentieth century performed a foundational role in forging connections between island cultures, generating a readership which extended across the archipelago, as well as in building up a tradition of short story writing within the Caribbean region. The community of writers and readers envisaged by editors such as John Wickham, W. T. Barnes, Frank Collymore and A. J. Seymour was exclusively Anglophone; the magazines incorporated material from Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, St Lucia and British Guiana, which were all part of the English-speaking West Indies. Both the contents of issues and the editorial comments suggest that short fiction and poetry produced by Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean writers lay beyond the scope of these editors’ vision. Caribbean Voices, a radio programme contemporary with Bim and Kyk-Over-Al, was equally influential in the development of a Caribbean short story writing tradition and was similarly Anglophone in focus. Organised by British producer Henry Swanzy, and featuring short stories and poems by Caribbean writers, the programme broadcast this material from London back to the Englishspeaking Caribbean. In this way, a British-based initiative strengthened the audience generated by the circulation of literary magazines within the region, increasing listeners’ awareness and appreciation of writing from other islands Anglophone Caribbean, unlike the more inclusive terms ‘Antillean’ and ‘Caribbean’ used later by writers, critics and cultural theorists to refer to all linguistic zones. 70 John Wickham, ‘Editor’s comeback’, Bim, 1:4 (1944), 1. 71 W. T. Barnes and F. A. Collymore, ‘Foreword’, Bim, 3:9 (1943), 9. 72 A. J. Seymour, ‘Comment’, Kyk-Over-Al, 5:17 (1953), 204. 73 A. J. Seymour, ‘Editorial’, Kyk-Over-Al, 6:20 (1955), 135–38 (p. 136).

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Introduction and from the Caribbean diaspora. Correspondence between Swanzy and the Jamaica-based editor Gladys Lindo between 1945 and 1953 reveals concerns and priorities comparable to the editorials of Bim and Kyk-Over-Al. Returning rejected manuscripts to Lindo in 1946, Swanzy regrets the ‘complete absence of local colour’.74 It becomes clear from later letters that this notion of ‘local colour’ is a major element of his acceptance criteria. Responding to criticism from potential contributors that his ‘restriction’ on work set outside the Caribbean region is ‘unfair’,75 Swanzy contends that ‘a specific West Indian Weltanschauung […] is still in the making’, and as a result, ‘a general story laid in some other part of the world is so frequently indistinguishable from an ordinary commercial American or British story, that it really is not worth including in the programme’.76 Caribbean Voices not only facilitated the expansion of a Caribbean literary tradition in practical terms, but also, with its insistence on a West Indian Weltanschauung, conveyed primarily though the setting and language of short stories,77 actively intervened in the shaping of a regional Caribbean aesthetic. Recent anthologies and studies of Caribbean short stories have begun to move beyond an exclusively Anglophone framework in order to make connections between Anglophone, Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean short stories.78 While I acknowledge the value of this endeavour, and indeed took such an approach in an essay collection that I co-edited, The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (2011), this book concentrates more specifically on Anglophone Caribbean short story collections and cycles. The British-based Caribbean Voices programme and the region’s various small magazines, with their focus on English-speaking Caribbean territories, contributed to the emergence of a rich Anglophone tradition of short story writing. My study foregrounds this particular aspect of a broader multilingual tradition. 74 Henry Swanzy, Letter to Gladys Lindo, 13 August 1946, Caribbean Voices Correspondence 1945–1953, folder 1, West Indiana Collection, UWI St. Augustine, Trinidad. 75 Gladys Lindo, Letter to Henry Swanzy, 29 July 1947, Caribbean Voices Correspondence 1945–1953, folder 1. 76 Henry Swanzy, Letter to Gladys Lindo, 6 August 1947, Caribbean Voices Correspondence 1945–1953, folder 1. 77 This aspect of Swanzy’s preference for ‘local colour’ also caused controversy among the region’s writers and listening audience. For example, after the programme broadcast a short story by Sam Selvon, ‘The Humming Bird’, written in Trinidadian Creole, listeners expressed ‘disgust’ at a narrative ‘liberally salted with “obscenities”’. Letter from J. M. Laing, Manager of Radio Distribution Barbados Ltd., to Miss Irene M. Elford, The British Broadcasting Corporation, 30 September 1948, Caribbean Voices Correspondence 1945–1953, folder 1. 78 See, for example, Stewart Brown and John Wickham, eds, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Hyacinth M. Simpson, Special Issue of Journal of West Indian Literature, 12:1–2 (2004); Lucy Evans, Emma Smith and Mark McWatt, eds, The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2011).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories The above discussion shows how editors of and contributors to the Caribbean Voices programme and various small magazines were self-consciously engaged in the act of community building, both in the sense that they helped to generate communities of short story writers and readers across the Caribbean region and diaspora, and also in the sense that they encouraged the development of a shared regional consciousness. As this book demonstrates, in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century Caribbean short story writing, community has remained a key concern. However, whereas the collaborative activities of Caribbean literary magazines of the 1940s and 50s and the Caribbean Voices programme involved the contribution of individual writers and artists to a collectively produced regional aesthetic, and their commitment to a common goal of cultural nationalism during the build-up to Federation, in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean short story writing, the shared aim of political and cultural independence has given way to the more open and complex question of what constitutes a Caribbean community. The earlier emphasis on the prospect of independence has been replaced by a concern with other factors which impact on the imagining of community in the Caribbean, such as globalisation, mass tourism, economic instability, political corruption and neo-colonial dependency. Ramchand draws attention to a revival of the short story form in the 1980s after the novel writing ‘boom’ of the 1950s and 60s,79 noting that, from the publication of Olive Senior’s collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories in 1986 to the writing of his essay in 1997, 18 short story collections by Caribbean writers were published.80 This point is reinforced by Hyacinth Simpson, who describes a ‘tremendous surge in short fiction writing from West Indians in the region and the diaspora in the 1980s and 1990s’,81 in the form of anthologies and single-author collections, and further suggests that the recent increase in critical attention to Caribbean short fiction has been ‘fuelled by the abundance of short story collections published locally and abroad’.82 Victor Ramraj describes the same phenomenon, regarding the increase in Caribbean short story writing in the late twentieth century as partly due to ‘North American publishers’ receptiveness to the short story’.83 These observations indicate that the recent renaissance of the genre in the Caribbean region and its diaspora has involved a shift in the short story’s prevalent mode of publication; the practice of including individual 79 See Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, p. 11. 80 Ramchand, ‘The West Indian Short Story’, pp. 28–29. 81 Hyacinth M. Simpson, ‘Introduction’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 12:1–2 (2004), i–vii (p. i). 82 Hyacinth M. Simpson, ‘Patterns and Periods: Oral Aesthetics and a Century of Jamaican Short Story Writing’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 12:1–2 (2004), 1–30 (p. 1). 83 Victor J. Ramraj, ‘Short Fiction’, in A History of Literature in the Caribbean, Vol. 2, ed. by A. James Arnold (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2001), pp. 199–223 (p. 199).

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Introduction stories in local magazines and newspapers has been overtaken by anthologies, single-author collections and short story cycles published mainly outside the region.84 My study examines how this development has impacted upon the aesthetics of Caribbean short story writing. The textual analyses I offer in the chapters which follow look beyond the form of individual stories, exploring the structural dynamics operating within single-author collections and short story cycles. Many contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers have produced collections of stories connected in some way, whether thematically, through a common setting, or through recurring characters. Others have produced texts marketed as novels but which, structured as a series of interlinked episodes, can be read as short story cycles. Of the texts examined here, Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986), Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (1988) and Alecia McKenzie’s Satellite City and Other Stories (1992) fall into the former category; Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom (1992) and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) fall into the latter category; and Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000), Kwame Dawes’ A Place to Hide and Other Stories (2003) and Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement (2005), fall somewhere in between. Short story collections and cycles as narratives of community A key concern of this book is the relationship between the narrative structure of these texts and their portrayal of community. Studies of the short story ‘cycle’, ‘sequence’ or ‘composite’ frequently present them as narratives of community. James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), a collection of stories linked primarily by place, which explores the lives of a city’s inhabitants, is regarded by many critics as characteristic of this mode of writing; an entire chapter is devoted to this text in Forest Ingram’s Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century (1971) and in Susan Garland Mann’s The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (1989), and others have referred to it as one of the ‘influential classics of the genre’,85 or a ‘formal paradigm’.86 Some critics have argued that this literary form necessarily leads to the imagining of community; for example, Forrest Ingram asserts that ‘[n]umerous and varied connective strands draw the co-protagonists of any story cycle into a single 84 Publishing houses outside the region which have produced anthologies or singleauthor collections of Caribbean short stories include Longman, Heinemann Caribbean, New Beacon, Peepal Tree, Faber and Faber, Oxford University Press, Penguin Books, Macmillan Caribbean, Serpent’s Tail (UK); Mosaic Press, Women’s Press, Sister Vision (Canada); Warner Aspect, Grove Press (US). 85 Gerald Lynch, The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p. 20. 86 J. Gerald Kennedy, ‘Towards a Poetics of the Short Story Cycle’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 11 (1988), 9–24 (p. 10).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories community’, adding that ‘[h]owever this community may be achieved, it usually can be said to constitute the central character of a cycle’.87 Following Ingram, in his attempt to map out the distinctive features of short story cycles, Ian Reid states that ‘a sense of community normally develops through the series’, offering Dubliners as the prime example.88 J. Gerald Kennedy makes a similar claim, proposing that ‘[p]erhaps insofar as story sequences present collective or composite narratives, they may all be said to construct tenuous fictive communities’.89 Community has remained a central issue in scholarly debates on this literary form, despite a shift in focus away from European canonical texts such as Dubliners. Early studies of the short story cycle tend to adopt a universalising approach which does not take into account the cultural contexts of writers and their subject matter. In most cases, this coincides with an overriding concern to identify the unifying features of the cycle, even where there is a professed emphasis on the conflict between unity and fragmentation. For example, Forrest Ingram suggests that ‘[c]entral to the dynamics of the short story cycle is the tension between the one and the many’.90 Nevertheless, his definition of the form hinges on the extent to which, and the ways in which, its components are unified. Ingram’s assumption that there is a single underlying ‘order’ or ‘pattern’ devised by the author and to be discovered by the perceptive reader is visualised in his notion of a ‘thematic center’ or ‘thematic core’ around which recurrent elements of a cycle rotate.91 Here, the tension he has identified between ‘the one and the many’ appears to resolve as the stories are neatly slotted into a central unifying cog. In a similar fashion, Susan Garland Mann describes as a distinguishing feature of the short story cycle the ‘simultaneous independence and interdependence’ of stories,92 and yet the ensuing chapters are devoted to exploring ‘unifying devices and patterns’.93 More recent studies have moved beyond universalising theories in order to argue that the short story cycle or composite or sequence is a mode of writing distinct to the US or Canada.94 This has often been accompanied by readings 87 Forrest L. Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), p. 22. 88 Ian Reid, The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 47. 89 J. Gerald Kennedy, ‘Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence – Definitions and Implications’, in Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, ed. by J. Gerald Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. vii–xv (p. xiv). 90 Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles, p. 19. 91 Ibid., pp. 19, 20–21. 92 Susan Garland Mann, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 12. 93 Ibid., p. 16. Maggie Dunn and Ann Morris similarly prioritise unity in their study, The Composite Novel: The Short Story Cycle in Transition (New York: Twayne, 1995). 94 Lynch claims that the short story cycle is ‘distinctly and distinctively a Canadian

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Introduction of interconnected stories as articulations of a multicultural national identity, as is indicated in the titles of Rolf Lundén’s book The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite (1999), Gerald Lynch’s The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles (2007) and James Nagel’s The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre (2001). These titles also illustrate how this line of argument often replicates the rhetoric of unity in diversity to be found in the earlier phase of criticism. Despite the shift from universalising to culturally specific theoretical models, there remains in these more recent studies of the genre a tendency to measure texts according to their unifying features, in cultural as well as formal terms. For example, Nagel begins by saying that within a cycle ‘there must be some principle of unification that gives structure, movement, and thematic development to the whole’.95 This emphasis on the ‘whole’ operates at the level of content as well as form; he is less interested in the particular ethnic identities expressed within these cycles than in their contribution to the ‘growing multiethnic canon of the fiction of the United States’.96 A notable exception is Victoria Kuttainen’s Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (2010). Rejecting both the nationalist framework and celebratory tone of the earlier studies, Kuttainen is concerned primarily with the ‘difficult relations’ expressed through the dynamics of the short story composite in settler contexts (Canada, the US and Australia). Caribbean literature has featured only marginally in discussions of the short story cycle, sequence or composite,97 despite the popularity of this mode of writing among Caribbean writers. My study extends the recent focus of scholarly debates on the cultural significance of interconnected stories, and their function as narratives of community, drawing attention to the use of this literary form by contemporary Caribbean writers. Although useful as a starting point, the genre theory discussed above is limited in its applicability to Caribbean short story collections and cycles. The concept genre’ (Lynch, The One and the Many, p. 4), and Kennedy makes the point that American writers have been ‘notably productive in the short story sequence’ (Kennedy, ‘Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence – Definitions and Implications’, p. viii). 95 James Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), p. 2. 96 Ibid., p. 8. 97 There has been no book-length study, but a handful of articles have explored the use of interconnected stories by Caribbean writers. See Rocío G. Davis, ‘Oral Narrative as Short Story Cycle: Forging Community in Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!’, MELUS, 26:2 (2001), 65–81 and ‘Negotiating Place/Re-Creating Home: Short Story Cycles by Naipaul, Mistry, and Vassanji’, in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. by Jacqueline Bardolph (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 323–32; Thomas Loe, ‘Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy as a Short Story Sequence’, Notes on Contemporary Literature, 26:1 (1996), 2–3; M. Belén Martín-Lucas, ‘Psychic Spaces of Childhood: Jamaican-Canadian Short Story Cycles’, International Journal of Canadian Studies, 18 (1998), 93–114.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of unity in diversity, which informs the formalist studies as well as those concerned with the cultural dimensions of the genre, is certainly relevant to both the narrative structure of the texts analysed in this book and the kinds of community they depict. However, my readings illustrate that the identification of unifying factors is not the most productive approach to either the form or the content of these texts, which enact subtle and complex modes of working through differences without erasing them. In the eight short story collections and cycles analysed here, the stories are linked in different ways, with varying effects, and in each case the text’s narrative structure emerges out of the writer’s unique engagement with the question of community. Unlike many of the studies mentioned above, which trace the generic origins of the short story cycle, sequence or composite back to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron, this book situates the form of interconnected stories within a distinctively Caribbean oral and literary history. Victor Ramraj presents the Caribbean short story as rooted in both the oral traditions of Carib, Arawak, African and Indian folktales and the literary traditions of ‘yarns, tales, anecdotes, and “creole chips”’ published in local newspapers and magazines.98 Frank Birbalsingh similarly draws attention to the oral roots of Caribbean short stories, considering how oral storytelling practices have shaped their narrative structure. He regards the short story form in the Caribbean as a ‘direct descendant of a Caribbean oral tradition of folk tales’ characterised by ‘discursive, digressive, episodic and anecdotal literary patterns’.99 Birbalsingh’s comment is based on an analysis of Sam Selvon’s writing, but the patterns he identifies can also be found in the work of a number of other Caribbean short story writers. Of those studied in this book, in the stories written in a form of Jamaican Creole in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories, digression and anecdote are prominent narrative devices, used to create the effect of a told tale. A comparable narrative style is adopted by Robert Antoni in My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, where stories contain within them multiple embedded tales, anecdotes and asides, rendering it difficult to keep sight of the ‘main’ narrative strand. The ‘digressive’ and ‘episodic’ patterns derived from oral storytelling practices are also visible in the broader narrative structure of Senior’s story collection and Antoni’s story cycle, as well as of the other texts examined here, all of which are composed of interlinked stories. Oral storytelling practices in the Caribbean are closely associated with the process of community building; in an essay on the short story form, Senior comments that ‘while writing is a private act, orality is a communal one; it implies a teller and a listener, as traditional song consists of call and response’.100 She describes how in her own writing she approximates 98 Ramraj, ‘Short Fiction’, p. 220. 99 Frank Birbalsingh, ‘The Indo-Caribbean Short Story’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 12:1–2 (2004), 118–34. 100 Olive Senior, ‘The Story as Su-Su, the Writer as Gossip’, in Writers on Writing: The

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Introduction the communal act of storytelling, deliberately choosing ‘to write from the perspective of the many different people who make up the place I come from and not limit myself to any one point of view’ in order to convey how within the Jamaican island community – ‘[e]very voice feeds into and takes from a larger collective voice’.101 The use of digression and anecdotes in the stories written in Creole allows Senior to embed within her narrators’ stories the stories of other characters, so that responsibility for the telling of the story is shared among members of the community depicted. This process is played out on a larger scale across the collection, which incorporates a range of narrative voices. In different ways, the episodic form of the short story collection or cycle enables each of the writers considered here to explore community dynamics. While the genre theory discussed above is, as already mentioned, limited in its applicability to Caribbean short story collections and cycles, Caribbean cultural theory provides a more useful framework within which to read these texts as narratives of community. Wilson Harris, Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Édouard Glissant ground their theoretical models of Caribbean identity in the geography of the archipelago. In his endeavour to explain the ‘native and phenomenal environment of the West Indies’,102 Harris states that ‘the longest chain of sovereign territories one sees is ultimately no stronger than its weakest and most obscure connecting link’,103 evoking the image of a chain of islands. With the question, ‘how can one begin to reconcile the broken parts of such an enormous heritage[?]’,104 Harris transfers the figure of the chain to Caribbean cultures, composed of fragments of Amerindian, European, African and Asian cultures. Elsewhere in the same essay, the chain metaphor is applied to Caribbean identities: the ‘West Indian’ is described as ‘a series of subtle and nebulous links’.105 Harris contemplates the limits of the novel form developed in nineteenth-century Europe for Caribbean writers, arguing that the traditional novel’s ‘consolidation’ of character and emphasis on the individual restricts the expression of Caribbean identities as plural, fluid and contingent on relationships with others.106 He reflects on the contradiction between form and content in the work of Caribbean writers of his generation, who ‘may conceive of themselves in the most radical political light but their approach to art and literature is one which consolidates the most conventional and documentary techniques in the novel’.107 He proposes in place of the Art of the Short Story, ed. by Maurice A. Lee (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2005), pp. 41–50 (p. 49). 101 Ibid., p. 42. 102 Wilson Harris, ‘Tradition and the West Indian Novel’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. by Bundy, pp. 140–51 (p. 141). 103 Ibid., p. 142. 104 Ibid., p. 142. 105 Ibid., p. 140. 106 Ibid., p. 140. 107 Ibid., p. 150.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories traditional novel the ‘revolutionary novel of associations’, which functions ‘in a poetic and serial way so that a strange jigsaw is set in motion’.108 For Harris, the idea of a chain’s ‘connecting link[s]’ offers a way of visualising the creative possibilities latent within a natural, social and cultural environment made up of ‘broken parts’. He suggests in this essay that the strength of the Caribbean region lies in the potential for associations between national cultures, ethnic groups and linguistic zones, as well as between the Caribbean region and the ‘overlapping contexts of Central and South America’.109 In addition, he emphasises the need for literary writing to articulate these connecting links through its narrative structure as well as its subject matter. Glissant’s comment that ‘the reality of archipelagos in the Caribbean or the Pacific provides a natural illustration of the thought of Relation’110 highlights how, as in Harris’ work, theoretical ideas are embedded in the region’s geography. His description of the Caribbean as ‘a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc’ suggests at once dispersal and connection.111 Glissant then moves seamlessly from the explosion of ‘scattered lands’ to the process of creolisation as an ‘incredible explosion of cultures’.112 Just as the scattered islands are arranged into an arc, the scattered cultures are drawn together in an act of ‘consentual, not imposed, sharing’.113 These associated images of linked islands and cultures are set alongside ‘the linked histories of peoples’.114 Glissant’s conception of the Caribbean as a ‘multiple series of relationships’ therefore has various possible meanings.115 It could refer to relationships – both political and cultural – formed between Caribbean territories divided by the sea. Alternatively, it could be read in terms of the Caribbean region’s complex history of multiple migration if we consider relationships between the various ethnic groups within each Caribbean nation, and between Caribbean people and the other parts of the world to which they are ancestrally connected. Glissant’s model of ‘Relation’ conveys both the potential for and the fragility of community in this ‘explosive region’.116 The concept of a ‘multiple series of relationships’ further indicates that any configuration of community in the Caribbean is only one of many possibilities for affiliation. While he does not, like Harris, relate his ideas directly to the issue of literary form, Glissant’s model of Relation resonates with a mode of writing where meaning is generated through relationships between stories. Benítez-Rojo envisions the Caribbean archipelago as ‘an island that “repeats” itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and 08 Ibid., p. 146. 1 109 Ibid., p. 141. 110 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 34. 111 Ibid., p. 33. 112 Ibid., p. 34. 113 Ibid., p. 34. 114 Ibid., p. 33. 115 Ibid., p. 139. 116 Ibid., p. 33.

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Introduction lands of the earth’.117 He invokes the discourse of chaos theory in his assertion that ‘every repetition is a practice that necessarily entails a difference and a step toward nothingness’.118 On one level, the ‘repeating island’ represents the archipelago as a chain of islands, each one a repetition of the others but at the same time different in some way. He draws attention to the discrepancies between each island’s experience of the plantation system, considering how a temporally ‘staggered exploitation of the region’ involving varying demographic figures resulted in inter-island cultural differences which, ‘far from negating the existence of a pan-Caribbean society, make it possible in the way that a system of fractal equations or a galaxy is possible’.119 Benítez-Rojo explores the similarities between communities shaped by the same plantation economy, but he simultaneously emphasises the differences – ethnic, religious, linguistic, political – which not only exist within a regional Caribbean identity, but constitute it. On another level, Benítez-Rojo’s repeating island alludes to the way Caribbean cultures repeat themselves globally as the Caribbean diaspora expands in Europe and North America. By borrowing from chaos theory, he is able to emphasise the unbounded character of the archipelago, which becomes in his theory more than a geographical formation; it is also ‘a cultural meta-archipelago without center and without limits’.120 His model of repetition with a difference highlights connections between Caribbean nations, as well as between the Caribbean region and its diaspora, without attempting to unify a diverse and heterogeneous collection of cultures and societies. The concept of differential repetition provides a productive framework in which to read short story collections and cycles, and particularly those where the same story repeats itself in different ways, as is the case in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences, which features a repeated journey upriver, or where the themes and motifs introduced in one story are repeated, modified and embellished in subsequent stories, as is the case in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom. In each of these theoretical formulations, reflections on the geography of the Caribbean archipelago are extended into discussions of Caribbean culture and communal identity. In each case, a double movement of dispersal and convergence is described; each model offers us the possibility of connections between people, places and cultures in spite of the region’s geographical, cultural, political, ethnic and linguistic fragmentation. Glissant’s, Harris’ and Benítez-Rojo’s models of association across difference resonate with the narrative structure of a short story collection or cycle made up of episodes at once discrete and interrelated. The form of these texts invites comparison with the region’s geography as a chain of self-contained territories divided by water; with the demographic structure of Caribbean nations, fractured 117 Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, p. 3. 18 Ibid., p. 3. 1 119 Ibid., pp. 36, 72. 120 Ibid., p. 9.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories along the lines of ethnicity and class, which contain within them smaller collectivities; or with the strained relations between Caribbean regional and diasporic communities. The chapters which follow investigate how literary writers since the mid-1980s have employed the form of interconnected stories in different ways and to varying effect. My analyses show how contemporary Caribbean writers’ uses of this literary form are as diverse as their imaginings of community. Whereas genre theorists such as Ingram, Garland Mann, Lynch and Lundén aim to confine the short story cycle or composite within strict formal criteria, my emphasis is on the flexibility and dynamism of this mode of writing. Literary studies and anthropology While Caribbean cultural theory is one important frame of reference in this study, another is Caribbean anthropology. In my analysis of Caribbean short stories, I look beyond literary and cultural studies to consider models of community generated in the social sciences. As a discipline which takes community as its primary object of study, anthropology is the branch of social science research most relevant to this project. The ‘textualist turn’ in anthropology in the 1980s led to debates on the value and potential problems of a convergence of anthropology with literary and cultural studies.121 This was initiated by James Clifford and George Marcus’ controversial collection of essays, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). Clifford presents the ‘crisis in anthropology’ as a starting point from which new modes of ethnography can be developed.122 This ‘crisis’, as he understands it, stems from a recognition that the ‘ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience’ has ‘crumbled’; the writing of anthropologists can no longer be seen as merely a means of communicating the findings of fieldwork, or as unbiased and objective accounts of a stable and unchanging social reality. Clifford identifies the ‘literariness’ of anthropology, suggesting that literary devices such as ‘metaphor, figuration, narration’ are not simply stylistic embellishments, but integral to the ethnographic text, helping to shape the way that cultural phenomena are presented to and understood by readers.123 Not long after the publication of Writing Culture, Frances E. Mascia-Leeds

121 Will Rea, ‘Anthropology and Postcolonialism’, in A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature, ed. by Shirley Chew and David Richards (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 182–203 (p. 194). 122 James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1–26 (p. 3). 123 Ibid., p. 4.

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Introduction and Patricia Sharpe observed that Clifford’s notion of ‘cultural poetics’124 had generated a ‘cross-fertilization’ between the disciplines of anthropology and literary studies, as anthropologists began to understand their work as ‘the construction of texts about texts’ and, conversely, literary scholars began to situate texts in context and reinvent themselves as ‘cultural critics’.125 However, while some scholars have drawn attention to the benefits of mutual borrowings between the two disciplines, others have expressed resistance to the idea.126 Within Caribbean studies, the ‘cross-fertilisation’ between anthropology and literary studies envisaged by Mascia-Leeds and Sharpe has not materialised in the decades following the publication of Writing Culture. Writing in 1989, John Stewart commented on how ‘social scientists have developed various models – the plural and consensual among them – to describe and account for the arresting complexities in Trinidadian society and culture’, but have done so ‘by and large, without any particular attention to the creative literature by Trinidadians’,127 even though Trinidadian writers have been exploring similar issues for decades. Since then, little has been done to bridge the gap between the disciplines of anthropology and literary criticism identified by Stewart.128 24 Ibid., p. 12. 1 125 Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, ‘Culture, Power and Text: Anthropology and Literature Confront Each “Other”’, American Literary History, 4:4 (1992), 678–96 (p. 678). 126 For example, Rose de Angelis observes that the convergence of anthropology and literary criticism ‘allows for a multiplicity of possibilities in reading, writing about, and interpreting people, places, and perspectives, real or imagined’. See Rose de Angelis, ‘Introduction’, in Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse, ed. by Rose de Angelis (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–7 (p. 2). However, Mario Cesareo identifies problems with the use of literary texts as source material for ethnography, since – he argues – it often leads to a conflation of the text’s narrative world and the social reality in which the text was produced and disseminated. See Mario Cesareo, ‘Anthropology and Literature: Of Bedfellows and Illegitimate Offspring’, in Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse, ed. by Rose de Angelis, pp. 158–74 (p. 159). Nicholas Thomas expresses a similar scepticism towards the idea of a convergence between anthropology and cultural studies, outlining what he sees as the relative limitations of cultural studies, such as an emphasis on abstract theory rather than empirical study, and a response to the text as text, rather than as embodied and shaped by material circumstances. See Nicholas Thomas, ‘Becoming Undisciplined: Anthropology and Cultural Studies’, in Anthropological Theory Today, ed. by Henrietta L. Moore (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 262–79 (pp. 268–69). 127 John Stewart, ‘The Literary Work as Cultural Document: A Caribbean Case’, in Literature and Anthropology, ed. by Philip A. Dennis and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1989), pp. 97–112 (p. 103). Stewart views V. S. Naipaul as an exception, since his fiction is ‘increasingly being cited by social scientists as an exemplary presentation of East Indian life in Trinidad’ (ibid., p. 112). 128 In the years following John Stewart’s and Michael V. Angrosino’s contributions to

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories One reason for this limited interchange between Caribbean anthropology and literary studies might be a historically narrow conception, on the part of anthropologists, of what comprises ethnographic data, and a tendency to overlook the role of literary texts in constituting culture. It could also be due to a tendency of literary critics to regard anthropology as at variance with anti-colonial and postcolonial literature, due to the discipline’s colonial foundations.129 In 1973, Talal Asad pointed out that the discipline of anthropology had emerged and flourished during the colonial era, and that ‘throughout this period its efforts were devoted to a description and analysis – carried out by Europeans, for a European audience – of non-European societies dominated by European power’.130 Mary Louise Pratt continued this line of inquiry, considering how traditional ethnography mystified ‘the larger agenda of European expansion in which the ethnographer, regardless of his or her attitudes to it, is caught up, and that determines the ethnographer’s own material relationship to the group under study’.131 However, the discipline has changed significantly over the last 50 years, and has been critiqued from within. Many of the anthropologists whose work is discussed in this book are of Caribbean origin. While some of them – such as Edith Clarke and M. G. Smith – have been influenced by the structural functionalist methodology of post-war British social anthropology, which was informed by colonial ideologies,132 others consciously challenge those methods, developing a form of Caribbean anthropology sensitive to the region’s social and economic history. For example, in the preface to Martha Brae’s Two Histories (2002), Jean Besson positions her work both within and Literature and Anthropology, ed. by Philip A. Dennis and Wendell Aycock (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 1989), and Stewart’s book-length study, Drinkers, Drummers and Decent Folk: Ethnographic Narratives of Village Trinidad (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1989), which combines field notes with fictional narratives, there has been very little emphasis within Caribbean studies on overlaps between anthropology and literary studies. Daniel Miller’s Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997) discusses parts of Earl Lovelace’s novel The Dragon Can’t Dance (London: Faber, 1998 [1979]) to illustrate his theory, but his study is based mainly on traditional methods of fieldwork. The anthropological research of Deborah Thomas and Rivke Jaffe engages with popular culture (e.g. music, film, visual art) but not with literary texts. 129 Christopher Miller has discussed the long-standing separation of the disciplines of anthropology and literary studies in the context of Francophone African culture, suggesting that their continuing separation is due to the controversy surrounding the ‘colonial history of anthropology’. See Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 5. 130 Talal Asad, ‘Introduction’, in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanity Books, 1998 [1973]), pp. 9–19 (p. 15). 131 Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Fieldwork in Common Places’, in Writing Culture, ed. by Clifford and Marcus, pp. 27–50 (p. 42). 132 Rea, ‘Anthropology and Postcolonialism’, pp. 186–87.

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Introduction against the ‘ahistorical methodology’ of 1960s Caribbean anthropology, commenting how her own methodology was transformed during the course of the study to involve more ‘wide-ranging research on Martha Brae’s two histories’.133 Unlike her predecessors, she foregrounds her Caribbean heritage and specifies her position within ‘the Jamaican color-class system of social stratification’.134 Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that the spatially bounded, ahistorical and culturally homogenous community – the ‘traditional object of the discipline’ – has never been a reality within Caribbean societies, which are complex, heterogeneous and historically contingent.135 He draws attention to the incongruity between anthropology’s preference for ‘“pre-contact” situations’ and the Caribbean, which is ‘nothing but contact’.136 However, since 1990, anthropologists have shifted their focus from the spatially bounded village to urban, national and transnational configurations of community. This change in the subject matter of anthropologists has led to an interrogation of the methods and assumptions which had previously underpinned the discipline. Vered Amit observes that in moving to the ‘terrain of complex societies they had hitherto consigned to sociologists’, anthropologists began to understand how communities are ‘problematically embedded in wider social and cultural contexts’, rather than being the self-contained, isolated units seen in classic anthropological studies of ‘primitive societies’.137 The increased emphasis on wider contexts which Amit describes is discernible in Caribbean anthropology published since 1990. For example, the work of Rivke Jaffe, Don Robotham and Barry Chevannes on Kingston considers the ambivalent relationship between inner-city communities and state power; Brackette F. Williams positions her ethnographic study of a rural East Coast Demerara community in Guyana within the broader historical context of colonialism and nation-building; the work of Steven Vertovec and Daniel Miller explores the impact of global capitalism on Trinidadian rural and suburban communities in the context of the oil boom and its aftermath; and Deborah Thomas’ study of a hillside community just outside Kingston deals with tensions between nationalism and transnational influences in the negotiation of Jamaican identity. Bearing in mind Trouillot’s observations, the changing methodology of Caribbean anthropology published within the last two decades can be seen not only as the result of an expanding field of inquiry, but also as an indication that recent scholars have recognised in 133 Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories (Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. xxii. 134 Ibid., p. xxv. 135 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1992), 19–42. 136 Ibid., p. 22. 137 Vered Amit, ‘Reconceptualizing Community’, in Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments ed. by Vered Amit (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–20 (p. 2).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Caribbean communities a complexity overlooked by earlier generations of anthropologists. Bearing in mind these developments in Caribbean anthropology, I suggest that an interdisciplinary approach to Caribbean communities which places literary texts in dialogue with anthropological texts can benefit both literary scholars and anthropologists. This book examines overlaps and tensions between literary and anthropological representations of Caribbean communities. While anthropological studies inform my readings of short story collections and cycles, my textual analysis on some occasions draws attention to the limitations of anthropological perspectives. Looking beyond literary and cultural studies to social science research provides me with a wider critical and conceptual vocabulary with which to approach Caribbean short stories. Whereas the cultural theory of Harris, Glissant and Benítez-Rojo engages with the concept of communal identity in relation to broader visions of a Caribbean regional consciousness, the anthropological studies considered here examine the specifics of Caribbean communities, focusing on social relations operating within particular communities. Drawing on anthropological studies therefore enhances the specificity and detail of my textual readings, illuminating issues relevant to the texts but not generally explored within the bodies of critical writing on those texts.138 Conversely, this book explores what an interdisciplinary exchange between anthropology and literary studies can bring to Caribbean anthropology. In a study of nationalism in the Caribbean, Stefano Harney proposes that ‘the weaknesses of literary texts as raw material for general social analysis – their indeterminacy and their individuality – are in fact strengths in the pursuit of the concepts of nationhood and peoplehood’.139 The following chapters demonstrate that literary texts can offer a more nuanced engagement with the dynamics of a community than is provided in anthropological research, and this may well be due to the individuality of each writer’s voice. It is also due, however, to the capacity of literary texts – and short story collections or cycles in particular – to incorporate a range of sometimes incompatible perspectives and subject positions; a task which is difficult, although not impossible, within the format of an anthropological study. In this respect, the form of interconnected stories is an appropriate mode of writing through which to convey what Clifford describes as ‘a cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances’.140 Secondly, while anthropological studies are primarily concerned with identifying the existing structure 138 For example, Trinidad’s oil boom and its repercussions as an important context for Lovelace’s fiction of the 1970s and 80s; Jamaican family structures and the history and social structure of Jamaican ‘free villages’ as a key reference point for Senior’s short fiction. 139 Stefano Harney, Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (London: Zed Books, 1996), p. 8. 140 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, p. 12.

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Introduction and characteristics of communities, achieving this in most cases through empirical research, literary texts can open up a space for imagining community. Whereas some of the texts analysed in this book portray, comment on and critique existing configurations of community, others envisage alternative models of community which may not reflect lived reality but which have the potential to shape social relations. Engaging with literary writing and literary criticism could therefore deepen anthropologists’ understanding of Caribbean communities. Book structure The following chapters examine representations of community in eight Caribbean short story collections and cycles. Each of the four chapters deals with a different model of community. Beginning with small-scale rural communities, later chapters move on to progressively larger, more expansive models, exploring urban communities, national communities, and finally the idea of a globalised Caribbean community which resists circumscription within national or regional boundaries. While these divisions help to convey the wide range of ways in which community has been conceptualised by Caribbean short story writers over the past three decades, the book does not intend to imply that these models of community are separate or mutually exclusive, and nor does it aim to map a chronology in literary representations of community from smaller and localised to larger and dispersed collectivities. Chapter One examines the representation of village and small-town communities in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) and Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (1988), reading these story collections alongside anthropological studies of rural communities in Jamaica and Trinidad. I explore how the style and narrative structure of these texts reflects their writers’ indebtedness both to a Euro-American modernist tradition of short story writing and to a Caribbean oral storytelling tradition. By adopting narrative strategies from both traditions, I argue, Senior and Lovelace develop a mode of writing appropriate for articulating the collective voice of a community. The stories in Senior’s collection are set in Jamaican villages in the 1940s and 50s. My analysis of the stories focuses on the overlapping social structures of the family and the village. I compare Senior’s depiction of family dynamics to ‘kinship’ studies of the 1950s. While the work of structural functionalist anthropologists such as M. G. Smith and Edith Clarke is informed by the assumption that the European model of the nuclear family is a norm from which Caribbean families deviate, Senior’s stories present phenomena such as absent parents and ‘outside’ children as characteristic features of Jamaican families and village life, shaped by various social, cultural and historical factors. Senior’s stories illuminate the ways in which the fluid and expansive structure of Jamaican families can provide an effective support network, while at the same time drawing attention to discrepancies 29

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories in the way the non-nuclear family is experienced in different social milieux. Whereas the anthropologists whose work I discuss are primarily interested in social structures, Senior’s stories foreground individual experiences and explore the potential for individuals – women in particular – to challenge and subvert the roles ascribed to them within the village community. The stories in Lovelace’s collection move between the ‘remote town’ of Cunaripo and Trinidad’s capital city, Port of Spain, as do the characters depicted within them. They also span several decades, ranging in their setting from mid to late twentieth century. The collection seems at first to contrast the supportive camaraderie of village communities with the transience and anonymity of fast-paced city life. However, Lovelace’s stories complicate any clear-cut division between rural and urban locales: the traffic of people, products, images and ideas between Cunaripo and Port of Spain features in most of the stories, and Lovelace’s Cunaripo actively participates in Trinidad’s growing consumer culture. Daniel Miller and Steven Vertovec discuss the growth of consumerism in Trinidad in the wake of the oil boom. Whereas Miller and Vertovec emphasise its benefits, arguing that Trinidadian cultural specificity is not diminished by, but rather articulated through, consumption practices, Lovelace’s stories highlight the vulnerability of the island’s rural communities in the face of global capitalism and the attendant trend of migration to urban and metropolitan centres. Furthermore, while Miller’s and Vertovec’s ethnographies present us with a coherent narrative of rural life in Trinidad, Lovelace’s stories combine a variety of voices and perspectives, dramatising a conflict between value systems. Focusing on Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston, Chapter Two explores the portrayal of urban communities in Alecia McKenzie’s short story collection, Satellite City and Other Stories (1992) and Kwame Dawes’ story cycle, A Place to Hide and Other Stories (2003). McKenzie’s stories are set in fictional but recognisable locations within Kingston. The inner-city enclave of Renk Town is contrasted with Meadowbrook Estates, an upmarket neighbourhood in the hills overlooking Kingston, and nicknamed ‘Satellite City’ due to its distinguishing feature of large satellite dishes (symbolising both the Americanisation of Kingston’s middle and upper classes and the way in which they have retreated out of the city into surrounding suburbs). Kwame Dawes’ collection, which engages in a more direct way with the geography of Kingston, opens with a view of the city ‘from the terrace of a house on the hills above Kingston’.141 Both Dawes’ and McKenzie’s stories comment on the uptown/downtown dichotomy which fragments late twentieth-century Kingston. I position their fictional accounts of Kingston in relation to the studies of anthropologists and geographers who are similarly concerned with the city’s socio-spatial divisions and hierarchies. Both texts highlight the impact of dominant imaginings of Kingston – in particular within media discourse – on social relations, drawing attention 141 Kwame Dawes, A Place to Hide and Other Stories (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003), p. 9.

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Introduction to the way that perceptions of a city can inform experiences of urban space. I argue that through their incorporation of a variety of sometimes conflicting narrative voices, alongside their multiple allusions to other modes of cultural expression, such as music, art, tabloid journalism and radio, Dawes’ and McKenzie’s texts present Kingston as a site of competing narratives. In addition, I suggest that their stories contribute to the shaping of the city’s urban imaginary. In Dawes’ story cycle, individual stories are drawn together by a ‘reggae aesthetic’ which also enables him to envisage connections between communities in different parts of the city. In a different way, McKenzie’s collection builds up an intricate network of social relations, extending across stories, which complicates the city’s imagined uptown/ downtown dichotomy. While Barry Chevannes’ and Rivke Jaffe’s studies of Kingston focus on communal solidarity within inner-city neighbourhoods, McKenzie and Dawes look beyond the micro-community in their attempt to write across the city’s social worlds. Chapter Three concentrates on national communities, looking at texts which explore the history and ongoing struggles of post-independence Guyana and Trinidad. I firstly locate Mark McWatt’s short story cycle Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement (2005) within a Guyanese cultural tradition. I analyse a sequence of three stories, each tracing a journey upriver and the scaling of a waterfall in the Guyanese interior. This repeated journey is itself a repetition of Harris’ sequence of novels, The Guyana Quartet, which in turn contains echoes of Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596). I argue that McWatt enters Harris’ textual landscape in order to question his vision of ‘cross-cultural wholeness’.142 Bearing in mind the enduring presence of the El Dorado legend not only in Caribbean literary and theoretical writing, but also within Guyana’s post-independence politics, I compare Harris’ celebration of its creative possibilities with McWatt’s concern that its rearticulation within politicised narratives of national identity, and as part of the rhetoric of the tourism industry, presents a threat to the development of a Guyanese national consciousness. Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom (1992) contains six ‘Carnival Tales’ set on the island of Kairi, a fictionalised version of Trinidad. The text is partly narrated by the fantastical figure of Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos, who skips between centuries in order to explore his ancestral heritage and its legacies. Lavren’s stories are complemented by a ‘Journal’ written by an unnamed narrator who offers us a ‘chronicle of the heart’,143 looking back upon his childhood and adolescence in Trinidad. Witchbroom begins with an ‘Overture’ which, like a piece of music, is organised around the repetition of themes and motifs. I consider how the text’s fugal structure serves as a means of conveying the dynamics of a Trinidadian community made up of various intersecting histories, allowing voices from different sociocultural backgrounds to sound together 42 Harris, ‘Creoleness’, p. 240. 1 143 Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom (London: Allison & Busby, 1992), p. 98.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories without merging. Positioning Scott’s work in counterpoint to Walcott’s, I compare Walcott’s emphasis on the creative possibilities of amnesia to Scott’s dynamic of inventive remembrance. According to M. G. Smith’s ‘plural society’ model, which has influenced anthropological studies of the Caribbean region since the 1960s, the social and ethnic diversity of Caribbean societies prevents the development of a national culture. Both McWatt and Scott examine, in their fiction, how deep-seated divisions along the lines of race and class in Guyana and Trinidad complicate the imagining of the nation. However, despite their critical distance from the more hopeful visions of community offered by their literary predecessors, they continue to invest in the idea of the Caribbean nation. The final chapter considers how Dionne Brand and Robert Antoni move beyond both national and regional frameworks in their imagining of community. Writing on the cusp of the millennium, and complementing concurrent trends in anthropology, these writers reconsider the parameters of community in a globalised world. Dionne Brand’s story cycle, At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), features an extended family spanning 200 years and moving between Trinidad, Europe, the US and Canada. I explore how both the family tree preceding the text and the latter’s sprawling structure of loosely connected stories at once invoke and undermine the concept of a genealogical sequence. Positioning Moon in relation to the tidal poetics of Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s work, I consider the significance of circular movement, both as it is expressed through the journeys of the stories’ various protagonists and through the form of a text which, for all its expansive cartography, begins and ends in Trinidad. I then move on from the notion of a tidal cycle to consider the overlapping circulatory systems of the body and the economy. Having previously related the recurring motif of spillage to the text’s organisation as stories dispersed from a source which cannot contain them, I shift my attention to its more troubling connotations of waste and bloodshed. Drawing on the theory of Arjun Appadurai and Zygmunt Bauman, I argue that Brand’s story cycle alerts us to the limitations of aquatic metaphors as a basis for communal identifications in a context where the global organisation of power is becoming increasingly mobile, dispersed and circulatory. My reading of Robert Antoni’s collection of interconnected stories, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000), deals with communities of readership as they are figured within and interpellated by the text. I begin by considering how digression both shapes the stories’ content and is formally enacted through the device of embedded tales, drawing attention to how effects of digression such as entangled plot lines, anachronisms and a slowed pace stimulate a self-conscious and reflective reading process which interrupts the exoticist discourse mobilised by the book’s cover image. Maintaining a focus on the questions of audience and reception, I then turn to the role of comedy in Antoni’s address to readers. I consider how through his incorporation of calypso humour, Antoni challenges distinctions between local and global consumer publics, and between authentic and commodified cultural products. 32

Introduction Reading Folktales in relation to Trinidadian popular culture and its global marketing, I suggest that the tonal ambivalence generated through Antoni’s comic strategies encourages movement on the part of readers between insider and outsider positions. I argue that Folktales rethinks notions of community and audience in the context of a twenty-first-century Caribbean characterised by a heightened mobility of people and products. The term ‘community’ is used in this book to collate hinged but divergent ways of thinking. The writers discussed occupy a range of positions in terms of class, ethnicity, nationality and gender. Published between 1986 and 2005, the eight texts analysed here are all set either partly or fully within the Caribbean region; in Trinidad, Jamaica or Guyana. In the more recent texts, the setting extends to the Caribbean diaspora in Europe and North America. Together, they convey a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean which flows ‘outwards past the limits of its own sea’.144 Moving from rural to urban, national and global communities, the book draws attention to changing conceptions of community around the turn of the millennium. While this framework provides a way of grouping the texts according to different models of community, my readings illustrate firstly that the texts within each category by no means represent community in the same way, and secondly that the boundaries between the categories are permeable. Both Lovelace’s and McKenzie’s stories challenge clear-cut distinctions between the rural and the urban; Lovelace’ stories comment on the impact of urbanisation on Trinidad’s rural communities, and McKenzie’s stories highlight the rural roots of small neighbourhoods within Jamaica’s capital city, Kingston. Dawes’ stories of Kingston are also about Jamaica, and are framed with reflections on the African diaspora, as the ‘Vershans’ move us beyond the city and the nation to Ghana and North America. Similarly, in McWatt’s Suspended Sentences, Guyana is figured as a community of literary voices which extends to Europe and North America. Finally, Scott’s Trinidad is overlaid with a broader regional consciousness, evoked through the repeated motif of an ‘archipelago of islands’, featuring as a necklace, a rosary, or a ‘broken-back spine’.145 The book’s trajectory is not chronological; although it begins with works published in the 1980s, the second, third and fourth parts all deal with works published in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century. It does not, therefore, attempt to chart a historical progression in literary representations of community from rural to urban, national and global communities. Nevertheless, it does highlight a shifting negotiation of the relationship between the local and the global in Caribbean short story collections and cycles over the last three decades. Senior’s and Lovelace’s story collections, published in 1986 and 1988 respectively, both highlight the global context of rural Caribbean communities, drawing attention to their origins in colonialism and the plantation economy. Both writers examine the tension 44 Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, p. 4. 1 145 Scott, Witchbroom, pp. 3, 12.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories between European and African cultural influences within Caribbean villages, as well as exploring the growing influence of late twentieth-century global capitalism within seemingly remote rural locations. Yet the transnational frame of Caribbean communities is articulated differently in these story collections than in Brand’s and Antoni’s story cycles, published in 1999 and 2000. Whereas Senior’s and Lovelace’s collections feature households and village communities, Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon envisages a diasporic family which crosses continents and centuries, and Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales interpellates a Caribbean reading community which operates across national borders. The communities portrayed in and invoked by these later texts are more fluid and diffuse, and are not united by a shared locality. While Lovelace contemplates the uncertain future of Trinidad’s rural communities, Brand and Antoni grapple with the question of whether community remains a viable concept in the twenty-first-century Caribbean. Providing in-depth readings of eight literary texts, the book focuses on a small selection of a much larger body of Caribbean short fiction which explores the concept of community. Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana have produced more extensive literary traditions than the smaller island states within the Anglophone Caribbean and, perhaps as a result of this, there is an emphasis here on writers who are originally from these three countries. Therefore, the book claims neither that the short story collections and cycles discussed here are representative of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean short fiction, nor that the kinds of communities depicted in these texts are representative of all Caribbean communities, which of course differ greatly depending on the history and demographics of the society in question. The chapters which follow examine some key examples of short story collections and cycles produced over the last 30 years, considering how Caribbean writers have made use of a versatile mode of writing in order to configure community in a number of diverging ways. My readings aim to demonstrate the crucial role played by this literary form in conveying the complexity and dynamism of Caribbean communities.

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CHAPTER 1

Rural Communities Rural Communities

Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace and the short story form For Édouard Glissant, literature of the Americas is characterised by an ‘irruption into modernity’. He proposes that while literary traditions in other parts of the world have ‘slowly matured’, in the Americas, due to a shared history of colonialism and transatlantic slavery, the shaping of literary traditions has taken the form of a ‘brutal emergence’.1 The word ‘modernity’ here relates both to the style and form of literary expression, and to the context in which it is produced; as Dave Gunning explains, the ‘capitalist systems that made possible the slave-based plantation colonies of the [Caribbean] region ensured that the very structures of these societies were grounded in the dynamics of an emergent modernity’.2 Glissant presents literature of the Americas as ‘the product of a system of modernity that is sudden and not sustained or “evolved”’, 3 arguing that modernity in the Caribbean and other parts of the ‘New World’ has been ‘abruptly imposed’ from without rather than gradually developed over time within these societies.4 He associates this break in historical continuity in the Americas with a break in the continuity of literary and cultural traditions, considering how the sudden ‘confrontation’ of European written traditions with African oral traditions has led to new forms of literary expression specific to the Americas.5 Glissant’s ideas provide a basis 1 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989 [1981]), p. 146. 2 Dave Gunning, ‘Caribbean Modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasoriek, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 910–25 (p. 912). 3 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 149. 4 Ibid., p. 148. 5 Ibid., p. 151.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories for conceptualising a form of modernism which has emerged out of, and in response to, the particular histories of Caribbean societies, and which enables Caribbean writers to ‘give meaning to the reality of [their] environment’.6 Following Glissant, Simon Gikandi sees the linguistic and formal experimentation of Caribbean modernist writers as resulting from their attempts to synthesise a European literary heritage with an African-derived folk culture.7 Glissant warns against the danger of reducing a Caribbean community to its ‘folklore’, arguing that literature ‘cannot “function” as a simple return to oral sources of folklore’.8 Caribbean writers must, instead, grapple with two disparate traditions, making an attempt in their work to contend with the ‘tortured relationship between writing and orality’.9 To read Caribbean writing as a straightforward expression of folk culture is to overlook both its experimental qualities and its engagement with a Caribbean ‘lived modernity’.10 Peter Kalliney draws attention to the problems of this kind of reading in a discussion of Sam Selvon’s writing, which, he points out, has often been held up by critics as ‘the antithesis of modernist experimentation and angst’, attuned as it is to ‘the less complicated rhythms of the folk’. Kalliney contests this critical consensus, arguing that The Lonely Londoners’ ‘loose, episodic structure – more a collection of stories than a coherent narrative – resembles modernist storytelling as strongly as it does any folkloric tradition’.11 In an essay on the short story, Olive Senior similarly comments on the way in which ‘modern’ Caribbean writers simultaneously engage with a Caribbean oral storytelling tradition and with the ‘Western literary canon’ to which writers of her generation have been exposed as part of their ‘formal education’.12 This enables them, she suggests, to borrow strategies from the oral tradition and at the same time build on it, extending ‘both the narrative technique and the possibilities for meaning in the story’.13 One of the key differences Senior identifies between the ‘traditional storyteller’ and the ‘modern’ short story writer in the Caribbean is that whereas ‘oral culture does not appear to deal too much with the internal, to delve too deeply into feelings, motivations, and the like’, the ‘modern’ short story ‘can and must go beyond the surface of everyday events’ and contemplate ‘what lies beyond the visible and the known’.14 6 Ibid., p. 146. 7 Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 16. 8 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 151. 9 Ibid., p. 151. 10 Ibid., p. 148. 11 Peter Kalliney, ‘Metropolitan Modernism and its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature’, PMLA, 122:1 (2007), 89–104 (p. 96). 12 Olive Senior, ‘Lessons from the Fruit Stand: Or, Writing for the Listener’, Journal of Modern Literature, 20:1 (1996), 39–44 (pp. 41–42). 13 Ibid., p. 41. 14 Ibid., p. 42.

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Rural Communities Whereas writing is a highly individual and often isolating experience, oral storytelling, Senior explains, is a communal one, involving active participation from an audience present at the moment of telling, whether it takes place in ‘formal storytelling sessions’ or ‘in the street or the home as part of everyday exchange’.15 The merging of written and oral traditions that Senior sees as the challenge facing the ‘modern’ Caribbean short story writer, then, involves a concomitant negotiation between the internal and the external, between individual and communal experiences, and between introspection and social interaction. As Glissant puts it, the ‘synthesis of written and spoken rhythms’ attempted by Caribbean writers brings together ‘the solitude of writing and the solidarity of the collective voice’.16 Gikandi and Mary Lou Emery read Caribbean literature of the 1950s and 60s as modernist, and yet emphasise the ambivalence of Caribbean writers towards canonical forms of modernism. Emery locates the work of George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris in relation to earlier modernist texts by writers such as Jean Rhys, Una Marson and Claude McKay, and she presents this longer tradition of Caribbean modernism as a response to the region’s ‘unique conditions of modernity’.17 She further proposes that some Caribbean women’s writing in the 1970s and 80s ‘carries forward in new ways the modernism of earlier decades’.18 I suggest that Olive Senior’s short story collection Summer Lightning and Other Stories (1986) and Earl Lovelace’s collection A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (1988) can be seen as part of this tradition. Indebted both to Caribbean oral culture and to Euro-American modernist short story writing conventions, these two writers develop a mode of short story writing appropriate for articulating the dynamics of Caribbean rural communities. Gunning considers Caribbean writers’ modernist aesthetics primarily in terms of the individual subject; for example, he finds in the fiction of Jean Rhys and George Lamming themes familiar in high modernism, such as ‘the isolation of the individual in the world’ and ‘the alienation of the subject under modernity’.19 While these themes can certainly be detected in Senior’s and Lovelace’s story collections, they run alongside a concern with the plight of Caribbean communities under modernity, where ‘modernity’ encompasses the expansion of the British Empire and the plantation economy as well as late twentieth-century global capitalism. My focus in this chapter is on how these two writers appropriate modernist devices, alongside narrative techniques derived from oral storytelling, as a means of conveying the collective voice of a community. 15 Ibid., p. 40. 16 Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 147. 17 Mary Lou Emery, ‘Taking the Detour, Finding the Rebels: Crossroads of Caribbean and Modernist Studies’, in Disciplining Modernism, ed. by Pamela L. Caughie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 71–91 (p. 75). 18 Ibid., p. 82. 19 Gunning, ‘Caribbean Modernism’, p. 920.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Several studies of the short story have located European and North American short fiction within the wider literary culture of the modernist movement. In an influential 1968 essay, Nadine Gordimer described the short story as ‘a fragmented and restless form’, proposing that ‘it is perhaps for this reason that it suits modern consciousness’, which is best expressed as a ‘flash of fireflies, in and out, now here, now there, in darkness’.20 Later critics have extended and developed this idea.21 In singling out the short story as an ideal mode of writing for modernist literary experimentation and as especially apt for articulating the experience of modernity, critics of the modernist short story allude to various strategies and devices which they see as typical of modernist short fiction; for example, ellipsis, ambiguity, epiphany, symbolism, impressionism,22 plotlessness and economy. The stylistic features of modernist short stories are presented by Adrian Hunter as a means of engaging with a climate of ‘fragmentation, dislocation and isolation’,23 and by Gordimer as a means of examining ‘the increasing loneliness and isolation of the individual in a competitive society’.24 Both Senior’s and Lovelace’s collections incorporate elements of a modernist style of short story writing. Critics have commented on Senior’s use of modernist devices such as epiphany and symbolism in her short stories. Alison Donnell observes how the stories in Summer Lightning often locate ‘a single moment which provokes a shift of consciousness and an awareness of the irretrievable loss of the world as it was before’.25 Liliane Louvel reads ‘Summer Lightning’ as ‘an initiation culminating in a moment of revelation’, and draws attention to the symbolic function of images and objects in the story.26 Senior herself has referred to the concept of ‘epiphany’ when discussing her own literary practice, describing the short story as ‘an exercise in distillation’ which has to contain ‘a moment of enlightenment or epiphany’.27 These kinds 20 Nadine Gordimer, ‘The Flash of Fireflies’ [1968], in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by Charles E. May (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994), pp. 263–67 (p. 264). 21 See, for example, Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 6; Clare Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880–1980 (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 57; Adrian Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 46. 22 See particularly Suzanne C. Ferguson’s discussion of the impressionist movement’s impact on early twenty-first-century short story writing in ‘Defining the Short Story: Impressionism and Form’, Modern Fiction Studies, 28:1 (1982), 13–24. 23 Hunter, The Cambridge Introduction, p. 47. 24 Gordimer, ‘The Flash of Fireflies’, p. 266. 25 Alison Donnell, ‘The Short Fiction of Olive Senior’, in Caribbean Women Writers: Fiction in English, ed. by Mary Conde and Thorum Lonsdate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 117–43 (p. 119). 26 Liliane Louvel, ‘“Summer Lightning”: A Reading of Olive Senior’s Short Story’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 13:2 (1991), 42–48 (p. 42). 27 Hyacinth Simpson, ‘The In-Between Worlds of Olive Senior’, Wasafiri, 23:1 (2008), 10–15 (p. 12).

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Rural Communities of modernist devices feature in ‘Summer Lightning’, ‘Love Orange’, ‘Bright Thursdays’, ‘The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream’ and ‘Confirmation Day’, stories narrated in Standard English which also explore typical modernist themes of isolation and alienation. Four of these stories feature child protagonists who have been separated from their immediate families and sent to live with wealthier middle-class relatives. The fifth, ‘The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream’, deals with a rift generated within a family by uncertainty surrounding a young boy’s paternity. In all of these stories, visual images are imbued with a deeper meaning. The figure of the astronaut in ‘Summer Lightning’, symbolising a boy’s sense of displacement in his grandparents’ house, adds psychological depth to the story. In ‘Bright Thursdays’ the concept of exposure is used first to illustrate the protagonist Laura’s fear of open spaces, as she feels ‘naked and anxious, as if suddenly exposed’ when she encounters a landscape different from that of her mountain village.28 Read in relation to the photograph of the dark-skinned child Laura dressed in white which provides the story’s central image, ‘exposure’ becomes associated with the whitening of a photographic negative, or – if the exposure is more extreme – the annihilation of the picture. Laura’s fear of exposure is thus linked to an anxiety that her identity will be lost in the new social setting. As in ‘Summer Lightning’, here complex emotions are distilled through a single image. Some of these stories end with a kind of Joycean anti-epiphany where protagonists seeking fulfilment and illumination encounter instead frustration and disillusionment. For example, ‘Bright Thursdays’ is charged with Laura’s desire to meet her father but ends with his abrupt dismissal of her as a ‘bloody little bastard’ (53), and the protagonist of ‘The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream’, Benjy, poised to experience his first taste of a food he has dreamed about, is ultimately faced with his father’s anger at the prospect of Benjy’s illegitimacy. In ‘Confirmation Day’, which contains long passages without punctuation conveying the continuous flow of a young girl’s thoughts as she experiences a confirmation ceremony, Senior utilises the modernist device of stream of consciousness in order to explore a theme which recurs in many of the stories: the constrictive influence of Christianity on the identities of African Jamaican girls. There is a form of anti-epiphany in this story too, since it ends with the girl’s realisation that confirmation has not ‘transformed’ or enlightened her, as she had expected (82). Instead, she discovers a ‘new power’ within herself to resist becoming a ‘child of god’ (84). Referring to the revelatory nature of epiphany, Gordimer observes that ‘a discrete moment of truth is aimed at – not the moment of truth’.29 In Senior’s collection, the stories written in Standard English offer an accumulation of partial and subjective truths, and in this respect they complement the interplay of voices to be found within the stories written in a form 28 Olive Senior, Summer Lightning and Other Stories (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1986), p. 45. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 29 Gordimer, ‘The Flash of Fireflies’, p. 265.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of Jamaican Creole. However, the voicelessness of the protagonists in the stories which contain modernist devices, where the psychological struggles of displaced children are silently evoked through symbolism, or in the case of ‘Confirmation Day’, through internal monologue, contrasts with the multiple voices to be found in the stories written in Creole, which draw, in their form, on Caribbean oral storytelling traditions. Richard Patteson points out that Senior’s stories ‘owe as much to a tradition of oral storytelling in Africa as to the genre developed by Poe, Chekhov, and Maupassant’. 30 As discussed in this book’s Introduction, Frank Birbalsingh sees the short story form in the Caribbean as a ‘direct descendant of a Caribbean oral tradition of folk tales’ characterised by ‘discursive, digressive, episodic and anecdotal literary patterns’. 31 All of these features are present in the stories written in a form of Jamaican Creole. Stories such as ‘Ballad’ and ‘Real Old Time T’ing’, which recreate in writing the structure of the told tale, include numerous anecdotes and asides which shift the reader’s attention away from the story’s central focus. The narrators’ stories also contain within them the stories of other characters, and in doing so create space for multiple perspectives. These stories’ unwieldy structure differs significantly from the narrative efficiency associated with the modern short story as defined by Edgar Allan Poe. 32 Senior says that her writing is an attempt to ‘mediate the worlds I have inherited’, 33 and the merging of Euro-American modernist short story writing conventions with elements of a Caribbean oral storytelling tradition in this collection reflects her dual cultural heritage. Furthermore, her negotiation of two culturally distinct short story writing traditions offers her a way of exploring her alternating childhood experiences of social interaction and isolation, experiences which resulted from her being ‘shuffled back and forth’ between the households of her immediate family in Trelawny, and her more affluent relatives in the parish of Westmoreland. 34 In addition, the shifts between two discrepant modes of short story writing evoke the friction between middle- and lower-class Jamaican social codes, which is a dominant theme within the stories. James Procter identifies a contradiction between the form and content of 30 Richard F. Patteson, Caribbean Passages: Critical Perspectives on New Fiction from the West Indies (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998), p. 18. 31 Frank Birbalsingh, ‘The Indo-Caribbean Short Story’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 12:1–2 (2004), 118–34 (p. 125). 32 For Poe, the short story’s most important feature is ‘unity of effect or impression’. He stipulates that the short story must be tightly structured, every detail necessary to this unifying effect. See Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Review of Twice-Told Tales’, Graham’s Magazine, May 1842. Reprinted in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by May, pp. 59–72 (pp. 60–61). 33 Olive Senior, ‘The Story as Su-Su, the Writer as Gossip’, in Writers on Writing: The Art of the Short Story, ed. by Maurice A. Lee (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2005), pp. 41–50 (p. 49). 34 Anna Rutherford, ‘Interview with Olive Senior’, Kunapipi, 8:2 (1986), 11–20 (p. 11).

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Rural Communities Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion, proposing that while the stories offer a critique of modernity, they simultaneously embrace formal qualities of the modern short story such as ‘impressionism’, ‘brevity’, and ‘elliptical plot structures’. 35 He considers how Lovelace’s use of these devices ‘unsettle[s] an unequivocal alignment of his writing with a spontaneous, or anti-modernist, folk culture’. 36 Jak Peake, however, positions Lovelace’s collection within a ‘distinctly Caribbean tradition of interlinked short story-telling’ rooted in the region’s folk tales. 37 I suggest that Lovelace, like Senior, attempts in his collection to synthesise these two very different short story traditions. As a series of vignettes depicting rural life in Trinidad, A Brief Conversion shares some of the characteristics of the modernist short story. Unlike Lovelace’s novels, which devote long passages to character development, his stories offer impressionistic glimpses into the lives of a number of individuals. The stories, some of which are as short as four or five pages, present us with fragments of these characters’ lives and experiences. The style of individual stories is economical, condensing a wide range of complex ideas into just a few pages. Furthermore, just as modernist short stories, according to Paul March-Russell, often address ‘social change and the break-up of community’ resulting from industrialisation and technological progress, 38 Lovelace’s stories deal with the fragmentation of Trinidad’s rural communities as a result of urbanisation and a growing consumer culture. Yet various connections between the stories in A Brief Conversion indicate that they should not be read as individual fragments but instead as part of a larger aesthetic project. There are recurring characters, such as Travey’s uncle Bango; the stories share the settings of the rural town of Cunaripo and Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain; and they are linked by repeated descriptions of the same cultural events, such as Christmas. Rather than depicting the ‘loneliness and isolation of the individual’, 39 these stories, read together, build up a complex picture of rural life in Trinidad. March-Russell comments on the ghostly presence of oral and folk culture in the work of Leskov, Kipling and Poe, which contains only ‘the afterglow of storytelling’, relating this to the effects of modernity on cultural production.40 Clare Hanson makes a comparable point about Irish and Welsh short story writers Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain and T. F. Powys who, she suggests, 35 James Procter, ‘A “Limited Situation”: Brevity and Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion’, in Caribbean Literature after Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, ed. by Bill Schwarz (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2008), pp. 130–45 (p. 131). 36 Ibid., p. 143. 37 Jak Peake, ‘Remapping the Trinidadian Short Story: Local, American and Global Relations in the Short Fiction of Earl Lovelace and Lawrence Scott’, in The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, ed. by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt and Emma Smith (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2011), pp. 183–98 (p. 187). 38 Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 26. 39 Gordimer, ‘The Flash of Fireflies’, p. 266. 40 March-Russell, The Short Story, p. 26.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories ‘can only look back self-consciously to a past offering a hypothetically organic “world of story” which has now vanished’.41 In these examples, the writers’ sense of dislocation from folk traditions is a result of the breakdown of ‘organic’ communities bound by a shared culture as a result of urbanisation. Due to the social and economic changes effected by modernity, individuals are ‘estranged from themselves and from each other’.42 Despite their use of modernist short story writing conventions, oral culture in Senior’s and Lovelace’s fiction is much more than a nostalgic echo of a disappearing art form. Rather than mourning the loss of community in an industrial society, they adopt modernist narrative strategies alongside oral storytelling devices in order to convey the collective voice of a community. Modernist techniques are indeed implemented as a means of portraying the fragmentation and instability of the individual subject, but in the context of Caribbean communities which are fundamentally plural and diverse, these techniques enable, rather than undermine, the articulation of community. Senior makes the following observation about her short story collection Summer Lightning: I believe Summer Lightning to be a true expression of everyday life in that part of the world I describe, i.e., deep rural Jamaica, in terms of behaviours, beliefs, practices narrated and language used. [...] Summer Lightning is tightly focussed on one world – that of rural Jamaica at a particular point in time.43

Senior invites us here to read her fiction as a form of ethnography, claiming that the stories in Summer Lightning accurately convey the behaviours, beliefs, social practices and language of communities in rural Jamaica during the 1940s and 50s. Her depiction of these communities is partly based on her own direct experience of them. She was born in the village of Troy in Cockpit Country, a mountainous region of Trelawny in inland Jamaica, and at the age of four was sent to live with her mother’s more affluent relatives in the parish of Westmoreland.44 She later went to high school in Montego Bay.45 She left to study at university in Canada, where she now lives, although she frequently returns to Jamaica.46 Senior moves between the roles of creative writer and ethnographer. Alongside her fiction and poetry, she has produced reference books on Jamaica’s cultural heritage – A–Z of Jamaican Heritage (1984) and Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (2004) – as well as an anthropological study, Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean (1991). Her knowledge of rural Jamaica is therefore the product of a combination of 41 Hanson, Short Stories and Short Fictions, p. 111. 42 March-Russell, The Short Story, p. 26. 43 Charles H. Rowell, ‘An Interview with Olive Senior’, Callaloo, 36 (Summer, 1988), 480–90 (p. 484). 44 Wolfgang Binder, ‘An Interview with Olive Senior’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 18:1 (1995), 106–14 (p. 106). 45 Rutherford, ‘Interview with Olive Senior’, p. 18. 46 Denise deCaires Narain, Olive Senior (Horndon: Northcote House, 2011), p. 2.

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Rural Communities first-hand experience, fieldwork, and wide reading. It is equally possible to read Lovelace’s fiction as a form of ethnography. Lovelace was born in Toco, Trinidad, but grew up in Scarboro, in Tobago, which he describes as a ‘rural town’, and later worked as a journalist in Port of Spain.47 As an adult, he studied and then worked abroad before returning permanently to Trinidad. His writing is not restricted to fiction; he has adopted the roles of both creative writer and cultural critic and,48 as is the case with Senior’s work, there is some overlap between his fictional and non-fictional writing. According to Alison Donnell, Senior’s short fiction positions itself within, while simultaneously looking back ironically upon, a ‘canonical’ Caribbean literary tradition.49 In the two sections which follow, I locate Senior’s and Lovelace’s stories in relation to a different body of writing, drawing attention to the ways in which their fictional portrayals of community both evoke and resist dominant paradigms within Caribbean anthropology. The anthropological texts that I consider inform my reading of the stories, allowing for in-depth discussion of issues pertinent to the texts such as, in the case of Summer Lightning, Jamaican family structures and the history and social structure of Jamaican ‘free villages’ and, in the case of A Brief Conversion, Trinidad’s oil boom and its repercussions. On the other hand, my analysis of Senior’s and Lovelace’s stories highlights limitations in the methodology of anthropological studies. By using the form of the short story collection to convey a variety of narrative voices and perspectives, I suggest, Senior and Lovelace invent a mode of ethnography more attuned to the dynamics of Caribbean rural communities than conventional anthropological studies based on fieldwork and participant observation. The ‘textualist turn’ in anthropology in the 1980s, inspired by James Clifford and George Marcus’ essay collection, Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986),50 blurred the boundary between ethnographic and literary texts. Challenging a tendency within the discipline to regard the writing process as secondary to fieldwork, Clifford emphasises the centrality of writing to anthropology, commenting on the close relationship between form and content in ethnographic writing, and the ways in which the subject position of the writer informs their depiction of the cultures they study. In doing so, he reflects on the necessarily ‘partial’ and ‘incomplete’ nature of ethnographic texts, which, like literary texts, offer a reading rather than a definitive explanation of cultural phenomena.51 Clifford’s intervention 47 H. Nigel Thomas, ‘From “Freedom” to “Liberation”: An Interview with Earl Lovelace’, World Literature Written in English, 31:1 (1991), 8–20 (p. 9). 48 A number of his essays are collected in Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays), ed. by Funso Aiyejina (San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon Trinidad, 2003). 49 Donnell, ‘The Short Fiction of Olive Senior’, p. 118. 50 Will Rea, ‘Anthropology and Postcolonialism’, in A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature, ed. by Shirley Chew and David Richards (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 182–203 (p. 194). 51 James Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories undermines the assumption that anthropological studies offer more objective and unbiased accounts of societies and cultures than literary texts, or have greater claim to the ‘truth’. The Writing Culture debate generated conflicting responses within the field of anthropology. Some anthropologists turned to fiction as a new mode of ethnographic writing. For example, Trinidadian anthropologist John O. Stewart’s study Drinkers, Drummers, and Decent Folk: Ethnographic Narratives of Trinidad (1989) combines field notes with fictional narratives. In taking this approach, he reacts against the ‘depersonalised’ and ‘scientifically oriented’ methodology of earlier anthropologists, and their tendency to distance themselves from their subject matter, the cultural ‘other’, regarding their accounts of the societies they observed as ‘objective’, ‘value-free’, ‘neutral’ and ‘accurate’.52 The response of Kevin Yelvington, a US-based anthropologist who has done research on Trinidad, is very different. He comments on the problems generated by developments in the field in the late 1980s and early 90s, arguing that while ‘[t]hose identified with postmodern anthropology have rightly drawn our attention to the power differentials involved in depicting the cultural “other” and the need to present multivocal texts’, their approach risks ‘reducing the anthropological narrative to the anthropologist’s personal confession’.53 Both Senior and Lovelace create protagonists whose personal history intersects to some extent with their own. Their stories are grounded in personal experience, and yet they constitute much more than a ‘personal confession’. According to Clifford, ‘[p]olyvocality was restrained and orchestrated in traditional ethnographies by giving to one voice a pervasive authorial function and to others the role of sources, “informants,” to be quoted or paraphrased’.54 Senior’s and Lovelace’s story collections are informed by their own experiences of Caribbean rural communities and, as a result, break down the opposition between ethnographer and informant, observer and observed, to which Clifford refers. In doing so, they disrupt the hierarchy of voices which structures the traditional ethnographic text. The interplay of voices within both writers’ short fiction – facilitated by the fragmented form of the short story collection – allows them to explore a range of subject positions, and in doing so to bring out the ‘polyvocality’ suppressed in traditional ethnographies. In the sections which follow, I position Senior’s and Lovelace’s short story collections in relation to anthropological studies of Jamaican and Trinidadian Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1–26 (p. 7). 52 John O. Stewart, Drinkers, Drummers and Decent Folk: Ethnographic Narratives of Village Trinidad (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1989), pp. 1–2. 53 Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1995), p. 6. 54 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, p. 15.

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Rural Communities rural communities, comparing both the form and the content of the literary and anthropological texts. I read Senior’s stories alongside the work of structural functionalist anthropologists of the 1950s and 60s, such as Edith Clarke, R. T. Smith and M. G. Smith, as well as the ‘historicised anthropology’ of scholars such as Sidney Mintz and Jean Besson.55 While Besson’s work chronologically follows the work of the structural functionalists (fieldwork for Martha Brae’s Two Histories (2002) was undertaken between 1968 and 1972),56 earlier versions of the chapters I refer to in Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean Transformations (1989) were published in the early 1960s, and his essay ‘The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages’ (1987) is based on fieldwork done in 1952. I have chosen to make reference to the structural functionalist studies partly due to their emphasis on kinship networks, which to some extent connects with Senior’s focus on family structures. Secondly, these ethnographic texts are based on fieldwork undertaken in the same period in which Senior’s stories are set – the 1940s and 50s.57 Although Summer Lightning was not published until 1986, Senior wrote many of the stories in the 1960s, not long after the publication of Clarke’s and M. G. Smith’s studies.58 However, despite common ground and shared concerns, the structural functionalists present Jamaican families of this period differently to Senior, and my comparative analysis examines the tensions and discrepancies between anthropological and fictional accounts of the same subject matter. The work of Mintz and Besson offers detailed studies of the history and social structure of ‘free villages’ in rural Jamaica, the same kind of village which features in some of Senior’s stories. While these examples of historicised Caribbean anthropology help to illuminate the historical dimensions of Senior’s fiction, the stories in Summer Lightning offer different kinds of insights into the internal dynamics of Jamaican village communities. I read Lovelace’s stories alongside the work of three anthropologists whose work, published in the 1990s, contributes to the discipline’s growing concern with urbanisation, transnationalism and globalisation: Daniel Miller, Kevin Yelvington and Steven Vertovec. These three scholars explore the impact 55 Will Rae describes the movement following decolonisation from an ahistoricised ethnography, seen in the work of structural functionalists, to a ‘historicised anthropology’ in the work of Sidney Mintz and others, which ‘articulated the place of the marginalized, exploited, and powerless in historicized global movements’. See his essay ‘Anthropology and Postcolonialism’, in A Concise Companion to Postcolonial Literature, ed. by Shirley Chew and David Richards (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 182–203 (p. 191). 56 Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories (Chapel Hill, NC and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. xxii. 57 In an interview, Senior explains that ‘Summer Lightning is rooted in rural Jamaica, set mainly in the forties and fifties’. Rowell, ‘Interview with Olive Senior’, p. 484. 58 In an interview, Senior says that all except one of the stories in the collection were written in the mid-1960s and early 70s. Rutherford, ‘Interview with Olive Senior’, p. 15.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of the 1970s oil boom on Trinidadian communities, a central theme in Earl Lovelace’s stories of rural Trinidad but one which is often overlooked by literary critics.59 The anthropologists whose work I consider in connection with Senior’s stories are concerned with Jamaican family structures and village communities, and tend to view them as self-contained entities, even when – as is the case with Besson’s and Mintz’s work – their foundation in colonial history and the plantation economy is explored. In contrast, Miller and Vertovec explore the openness of Trinidad’s rural communities to urban and global influences, and their participation within Trinidad’s growing consumer culture. Miller, Vertovec and Yelvington resist the ‘experimental moment’ in anthropology in the late 1980s and early 1990s,60 instead offering accounts of Trinidadian urban, suburban and rural communities based on the traditional method of fieldwork and participant observation. They choose not to self-consciously examine their own position in relation to the communities they observe, or to consider the partiality of their ethnographic texts as one among many possible representations of the cultural phenomena they describe. In this respect, their approach to their subject matter differs from that of Lovelace, whose story collection integrates a variety of sometimes conflicting narrative voices and perspectives. In their short story collections, both Lovelace and Senior employ the modernist technique of ‘multiple points of view, all more or less limited and fallible’.61 Summer Lightning draws together the stories of an array of child protagonists in different social settings. Narrative point of view in the collection continually shifts, since the narrative voice in many of the stories is focalised through the consciousness of each story’s protagonist. Other stories incorporate the voices of several characters. In A Brief Conversion, stories set within the same community are told by a range of narrators, whose position in relation to the community they describe is sometimes revealed, and who offer varying and often incompatible perspectives on Cunaripo and its inhabitants. As I will argue, Senior’s and Lovelace’s synthesis of modernist short story writing conventions with oral storytelling strategies enables them to portray the internal fracture and the heterogeneity characterising Caribbean rural communities more effectively than is possible within the formal constraints of

59 An exception is Jak Peake, who reads Lovelace’s story ‘Joebell and America’ in relation to Trinidad’s oil boom in his essay ‘Remapping the Trinidadian Short Story: Local, American and Global Relations in the Short Fiction of Earl Lovelace and Lawrence Scott’. Louis James also makes a brief passing reference to the oil boom in ‘Writing the Ballad: The Short Fiction of Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace’, in Telling Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. by Jacqueline Bardolph (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 103–08. 60 Edward M. Bruner, ‘Introduction: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self’, in Paul Benson, ed., Anthropology and Literature (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 1–26 (p. 1). 61 David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Fiction (London: Arnold, 1977), p. 46.

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Rural Communities a traditional ethnography. This mode of writing also allows them to challenge some of the assumptions informing anthropological studies. Village life in Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning and Other Stories Houses and households another family group would come out of the house and join them. Soon, a long line of people was walking in single file down the path. The family groups got mixed. The adults would walk behind other adults so that they could talk. The children bringing up the rear instinctively ranked themselves, putting the smallest ones in front. Occasionally one of the adults would look back and frown because the tail of the line had fallen too far behind. (89–90)

This extract from ‘The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream’ offers one of the more positive portrayals of community to be found in Olive Senior’s short story collection, Summer Lightning. It describes the journey of various families living in an isolated mountain village in Jamaica to the harvest festival sale in the larger fictional village of Springville.62 The family of four on which the story focuses meets with various other families until eventually the village community becomes one large family, rendering nuclear units indistinguishable. The cohesion within this amalgamation of households can be seen both in the social interaction between the adults and in the way in which the adults monitor the progress of the smallest children. The extract visualises the idea explored in several of Senior’s stories that within rural Jamaican villages, support systems – often underpinned with an intricate web of family connections – extend beyond the nuclear unit, which is often incomplete or, as is the case in this particular story, fissured in some way. In Summer Lightning, as this scene indicates, the articulation of community is bound up with an exploration of family dynamics. In this way, Senior’s stories resonate with anthropological studies of Jamaican rural communities, the majority of which have focused on kinship relations.63 However, whereas structural functionalist anthropological studies of the 1950s often present the nuclear family, a European cultural model, as a norm from which the more complex Caribbean family structures deviate, Senior’s fictional and nonfictional writing challenges this idea, situating the fragmented and expansive 62 The story seems to be set in Cockpit Country, the mountainous region of Trelawny in inland Jamaica where Senior was born (deCaires Narain, Olive Senior, p. 2). 63 Michel-Rolph Trouillot notes that family and kinship studies were a dominant field in Caribbean anthropology in the 1960s, which expanded in the 1970s and 80s. See his essay ‘The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21 (1992), 19–42 (p. 25).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories structure of Caribbean families in the context of the region’s history of colonialism and plantation agriculture. While the structural functionalists tend to regard the non-nuclear form of Caribbean families as a problem which needs resolving, Senior’s work affirms the value of the extended family as a support network well adapted to the socioeconomic circumstances of Jamaican rural communities. Furthermore, unlike the structural functionalists, she considers the impact of class on perceptions of non-nuclear families. In Summer Lightning, the fractured nuclear unit appears in most of the stories, but is experienced differently depending on the socioeconomic background of the stories’ protagonists. Whereas the structural functionalists seek to identify the key characteristics of Caribbean families, looking for patterns which apply uniformly to all, Senior’s stories resist such a neat theoretical framework, offering instead an uneven and variable picture of Caribbean families. One example of the structural functionalist approach to Caribbean families is the work of M. G. Smith, a Jamaican-born anthropologist of mixed Jamaican and English parentage who studied in London.64 In his introduction to the 1966 edition of Edith Clarke’s study of rural communities in Jamaica, My Mother Who Fathered Me (first published in 1957), Smith identifies the ‘practical problems’ inherent in the family life of ‘West Indian “lower class” Negroes or folk’, observing that ‘family life is highly unstable, marriage rates are low, especially during the earliest phases of married life, and illegitimacy rates have always been high’. As a result, he suggests, ‘[m]any households contain single individuals, while others with female heads consist of women, their children, and/or their grandchildren’.65 Underlying Smith’s comments is the assumption that marriage is a necessary basis for family life, and that children born outside of wedlock must therefore be evidence of a dysfunctional family. In presenting female-headed households as a social problem, he implicitly holds up the male-headed nuclear family as an ideal to which Caribbean families should aspire. Clarke makes similar assumptions in the main body of the text introduced by Smith. Clarke was a member of the Jamaican white elite who also studied in London.66 Like Smith, she uses the words ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ to describe children born inside and outside of wedlock,67 and this language implies that any configurations of family which do not fit neatly within the 64 Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘Caribbean’, in Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, ed. by Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 86–90 (p. 88). 65 M. G. Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Edith Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica, 2nd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966 [1957]), pp. i–xliv. 66 Yelvington, ‘Caribbean’, p. 88. 67 Edith Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica, 2nd edn (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1966 [1957]), p. 120.

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Rural Communities European cultural model of a nuclear family bound by a Christian ceremony are socially invalid and an aberration from expected behaviour. Clarke’s use of the term ‘denuded’ households to describe a ‘family type’ where either the mother or father is ‘lacking’ similarly contains the supposition that non-nuclear families are deficient and in need of rehabilitation.68 If, as Smith suggests, the household is the ‘basic unit’ within the community,69 then it follows that these ‘unstable’ households threaten to unravel the social fabric. Clarke notes in her Foreword that the research on which the study was based was ‘sponsored by the Colonial Social Science Research Council and financed by the Colonial Office from funds provided for research under the Colonial Development and Welfare Act’.70 The context of her research suggests that her ideas are likely to have been aligned with colonial policies, and to have complemented the work of colonial social welfare workers who, as Christine Barrow explains, arrived in Jamaica from England in the postwar period ‘to deal with what were perceived as the problems of family life in the Caribbean’. According to Barrow, these social welfare workers ‘judged Caribbean families by their own middle class, Christian, nuclear family standards and found them to be dysfunctional and disorganised’.71 Despite the Jamaican origins of M. G. Smith and Edith Clarke, the same kind of Eurocentric perspective on Caribbean families characterises their research. This can be connected not only to their British education but also to their respective middle- and upper-class status in Jamaican society.72 Looking back on Caribbean anthropology prior to 1970, Kevin Yelvington reflects that ‘[e]xplicit colonial ideologies became implicit anthropological assumptions as anthropologists often endeavoured to explain [...] “pathologies” and “deviations” from North Atlantic value-norms’. He adds that the theoretical orientation of the structural functionalism that emerged in the 1950s, of which Smith’s and Clarke’s work was part, reinforced this.73 With their tendency to identify family ‘types’ and generate taxonomies

68 Ibid., p. 127. 69 M. G. Smith, ‘Community Organization in Rural Jamaica’, Social and Economic Studies, 5:3 (1956), 295–312 (p. 299). 70 Edith Clarke, ‘Foreword’, in My Mother Who Fathered Me, pp. 11–14 (p. 11). 71 Christine Barrow, ‘Men, Women and Family in the Caribbean: A Review’, in Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings, ed. by Christine Barrow and Rhoda Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2001), pp. 418–26 (p. 419). 72 Trouillot notes that Smith’s work has been described by his critics as ‘local middleclass ideology passing for social theory’ (‘The Caribbean Region’, p. 23). In his Foreword to the 1999 revised edition of Clarke’s book, Rex Nettleford mentions that Clarke had grown up ‘as a member of the propertied and enlightened upper class in post-emancipation Jamaica’. Rex Nettleford, ‘Foreword’, in Edith Clarke, My Mother Who Fathered Me: A Study of the Family in Three Selected Communities in Jamaica, rev. ed. (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1999 [1957]), pp. vi–xi (p. vii). 73 Yelvington, ‘Caribbean’, p. 88.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of characteristic behaviour, the structural functionalists approached their material in a pseudo-scientific manner which would supposedly allow for an objective analysis. Yet, as Yelvington observes, their apparently objective approach was in fact ‘steeped in value judgements’.74 Barrow considers how these value judgements shaped their interpretation of the families they encountered, arguing that despite the extensive field work undertaken by structural functionalists, ‘their interpretation of [their] ethnographic data was controlled by the ideological and theoretical assumptions of their model’, which ‘defined the family for them as a co-residential nuclear unit, ideally and in practice’.75 In her anthropological study Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the EnglishSpeaking Caribbean (1991), Senior acknowledges the cultural specificity of Caribbean family structures and the ways in which they are embedded in the region’s history. Drawing upon the findings of a range of researchers working on the Women in the Caribbean project, Senior’s study opens with the statement that ‘only about one-quarter of the region’s children are born into what conforms to the nuclear family, i.e. with the father, mother and their children together under one roof’.76 This statistic challenges the idea – seen in earlier anthropological studies of Caribbean kinship – that the nuclear family is a norm and the ‘outside’ child or absent parent is an anomaly. For Senior, these phenomena are less a threat to the social fabric than a constitutive element of it. Quoting from George Lamming’s novel In the Castle of My Skin (1953), from which Edith Clarke took her title My Mother Who Fathered Me, she claims that the ‘paradigm of absent father, omniscient mother, is central to the ordering and psyche of the Caribbean family’.77 Senior comments how ‘child-shifting in various forms’, which she explores in different ways in her anthropological study and her short stories, is ‘widespread throughout the Caribbean’, and has antecedents in some West African cultures and in the system of chattel slavery where ‘the concept of a family hardly existed’ and ‘dispersal of family members was the norm’.78 Rather than viewing child-shifting as a social problem that needs rectifying, she presents it as a ‘problem-solving mechanism indulged in by a mother who is left by the father to provide and care for the child and who cannot do both’, and suggests that as a ‘further extension of this adaptation’, society provides older women ‘who specialise in the child-rearing role’.79 Her study balances

74 Ibid., p. 88. 75 Christine Barrow, Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1996), p. 24. 76 Olive Senior, Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-speaking Caribbean (Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, 1991), p. 8. 77 Ibid., p. 8. 78 Ibid., p. 16. 79 Ibid., p. 17.

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Rural Communities this kind of emphasis on the value of the fluid and expansive structure of Caribbean families with an examination of the difficulties it generates. Senior observes that while a substantial body of research has explored ‘the Caribbean family structure and family formation’, little attention has been paid to ‘the internal dynamics of the family’ and ‘the effects of the processes described on the development of self-identity and socialization’.80 In Summer Lightning, a fictional mode of writing enables Senior to examine these effects in more depth than the existing anthropological research; the stories foreground the internal struggles of a range of displaced children. While Senior shares the interest of anthropologists such as Clarke and Smith in family structures, she not only interprets those structures differently, but also explores their psychological impact on individuals. Furthermore, she considers how the non-nuclear family is experienced differently in middle-class and lower-income households. Rather than attempt to identify a structure applicable to all Caribbean families, Senior’s stories examine the complexities and inconsistencies of Jamaican family life. The form of the short story collection, which, in the case of Summer Lightning, draws together the narratives of an array of child protagonists in different social settings, contributes to this process. Whereas the structural functionalists aim for a neutral and objective approach to their subject matter, Summer Lightning includes stories told from the point of view of various protagonists. In this way, Senior is able to experiment with a range of subject positions, presenting Jamaican households from a different angle in each story. The stories ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’ feature child protagonists who, for different reasons, have been separated from their parents and transported to a middle-class setting in which they feel alienated. While the specifics of these fictional children’s circumstances differ from those of Senior’s childhood, to an extent their experiences resemble hers.81 Written in Standard English and in the third person, both stories deal with an individual’s

80 Ibid., p. 24. 81 Senior explains in an interview that she was born in the village of Troy, on the edge of Cockpit Country, in the mountainous region of Trelawny in inland Jamaica. Her father was a ‘small farmer’ and her family was ‘poor’, struggling to support ten children. At the age of four she was sent to live with her mother’s relations in a parish called Westmoreland, which was ‘not that far away, but far removed in terms of the way of life’. The relations were ‘better off than my parents’ and ‘lived on a fairly large property’ (Binder, ‘Interview with Olive Senior’, p. 106). Describing the same situation in another interview, Senior reflects how she felt ‘alienated from both backgrounds’ and struggled ‘to make the adjustments between the two worlds’. She adds that the stories in Summer Lightning to some extent ‘represent an attempt on my part to come to grips with those aspects of my childhood’ (Rutherford, ‘Interview with Olive Senior’, p. 11). Senior’s movements between a lower-income family in Troy and a middleclass household in Westmoreland resemble the trajectories of the protagonists ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories inner conflict. The physical features of the house – in both cases described as large, empty and inhospitable – are prominent in both stories, and overshadow the dynamics of the household, since there is very little interaction, let alone any meaningful connection, between the child protagonist and the other occupants of the house. In ‘Summer Lightning’, there is no dialogue between the boy and the relatives who are acting as surrogate parents. The boy’s uncle is present only in an indirect way through his desk full of mysterious objects, which the boy examines periodically. The aunt appears only in an embedded account of her relationship with a Rastaman, Bro. Justice, which takes us back in time and away from the perspective of the boy. The boy’s detachment from his relatives is reinforced when he reflects that they are ‘excluded’ from his imagined world because ‘he couldn’t see them stiff and proper quite fitting into and accepting the mysteries of this world’ (2). The fact that ‘the aunt’ and ‘the uncle’ remain unnamed renders them shadowy, indistinct figures in the reader’s mind as well as the boy’s. ‘Summer Lightning’ opens with a description of the layout of the house belonging to the boy’s aunt and uncle: They always gave [the old man who visited each year] the garden room. No one called it by that name but that was how the boy thought about it. This room by some architectural whimsy completely unbalanced the house. There on one side were three large bedrooms and a bathroom, in the middle the kitchen and the dining room and what the uncle called the living room and his aunt the parlour, and on the far side this one bedroom. (1)

The detail that ‘the garden room’ is not the room’s official name but ‘how the boy thought about it’ indicates how only within a private fantasy world of his own making can he lay claim to a room as his own. Liliane Louvel has commented on the significance of this room’s naming, pointing out that ‘[t]he room itself partakes both of outside and inside: it is “the garden room”, it belongs to two worlds’.82 This notion that the ‘garden room’ is neither inside nor outside can be related to the status of the child, who is himself neither inside nor outside the household, in the sense that he is formally attached to it but experiences no sense of belonging. The idea that the room he identifies with ‘completely unbalanced’ the house reflects how the ‘order’ of his aunt’s and uncle’s life (9) is unsettled by his presence. Later in the story, the narrator briefly alludes to the boy’s family background; we are told that the uncle ‘was kindly’ and ‘even indulged the boy, for it was not his sister, after all, who had made the disastrous marriage’ (5). This passing comment could indicate that the boy’s father is dark skinned and lower class, and that the boy has been sent away from his immediate family to his aunt and uncle’s house in order to improve his prospects in life. The story never confirms this, but the glimpse that we are given of the boy’s origins disturbs the hermetic logic of the nuclear family model, just as the liminal status of the ‘garden room’, opening 82 Louvel, ‘Summer Lightning’, p. 43.

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Rural Communities both inwards into the enclosed and ordered space of the dining room and outwards into the expanse of a ‘tangled and overgrown garden’ (1), disrupts the self-containedness of the house. ‘Bright Thursdays’ deals with the experiences of a young girl whose dark-skinned and impoverished mother has sent her to live with the parents of her light-skinned and wealthy father, Bertram. Laura has never met her father, and the story builds up to her first encounter with him. In Working Miracles, Senior explains that while most ‘legislation in the Caribbean (inherited from English law) distinguishes between “legitimate” children born in wedlock and those who are “illegitimate,”’ children born outside the ‘stable residential union’ of their mother and father are ‘called throughout the Caribbean “outside children”’.83 Her explanation points to a discrepancy between the legal status of these children and their social status. Senior goes on to identify a difference between lower-income families and ‘the middle and upper strata where marriage is the norm’; while lower-income families ‘recognize the legal but not the social aspects’ of the status ‘legitimate/illegitimate’, wealthier families have in the past attached ‘considerable social stigma’ to illegitimacy, since their values are ‘derived from metropolitan countries’.84 The fact that members of Bertram’s family refer to his encounter with Laura’s mother, Miss Myrtle, as ‘Bertram’s mistake’ (40), along with Bertram’s ultimate dismissal of Laura as ‘the bloody little bastard’ (53), clarifies that they regard Laura as both socially and legally ‘illegitimate’. Like the protagonist of ‘Summer Lightning’, Laura, as an ‘outside child’ taken in by her father’s parents, is neither inside nor outside their household. She is initiated into its elaborate rituals of meal times and cleanliness, but remains emotionally detached from the family; her dark skin a constant reminder to them of what they see as her dubious origins. Laura remains on the periphery, haunting the ‘empty, echoing space’ (37) of her grandparents’ house as she ‘wandered from room to room and said nothing all day’ (46). Her insubstantial presence in the house threatens to erode the veneer of middle-class respectability announced by its ‘heavy mahogany furniture’ (36). As in ‘Summer Lightning’, there is a suggestion that the order and stability of this household, expressed in the well-polished and durable furniture as well as in the rigidity of its daily schedule, is upset by her existence within it: Laura’s fear that she and her grandparents ‘so unbalanced the [large mahogany] table that it would come toppling down on them’ (37) recalls the opening of ‘Summer Lightning’ with its description of the ‘garden room’ which ‘completely unbalanced the house’ (1). By the end of the story, Laura has internalised a middle-class valuing of whiteness, and has also accepted her own social status as an ‘illegitimate’ child. She feels ‘bitterly ashamed’ of her mother’s ‘dark face’ and ‘coarse shrill voice’, and reasons that ‘[k]nowing the mother she had come from, it was no 83 Senior, Working Miracles, p. 21. 84 Ibid., p. 21.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories wonder […] that her father could not acknowledge her’ (52). Her changing sense of self results from her experience of a household which is differently organised to the home she has left behind. Faced with the ordeal of a meal in her grandparents’ house, for which complicated ‘Table Manners’ must be learned (38), Laura compares it to the casual and improvised character of meals in her mother’s house, where they would eat with ‘whatever implement happened to be handy’ (37). Whereas her grandparents’ dining table has sufficient places for all 12 photographed family members, who ‘fitted neatly in their slots’ leaving ‘no place left for her’ (37), in her mother’s house family members would have no fixed positions, sitting ‘wherever their fancy took them’ (37), and would often not sit down at all. The layout of her mother’s house, with its flimsy ‘lean-to kitchen’ (37) which extends outwards to the washing basin outside, also differs significantly from the enclosed and clearly defined ‘Dining Room’ in her grandparents’ house (37), separated from the kitchen which is solely the domain of Mirie the cook. The openness of her mother’s house to the outdoors, and its indistinct boundaries, suggest that the status of an ‘outside child’ would be perceived differently in that setting. Whereas stories with middle-class settings such as ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’ feature children marginalised by their inside/outside status, other stories with lower-class settings present the fluid and extensive character of Caribbean family networks in a more positive light. Unlike the two stories discussed above, ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ is narrated in a version of Jamaican Creole rather than Standard English. While ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’ are narrated in the third person, ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ has a first-person narrator. The narrator is not a central character in the story, but nevertheless positions him or herself as part of the small village community he or she depicts. The style of narration has an oral quality to it; by opening sentences with phrases such as ‘Let me tell you […]’ and ‘But hear the one Patricia she […]’ (54), the narrator addresses the reader directly, drawing us into the story and inviting us to respond to or comment upon it. In this way, the story creates the illusion that we are in conversation with the narrator, and as such part of the gossiping community he/she describes. Like ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’, ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ deals with a conflict within a household. However, the nature of the conflict and its repercussions are very different in this story. The narrative centres on the experience of Papa Sterling, whose daughter Patricia returns from Kingston to rebuild his house so that it is suitable for her and her children to visit. Ignoring Papa Sterling’s protests, she sets a group of men to work with concrete, tiles and paint while he looks on in dismay, ‘wondering where the pretty little board house he build with his own two hands gone to’ (63). The narrator comments that ‘as the new house getting bigger and bigger Papa like he getting squeeze smaller and smaller and he spending less and less time there’ (63). Here Papa Sterling appears to be dispossessed of his land and property, cast out of his home by offspring whose desire to modernise outweighs their respect for the wishes of an elderly relative. 54

Rural Communities Senior’s story makes reference to the family land system which, according to Jean Besson, is rooted in the experience of plantation slavery. Besson describes how slave communities created a system of ‘unrestricted nonunilineal descent and applied it to the passing on of provision grounds’.85 For Besson, family land is ‘a creole institution created by Caribbean peasantries in the face of Euro-American land monopoly in the capitalist world economy’;86 she presents the initiation and perpetuation of the family land tradition as a mode of resistance to the colonial and neo-colonial exploitation of African Caribbean people, and as conducive to the continuing survival of rural Jamaican communities. Besson’s anthropological research focuses on Martha Brae, an African Caribbean peasant village in Trelawny, the parish in which Senior was born. She explains how family land in Martha Brae differs from legal land tenure in that rights to family land are ‘validated through the oral tradition’ and are ‘based on unrestricted cognatic descent, whereby all children and their descendants are considered heirs regardless of their gender, birth order, “legitimacy”, or residence, and marriage is not regarded as a basis for inheritance’.87 According to Besson, then, family land as it operates in Martha Brae differs significantly from the linear, patriarchal system of inheritance in Euro-American contexts in that it is more inclusive, encouraging an egalitarian sharing of land and property rather than individual ownership, avoiding hierarchies related to age or gender, and de-emphasising marriage. Whereas the legal system of land tenure, based on a European model, would disinherit an ‘illegitimate’ child, the more flexible and accommodating family land system endows ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ children with equal rights. The family land tradition, then, encourages the integration of ‘outside’ children into the family. The fact that ‘residence’ is not required as a basis for inheritance further suggests that the institution of family land allows for kinship networks which are dispersed and expansive, and which can survive the strain of mass migration. In some ways, ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ presents family land as a basis for social cohesion within a rural Jamaican village. Patricia’s rebuilding of her father’s house, despite the antagonism it generates, demonstrates how the family land system keeps dispersed families in contact and encourages them to return from the city or abroad. The character of Miss Myrtella, introduced as ‘a widow lady that come from a family round here but her daddy take her to England from she small’ (56), offers another example of this. We are presented with a convoluted narrative which first informs us that Miss Myrtella’s grandmother was born as a ‘daughter on the side’ (57), and goes on to reveal that Miss Myrtella herself is an ‘outside child’, since she is the daughter of a visiting bridge-builder rather than of the official ‘father’ who took her to England. Neither her family history nor the ‘speaky-spoky’ 85 Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, p. 142. 86 Ibid., p. 19. 87 Ibid., p. 140.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories (63) English accent and mannerisms that she acquired abroad prevent Miss Myrtella from ‘settl[ing] down on the family land’ (56) on her return to Jamaica. Her story therefore illustrates the inclusivity of a family land system which replaces a linear model of inheritance with an intricate network of familial connections, and which permits the reintegration of those estranged by time away. Miss Myrtella’s situation is markedly different to that of the child protagonists in ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’, who regard the houses they inhabit as their relatives’ property. This implies that in middle-class settings, the colonial legal tenure system dominates over the creolised family land tradition. While family land to some extent operates as a basis for social cohesion in this story, the village community is founded on more than shared family land. The narrator makes the following comment about the aftermath of Patricia’s first visit to Papa Sterling: After she gone Papa who is a very tricky man have it round the district as joke. Come cross the road to we and say how him getting a new house and we all laugh for all him ever get from the one Patricia is promise. (55)

Through the use of the pronoun ‘we’, in its Creole forms of both subject and object, the narrator situates her/himself as part of a gossiping community sharing Papa Sterling’s joke at Patricia’s expense. As the words ‘round the district’ indicate, the story travels quickly through the village. The narrator observes that as ‘news bout Papa new house spread […] all the boys dem start tease him’ (55), and this is followed by a series of comments and questions as ‘the boys’ elaborate upon his story, furnishing Papa Sterling’s imagined house with an array of luxurious items and modern conveniences which, in a village without electricity, seem to them far-fetched. In this way, the story is passed around among the villagers and communally told; the narrator becomes part of the crowd, one voice among many. The story’s mode of narration as well as its content illustrates the energy and liveliness of this close-knit village community. In the telling of her/his story, the narrator relies on stories told to her/him by other villagers. For example, he/she hears of Papa Sterling’s courtship with Miss Myrtella from Puncie, and tells us that ‘Puncie just like radio for as fast as she get anything she take it and broadcast it’ (63). In a remote village cut off from the country’s official broadcasting networks, the channels of gossip operate as an informal alternative, keeping the community up to date with the latest ‘news’. In this story, where the gossipers share Papa Sterling’s joke against his daughter and sympathise with his situation, gossip is presented as a means through which community is articulated and reinforced. As we have seen, ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’ are set mainly inside houses. The story of ‘Real Old Time T’ing’, however, takes place in public spaces; gossip occurs in the street – as is indicated when Papa Sterling ‘cross the road to we’ – in ‘Chinloy Shop’, and in ‘the piazza’ (55). Furthermore, compared to the rigid timetable which structures Laura’s life 56

Rural Communities with her grandparents, this story conveys a relaxed sense of time. This can be seen both in the behaviour of characters within the story, such as ‘them idlers playing domino’ (57) who have the time to discuss, retell and embellish Papa Sterling’s story, and also in the story’s nonlinear narrative structure. The stories of other villagers are embedded within the narrator’s account of Papa Sterling’s experience, and the main thread of her/his story sometimes gives way to anecdotes and asides. For example, mid-way through her/his account of Patricia’s visit to Miss Myrtella’s house, the narrator breaks off to describe a series of earlier occasions where Patricia had visited other villagers and pressured them to sell her their belongings. At other moments, events from the future interrupt the present time of narration. Commenting on Papa Sterling’s party, the narrator mentions that ‘pickney them eat cake and ice cream so till them all have nightmare that night’ and then adds ‘But that was later’ (64). This loosely structured and temporally disordered style of narration contrasts with the metaphoric density and tight economy of ‘Summer Lightning’ and ‘Bright Thursdays’, just as the story’s final image of the entire village crowding into Papa Sterling’s house and yard directly opposes the ‘too-ordered household[s]’ depicted within the earlier stories. In ‘Bright Thursdays’, Laura sometimes walks ‘down the driveway to the tall black gate hoping that some child would pass along and talk so that they could be friends’, but this prospect is foreclosed by her realisation that ‘she would never find anyone in this place good enough to bring into Miss Christie’s house’ (47). In ‘Real Old Time T’ing’, boundaries between families and the village community are less clearly demarcated. When Papa Sterling is pushed out of the family plot by his daughter, he is assisted by the villagers who deliberately hold back their gossip regarding his courtship with Miss Myrtella so that Patricia will not have the opportunity to ruin it, since ‘everybody round here really love Papa and would like to see him happy’ (63). Beyond Papa Sterling’s family unit, then, there is a wider community which ensures his wellbeing and integration. Whereas the stories set in middle-class households examine the loneliness, displacement and alienation of ‘outside children’, other stories such as ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ explore ways in which non-nuclear Jamaican families, often coextensive with a larger village community, can provide an effective support network. In Summer Lightning, a number of the stories each deal with a different experience of ‘child-shifting’. As a result, the collection builds up a picture of Caribbean families which works against the assumption underlying the research of structural functionalist anthropologists that the nuclear family is a universal norm which transcends social and cultural contexts. As we progress through the collection and encounter more examples of displaced children and absent parents, we are invited to consider that the fractured nuclear unit may be a characteristic feature of Jamaican families rather than an aberration. Moreover, the sprawling and open-ended non-nuclear family, reflected both in the unwieldy narrative form of stories such as ‘Real Old Time T’ing’, 57

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories and in the structure of a collection consisting of loosely connected stories, is celebrated in Senior’s fiction despite her consideration of the problems encountered by some ‘outside children’. Summer Lightning foregrounds the impact of class differences on the dynamics of families and households, an issue not sufficiently dealt with in anthropological theories of Caribbean family structures. In juxtaposing stories set in middle-class social milieux with stories set in lower-income rural communities, Senior suggests that the non-nuclear family is experienced differently in these two contrasting locales. By incorporating a range of narrative voices and perspectives into her story collection, she illustrates how the divergent social codes operating in different class settings impact on individuals’ understanding of their status as ‘outside children’. The village As we progress through Summer Lightning, the representation of Jamaican rural communities becomes increasingly complex and multifaceted; Senior’s affirmative portrayal of community as a source of cohesion and support in ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ is set against more critical insights into the constraints and exclusions that operate within village communities. The anthropological research of Sidney Mintz and Jean Besson on the social history of ‘free villages’, founded by Christian missionaries in post-emancipation rural Jamaica, provides a useful context for some of Senior’s stories. However, Senior’s depiction of rural communities is more ambivalent than that of Mintz or Besson. Mintz emphasises the enduring power of the Christian church and the continuing conformity of village people to colonial, European values. For Besson, the identity of Jamaican free village communities is based not upon the plantation and its legacies but instead upon collective resistance to the plantation system. She emphasises the subversive role of creolised forms of Christianity and of Christian marriage within village communities. Senior’s position is less consistent than either of these; her stories juxtapose instances of conformity and resistance. In Summer Lightning, Senior’s commentary on the history and social structure of Jamaican village communities is articulated through her characterisation of girls and women. The collection presents us with a variety of female characters, each of whom performs their femininity differently. Both Mintz and Besson distinguish their own approach to Caribbean rural communities from that of the structural functionalist anthropologists discussed in the previous section. Mintz draws attention to the historical orientation of his research, explaining how this enabled him to move beyond the preoccupation with kinship networks in the work of anthropologists such as M. G. Smith and R. T. Smith, who were trained according to the tradition of British social anthropology. He highlights how issues central to his own research on Caribbean rural communities, such as plantation agriculture and the formation of Caribbean peasantries, were overlooked in Caribbean 58

Rural Communities anthropology of the 1950s and 60s.88 In Martha Brae’s Two Histories (2002), Besson similarly comments on the dominance of kinship studies in Caribbean anthropology, and explains how her own methodology combines anthropological fieldwork with historical research in order to uncover ‘Martha Brae’s hidden Afro-Caribbean cultural history’.89 She notes that the early stages of her research on Martha Brae, influenced by the work of anthropologists such as Edith Clarke and M. G. Smith, reflected the ‘ahistorical’ approach typical of British social anthropology of the 1960s and 70s. However, she claims that her indebtedness to these ‘pioneers’ runs alongside her ‘critique of their interpretation of Jamaican family structure’.90 Besson also acknowledges the influence of Mintz’s work on the development of her methodology for the study of Martha Brae.91 In a 1987 essay, Mintz examines the formation of Jamaican free villages after Emancipation. He explains how these villages were founded by Baptist and Methodist missionaries who bought ruined estates in order to ‘resettle parishioners [emancipated slaves] as independent peasants in church communities’.92 Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Sturge Town, St Ann in 1952, Mintz considers the extent to which the original characteristics of these villages were still present in the 1950s. He points out that free villages such as Sturge Town can be distinguished from other Jamaican rural communities in that they were originally ‘artificially created nuclei of population, with a particular internal social structure’.93 This made them, at least initially, more ‘religiously homogenous’, more ‘socially definable’ and more geographically and ideologically ‘isolated’ than other rural communities.94 According to Mintz, a typical feature of these villages is the continuing dominance of the closely associated institutions of church and school: he comments that ‘the schools in the church-founded free villages are usually under church supervision even today’,95 and notes how in Sturge Town, the Baptist Church ‘was still the centre of social and recreational activities’ as well as the 88 Sidney W. Mintz, ‘The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages’ [1987], in Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings, ed. by Christine Barrow and Rhoda Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2001), pp. 940–53 (p. 952). 89 Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, p. xxi. 90 Ibid., p. xxii. 91 Besson makes the following acknowledgement: ‘[Mintz’s] ethnography on Caribbean plantation and peasant communities rang true with my professional and personal experience of the region, and his theoretical approach transformed my perspective on the Caribbean plantation-peasant interface. This led me to reassess and extend my methodology for the study of Martha Brae, a settlement at the heart of the Caribbean region, and resulted in my prolonged and more wide-ranging research on Martha Brae’s two histories up to 2001’. (p. xxii). See Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, p. xxii. 92 Mintz, ‘The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages’, p. 941. 93 Ibid., p. 948. 94 Ibid., pp. 947–48. 95 Ibid., p. 950.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories principle source of outside opportunities for young people.96 He comments on the ‘internal pressures for conformity’ among villages originally under strong missionary control and adds that church leaders continued to ‘exert influence in maintaining such conformity’ in the Sturge Town of the 1950s.97 Critics have commented on the ambivalence of Senior’s portrayal of Jamaican rural communities. Evelyn O’Callaghan observes that most of the stories in Summer Lightning ‘at once portray an almost idyllic community organically connected to the Jamaican landscape and reveal the frightening inadequacies in the society for the nurturing of the mature individual’.98 In a more recent study of Senior’s oeuvre, Denise deCaires Narain comments on the contradictory nature of the communities in Senior’s stories, depicted as ‘structures that provide support for children, in noisy, unpredictable, and generous ways’, but also as ‘structures that discipline children harshly into regimes of respectability shaped by religious conformity and hypocritical moral codes’.99 Senior’s critique of village life is expressed most prominently in ‘Ballad’, the final and longest story in the collection. The fictional village of Springville, the setting of ‘Ballad’, has many of the characteristics of the free villages founded by missionaries. Springville also features in ‘The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream’. We are told in that story that the ‘most imposing buildings in the village were the school and the Anglican church which were both on the main lane’, and that ‘the Baptists and the Seventh Day Adventists had their churches on the side road’ (91). As in the free villages described by Mintz, the Christian church is prominent here, in various forms, and the centrally located Anglican church is situated in close proximity to the school, which hints at the association between these key institutions. ‘Ballad’ explores the negative effects of a rural community’s social, cultural and geographic isolation. The style of this story is similar to that of ‘Real Old Time T’ing’ in that it is written in Jamaican Creole, narrated in the first person and directly addresses the reader in the second person, which gives it a conversational tone. The story opens with the statement: ‘Teacher ask me to write composition about The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Meet and I write three page about Miss Rilla and Teacher tear it up and say that Miss Rilla not fit person to write composition about’ (100). The story which follows centres on the character of Miss Rilla. From its outset, then, the story we are reading is presented as a deliberate transgression of the regulations of the schoolroom, in terms of both its form and content. The opening paragraph offers an early indication of the disapproval of Springville’s linked institutions of school and church towards a character such as Miss Rilla. 96 Ibid., p. 946. 97 Ibid., p. 949. 98 Evelyn O’Callaghan, ‘Feminist Consciousness: European/American Theory, Jamaican Stories’, Journal of Caribbean Studies, 6:2 (1988), 143–62 (p. 144). 99 deCaires Narain, Olive Senior, p. 20.

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Rural Communities In an interview, Senior gives the examples of ‘religion’ and ‘respectability’ as issues she feels strongly about, has rebelled against and tends to satirise in her work.100 In Summer Lightning, these issues are central to her portrayal of Jamaican village communities. As I will demonstrate in my analysis of three contrasting protagonists, the female characters in Senior’s stories respond in different ways to the social codes operating within their communities. The question of female ‘respectability’, closely linked to European and Christian values, has also been widely discussed in anthropological studies of Caribbean rural communities. In a study published in 1973, based on fieldwork in Providencia, which extends those findings to Caribbean island societies generally, Peter Wilson makes a direct link between the concept of respectability and the ‘white’ Christian church, arguing that the ‘mores advocated by the church, including especially monogamous marriage, are the ultimate referent for respectability’, and that this has led to an ‘emphasis on the nuclear family household as the ideal’.101 Wilson goes on to suggest that due to this close association between the church and the domestic sphere, respectability is primarily a female concern.102 He compares the ‘female-oriented’ Christian church to African-derived religions such as Rastafari, which, he says, ‘gives far greater play and emphasis to the male’ and is associated with anti-colonial politics.103 More recent studies have interrogated Wilson’s association of respectability with female identity. Drawing on her own fieldwork in Jamaica, Besson argues that ‘female cultural values in Martha Brae are not a mirror image of the Euro-centric value-system of respectability, but a transformation of this system within an Afro-Caribbean peasant culture of resistance in which women play a central role’.104 She notes that in a context where ‘[o]rthodox Baptist faith provided the formal framework of free village life’, many women were part of a counter-cultural movement as leaders in a creolised revival of Baptist Christianity.105 Besson further contends that women are not always confined to the domestic sphere, as Wilson proposes, but often ‘establish reputations among entrepreneurial roles’, the most significant of these being ‘markethiggler’.106 Barrow similarly critiques the prescriptive definition of gender roles in Wilson’s study and other structural functionalist interpretations of 100 Dominique Dubois and Jeanne Devoize, ‘Olive Senior - b. 1941’, Journal of the Short Story in English, 41 (Autumn 2003), 287–298 [accessed 23 January 2013], np. 101 Peter J. Wilson, Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of the Caribbean (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 100. 102 Ibid., p. 102. 103 Ibid., pp. 104–05. 104 Jean Besson, ‘Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered: A New Perspective on Afro-Caribbean Peasant Women’, in Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings, ed. by Barrow and Reddock, pp. 350–70 (p. 354). 105 Ibid., p. 358. 106 Ibid., p. 359.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Caribbean family structures, where ‘women were assumed to conform to the values of respectability’.107 She claims that this kind of stereotyped and standardised portrayal of women presents a ‘pattern of submissiveness, a preoccupation with home, motherhood and domesticity and an economic security derived from dependence on a man which is highly unlikely in the circumstances of poverty, unemployment and economic uncertainty in which many Caribbean women live’.108 Like Barrow, Senior is concerned, in her anthropological study of Caribbean women’s lives, with the disparity between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ images of femininity. She considers how Erna Brodber’s historical survey of ‘images projected in the press and church in the period 1938 to the present’ in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad identifies an imported model of femininity ‘whose being or purpose is derived from the existence of another, whether husband, father, or extended family, and whose locus is the home or household’, and adds that in Jamaica, the image of femininity also has physical properties: a woman should be ‘pale and delicate’.109 As Barrow points out, the model of absolute submissiveness to and dependence upon others is unrealistic in circumstances of unemployment and ‘economic uncertainty’, and another section of Senior’s book deals with the experiences of ‘working women’, showing that this imported model is not the norm in Caribbean societies. Additionally, bearing in mind the fact that the majority of Jamaica’s population is of African descent, the ideal of whiteness is not only unrealistic but in most cases impossible to achieve. Senior’s stories, including ‘Ballad’, contain conflicting images of women, some illustrating the stereotype of female respectability, and others subverting it. Through her representation of women, Senior examines the pressure placed on Jamaican women to conform to an imported ideal, drawing attention to the debilitating effects of this on the psychological development of girls. At the same time, her stories dramatise acts of resistance against the stereotype of female respectability, suggesting that its ideological influence within Jamaican village communities may be considerable but is not absolute. The protagonist of ‘Bright Thursdays’, Laura, conforms to an imported ideal of female respectability. In an interview, Senior remarks that her short stories are often structured ‘around a central image’.110 In ‘Bright Thursdays’, that image is the professional photograph of Laura sent to her grandparents by her mother. The picture is described as follows: It was a posed, stilted photograph in a style that went out of fashion thirty years before. The child was dressed in a frilly white dress trimmed with 107 Barrow, Family in the Caribbean, p. 24. 08 Christine Barrow, ‘Anthropology, the Family and Women in the Caribbean’, in 1 Gender and Caribbean Development, ed. by Patricia Mohammed and Catherine Shepherd (University of the West Indies, Women and Development Studies Project, 1988), pp. 156–69 (p. 162). 109 Senior, Working Miracles, p. 41. 110 Simpson, ‘In-Between Worlds’, p. 12.

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Rural Communities ribbons, much too long for her. She wore long white nylon socks and white T-strap shoes. Her hair was done in perfect drop curls, with a part to the side and two front curls caught up in a large white bow. In the photograph she stood quite straight with her feet together and her right hand stiffly bent to touch an artificial rose in a vase on a rattan table beside her. She did not smile. (42)

The excess of white in this image – a ‘frilly white dress’, white socks and shoes, a ‘large white bow’ – highlights how Laura’s mother has dressed her to match an ideal of white female respectability. The length of the dress is presumably intended to denote the sexual modesty befitting a respectable young girl. Laura’s ‘perfect drop curls’ and the ‘artificial’ rose accompanying her in the picture draw attention to the synthetic quality of the image, which is too ‘perfect’ to be realised and exists only as a figment of her mother’s imagination. The photograph depicts an externally controlled performance of femininity, and the words ‘stilted’ and ‘stiffly’ emphasise the awkwardness of that performance. As the story develops, and Laura becomes increasingly submissive and silent, she is gradually reduced to the contrived image in the photograph. In ‘Do Angels Wear Brassieres?’, Senior presents us with a very different performance of femininity. In some ways this performance is, like Laura’s, an imitation of the white ideal of female respectability: wearing her aunt’s jewellery, hat, shawl and high-heeled shoes, Beccka parades in front of her aunt’s mirror. However, the description of Beccka ‘mincing and prancing, prancing and mincing’ (71) adds a playful element to the performance and suggests that she is parodying the affectation of a ‘lady’s’ behaviour (71). Laura’s performance is orchestrated by her mother, with the help of a professional photographer; Laura has no control over it. Beccka’s performance, however, is an act of transgression, since Auntie Mary’s room is ‘forbidden’ territory (71), and is choreographed entirely by herself. Having assumed the image of respectable femininity, Beccka then distorts it when she imagines herself doing the ‘wickedest’, ‘second wickedest’ and ‘third wickedest’ things ‘a woman can do’, which involves drinking, entering a nightclub, and dancing (71–2). In this way, Beccka breaks the code of behaviour to which her performance is supposed to adhere. In ‘Ballad’, Senior tells the story of a female character who refuses to fit the mould of respectable femininity. The narrator, Lenora, remarks that ‘[b]efore Miss Rilla laughing I never hear woman really laugh before, think only man know how to give deep belly laugh’ (104). Her first encounter with Miss Rilla, then, leads her to question the fixity of gender roles. This reference to Miss Rilla’s raucous laughter stands in direct opposition to Laura’s unsmiling silent pose in ‘Bright Thursdays’. Miss Rilla’s deviation from the prescribed behaviour and attitude of a ‘respectable’ woman is also evidenced in her role as a market higgler. Travelling each week to Kingston to sell baked goods, Miss Rilla strays from the domestic sphere and the linked locale of the church, and enters into the public domain of economic activity. It is perhaps partly due to 63

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories this frequent interaction with the world beyond the village that she is not, like MeMa and other village women, psychologically enclosed within Springville’s Christian value system. Wilson explores the function of gossip in Caribbean island communities, proposing that it is through gossip that the ‘female value of respectability’ can be ‘eroded or kept in bounds’.111 Gossip surrounding Miss Rilla’s lack of respectability, which constitutes the substance of the narrative, does seem to operate as a basis for social cohesion in this story. Whereas in ‘Real Old Time T’ing’, the gossiping community serves as a support network which ensures Papa Sterling’s welfare, in ‘Ballad’, Senior reveals another side to village life, showing how close-knit rural communities can exclude those who do not conform and integrate. The women in this story are brought together in a mutual critique of Miss Rilla’s appearance, behaviour and way of life. Lenora describes how when Miss Rilla walked past the house ‘in her pretty red dress and her new head tie and some big gold earring hanging down’ (102), Lenora’s stepmother MeMa would greet her cordially, before gathering together with two other women to discuss her ‘brazen’ application of rouge, her outsized earrings and her audacity in wearing Poppa D’s boots (103). Their rejection of Miss Rilla brings them together, reinforcing the dominant ideology to which they all subscribe. Raymond T. Smith asserts, with reference to the ‘dual marriage system’ in Jamaica, that ‘it is wrong to explain a structured system of social practices in terms of the motives of individuals who act within it; the motives themselves are partially derived from the structure that sustains and reproduces them’.112 For Senior, however, assessing the actions of individuals, and their varying responses to the social structures of which they are a part, is essential to an understanding of communities. Summer Lightning presents us with a variety of female characters, some of whom conform to the Eurocentric ideal of respectability while others do not. Beccka’s satirical imitation of the respectable middle-class ‘lady’ is enacted in front of her Auntie Mary’s ‘three-way adjustable mirror’ (71). The three connected mirrors, positioned at different angles, offer varying images of Beccka. Furthermore, their ‘adjustable’ function provides Beccka with the opportunity to alter the angle of the mirrors and thereby distort the self-images with which they present her. The three-way mirror serves as a metaphor for the way in which female identity is refracted across the stories in Summer Lightning: in ‘Bright Thursdays’, Laura eventually submits to a European ideal of female respectability; in ‘Do Angels Wear Brassieres’, Beccka mocks that ideal; and in ‘Ballad’, Miss Rilla rejects it entirely. Notably, whereas ‘Bright Thursdays’ is written in Standard English, the two stories where the notion of female respectability is challenged are narrated in a form of Jamaican Creole. 111 Wilson, Crab Antics, p. 165. 112 Raymond T. Smith, The Matrifocal Family: Power, Pluralism and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 62.

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Rural Communities Senior thus conveys a more nuanced picture of Jamaican village life than Wilson, whose structuralist approach to his subject matter relies on associations between the oppositions female/male, respectability/reputation, Christian/Rastafari. Her stories confirm Mintz’s observation that the social structure introduced to Jamaica’s free villages by the Christian missionaries who founded them continued to shape the lives of villagers in the 1950s. Yet the stories also suggest that the linked institutions of church and school do not necessarily determine the identities of individuals; Senior’s fiction explores the potential for girls and women to negotiate their roles within the village community. Whereas Besson emphasises the part played by women within an ‘Afro-Caribbean peasant culture of resistance’,113 in Senior’s stories resistance to a European ideal of respectability is only one of many positions adopted by female characters. Drawing together an assortment of female protagonists and narrators, some of whom accept the constraints of village life while others react against the role ascribed to them, Summer Lightning illustrates the heterogeneity of female identity in the context of Jamaican rural communities. O’Callaghan identifies in Senior’s short story collections the ‘sounding of the personal note’ and ‘attention to emotional response’,114 and deCaires Narain notes how Senior ‘always embeds the drama of an individual’s struggle within the context of community’.115 The psychological depth of Senior’s stories, and their emphasis on individual responses to and negotiations of social structures at the level of the family and village, distinguishes them from the work of Caribbean anthropologists. Moreover, the form of the short story collection facilitates a mode of ethnography distinct from those offered by anthropologists such as Clarke, M. G. Smith, Besson or Mintz. Senior offers the following observation on her own literary practice: I am trying to take the author out of the story [...] what I wanted to do was give voice to others. And if I’m going to give them voice, I need to give them room to speak. I know it’s artifice, but I want to create scenarios where my characters can speak directly to the reader.116

Although the stories in Summer Lightning are informed by Senior’s own childhood experiences,117 Senior’s own voice recedes in those stories where the narrators identify themselves as members of the community being depicted and allow the voices of other community members to invade the narrative. The structure of the short story collection, enabling Senior to

13 Besson, ‘Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered’, p. 354. 1 114 O’Callaghan, ‘Feminist Consciousness’, p. 147. 115 Denise deCaires Narain, ‘Olive Senior’, in Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Third Series (Detroit, MI: Gale, 1996), pp. 340–48 (p. 344). 116 Simpson, ‘In-Between Worlds’, p. 14. 117 Senior says that there are ‘autobiographical elements’ in her stories that are ‘perhaps strongest in the first set of stories’. Simpson, ‘In-Between Worlds’, p. 14.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories create a number of protagonists in differing social settings, adds to this impression of many voices. James Clifford calls for a new mode of ethnography which would render ‘negotiated realities as multisubjective’.118 The voices in Senior’s stories are heavily mediated by her own authorial voice, as she herself acknowledges when she says ‘I know it’s artifice’. However, Summer Lightning gestures towards the kind of multivocal rendering of community that Clifford describes. The short story form allows Senior to experiment with a variety of subject positions; her fiction at once incorporates and moves beyond her own perspective. From country to city in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories Trinidad’s consumer culture: anthropological perspectives In his essay ‘Caribbean Folk Culture within the Process of Modernisation’ (1987), Lovelace expresses a profound unease towards a form of modernisation imposed on Trinidad from without, rather than developed organically from within. He is concerned that the import of foreign technologies is accompanied by the adoption of foreign cultural models and the value systems they encompass, and he considers the implications of this for the identity and self-image of an emerging nation. He observes: ‘Increasingly, as we have been bombarded with these technologies and ideas, we are being forced to raise the question: Who are we? What are we bringing into the world in which we live? Are we simply to consume what has been imposed on us?’119 The latter question informs the short stories in A Brief Conversion and Other Stories, published a year later, which deal with the impact of Trinidad’s growing consumer culture on the inhabitants of rural communities. Both the essay and the short story collection were published not long after Trinidad’s oil boom of the 1970s and the subsequent recession in the 1980s, and their critique of ‘modernisation’ and consumerism can be read, at least in part, as a response to these events and their repercussions. Anthropological studies of Trinidad in the 1970s and 80s have similarly focused on the oil boom and its aftermath. Daniel Miller’s Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad (1997) is based on fieldwork undertaken between 1987 and 1989, in four communities on the periphery of Chaguanas in North East Trinidad; Steven Vertovec’s ‘Oil Boom and Recession in Trinidad Indian Villages’ (1990) offers a case study of the village of Penal Rock Road in Southern Trinidad, 15 miles from San Fernando;

118 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, p. 15. 19 Earl Lovelace, ‘Caribbean Folk Culture within the Process of Modernisation’ 1 [1987], in Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays), ed. by Funso Aiyejina (San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon Trinidad, 2003), pp. 25–29 (p. 25).

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Rural Communities and Kevin Yelvington’s Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (1995) contains an ethnography of factory workers in Port of Spain based on participant-observation fieldwork undertaken between 1986 and 1987. Whereas the anthropologists whose work I discussed in relation to Olive Senior’s stories are all of Jamaican origin, Miller, Vertovec and Yelvington are not from the Caribbean region. Despite Vertovec’s insistence in a review of the anthropology of Caribbean East Indians that we ‘must all appreciate the studies of anthropologists within their own given methodological milieux’ and that we must also ‘be aware of anthropologists’ interests and intents and the manner in which they describe their observations’,120 neither he nor Miller nor Yelvington examine their own position in relation to their subject matter. Miller’s and Yelvington’s ethnographies begin with an introduction describing the context of the fieldwork and the challenges encountered, but there is no mention of how their own social and cultural backgrounds impacted on the fieldwork. In fact, Yelvington criticises the self-conscious and reflexive mode of ethnography endorsed by the contributors to Clifford’s and Marcus’ Writing Culture. He believes that an emphasis on the subjectivity and social location of the anthropologist is incompatible with ‘politically aware’ anthropology. Despite Producing Power’s central interest in power relations within a workplace and how they are informed by ethnicity, gender and class, he refrains from positioning himself within the ‘culture of domination’ he is investigating.121 He argues that incorporating the ‘subjective views’ of the factory workers could be misleading since the domination he describes is ‘insidious, hidden, and contorted, and the actors are not necessarily consciously aware of the full extent of its workings’.122 This line of reasoning indicates that he considers himself to be removed from the situation he analyses and, as a result, able to comment with an objectivity unavailable to his co-workers. Although their work resists the ‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology,123 the methodology of Miller, Vertovec and Yelvington departs from the conventions of traditional ethnography in another way. Their studies can be located within a different development in the field, in the 1990s, when – as Vered Amit notes – anthropologists ‘took up the popular and scholarly preoccupation with globalization, diasporas, deterritorialization and transnational fields’.124 In each of the anthropological texts discussed here, analysis of the fieldwork is preceded by a chapter or section which locates the ethnography in its

120 Steven Vertovec, ‘East Indians and Anthropologists: A Critical Review’, Social and Economic Studies, 40:1 (1991), 133–69 (p. 155). 121 Yelvington, Producing Power, p. 6. 122 Ibid., p. 6. 123 Bruner, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 124 Vered Amit, ‘Reconceptualizing Community’, in Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments, ed. by Vered Amit (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–20 (p. 9).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories historical, political and socioeconomic contexts. This involves looking beyond the confines of the community under study to the wider phenomena in which it is embedded, such as patterns of migration, urbanisation, the development of the nation-state, and globalisation. Writing in 1991, Vertovec identifies his own work as part of a ‘new’ approach in anthropology of ‘combining anthropology and history’.125 Miller’s study is similarly historically grounded, and one of his explicitly stated aims is to explore ‘the nexus of political and economic power relations on an international scale as they have operated in Trinidad’, and relate this to ‘the local political and economic context’ of the factory workers.126 With their interest in the relationship between the local, national and global, all three scholars move beyond anthropology’s earlier focus on bounded and isolated ‘primitive’ communities, and in doing so encroach on what – as Miller explains – was once the domain of sociology.127 While Yelvington’s study focuses on Trinidad’s capital city, Miller and Vertovec deal with the impact of mass consumerism on Trinidad’s rural communities, examining both the tensions, and the increasing overlap, between rural and urban locales. Yelvington, Miller and Vertovec each offer an account of the 1970s oil boom and its impact on Trinidadian communities. Yelvington locates Trinidad’s oil boom in the years 1973–80 and explains that it resulted from ‘action by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)’ which ‘drove up worldwide oil prices in 1973’.128 He acknowledges the positive short-term effects of the boom, which drastically increased the country’s revenues, enabling Eric Williams’ PNM government to create new jobs ‘especially for the black, urban working classes’.129 At the same time he draws attention to the longer-term negative consequences of the boom, which ‘started a consumption binge that relied heavily on foreign goods, especially food, that undermined local production’.130 Yelvington considers the oil boom’s cultural, as well as economic, repercussions. He comments on how Trinidad’s ‘rapidly created middle class’ acquired a taste for foreign goods and shopping trips to Miami and, as a result, ‘became more familiar with “American culture”’.131 Whereas Yelvington’s account suggests that this change in consumption practices entailed a dilution of Trinidadian cultural identity, Miller and Vertovec comment on the potential within rural and suburban communities for either resisting or creatively appropriating the consumer culture generated by the oil boom. Vertovec discusses the experiences of inhabitants in the village 25 Vertovec, ‘East Indians and Anthropologists’, p. 154. 1 126 Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1997), p. 41. 127 Miller describes the traditional divide between anthropology and sociology, ‘the latter’s task being to explicate the attributes of modern societies’. Ibid., p. 17. 128 Yelvington, Producing Power, p. 63. 129 Ibid., pp. 63–64. 130 Ibid., p. 64. 131 Ibid., p. 65.

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Rural Communities of Penal Rock Road, located approximately 15 miles from San Fernando, the island’s second largest urban area after Port of Spain. He describes the physical changes in the village as a result of the oil boom: ‘cement and brick houses have replaced many of the wooden houses, and most have electricity. Cars and vans are found in many homes. Televisions, refrigerators, stereos, and even video recorders are now common household items’.132 Vertovec argues that these alterations to Penal Rock Road village life ‘did not dissipate Indian social or cultural institutions or values’. He comments on how the extended family model persisted despite the fact that young married couples could afford their own houses; girls continued to submit to their parents’ decisions regarding a marriage partner despite their access to a higher standard of education; stereos and videos ‘were utilised primarily for Hindu imports from India, creating more vivid models of “Indian-ness” than ever before’; and family-based Hindu rituals, sponsored by money generated by the oil boom, ‘proliferated in number, kind, and extensiveness’.133 Vertovec draws from his findings the conclusion that ‘Indian social and cultural life not only survived rapid economic development, but actually benefited from it’.134 In his study of four communities on the periphery of Chaguanas, Miller challenges what he sees as a ‘consensual theory’ regarding the effects of the oil boom which pervades ‘academic and official discourse’ and the news media: the ‘theme of affluence as the loss of authenticity’. He proposes that this ‘neo-global rhetoric’ is not reflected in ‘popular sentiment and cultural response’.135 The main argument that emerges from Miller’s study is that ‘contrary to the dominant discourse on the effects of mass consumption, it is precisely through consumption that the specificity of Trinidadian culture is constructed and in the main preserved’.136 This argument is illustrated through his examination of the traditional Trinidadian festival of Christmas, which incorporates imported goods and images while retaining a cultural specificity which distinguishes it from Christmas as a globalised commercial discourse. The arguments made by both Vertovec and Miller, then, complicate Lovelace’s question, ‘Are we simply to consume what has been imposed on us?’, presenting us with modes of consumption that are far from simple. Lovelace’s short story collection A Brief Conversion offers a more ambivalent take on the effects of Trinidad’s growing consumer culture on its rural communities. While Miller and Vertovec emphasise the benefits of the oil boom, arguing that Trinidadian cultural specificity is not diminished by, but 132 Steven Vertovec, ‘Oil Boom and Recession in Trinidad Indian Villages’, in South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, ed. by Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach and Steven Vertovec (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 89–111 (p. 102). 133 Ibid., p. 103. 134 Ibid., p. 103. 135 Miller, Modernity, p. 205. 136 Ibid., p. 206.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories rather articulated through, consumption practices, Lovelace’s stories highlight the vulnerability of rural communities in the face of global capitalism and the attendant trend of migration to urban and metropolitan centres. Whereas Yelvington privileges his own interpretation of his subject matter over the ‘subjective views’ of factory workers, Lovelace’s stories combine a variety of voices and perspectives. The critique of consumerism that we see in his essay ‘Caribbean Folk Culture within the Process of Modernisation’ is only one of the many, often divergent, opinions presented in the stories. Individual stories feature conversations between characters with differing outlooks, and across the collection, stories set in the same place are told by various narrators who position themselves differently in relation to the community they describe. As I will go on to discuss in more detail below, the stories articulate a tension between tradition and modernity, community and individualism, and a related opposition between social or cultural capital and monetary capital. Activities such as traditional Trinidadian Christmas celebrations, liming and cricket are valued by some of Lovelace’s characters as providing the basis for a community spirit in rural Trinidad, and dismissed by others as financially unviable. While Lovelace’s nonfiction might invite us to align him with the former position, these competing attitudes remain unresolved in the story collection. It is true that certain characters take a moral standpoint on the plight of Trinidad’s rural communities. However, unlike Vertovec’s, Miller’s and Yelvington’s anthropological studies, Lovelace’s story collection does not offer a consistent position on the issues it explores. The fragmented form of A Brief Conversion enables shifts in narrative point of view. Christmas in small-town communities Critical writing on Lovelace’s fiction has often focused on his portrayal of Carnival,137 but another Trinidadian festival, Christmas, is equally prominent in A Brief Conversion, featuring in four of the 13 stories. Through his 137 See, for example, Nicole King, ‘Performance and Tradition in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion: The Drama of the Everyday’, in Caribbean Literature After Independence, ed. by Schwarz, pp. 111–29; Carolyn Cooper, ‘“Self Searching for Substance”: The Politics of Style in Earl Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion and Other Stories’, Anthurium, 4:2 (2006) open access journal: [accessed 22 January 2013]; John Thieme, ‘“All o’ We is One”: Carnival Forms and Creolisation in The Dragon Can’t Dance’, in Caribbean Literature after Independence, ed. by Schwarz, pp. 146–60; Diana Brydon, ‘Trusting the Contradictions: Competing Ideologies in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance’, English Studies in Canada, 15:3 (1989), 319–35; Linden Lewis, ‘Masculinity and the Dance of the Dragon: Reading Lovelace Discursively’, Feminist Review, 59 (Summer 1998), 164–85; Angelita Reyes, ‘Carnival: Ritual Dance of the Past and Present in Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance’, World Literature Written in English, 24:1 (1984), 107–20.

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Rural Communities portrayal of Christmas, Lovelace explores the tension between adherence to long-standing cultural traditions and participation in a consumer culture which characterises the small-town community of Cunaripo. Christmas is discussed in detail in Miller’s anthropological study. He acknowledges that as the ‘climax of yearly expenditure’, Christmas is recognised as ‘the key festival of consumerism’, and that the ‘relationship between Christmas and commerce has become a world-wide phenomenon’. However, as already mentioned, his study highlights the ‘specific character’ of a ‘Trini Christmas’, presenting this as evidence of the ‘particular nature of Trinidadian consumerism’.138 He draws attention to the use of decorations such as ‘holly, Santa Claus and paper festoons, in white, scarlet and green’, and artificial Christmas trees, all of which belong to ‘an international range of Christmas symbols’.139 Miller also documents a variety of Christmas consumables which are not recognisable as part of a globalised Christmas discourse, but which are essential components of the traditional ‘Trini Christmas’. These include homemade drinks such as sorrel and ginger beer, purchased drinks such as rum, cola and beer, a ham, a meat pasty called a pastelle, ‘black’ cake, sponge or sweet bread, apples and grapes. The latter two items are imported goods and yet, along with the other items, are symbolic of an authentic Trinidadian Christmas.140 Miller identifies parang music as another key symbol of ‘Trini Christmas’. He describes the tradition, derived from Venezuelan immigrants, of parang bands consisting of ‘small groups of musicians with instruments such as the cuatro and the box bass’, singing Christmas songs in Spanish, who would go from house to house on Christmas evening.141 He adds that although calypso and soca tunes are also played on the radio at Christmas time, parang music ‘has a distinct edge as symbolically evocative, especially of some past period when it was itself more common’.142 With this comment he alludes to the nostalgic quality of parang music, which continues to be associated with a ‘proper’ Trinidadian Christmas but, at the time of his fieldwork in the late 1980s, was seldom actually played live within people’s houses as it used to be. Parang music therefore serves to revive the memory of a tradition which has almost died out. For Miller this retrospective fixation on parang is just one element of a festival which operates through nostalgia; he comments that ‘[n]ostalgia is the self-consciousness of tradition and Christmas is thoroughly nostalgic’.143 In Lovelace’s short story collection, we are introduced to a traditional Trinidadian Christmas in the first and title story, ‘A Brief Conversion’. The narrator, Travey, tells us how his father would leave home in the days leading 38 Miller, Modernity, p. 83. 1 139 Ibid., p. 86. 140 Ibid., pp. 89–90. 141 Ibid., pp. 90–91. 142 Ibid., p. 91. 143 Ibid., p. 133.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories up to Christmas to play his cuatro with his parang band, returning to perform for the family on Christmas day: […] with the rest of the band, he would enter, like a stranger, the drawing room, with its curtains and its polish and its paint, with everything already on the table, the rum and the wine and the ham and the sweetbread and the ginger beer and the sorrel and the cake, the magnificent testament of [Travey’s mother’s] servitude, the yearly affirmation of her martyrdom and reproach. […] And he would play music and sing and eat and drink and leave with them, returning home maybe a day or two later, not content simply with making the rounds of the village, but, finding it necessary to go by his sister in Valencia, by his brother-in-law in Sangre Grande or by one of his cousins in Biche.144

This scene contains many of the cultural symbols of a traditional Trinidadian Christmas as described by Miller: rum, ginger beer, sorrel, a ham, sweetbread and ‘black’ cake. However, while Miller’s discussion of Christmas emphasises how the sharing of food and drink and the social interaction characterising Christmas celebrations reinforce a sense of community within the household, this passage is overshadowed by the resentment of Travey’s mother. The rituals of Christmas day serve here to highlight and intensify fractures within the family rather than affirm its cohesion; the father enters ‘like a stranger’, emotionally disengaged from his family. The substantial labour involved in cleaning and refurbishing the house and preparing a large amount of food is presented as evidence of Travey’s mother’s ‘servitude’ and ‘martyrdom’. Travey’s first-person narration, focalised through his mother’s thoughts, has a critical edge to it: Travey’s father’s activity of travelling from house to house in a parang band is displayed here as selfish and capricious behaviour on the part of a father who avoids his social role as a family man. However, the fact that the parang band’s travels take them not only around Cunaripo, but also into a family network extending beyond it, to his sister, brother-in-law and cousin in nearby villages and small towns, suggests that Travey’s father’s neglect of his immediate family during the festive period is motivated not by selfishness but rather by a sense of responsibility to a wider community. His father’s remark, ‘[s]omebody have to keep it up’ (9), associates his behaviour with an acceptance rather than a shirking of social responsibilities. This idea re-emerges more prominently in the later story ‘Those Heavy Cakes’. ‘Those Heavy Cakes’ begins as follows: ‘They used to live in Old Road in Cunaripo, and for him Christmas was the best time’ (81). Whereas in ‘A Brief Conversion’ we see Christmas through the eyes of a young boy, this opening sentence sets the story firmly in the narrator’s past, and indicates that the third-person narration is based on a nostalgic memory of Christmas. The 144 Earl Lovelace, A Brief Conversion and Other Stories (New York: Persea Books, 2003 [1988]), pp. 8–9. All further references to this edition will be marked in parentheses in the text.

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Rural Communities title ‘Those Heavy Cakes’ immediately associates the story with a traditional Trinidadian Christmas, of which ‘black’ cake is a central component. In many ways, the two opening paragraphs of the story enact a repetition of the passage dealing with Christmas in ‘A Brief Conversion’. Accompanied by the music of a visiting parang band, the following scene is described: brown was the colour: the reddish brown of the mahogany stain of the floor and table, and the lighter brown of the rum and the nearly black brown of the cake and the lustrous polished brown of the skin in which the ham was boiled, with sticks of clove in it; and the smell was varnish and paint and new linoleum from the kitchen; and the sounds was [sic] ‘Merry Christmas’ and laughing and glasses clinking. (82)

The details of rum, ‘black’ cake, a ham, new paint and polish are all present in the passage quoted earlier, but whereas in ‘A Brief Conversion’ they are merely listed, here they are described with an intricacy that illustrates the narrator’s emotional investment in each item. The narrator’s association of the scene with a particular colour, smell and sound reminds us of its status as distant memory triggered by the senses. The sounds of talking, laughter and glasses clinking introduce an atmosphere of convivial social interaction that is missing from the similar passage in ‘A Brief Conversion’. Whereas in the earlier story, the account of Christmas focuses on the physical and emotional absence of the father from the family unit, the narrator of this story presents us with a house crammed full of people, reflecting that it ‘used to be like it was the whole village that came in, their house was so small’ and it ‘was so packed nobody could move’ (82). The household becomes an inclusive space which opens itself up to a community beyond the family. While the Christmas scene in ‘A Brief Conversion’ focuses on the fracturing of Travey’s immediate family, this story emphasises how the rituals of Christmas serve to renew the bonds of community within Cunaripo. The father’s comment, ‘[s]omebody have to keep it up’ (83), an exact reiteration of Travey’s father’s words in ‘A Brief Conversion’, acquire a clearer meaning here, highlighting the role of cultural traditions such as Christmas in preserving a sense of community within the intersecting networks of the small-town community and the extended family. ‘Those Heavy Cakes’ charts a shift on the part of the family away from the community-centred traditional Trinidadian Christmas and towards a consumer capitalist model of Christmas where money is spent on presents for individuals and is contained within the nuclear family unit. The father in ‘Those Heavy Cakes’ begins to question the Trinidadian Christmas tradition he has followed for years, saying to his family: ‘You can’t waste money so. You can’t waste money buying all these things for people to come in and eat and drink. And when Christmas done, what happen? What? What all this for?’ (82). This outburst marks the beginning of the family’s changing values, as they move three times, each time into a larger house. The father suggests here that contributing to festivities which sustain the community spirit is a ‘waste’ of the family’s resources since it prevents the family from accumulating 73

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories material wealth. The ending of the story describes the two children receiving the gifts they had wanted and playing with them individually, seeing but not interacting with the other children on the street. The father is disappointed by the cake made with a ‘fancy recipe’ which is much lighter than the traditional ‘black’ cake (84), and he is also unnerved by the quietness of the street. The image of a small, noisy and overcrowded house on Old Road, which seemed to contain within it the entire neighbourhood, is replaced with this final image of a spacious, silent and empty house, where the family attempts to revive the spirit of a traditional Christmas by playing outdated parang music on a stereo, itself a symbol of the modern technology which has replaced Cunaripo’s oral traditions. The fact that the family’s movement to a more affluent neighbourhood is accompanied by a reinforcement of the boundaries of the family as a nuclear unit reminds us that, as discussed earlier in this chapter, the nuclear family is a European cultural model aspired to by some Caribbean families seeking to raise their social status. Whereas according to Miller’s anthropological study the traditional Trinidadian Christmas reaffirms the family ‘as a moral and expressive order’,145 Lovelace’s fictional representations of Christmas dramatise a conflict between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ values, and between an investment in the self-contained, nuclear family unit and a sense of responsibility towards a wider community underpinned with family connections. This unresolved conflict is played out in various ways within and between the four stories which feature Christmas. While Miller’s anthropological study seeks to identify a shared value system underlying the communities he analyses, Lovelace’s short story collection gives voice to conflicting value systems which – for him – characterise rural life in Trinidad. The country and the city Raymond Williams considers how in the nineteenth century, due to the expansion of the British Empire, the ‘traditional relationship between city and country was […] thoroughly rebuilt on an international scale’ as ‘[d]istant lands became the rural areas of industrial Britain’.146 As a former colony, Trinidad was one of these new ‘rural areas’ of industrial Britain. Lovelace’s stories both invoke and complicate the idea of rural Trinidad as peripheral to the island’s capital city, Port of Spain, and of Trinidad, in turn, as peripheral to the colonial metropolis. The stories comment on the perception, among inhabitants of the ‘remote town’ (37) of Cunaripo, that cultural life and economic opportunities are to be found elsewhere, drawing attention to the problems resulting from that way of thinking. Both the stories in A Brief Conversion and the characters within them move between Cunaripo and Port of Spain. As I will discuss in 145 Miller, Modernity, p. 100. 46 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Frogmore, St Albans: Paladin, 1975 1 [1973]), p. 336.

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Rural Communities detail below, the story collection blurs the boundaries between rural and urban locales. By examining the relationship of the rural to the urban, the national and the global, Lovelace’s stories interrogate the fiction of the bounded community, a key trope in traditional anthropology. The sequence of three connected stories based in Port of Spain, ‘The Fire Eater’s Journey’, ‘The Coward’ and ‘The Fire Eater’s Return’, set in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s respectively, deal with the build-up to the oil boom, the boom years and the subsequent recession. The character Blues’ movement from Cunaripo to Port of Spain positions him within a socioeconomic trend of migration from the countryside to the island’s urban areas which accompanied the oil boom.147 Blues is attracted to the city as a hub of commercial activity; his friend Santo, who narrates his story, says that he ‘could sense from [Blues] a genuine delight at being at last part of the people, part of the centre of things, there among the shoppers and the newspaper hawkers and coconut vendors’ (39). Vertovec describes how during the oil boom ‘the island society quickly became absorbed in an “easy money,” free spending, consumptiondominated ethos’, noting that the ‘number of cars in the country increased by 65% between 1974 and 1980, and the number of televisions trebled over the decade’.148 Elsewhere, he argues that the ‘radical economic developments’ in this period benefited Trinidad’s East Indian communities, leading to ‘a kind of renaissance’ of Indian culture, according to some East Indians.149 The experiences of a rural migrant negotiating Port of Spain, depicted in Lovelace’s story trilogy, offer an insight into how the city’s wealth was experienced differently by different social and ethnic groups. Whereas Vertovec’s study focuses on the benefits of capitalist expansion for East Indian Trinidadians, Lovelace’s stories explore its adverse effects on Trinidad’s predominantly black urban lower-income population. Percy Hintzen comments on the dependence of Trinidad’s economy on foreign oil companies since the 1940s, and the continuing power of those companies over the economy due to the decision of Trinidad’s post-independence government to enter into joint ventures with foreign multinationals rather than fully nationalise industry.150 Blues’ encounter with Port of Spain illustrates the penetration of the city’s economy by international capital. Santo describes Blues’ experience of window shopping: Now and again he stopped to look in on a display window at the banlon jerseys and tweed jackets displayed on the torso of mannequins with pink 147 Vertovec quotes from an article in The Economist, 13 September 1980, which describes how the oil boom led to a high level of migration from the country to the city, creating a situation where ‘40% of the island’s 1.1 million people now live in the miles of sprawl behind Port of Spain’. Vertovec, ‘Oil Boom and Recession’, p. 98. 148 Ibid., p. 96. 149 Vertovec, ‘East Indians and Anthropologists’, p. 149. 150 Percy C. Hintzen, ‘Ethnicity, Class, and International Capitalist Penetration of Guyana and Trinidad’, Social and Economic Studies, 34:3 (1985), 107–63 (pp. 111–13).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories faces and brown hair and his eyes would light up with delighted amazement as he saw reflected there the man in long sleeves with folded newspaper, carrying so effortlessly that magnificent chest. God, he was beautiful. (39)

In this passage, the clothes specified – banlon jerseys and tweed jackets – indicate that the shops in downtown Port of Spain sell goods which are imported from the UK, and – in the case of tweed – traditionally worn by the upper class. Made from woollen materials, these goods are entirely unsuited to Trinidad’s tropical climate, and their association with a foreign country is confirmed by the ‘pink faces’ of the mannequins. The Port of Spain shop windows therefore present to Trinidadians a lifestyle and a self-image that, like the goods, are imported from abroad. Santo’s earlier reference to Blues ‘holding himself as if on display’ (38) associates him with the European-style models in the ‘display window’, and indeed in the passage quoted above he is delighted by the way in which his own reflection in the shiny glass is superimposed upon the mannequins. Focusing on his attire and accessories – ‘long sleeves’ and ‘folded newspaper’ – Blues overlooks the contrast between his own black face and the ‘pink’ faces of the mannequins. Blues’ encounter with a shop display window is repeated in the subsequent story, ‘The Coward’, featuring Black Power demonstrations, and this second occurrence reveals an alteration in his consciousness. Blues follows the march down the street: past shop windows with mannequins with blonde hair modelling tweed jackets and Parisian blouses. In the mirror of a display window, he caught a glimpse of himself and realised with a shock that suddenly he didn’t look so tall, that he wasn’t cool at all, that his tie was a rope around his neck and where was the crown of his hair? (46)

This time, the foreignness of the imported goods and the self-image projected by the mannequins is more overt: their hair is ‘blonde’ instead of ‘brown’, and the blouses are ‘Parisian’, clearly associated with metropolitan fashions. While previously, Blues happily identified his own reflection with the mannequins, here he becomes aware of the discrepancy between his own reflection and the figures in the window. This acknowledgement of his difference from the commercialised images of success and glamour promoted by Port of Spain’s retail sector aligns him with the others on the march. In the above passage, seeing his tie ‘as a rope around his neck’, Blues recognises that his tie – denoting his status as an urban wage labourer – constrains him, sentencing him to a life of unfulfilled ambition. At the story’s opening, Mr Cabral, a ‘tall fair-skinned mulatto who had a big position at the Royal Bank, where Blues worked as a Security Guard’, laughs at the march and warns Blues against joining it. This exchange indicates how Port of Spain’s wealth is in the hands of a light-skinned elite. The Black Power marchers, constituting an economic underclass, will not gain from the city’s profits. Despite the fact that Trinidad had been politically independent for almost a decade at the time of this story, Port of Spain’s industries and the 76

Rural Communities money produced by them do not belong to lower-class African and Indian Trinidadians. The ‘forbidding silence of imperial banks’ (46), impervious to the commotion in the street, reminds us that the economy remains to a large extent under the control of foreign multinationals. Santo’s account of Blues’ experiences draws attention to the way in which hierarchies of class and ethnicity persisted through a time of unusual prosperity in Trinidad. A city which had seemed to Blues to be ‘the centre of things’ turns out to be both isolating and alienating; despite his many attempts to be ‘spectacular’ (57), Blues remains unnoticed by other Port of Spain inhabitants. The story trilogy sets Blues’ experience of anonymity in Port of Spain against his earlier life in Cunaripo, where he is well known among the inhabitants. In Cunaripo, it is leisure activities, rather than work, which provide stability and continuity within the community. Like ‘most of the fellars’, Blues has no fixed profession, although he likes to call himself a painter, having once been temporarily hired to paint some government buildings. Santo describes how Blues drifts between an assortment of casual, short-term positions, working ‘with the County Council on the road gang around Christmas or just before Carnival’, picking up ‘a few days with Berisford, mixing cement and sand to make a concrete foundation’, or working for the Empress Cinema ‘to give out handbills and stick up posters for the coming attractions’ (34). The nature of these jobs is of little consequence to Blues, whose identity is established through his leisure activities; Santo tells us that ‘whatever the task, he would come back in time to play football or to sit with the fellars on the railing at the Junction’ (34). While Blues’ ad hoc employment introduces no set routine into his life, football and liming occur at regular times, providing a permanence to his lifestyle. Miller explains that in the context of the community he is discussing: liming refers to the older sense of the term, which is where men of the area tend to hang around at particular street corners. Here they show off their clothes, smoke marijuana and heckle passing women, but most of all they look to exchange news and hope for some action or event they can participate in.151

In economic terms, then, liming is a waste of time, and is characterised by inactivity: the men ‘hang around’ aimlessly with no clear plan; they ‘hope for some action’ rather than initiating it. Their immobile occupation of junctions suggests a lack of direction. This inactivity contrasts with the fast-paced and economically profitable ‘bustle’ of Port of Spain’s streets, which ‘swept along’ everyone in its path (37). Moreover, in heckling passing women, the limers slow down the more purposeful movements of others. Yet Miller describes ‘liming’ as ‘one of the most important social institutions of Trinidad’,152 and Lovelace similarly emphasises the social value of liming in his depiction of Cunaripo. 151 Miller, Modernity, p. 33. 52 Ibid., p. 33. 1

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Lovelace observes in an interview that in the country, ‘[l]iving is more important than money. Living is more important than acquiring’.153 This idea that country life is enriched by something other than the acquisition of material wealth is also explored in his stories. When Santo encounters Blues for the first time in Port of Spain, Blues glances at his watch, ‘a new acquisition’, and says: ‘Can’t find the time to go up [to Cunaripo] since I down here’ (40). If Blues’ purchase of a watch illustrates his attempt to participate in the city’s consumer culture, his comment about having no free time suggests that he has also been drawn into the fast-paced commercial logic of the city, where wasting time results in financial deficit. However, as we have seen, earlier in the story the wasting of time – in the form of ‘liming’ – is portrayed as worthwhile in that it generates among Cunaripo inhabitants a support network in emotional, if not financial terms; it offers unemployed and underemployed youths a stability that their makeshift employment does not provide; and it serves as a basis for a sense of belonging which – in Blues’ case at least – evaporates in the city. In this story trilogy, then, the monetary capital of urban Port of Spain seems to be pitted against the social and cultural capital of rural Cunaripo. However, the opening paragraph of ‘The Fire-Eater’s Journey’ complicates any clear-cut division between rural and urban locales: That time in Cunaripo everybody was young, and life was sitting with the fellars on the railing at Cunaripo Junction on pay-day Friday and, amid the bedlam of glaring calypsos and cinema announcements and shopping bargains hailed over loudspeakers, and Indian songs blasted from roadside snackettes […] (32)

Since the story deals with the well-worn theme of a naïve country boy negotiating the city, we might expect it to contrast a sleepy rural town with a bustling urban centre. Yet the above extract does exactly the opposite. Charged with a dynamism that is missing from the subsequent depictions of downtown Port of Spain, this scene draws our attention to a merging of cultural influences and traditions often associated with the cosmopolitan spaces of cities: African Trinidadian calypsos collide with American cinema and Indian songs, and later in the paragraph there is a reference to a ‘half-Chinese gambler who everybody called Japan’ (32). Visualised in the landmark of a road junction, this cultural encounter is noisy: it creates a ‘bedlam’ of high-pitched sounds, ‘blasted’ and ‘blaring’ through multiple loudspeakers. In addition, the fact that ‘cinema announcements’ and ‘shopping bargains’ compete with the sounds of calypso and Indian music shows that this rural town participates in the consumer culture which dominates Port of Spain. Furthermore, the story reveals how the delusions of grandeur which characterise Blues’ life in Port of Spain begin in Cunaripo, fuelled by the influence of Hollywood movies. The self he presents to the city is enabled 153 Thomas, ‘From “Freedom” to “Liberation”’, p. 11.

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Rural Communities through years of studied imitations of Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne (35), performed to a more attentive Cunaripo audience. Even when he is liming with the other young men, he imagines himself elsewhere. Like the narrator, Santo, who leaves Cunaripo to work as a journalist in Port of Spain, Blues sees Cunaripo as a place that he needs to escape from in order to fulfil his potential. He perceives his departure from the town as prefiguring his departure from the island: ‘Port of Spain first, then England’ (37). Although Blues’ ambition becomes the subject of Santo’s satire, his state of mind is not exceptional within the Cunaripo community. After two pages describing ‘life’ in Cunaripo, Santo says: ‘That was the life. The future? The future was a secret that none of the fellars talked about’ (34). The sense of camaraderie and mutual support evoked in the story’s portrayal of Cunaripo is therefore shown to be fragile and transient; few of the town’s young men can envisage a future there. Despite Santo’s reference to it as a ‘remote town’, then, the Cunaripo of A Brief Conversion is not in fact cut off from the outside world but very much open to external influences; the traffic of people, products, images and ideas between Cunaripo and Port of Spain features in most of the stories. This is a central theme in ‘Victory and the Blight’, set in a barbershop in Cunaripo. The shop’s owner, Victory, is irritated when one of his regulars, Brown, enters with a ‘stranger’ from Arima, a nearby rural town (133), to play draughts. Brown tells the visitor, Ross, about the history of the place: ‘This barbershop was the centre. On a Saturday morning you couldn’t get in. All the young teachers and civil servants lined up to talk cricket and boxing and waiting to trim. Those days real draughts use to play’ (136). His words evoke an image of Cunaripo as a centre of social interaction, and as a place abundantly populated with young and employed people. His reference to the ‘real draughts’ of the past, invalidating the game of draughts he is currently playing, suggests that the present-day Cunaripo, now a backwater rather than a source of activity, has become detached from reality, diminished to no more than a memory of what it once was. The crowd he describes is no longer there, as Victory acknowledges with his comment that the ‘worst thing that this government do is to allow people to go away’ (136). While in the Cunaripo of ‘The Fire-Eater’s Journey’, the future is ‘a secret that none of the fellars talked about’, here Victory’s fellow cricket club members are leaving Trinidad to study abroad because they ‘have to think about their future. They have to get their education’ (137). In this story, the small-town community of Cunaripo is presented as unsustainable, because for the young people of the present, the future is located elsewhere. Victory’s cricket club was once ‘solid’ and ‘something to belong to’ (137), but now that many of the players have left the country, it is reduced to the insubstantial presence of framed photographs on the walls of the barbershop, memorialising the club’s former glory. When Victory laments the dispersal of his club, Brown protests: ‘You think I going to stay here just to play cricket?’ (138), and ‘How do you expect a fellar like me scrambling 79

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories around for a living to care about cricket?’ (138) Brown’s comments indicate that the vibrant community of Cunaripo remembered from a past era is no longer practically viable in economic terms. With no prospect of stable employment, young men will inevitably leave. Victory counters this argument with the question: ‘How you mean just to play cricket? What you think put us on the map, make us known in Pakistan, England, Australia?’ (138) His response emphasises the cultural value of cricket not only as a leisure activity which used to bring Cunaripo inhabitants together, but also as a symbol of post-independence nationhood which has given Trinidad global prominence. As Ross’ later comment about one of the now absent cricketers elucidates, famous Trinidadian cricketers have served as important local role models: ‘You see him on the field and you see life. You see yourself’ (139). Brown explains to Victory that he ‘would go away to better [his] position’ (138), and it is clear that his notion of ‘betterment’, as social advancement through economic gain, is at odds with Victory’s. A dispute between Victory and another client, Pascal, draws attention to another issue affecting Cunaripo. Victory expresses concern at how local businesses and local craftsmanship are threatened by the expansion of a global market and by Trinidad’s investment in it. He is offended by Pascal’s request for him to ‘clean’ his head of hair rather than ‘trim’ his hair (135). Relinquishing his scissors, he says: Look, I have one of those machines here that you could just plug in […] they call it a clipper. I could just plug in the clipper and put it on your head and bzzz! Just like that, and all your hair gone. But, I don’t call that barbering. Barbering is playing music. Everything have to flow. Things have to fit. (135)

Significantly, a former member of the cricket team, now based in the States, sent the clipper to Victory. The mechanised action of the electric clipper is compared to the artistry involved in barbering. Victory’s comparison of barbering to ‘playing music’ endows it with an aesthetic quality, presenting it as a unique performance diminished by the standardising effects of the clipper. His comment that ‘Everything in the world losing taste, everything quick, quick quick […]’ (136) indicates that his distaste for the clipper relates to a deeper anxiety regarding the homogenising influence of global capitalism and the fast-paced lifestyle it encourages. As well as conveying a clash between generations, these arguments between Victory and his clients encapsulate the dialogue between different value systems which runs through the story collection. They illustrate conflicts between community spirit and individual aspirations; between cultural identity and economic ‘progress’; and between authenticity and consumerism. Victory’s perspective is challenged not only within ‘Victory and the Blight’, through the voices of other characters, but also in other stories where the same town is represented differently. Integral to Victory’s critique of the present is a romanticised vision of the Cunaripo community as it once was. ‘A Brief Conversion’ is set in colonial times, as is indicated by the Union Jack 80

Rural Communities at the police station (26). As we will see, this earlier story takes us back to the time remembered by Victory and – to an extent – undercuts his idealised picture of a rural small-town community. In an analysis of his novels, Evelyn O’Callaghan argues that Lovelace became ‘less interested in portraying the peasant’s world as idealized pastoral, and more with showing its limitations’.154 Chris Campbell similarly suggests that Lovelace’s novel The Schoolmaster ‘investigates long-standing assumptions about pastoralism’.155 The opening pages of ‘A Brief Conversion’ appear at first glance to construct a pastoral idyll. Looking back on his childhood, the narrator describes the barber’s visit every third Sunday, the regularity of his bicycle bell illustrating the reassuring predictability of small-town life. He reflects that ‘[o]f these mornings, these remain with me: the smell of the blossoms in our cedar tree, the sounds of the Shouters’ hypnotic, rhythmic hymns and the clip-clipping of Mr Fitzie’s barbering scissors’ (1). On the following page he completes this picture of a rural paradise with descriptions of bluebells, butterflies and hibiscus. However, the atmosphere changes on the second page: ‘Hold yer head!’ my mother commands. Mr Fitzie grips my cheekbones with the vice of his fingers and he screws my head in the direction he wants it and bends it at the angle he requires it to stay; and his scissors clip, snip; and I am stifled by his old perspiration smell, and the sickly scent of cedar blossoms hangs in the air; and, from the space below his armpit […] and in the tall elephant grass across the road, Mr Sylvestre’s donkey jerks its ears to shake annoying horse-flies from its face. (2)

On one level, the physical irritations of the countryside are illustrated in the donkey’s reaction to ‘annoying horse-flies’. However, Travey’s sense of suffocation in response to the ‘sickly scent of cedar blossoms’ and the barber’s ‘old perspiration smell’ hints at a deeper, psychological discomfort. While the craft of the barber in ‘Victory and the Blight’ is portrayed as a beautiful and perfectly timed performance where the scissors are in harmony with the hair and the shape of the head so that ‘everything flow’, in ‘A Brief Conversion’ Mr Fitzie bends Travey’s head in a ‘vice’-like grip, holding it at an uncomfortable angle against his will. Whereas Victory works with his clients to facilitate their individual style, Mr Fitzie imposes on Travey a style which, in rendering him awkward and self-conscious, hinders his self-expression. Mr Fitzie’s despotic barbering serves as a metaphor for the social and psychological styling of Trinidadian boys such as Travey, who is being prepared 154 Evelyn O’Callaghan, ‘The Modernization of the Trinidad Landscape in the Novels of Earl Lovelace’, ARIEL, 20:1 (1989), 41–54 (p. 48). 155 Chris Campbell, ‘Illusions of Paradise and Progress: An Ecocritical Perspective on Earl Lovelace’, in Caribbean Literature after Independence, ed. by Schwarz, pp. 61–75 (p. 67).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories for the Exhibition class which could enable his exit from the town and, eventually, the island.156 The fact that his mother oversees and directs the barbering procedure reveals her complicity with a colonial education system which moulds her sons according to a European ideal of respectability. In this story, Travey’s parents are positioned against each other, representing two opposing ideologies: his mother values individual progress, which she sees as achievable through a colonial education, while his father values a community spirit associated with the town’s creolised folk culture. His mother invests in the idea of the nuclear family while his father’s role as a family man is compromised by his loyalty to the wider Cunaripo community and an extended family network. Travey’s coming of age narrative is at the centre of this conflict played out between his parents and, more broadly, within the town and the nation. His conversion involves a period of submission to his mother’s attempts to make him well behaved and educated: he suddenly decides to become ‘a scholar, a saint’, and starts buttoning his shirt without being told (16). He believes that this ‘surrender of the self’ makes him a ‘hero’ to his father’s generation, allowing him to achieve with his education the ‘substance’ they have lacked (27). Ironically, the act which Travey considers to be a saintly shouldering of his community’s burden in fact contributes to its disintegration. This story reminds us that the tensions between tradition and ‘progress’, between cultural and monetary capital, and between community and individualism, seen in the stories set in 1970s and 80s, were already present within Trinidad’s rural communities in the 1940s and 50s. Lovelace’s collection therefore illustrates how the impact of modernity on rural communities in Trinidad extends back to colonial times. This issue is also addressed in anthropological studies of Trinidad. Yelvington observes that ‘Trinidad is not on the margin of the “so-called world system” (Mintz 1977) but, historically, squarely in the system’s foundation’.157 Miller makes a similar point, questioning the assumption that modernity in Trinidad is merely the effect of the oil boom and recession in the 1970s and 80s, and that late twentieth-century global capitalism has ‘demolished the specificity of what previously had been relatively autonomous developments’.158 As Miller points out, modernity in Trinidad has a longer historical trajectory, since Caribbean societies have for centuries been embroiled in global processes. In this respect, Trinidad presents a challenge for anthropology, a discipline

156 Bill Schwarz notes that as a boy, Lovelace became ‘subject to the system of competitive examinations which dominated the colonial education of the time’, and which ultimately provided other Caribbean writers, such as V. S. Naipaul, with access to the ‘intellectual life of the metropole’. Bill Schwarz, ‘Introduction: “Where Is Myself?”’, in Caribbean Literature after Independence, ed. by Schwarz, pp. xi–xxii (p. xiv). 157 Yelvington, Producing Power, p. 41. 158 Miller, Modernity, p. 14.

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Rural Communities ‘most readily associated with the study of groups defined as “non-modern”’.159 Charles V. Carnegie suggests that this may be the reason for anthropologists’ relative avoidance of the Caribbean region as the subject of community studies; he notes that ‘[u]nlike the situation in Old World rural societies where community studies took off in a big way, much of village formation in the Caribbean occurred after the disruptive forces of migration and integration into large scale agro-industrial enterprises’.160 The idea of the ‘spatially bounded’ and ‘culturally homogenous’ community, the subject matter of traditional anthropology,161 does not apply in a context where the communities have been shaped by migration and the plantation economy. While other stories within the collection, such as the Blues trilogy and ‘Victory and the Blight’, focus on the debilitating effects of the oil boom and subsequent recession on Trinidad’s rural communities, ‘A Brief Conversion’ draws attention to fissures within these communities which predate this recent manifestation of global capital. While Victory in ‘Victory and the Blight’ remembers Cunaripo as an autonomous and self-sufficient centre of social and cultural life, comparing it to the unstable and peripheral present-day Cunaripo, ‘A Brief Conversion’ takes us back to the mid-twentieth century and portrays a Cunaripo community already fractured by the clash between European and African cultural influences, and further strained by the presence of American soldiers during World War Two.162 Whereas Victory presents migration to the city as a recent trend, the narrator of ‘A Brief Conversion’ shows how this was foreshadowed in the priming of scholarship boys. The stories in A Brief Conversion present Trinidad’s rural communities, past and present, as embedded within wider cultural and socioeconomic contexts. By locating these communities firmly within a discourse of modernity, Lovelace dispels the myth of the bounded community which informed classic anthropology. As noted in this book’s Introduction, George Lamming says of In the Castle of My Skin: ‘[i]t is this method of narration, where community, and not person, is the central character, things are never so tidy as critics would like’.163 Although Lamming is describing a novel, his comment can be applied to A Brief Conversion, where the Cunaripo community is the central character, 159 Ibid., p. 17. 60 Charles V. Carnegie, ‘Introduction’, in Afro-Caribbean Villages in Historical Perspective 1 ed. by Charles V. Carnegie (Kingston, Jamaica: African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, 1987), pp. iv–x (p. v). 161 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 48. 162 Travey refers to the job opportunities that arose when ‘the Americans opened their base’ (p. 7). In addition, American Tarzan and Zorro movies inform the games Travey plays with his cousin Ronnie who is visiting from Port of Spain (p. 3). 163 George Lamming, ‘In the Castle of My Skin: Thirty Years After’ [1983], quoted in Louis James, Caribbean Literature in English (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 34–35.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories presented from a different angle in each of the stories. The story collection resists our attempts, as critics, to identify a stable position on the plight of Trinidad’s rural communities in the face of global capitalism. Instead, as I have shown, it incorporates divergent perspectives; conversations between characters reveal competing value systems, and narrative point of view shifts as we move from one story to the next. This ‘untidiness’ is due to the fact that the collection gives voice to a community. To return to James Clifford’s words, Lovelace’s stories offer us a ‘cultural poetics that is an interplay of voices, of positioned utterances’.164 In this respect, his portrayal of Trinidad’s rural communities differs significantly from those of the anthropologists considered in this chapter, who offer a coherent argument substantiated through their fieldwork. If Lovelace adopts in A Brief Conversion a mode of ethnography distinct from those of anthropologists such as Miller, Vertovec and Yelvington, his story collection also departs from the conventions of the ‘modern’ short story as defined by theorists such as Edgar Allan Poe and Brander Matthews. Poe and Matthews emphasise the short story’s unity, economy, containment and compression. For Poe, the short story is so tightly structured that every detail is necessary for the ‘unity of effect’ or ‘single effect’ it achieves’.165 With reference to Poe’s ‘single effect’, Matthews describes the short story as ‘complete and self-contained’.166 In A Brief Conversion, as we have seen, the stories are by no means unified since they often encompass conflicting points of view. Nor are they complete and self-contained, due to connections between them generated through recurring characters, themes and settings. Like the small-town community they depict, the individual stories in this collection are part of something larger. Highlighting overlaps and interaction between rural and urban locales, and exploring the impact of urbanisation and globalisation on rural Trinidad, Lovelace’s collection challenges the idea of the rural community, and of the short story, as bounded and self-contained.

64 Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, p. 12. 1 165 Poe, ‘Review of Twice-Told Tales’, pp. 60–61. 166 Brander Matthews, ‘The Philosophy of the Short-Story’ [1901], in The New Short Story Theories, ed. by May, pp. 73–83 (p. 73).

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CHAPTER 2

Urban Communities Urban Communities

‘I never go downtown, at least not alone. It’s too dangerous, part of Kingston that scares me.’1

T

he quotation above from Kwame Dawes’ story ‘Foreplay’ in A Place to Hide and Other Stories (2003) is spoken by a middle-class female character who lives in the uptown area of Mona. The socio-spatial division of Kingston referenced in her comment is a central concern in anthropologists and geographers’ studies of Kingston. Colin Clarke observes that the ‘dichotomy between uptown and downtown – associated as it is with class polarization, the material distinctions involving jobs and homes, and the creation of two commercial centres since independence – is inscribed in most aspects of social life’.2 His study demonstrates that the colour-class stratification in Kingston decreased in the post-independence period due to the migration of ‘whites and racial minorities’ out of Jamaica, and the movement of ‘socially mobile blacks’ into ‘middle class and elite positions’. 3 However, it also shows that ‘class stratification remains steeply hierarchical’, and that ‘downtown Kingston has become even more markedly black since independence’.4 Clarke comments that in the 30 years following independence in 1962, due to the processes of urbanisation and ghetto formation, ‘uptown and downtown developed into even more polarized and excluding social spaces’.5 1 Kwame Dawes, A Place to Hide and Other Stories (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003), p. 102. All further references to this edition will be marked in parentheses in the text. 2 Colin Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 102. 3 Ibid., p. 155. 4 Ibid., p. 184. 5 Ibid., p. 188.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Don Robotham explores what he describes as the ‘fracture of Uptown/ Downtown’, which he sees as ‘one of the main sources of social and political division in Kingston’.6 He argues that Jamaica’s anti-colonial nationalist movement, culminating in the country’s independence in 1962 and led by the emergent black and brown middle class, did not reduce the city’s social and economic divisions. Robotham explains how this growing middle class first moved out of downtown Kingston and then created a new commercial centre uptown (the New Kingston business district and the American-style shopping plazas in Liguanea) which rendered movement between uptown and downtown unnecessary, leading to the development of two distinct social spheres within Kingston. Writing in 2005, David Howard describes how the city’s uptown/downtown division is ‘[socially] and economically etched on the urban landscape’, creating ‘two seemingly separate cities’.7 Clarke, Robotham and Howard present the uptown/downtown divide as an aspect of the city’s lived reality, generated by social and economic factors. This chapter explores the role of representation in the shaping of urban space. Kwame Dawes’ short story cycle A Place to Hide and Other Stories (2003) and Alecia McKenzie’s short story collection Satellite City and Other Stories (1992) examine the impact of dominant imaginings of Kingston on the city’s social and spatial organisation. In particular, their stories expose how media discourse exacerbates the fragmentation of the city. In reading these texts, I consider the extent to which representations of Kingston have the potential to undermine, instead of reinforce, the city’s hierarchies. I argue that Dawes’ and McKenzie’s fictional portrayals of Kingston at once evoke and complicate uptown/downtown and associated safe/dangerous dichotomies. Dawes’ and McKenzie’s texts are set in the Kingston of the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Their stories provide commentary on key issues affecting life in Kingston during these decades, such as the effects of neo-imperial globalisation on the city, social and economic polarisation, the rise in inner-city crime and violence, and the relationship of this to political clientelism. As such, the stories offer an insight into the historical and cultural dimensions of urban development in late twentieth-century Kingston. However, rather than simply representing the city, Dawes’ and McKenzie’s stories analyse its ‘representational economies’.8 They explore and critically evaluate various perceptions of Kingston. Andreas Huyssen describes an urban imaginary as ‘the way city dwellers imagine their own city’. Drawing on Lefebvre’s ideas on the social 6 Don Robotham, ‘How Kingston was Wounded’, in Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, ed. by Jane Schneider and Ida Susser (Oxford: Berg, 2003), pp. 11–28 (p. 11). 7 David Howard, Kingston: A Cultural and Literary History (Oxford: Signal, 2005), p. 57. 8 Rashmi Varma, The Postcolonial City and its Subjects (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 1.

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Urban Communities production of space, he describes cities as ‘palimpsests of real and diverse experiences and memories’ and therefore always plural, never grasped ‘in its present or past totality’ by any one person. Dawes’ and McKenzie’s story collections explore the idea of the city as palimpsest in a number of ways: for example, by incorporating a range of narrative voices articulating conflicting experiences of the city, and through intertextual allusions to other modes of cultural expression which have contributed to Kingston’s urban imaginary, such as reggae and dancehall, art and sculpture, and media discourse. At the same time, these texts are themselves part of the palimpsest: Dawes’ and McKenzie’s stories both reflect upon and contribute to the collective imagining of Kingston. Huyssen emphasises that urban imaginaries are more than ‘figments of the imagination’; they are ‘part of any city’s reality’, since ‘what we think about a city and how we perceive it informs the ways we behave and act in it’.9 With this in mind, I intend to approach Dawes’ and McKenzie’s fictional accounts of Kingston, and their intertexts, as both responsive to and constitutive of the city. Dawes’ and McKenzie’s stories are informed by their own experiences of Kingston. Dawes was born in Ghana, grew up in Kingston, studied at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, and is now based in the US. He returns regularly to Jamaica, and is actively involved in literature development in Kingston. When he lived in Jamaica, Dawes moved between various locations within uptown Kingston: the university campus in Mona, and several places north of Hope Road and Half Way Tree, including Molynes Road, in an area he describes as ‘lower middle class’. Dawes also spent time on Maxfield Avenue, below Half Way Tree, where his mother worked, and where some of the stories in A Place to Hide are set.10 Since the road junction of Half Way Tree is often seen as marking the divide between uptown and downtown Kingston,11 the time spent by Dawes both above and below it positions him at a point of intersection within the city. In an interview Dawes described how his father, Neville Dawes, director of the Institute of Jamaica in the 1970s, saw himself ‘as someone on the periphery of a very middle class coterie of writers, musicians and 9 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Introduction: World Cultures, World Cities’, in Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing World, ed. by Andreas Huyssen (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 1–23 (p. 3). 10 This information is based on a conversation I had with Kwame Dawes on 4 October 2012 at a poetry reading event in Leicester Central Library. 11 David Howard compares ‘the different lifestyles of those who live south of Half Way Tree and those who live above’ (Kingston, p. 57). An article in the Jamaica Observer, ‘Half-Way Tree’, 22 September 2010, presents it as a meeting point between social classes: ‘Simply put, Half-Way Tree is neither uptown nor downtown […] it’s in the middle. And there, everyone must interact!’ The article mentions Damien Marley’s 2001 album Halfway Tree as ‘aptly named to pay homage to his uptown/ downtown heritage’. [accessed 6 January 2013].

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories dancers who were very much pushing for independence’ and as ‘suspicious of middle-class Jamaican society’.12 This account of his father suggests that his Marxist beliefs conflicted with his social position in Jamaican society. As a child growing up in a home ‘full of writers and artists who constantly came to visit’, Dawes was at once immersed in this Jamaican middle-class environment and influenced by his father’s political ideas, and a similar kind of scepticism towards the middle classes can be discerned in A Place to Hide.13 In the same interview, Dawes comments on his own perspective as a writer: ‘I have always lived with this sense of being inside and outside of various worlds. I think this has been good for me as a writer – to be, at once, inside and yet still able to look from outside inside.’14 The ‘various worlds’ of which Dawes speaks could be interpreted both as the different countries Dawes has inhabited, and also as Kingston’s uptown and downtown social worlds. His stories at once inhabit, and reflect critically upon, a middle-class mindset. McKenzie was born and grew up in Kingston, left Jamaica to study in the US, subsequently lived in the UK, Belgium and Singapore, and is now based in Paris. Like Dawes, McKenzie lived in different places in Kingston, moving from ‘near the sea to close to the hills’. She grew up in an area just northeast of Kingston’s downtown central business district, and went to school in downtown Kingston (St George’s Girls’ School on Duke Street and later Alpha Academy on South Camp Road).15 In an interview, she described her mother as ‘middle class in material terms but not mentality’.16 Her comment implies a critique of middle-class values which can also be found in the stories. As a writer with a middle-class background who lived in an area bordering uptown and downtown Kingston and frequently travelled downtown, before moving to the suburbs, McKenzie’s experience of the city does not fit neatly into the uptown/downtown dichotomy which, according to the studies discussed above, shapes the urban landscape. Dawes’ and McKenzie’s position as Jamaican writers living outside the region further complicates any attempt to locate them within a particular part of the city. In Rivke Jaffe’s study of two downtown Kingston communities (Riverton and Rae Town), based on fieldwork undertaken in 2003 and 2004, she considers both the barriers to and potential for community formation in Kingston. She observes that ‘the [Kingston] municipality is experienced as a number of separate communities […], loosely connected but often 12 Kwame Dawes, ‘Kwame Dawes: An Interview with Walter P. Collins, III’, Obsidian, 8:2 (2007), 38–52 (p. 41). 13 Ibid., p. 40. 14 Ibid., p. 45. 15 This information is based on an email conversation with Alecia McKenzie in November and December 2012. 16 Niala Maharaj, ‘New Wave: Alecia McKenzie’, Caribbean Beat, 11 (September/ October 1994) [accessed 6 January 2013].

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Urban Communities lacking in physical and symbolic interaction’.17 In her view, cohesion and identification are strong within these communities, but much weaker at the ‘inter-community or city level’.18 Jaffe suggests that Kingston functions in the minds of residents as ‘a collection of loosely connected community islands, whose residents have far less than unrestricted access to each other’s territory’.19 This model resembles Barry Chevannes’ conception of Kingston as an ‘overlapping congeries of communities’.20 For Chevannes, Kingston’s ‘vibrancy rests on a geographically based spirit of community’.21 He describes the urban yard as ‘a shared space of cooperation’, which generates a range of community-building activities, such as youth and sports clubs, street murals and clean-up campaigns.22 The fragmentation of a city into micro-communities creates opportunities for neighbourhood support networks and a localised sense of belonging, as Chevannes highlights. However, at the same time, as Jaffe notes, it prevents the development of effective grassroots movements.23 The short stories of Dawes and McKenzie draw attention to the splitting of the city into uptown and downtown social spheres and the additional fracture of the inner city as a result of political clientelism and the introduction of so-called garrison communities. They also consider the extent to which middle-class perceptions of downtown communities, fuelled by media representations, entrench these divisions. While some of their stories depict instances of communal solidarity within small urban neighbourhoods, both Dawes’ and McKenzie’s fiction looks beyond the micro-community, envisaging connections across the city’s social worlds. In the sections which follow, I first examine their representation of downtown communities, before moving on to look at their portrayal of uptown communities. As my readings show, while the stories foreground the social distance between these communities, they by no means present them as discrete entities, instead drawing attention to interchange between them. As a result, the apparent opposition of my two chapter headings breaks down during the course of my analysis. Like Lovelace’s A Brief Conversion, McKenzie’s Satellite City is a collection of stories linked through a common setting and containing some recurring characters. Dawes’ A Place to Hide, however, can be read as a short story cycle, since the stories are arranged around ‘Vershans’, numbered one 17 Rivke Jaffe, ‘Fragmented Cities: Social Capital and Space in Urban Curaçao and Jamaica’, in The Caribbean City, ed. by Rivke Jaffe (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2008), pp. 189–208 (p. 195). 18 Ibid., p. 190. 19 Ibid., p. 195. 20 Barry Chevannes, ‘Jamaican Diasporic Identity: The Metaphor of Yaad’, in Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean, ed. by Patrick Taylor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 129–37 (p. 133). 21 Ibid., p. 132. 22 Ibid., pp. 132–33. 23 Jaffe, ‘Fragmented Cities’, p. 198.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories to five.24 I end by exploring how the generic mode of these texts contributes to their imagining of Kingston. Downtown worlds Dawes’ story ‘Sinatra’ deals with the arrest, trial and release of a don (area leader) in league with politicans, and McKenzie’s story ‘Bella Vista’ examines the involvement of an influential lawyer and politician in inner-city crime through his grooming of young men. Another of McKenzie’s stories, ‘Natasha’, considers the effects of partisan political violence on Kingston’s lower-income communities. Several of their stories, then, touch on the phenomena of political clientelism, gang warfare and garrison communities which characterised life in Kingston in the 1970s and 80s.25 Both Dawes and McKenzie examine and critique middle-class perceptions of downtown communities. Resisting a media discourse which sensationalises the politicised violence of the inner city and in the process generates in middle-class audiences an emotional detachment from it, their stories illuminate connections between uptown and downtown worlds. In doing so, they challenge the idea that violent crime in Kingston is confined to the ‘ghetto’, drawing attention to broader networks of criminal activity. Furthermore, the stories invite us to consider how the division of the inner city into warring garrisons may have generated a climate of fear, but has also given rise to a strong sense of community within inner-city neighbourhoods. In Dawes’ story ‘Sinatra’, this ambivalence is embodied in its central figure, seen by some as a criminal and by others as a community leader. Brian Meeks defines garrison communities as ‘militarized inner-city communities that held allegiance to one or other of the dominant parties and ensured almost monolithic single-party voting on election day’.26 According to Amanda Sives, these politically homogenous communities date back to the 1962 election, following which the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP) government’s housing scheme eradicated squatter settlements in the west of Kingston, built low-income housing and allocated it on a partisan basis, transforming the area ‘both physically and politically’.27 Sives notes that the partisan allocation of 24 According to Susan Garland Mann, the framing device of short story cycles can take the form of ‘transitional paragraphs between stories’. Dawes’ ‘Vershans’ work in this way. Susan Garland Mann, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 2. 25 As noted by Rivke Jaffe, ‘garrison politics’ continues to operate in twenty-firstcentury Kingston, although the power balance between dons and politicians has shifted. See Rivke Jaffe, ‘The Hybrid State: Crime and Citizenship in Urban Jamaica’, American Ethnologist, 40:4 (2013), 734–48. 26 Brian Meeks, Envisioning Caribbean Futures: Jamaican Perspectives (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2007), p. 69. 27 Amanda Sives, Elections, Violence and the Democratic Process in Jamaica 1944–2007 (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2010), p. 65.

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Urban Communities housing deepened ‘political divisions in the inner city communities’,28 leading to an explosion of partisan political violence. She describes how in the 1970s, politicians formed relationships with criminal gangs who ‘began to develop political identities and affiliations that tied them into a politicised, territorial space’, leading to a situation where ‘certain areas of the city became JLP and others PNP’.29 Politicised warfare divided downtown Kingston into ‘a patchwork of competing turfs/constituencies’, 30 weakening communal identifications across the inner-city area while strengthening social cohesion within the garrison communities. Scholars have emphasised the role of dons in inspiring community spirit and social solidarity within the garrisons. Obika Gray comments on how the inner-city gunmen recruited by the dominant political parties in the 1970s to enforce allegiance were regarded within the garrisons ‘not as criminal gunmen, but as community leaders, worthy patrons and even heroic figures’. 31 Sives similarly considers the persisting influence of dons, or ‘area leaders’, as key community figures who provided security and social welfare. 32 However, as Gray points out, the direction of these communities’ energies against each other, rather than against the state, reduced the possibility of a city-wide ‘social and class transformation’. 33 Through his characterisation of Sinatra, Dawes reflects on communal identities in Kingston’s inner city as well as commenting on middle-class perceptions of the ‘ghetto’. Sinatra is a well-known criminal on trial for murder, and his nickname alludes to the American singer, Frank Sinatra, rumoured to have links to organised crime. Read in this way, the nickname references the influence of Italian-American gangsterism on Jamaican rude boy culture of the late 1960s and early 70s. 34 As we progress through the story we encounter various accounts of Sinatra’s role and character, through newspaper ‘headline stories’ (163), letters to the papers from the public, radio talk shows and Sinatra’s own bestselling book. The narrator describes media coverage of the trial that has emphasised public support for Sinatra: Letters had been published in the newspapers praising his community work. It was he who had organised the series of “Shock Out” reggae shows that raised over $10M for approved schools and places of safety. Sinatra was a community leader with heart. He might have killed, they said, but he only 28 Ibid., p. 68. 29 Ibid., p. 76. 30 Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial City, p. 208. 31 Obika Gray, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004), p. 186. 32 Sives, Elections, p. 138. 33 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, p. 158. 34 Gray describes the paradoxical ‘fusion of Rastafarian cultural nationalism with Hollywood-influenced gangsterism’ in inner-city rude boy culture (ibid., p. 102).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories killed those who deserved to die, those who were intent on destroying the unity and peace in his community. (163)

This account of Sinatra highlights the ambivalence of community dynamics in Kingston’s inner city. Sinatra’s public image is encompassed in the slogan ‘a community leader with a heart’. The abundance of local support for Sinatra as an authority figure within his community is balanced against the story’s exposure of how the community operates. The reports comment on Sinatra’s involvement in community-building activities, such as fundraising for ‘approved schools’ (for young offenders) and ‘places of safety’, and the revival of the reputation of downtown Kingston as a source of musical creativity. His fundraising work generates a sense of community, but it is a community which requires political consensus among its inhabitants. Sinatra’s supporters assure us that he is justified in killing any ‘who were intent on destroying the unity and peace in his community’, and we learn in the following paragraph that ‘[t]he community supported Sinatra because he protected them […] It was safe there. He was their Don’ (164). Given Sinatra’s associations with politicians, we can assume that his protection is offered on condition that they vote for a particular party. It is clear from these double-edged statements that the safety and harmony of this community is achieved through acts of violence against communities with a different political allegiance, or against those within the community who refuse to conform. Nevertheless, the multiple letters of support from within Sinatra’s community, which outweigh the handful of ‘negative letters and interviews’ (164), suggests that, bearing in mind the neglect of inner-city areas by the police and the absence of state-level public services, 35 his presence is valued and has generated a strong sense of cohesion within his community. The letters of support from inner-city inhabitants contrast directly with uptown residents’ responses to the trial. The narrator relates how following the publication of a politician’s ‘tell-all book’ which implicated Sinatra in a story of organised crime and political corruption, a book that was subsequently televised, adapted as a radio series, and published in the US, ‘the public, especially those who called up talk shows and wrote editorials, found the book’s content far too tasty to be ignored’, and ‘[e]verybody started calling for Sinatra’s arrest, everybody, that is, with a big mouth on the radio’ (165). The narrator discusses the account of a ‘middle-class talk show host’ from St Andrew, a parish which is part of the Kingston Metropolitan Area, north, west and east of Kingston proper and extending into the Blue Mountains. The talk show host says of Sinatra: ‘This is an avowed criminal wanted for extradition in the United States, whose notoriety 35 Anthony Harriott notes how ‘high rates of poverty, social exclusion and the unresponsiveness of the state agencies’ have rendered inner-city communities in Kingston more vulnerable to organised crime. See Anthony Harriott, Organised Crime and Politics in Jamaica: Breaking the Nexus (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2008), p. 7.

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Urban Communities everybody seems to know but the police’ (165). This report indicates how in the eyes of a middle-class audience, Sinatra’s public image shifts from that of a ‘community leader with a heart’, a valuable and necessary source of support and cohesion, to that of a dangerous criminal who represents a threat to the social order. The fact that the talk show host includes the detail that Sinatra is wanted for extradition in the US aligns the response of this uptown audience with a foreign perspective on Kingston’s ‘crime problem’. If this US-influenced stance distances them from events in the inner city, the media industry’s transformation of politicised violence in downtown Kingston into ‘melodrama’ (165) invites middle-class readers and listeners to detach themselves emotionally from the realities of the inner city. The shock of the ‘well-to-do professionals and “decent people”’ in the Beverley Hills neighbourhood that a notorious ‘ghetto’ criminal ‘virtually lived in their neighbourhood’ (163) underlines the perceived gap between the worlds of uptown and downtown. Dawes’ version of Sinatra’s story conflicts with the media stories described within it, challenging the perceptions of the inner city which the newspapers, radio shows and bestselling novels articulate. Sinatra’s connections to influential politicians are indicated early on in the story. His friend Pencil attends the trial with Angela, a middle-class journalist who is covering it, and is confident that it will go smoothly, telling her that ‘he had heard this from an MP in the area who said that he knew the members of the jury well’ (162). With this comment, he hints that the jury has been rigged in favour of acquitting Sinatra, a suggestion confirmed by Sinatra and Pencil’s relaxed attitude to the trial. They remain calm and assured throughout, secure in the protection of politicians whose interests they serve. Sinatra’s acquittal is followed by a party where ‘the sound system played Bob Marley’s “Duppy Conqueror” over and over again’ (166). The song is about a man’s release from prison and his struggle against oppression: the speaker describes being set ‘free’ and turned ‘loose’ on the streets. He celebrates his act of resistance against the authorities: ‘the bars could not hold me / force could not control me / they tried to keep me down / but God put I around’. 36 In this song, the experience of an individual prisoner is extended to the plight of a subjugated social group; the single voice of the speaker merges with the collective voice of the urban poor. We are told that ‘the Marley song was felt to be properly symbolic, a larger statement about the Babylon shitsem and its imprisonment of the souls of Black sufferers like Sinatra’ (167). However, the narrator goes on to observe that ‘[t]echnically, Sinatra had not really been set free from jail’ because he had stayed in the police commissioner’s office, ‘furnished with a bed and a kitchenette’, just for one night (167). In identifying this discrepancy between Marley’s lyrics and the actual circumstances of Sinatra’s 36 Bob Marley, ‘Duppy Conqueror’ [accessed 11 March 2012].

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories arrest, Dawes highlights the tension between the stance adopted by the speaker in ‘Duppy Conqueror’ and Sinatra’s position. While the voice of ‘Duppy Conqueror’ describes how he has been kept ‘down’ by the ruling powers, Sinatra’s activities and reputation are sponsored by one of the two dominant political parties. Whereas the speaker in Marley’s song expresses defiance against the authorities upon his release from prison, Sinatra’s release has been orchestrated by those in power. Sinatra writes a book about the trial which is described as having a ‘grassroots authenticity’ and as the expression of ‘a man of the people speaking to the people’ (166). This version of Sinatra is complicated by his collaboration with high-ranking politicians and the fact that, due to his connections with Kingston’s wealthy elite, he ‘virtually lived’ in the upmarket area of Beverley Hills, a ‘rich green crotch […] where the well-off had built monstrously elaborate homes on the prime real estate that overlooked Kingston’ (162), and is therefore removed from the deprivation of the inner-city communities with which he publicly identifies himself. In contrast to the words ‘set we free’, which identify Marley’s speaker with the collective voice of Kingston’s inner-city communities, Sinatra’s slogan ‘a man of the people speaking to the people’ merges with the democratic rhetoric offered by the People’s National Party (PNP), a rhetoric which masked deepening social and economic divisions within the city. Marley’s lyrics echo hollowly in Dawes’ story, which exposes the insincerity of Sinatra’s anti-establishment pose. 37 By revealing Sinatra’s entanglement within a web of affiliations stretching to the highest echelons of Jamaican society, Dawes’ story illustrates that the causes of rising crime rates and political violence are not confined to the ‘ghetto’, but extend across the city. Angela eventually realises that Sinatra’s public image, elevated to a legendary status through media coverage, is no more than ‘a storm in the teacup’, and that the ‘clumsy but well manicured fingers that were shaking the teacup were the true story’ (169). The fingers of the politicians who worked with Sinatra are ‘manicured’ because they are wealthy, and also in a figurative sense because they choose not to get their hands dirty, preferring to outsource their work in the inner city to area dons like Sinatra. They are ‘clumsy’ because they have stirred up violence in a shortsighted way, looking no further than the next election. Aware that the ‘true story’ of Sinatra is less likely to appeal to the ‘book-buying public’ (166) than the previous two books about him, 38 Angela eventually discards the book she is writing, and the story Dawes tells us is the one that Angela decides not to tell. While the media discourse satirised in the story encourages 37 The identification of Bob Marley with inner-city communities is itself complicated by Marley’s move out of the inner city to Hope Road in uptown Kingston, and then abroad, following the international commercial success of his music. 38 Angela struggles with the dilemma: ‘How tell a story which appealed to readers whose attention could be caught only by ever more sensational reports of ever more outrageous acts of violence?’ (168).

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Urban Communities Jamaican middle-class readers and listeners to distance themselves spatially and psychologically from events occurring in downtown Kingston, Dawes appeals to that same audience to recognise those events as part of their reality, and to acknowledge that responsibility for the unrest in downtown Kingston is shared by all the city’s inhabitants. McKenzie’s story ‘Natasha’ is similarly concerned with middle-class perceptions of Kingston’s lower-income communities. The story is set on the University of the West Indies Mona Campus and in neighbouring August Town. Although August Town is geographically closer to uptown residential areas such as Mona Heights and Beverley Hills than it is to the inner city in West Kingston, it is closer to the latter in terms of the living conditions and economic circumstances of its inhabitants. Howard describes August Town as ‘an unusual pocket of deprivation’ which is seen by many as one of several ‘transplanted segments of a dangerous downtown’, or an ‘uptown part of “downtown”’. 39 McKenzie’s choice of August Town and the UWI campus as settings for her story enables her to illustrate the simultaneous proximity and distance between Kingston’s social strata. The story centres on the relationship between a UWI undergraduate student, Andrea, and a young girl who lives in August Town, and explores the class tensions which emerge from Andrea’s interactions with the girl and her mother. Andrea responds to an advert for tutors to work with ‘disadvantaged’ children. The sentimental image this conveys in her mind of ‘a little sister or brother kind of child, kind and lovable, who would ask her strange questions to which she would give funny, grown-up answers’ is undermined when the child she is allocated, Natasha, turns out to be ‘very intelligent, almost unchildlike’, and is often unimpressed with Andrea’s responses.40 Andrea’s preconceptions reveal the naivety that she brings to the volunteering scheme, and her lack of prior contact with the inhabitants of communities such as August Town. They also suggest that her motives for joining the scheme are at least partly self-serving; in her imagined scenario she casts herself in a favourable light, and her participation in the scheme seems to be as much to do with enhancing her own self-image as with helping those less privileged than herself. Furthermore, the conversation she envisages with Natasha implies certain assumptions regarding the relationship between her and the child; the anticipated format of question and answer positions the child in an inferior and dependent position, and the volunteer as an authority figure with the power to enlarge the child’s mind. The notice in the lobby of Andrea’s dormitory, with its description of ‘children who were poor but bright and needed someone to look up to’ (31), may have encouraged her to adopt this paternalistic stance. These assumptions are challenged later in the 39 Howard, Kingston, pp. 115, 120. 40 Alecia McKenzie, Satellite City and Other Stories (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1992), p. 31. All further references to this edition will be marked in parentheses in the text.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories story, as it is revealed that Andrea has as much to learn from the tutoring experience as Natasha. Andrea’s mind, conditioned by her socioeconomic circumstances, is presented as narrow in a different way to Natasha’s, and the story emphasises the benefits for both parties of an encounter between individuals from different social milieux. Andrea’s real conversations with Natasha depart significantly from those she has rehearsed in her mind. Andrea is immediately unsettled by Natasha’s ‘untrusting’ eyes (31), which indicate that she does not accept Andrea as an authority figure. Instead of embarking on a series of ‘strange questions’, Natasha waits to be questioned, offering unexpected answers which confound Andrea. When Andrea magnanimously offers to ‘tell everyone you’re my sister’ in the cafeteria (33), expecting her to be grateful, Natasha rejects the honour, showing ‘no pleasure at the suggestion’ (33). This implies that, unlike Andrea, Natasha does not consider an association with someone of a higher social status to be beneficial. In answer to Andrea’s question: ‘Do you like dolls?’ Natasha responds: ‘When I grow up I’m going to be an astronaut’ (32), explaining that she is drawn to the idea of being able to ‘float around’ and defy gravity (32). Natasha’s aspiration could be seen as an expression of her desire to escape the constraints of her socioeconomic circumstances; aiming for such a competitive and highly skilled profession requires her to imagine life beyond August Town. Furthermore, the concept of floating operates figuratively in the story to suggest a transcendence of class divisions. Andrea’s laughter at the absurdity of Natasha’s dream reveals how deeply ingrained these divisions are and the extent to which they have shaped her thinking. This is confirmed later in the story, when we learn that Andrea ‘knew’ she would see Natasha in a few years weighed down by multiple children, ‘firmly anchored to her circumstances like everyone else’ (40). The contrast between Andrea’s and Natasha’s circumstances is most evident in their living conditions. The structure of the housing in August Town is described in detail: ‘They lived in a tenement in August Town. An L-shaped row of rooms housed several families, each family occupying one room, and all sharing a long, red-tiled verandah that ran along the building. There was one toilet in the yard’ (34). Resembling the communal yards of the inner city, this scene offers a glimpse of the limited facilities and the cramped living space which characterise yard existence in Kingston. Chevannes explains how Kingston’s ‘tenement yards’ are ‘the results of the spatial reconfiguration of the city when the affluent people moved out, taking with them their status symbols of residence and social class, and the poor people moved in, bringing with them their rural but changing worldview’.41 Here Chevannes draws our attention to the influences of rural life on tenement communities, which consist of rural migrants and their descendants. At the same time, his reference to their ‘changing worldview’ reminds us that experiences of the city have transformed the rural mindset of 41 Chevannes, ‘Jamaican Diasporic Identity’, p. 131.

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Urban Communities these communities, so that the urban yard has developed its own distinctive characteristics. Chevannes reflects how ‘the sense of community in the yard and the street’ is a dominant feature of Kingston, which distinguishes it from cities such as Toronto or New York; he observes that Kingston has ‘none of the anonymity’ of these cities.42 Chevannes’ discussion balances the problematic aspects of Kingston’s inner-city communities against their positive elements: the ‘Yaad’ is a metaphor for home, but at the same time it is ‘the place where most of the eight hundred people in 1980 were killed, where most of the nine hundred were murdered in 1996, where schools are forced to close, so intense and so violent the war, where the Dons rule’.43 He acknowledges that inner-city communities are also garrison communities, with ‘unswerving’ affiliations to one of the two dominant political parties,44 but he points out other cohesive factors such as sport, dance, cultural expression and markets, and he insists that, independently of their status as garrisons, ‘they are communities, like hundreds of others where people live in daily face-to-face, primary relationships of trust and social control’ (here he names August Town among a list of examples).45 Chevannes identifies ‘ritualized privacy’ and ‘cooperation’ as the two most socially significant characteristics of the tenement yard.46 The yard is a ‘private space’ which is ‘enclosed from public view and commerce’, and resistant to strangers.47 Yet it is also ‘a shared space of cooperation’, since its inhabitants ‘cooperate in the use of the domestic facilities, the kitchen, bathroom, and standpipe, and in common security against strangers’.48 Chevannes’ observations invite us to consider how conditions which could be seen as disadvantages – such as the sharing of facilities and living space – may in fact help to strengthen social relations both within and between families, generating a sense of community which is absent from more affluent Kingston neighbourhoods. When Andrea first visits August Town she is conscious of her position as an outsider, despite the fact that she is invited in by Mrs Jackson. Chevannes comments how, entering the ‘private space’ of the tenement yard, ‘the stranger is made to feel unwelcome until his or her bona fides is established’.49 Walking out of August Town in the early evening, accompanied by Mrs Jackson and Natasha, Andrea is unsettled by the presence of young men on the sidewalk and leaning against walls. One of them shouts a warning: ‘Hey, brown-skin girl, next time you come here, don’t wear no green blouse because green is

42 Ibid., p. 132. 43 Ibid., p. 134. 44 Ibid., p. 133. 45 Ibid., p. 133. 46 Ibid., p. 131. 47 Ibid., p. 131. 48 Ibid., p. 132. 49 Ibid., pp. 131–32.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Labourite colour, you hear me? This is strictly PNP territory’ (36). He then fires a gun in the air ‘to emphasize his words’ (37). His comment establishes her outsider status in two ways: firstly, it identifies the lightness of her skin, which indicates her middle-class background. Secondly, it exposes her lack of awareness that the territory is politicised and operates according to a strict colour code. Her position as an outsider looking in is reinforced by the third-person narration, which is focalised with her thoughts. She assumes that these youths are as much of a threat to Natasha as they are to her; this is suggested when one of them, Yappy, makes a sexually charged comment to Natasha which, in Andrea’s view, is more frightening than his gunshot. As the story develops, Andrea’s assumptions about life and social relations in August Town are gradually undermined. Mrs Jackson’s unperturbed response to Yappy’s gunshot – telling him to ‘stop the foolishness’ – and Yappy’s use of Mrs Jackson’s and Natasha’s names, reveal a level of familiarity in their interactions which complicates Andrea’s perception of the youths as hostile and threatening (37). At the end of the story Natasha is killed in crossfire, and at first glance this could be seen to support the idea of the ‘ghetto’ as a place of violence and destruction which precludes a sense of community. Upset by the news of Natasha’s death, Andrea asks one of Mrs Jackson’s neighbours whether Yappy was involved in the shooting; in her mind, this is the expected behaviour of the ‘bored and trouble-seeking boys’ (36) she had encountered on the street during her previous visit. The neighbour’s account of Natasha’s death contrasts directly with her expectations: ‘Yappy? Is Yappy dat try to shield her when he see she get shot. Is him try to calm down Miz Jackson when she start run up and down de street like a madwoman’ (48). Rather than being a source of danger for inhabitants of August Town, as Andrea had imagined, Yappy protects and supports members of his community. The hostility she had received from him and his peers on her first visit could be seen, then, as part of his attempt to safeguard his neighbourhood. On her return to August Town, Andrea describes the area: When the BBC or the New York Times did stories about political violence on the island, this was the sort of place they liked to show. It looked like a war zone. Slogans were scrawled on every wall and, if anyone paid attention to laws in the country, all the houses would’ve long been condemned. (47)

In this passage, McKenzie comments on the representation of Jamaica by foreign media, which perpetuates negative stereotypes of the island as violent and crime-ridden. The passage reflects on how US and UK reporters strategically select images of areas such as August Town which neatly illustrate the story they want to tell. Such images, it is suggested, assist them in constructing the kind of sensationalist story that will sell to an international audience. Andrea’s perspective seems to converge with that of the foreign media. The observation that all the houses would have been ‘condemned’ if anyone ‘paid attention to laws in the country’ seems to be 98

Urban Communities her own, indicating that she sees the close quarters of the tenements as uninhabitable, rather than as a basis for practices of sharing and cooperation. However, there is a discrepancy between Andrea’s impression of the area and the insights offered by McKenzie’s story, which moves beyond the limits of Andrea’s perception despite the dominance of her voice in the story. Although McKenzie’s depiction of August Town does not ignore the politicised violence, poor living conditions and high mortality rate of such areas, the stories in her collection build up a more detailed and nuanced picture of the city and the island than is offered by the foreign media, providing more insight into the complexities of downtown communities and their relationship to uptown neighbourhoods. If ‘Natasha’ draws our attention to the strong sense of collective identity within Kingston’s lower-income neighbourhoods, the opening of ‘Bella Vista’ comments on the exclusion of those neighbourhoods from the city’s official urban imaginary. The story begins with a description of the community living on Seaward Road near Bella Vista Hospital (presumably a fictional version of Belle Vue Hospital on Windward Road), ‘one of the poorest areas in the city’ (151). It has ‘pot-holes that could swallow a bus, and the houses on either side were all run down, all badly in need of repair’ (151). It is populated with young men ‘leaning idly against walls, quite sure the whole island didn’t have one job for them’ (151). The narrator reflects on how the government ‘generally ignored the area until foreign heads of state visited’, at which point they smarten it with whitewash and imported flowers (151–52). The protagonist, Mavis, remembers two instances of this, once when the US President visited in 1978, and earlier in honour of Emperor Selassie’s visit to Jamaica. She reflects that each time this was done with a different political party in power. The temporary improvement of the area is described in the story as a ‘beautification exercise’ (153). David Harvey describes a process of ‘urban restructuring through “creative destruction”’,50 where impoverished areas of cities – often central parts of the city where the land has become valuable – are cleared to make room for profitable developments. Offering examples of this taking place in Paris and New York, he explains how this activity often presents itself as beneficial to the city as a whole – done in the name of ‘civic improvement’, ‘urban renovation’ and ‘gentrification’ – but in reality the motive is usually economic, and rather than addressing the poverty-related problems in these areas, only moves them to another part of the city.51 Although the situation described in McKenzie’s story does not involve a long-term financial investment or any lasting transformation of the urban landscape, the situation is similar to those discussed by Harvey in that the city’s public image is being prioritised over its underlying problems; the 50 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London and New York: Verso, 2012), p. 16. 51 Ibid., pp. 16–18.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories ‘beautification’ exercises are superficial and reveal a lack of concern on the part of the ruling powers regarding the situation of the people living in the area. Not only does the planting of expensive flowers in an area where the roads are practically unusable indicate a disregard for the needs of the local people, but the use of imported flowers also suggests an indifference to the local environment; the area is being reshaped according to the needs and desires of a political and economic elite who monopolise the ‘right to the city’.52 The preparations for the US president’s trip suggest that, despite the fact that a socialist government was in power at that time (Michael Manley’s PNP, referenced in McKenzie’s stories although ‘Manley’ is replaced by ‘Canlie’), the prospect of foreign capital was more important to the government than social welfare. Despite political rhetoric of social change, and the repeated makeover of the district, Seaward Road is ‘an area that never changed’ (151). McKenzie’s stories comment on the limits of state-level politics in this context, suggesting that the only way in which Kingston’s lower-income groups can resist being rendered invisible is by developing the kind of localised communal identities and support networks that we see in her depiction of August Town. In choosing the setting of her stories, McKenzie selects neighbourhoods which do not fit neatly into the urban imaginary evoked in the city’s media discourse. As an ‘uptown part of “downtown”’, August Town disturbs the order of the city’s imagined uptown/downtown division. The community featuring in ‘Bella Vista’ and ‘Jakes Makes’ is even harder to place in terms of its social location within the city. This is not the same community described at the start of ‘Bella Vista’ and discussed above, since Mavis views the ‘people who lived around Seaward’ (152) as distinct from her and glimpses them through a bus window. However, Mavis’ own neighbourhood seems to be nearby. She tells us that her son Larry was supposed to go to Camperup High School, since that is ‘near where we live’ (158). It seems likely that Camperup High School is a fictional version of Camperdown High School on Camperdown Road, Kingston 16, which is off Windward Road and near to Belle Vue Hospital. This means that the neighbourhood described in the stories is just east of Kingston’s downtown central business district. This neighbourhood is not middle class; Mavis works as an office maid, travels by bus and has considered working as a higgler on King Street, where she feels

52 Harvey’s argument draws on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’, which he understands as the ‘freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities’. He proposes that it should be a ‘collective rather than an individual right, since reinventing the city inevitably depends upon the exercise of collective power over the processes of urbanization’ (ibid., p. 4). He also observes that, at present, the ‘right to the city’ is ‘far too narrowly confined, in most cases in the hands of a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape the city more and more after their own needs’ (ibid., p. 24).

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Urban Communities more at ease than the middle-class student, Cherry, who accompanies her there. And yet Grand Ma Scottie owns two houses, and can afford to send her grandchildren to study at UWI. Larry also studies at UWI, funded by his father, who is a successful lawyer and politician. McKenzie’s stories extend beyond a simplistic imagined geography of the city, showing us the social and economic unevenness within both uptown and downtown Kingston. Both McKenzie’s and Dawes’ stories offer a different account of Kingston to the media representations described within them. While they comment on the fragmentation of the inner city into warring factions due to partisan political violence, they also depict moments of cohesion and solidarity within downtown communities. Furthermore, the neighbourhoods in their stories unsettle the imagined dichotomies of uptown/ downtown, affluent/impoverished, safe/dangerous which underpin the city’s media discourse and reinforce its divisions and hierarchies. The Kingston of their fictional worlds is messier, less schematic, and exposes various kinds of connections and interchange between social spheres. Uptown worlds David Howard observes that just as Kingston’s downtown communities function as garrisons, closed to outsiders and protected against surrounding communities, the city’s uptown communities have become ‘gated domestic garrisons’, which have been ‘progressively fortified’ as violence has intensified in downtown areas.53 If parts of downtown Kingston are ‘no-go areas’ for uptown residents, inhabitants of downtown areas are equally unwelcome in suburban neighbourhoods, where households are secured against them. According to Howard, one of the most ‘divisive forces’ in Kingston is ‘that of fear, separating and dividing people into their imagined citadels of safety’.54 Building on Howard’s point, Rivke Jaffe, Ad de Bruijne and Aart Schalkwijk discuss the ‘geography of fear’ within cities such as Kingston.55 They explain how the security measures taken by middle- and upper-class elites, such as gates, guards, dogs and burglar bars, seal them off from the rest of the city, intensifying the polarisation of uptown and downtown social spaces. These security measures are intended to diminish fear, but in fact they have the opposite effect, since the exclusion of downtown inhabitants renders them more threatening as an ‘often ethnically defined urban “other”’.56 Jaffe considers how both the ‘visible barriers of the gated communities of the rich’ and the ‘“invisible” gates barring access to the poorer areas’ serve to 53 Howard, Kingston, p. 105. 54 Ibid., p. 98. 55 Rivke Jaffe, Ad de Bruijne and Aart Schalkwijk, ‘The Caribbean City: An Introduction’, in The Caribbean City, ed. by Jaffe, pp. 1–24 (p. 9). 56 Ibid., p. 9.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories ‘restrict citizen mobility, both spatially and socially’,57 reinforcing the city’s ­socio-spatial fragmentation. Dawes’ story ‘In the Gully’ takes place in an upmarket neighbourhood and the gully running alongside it, and McKenzie’s story ‘Satellite City’ is set in a suburb in the hills overlooking Kingston. Both writers critique a media discourse which reflects middle-class perceptions of the inner city as a source of danger. The stories offer more nuanced accounts of social relations in Kingston than the newspaper, radio and television reports depicted within them, and raise important questions regarding the origins and location of violence and danger in the city. Dawes and McKenzie interrogate the assumption that criminality is concentrated within the ‘ghetto’, suggesting instead that violence – of various kinds – pervades all levels of Jamaican society, and that a major source of violence is the division of the city into political and domestic garrisons. While ‘In the Gully’ focuses on the complicity of the city’s police force with the media industry in the criminalisation of the urban poor, ‘Satellite City’ explores the common agenda of a media discourse which sensationalises violent crime in the inner city and a line of greeting cards which erases it from representations of the island. Both discourses encourage middle-class readers and consumers to distance themselves psychologically from downtown communities, deepening the city’s socioeconomic divisions. Whereas Dawes’ story, centring on the rape and murder of a young girl, is unremittingly bleak, in McKenzie’s story the Kingston represented through media discourse and commercial art is pitted against competing narratives of the city to be found in creative art and in the lyrics of dancehall music. Clarke describes how by the early 1990s, Kingston’s ‘massive zone of deprivation’ had extended from downtown to ‘pockets of poverty associated with the gully courses in the uptown suburbs’.58 The first part of Dawes’ story ‘In the Gully’ charts the journey of a young girl up one of these ‘gully courses’ towards her home in the suburbs. The girl’s social status is not as clear-cut as that of other characters in the story. She wears a gold wristwatch, the expense of which her father justifies by saying that ‘they could afford it’ and ‘he was not going to deprive his daughter of anything’ (173). However, she also knows, from primary school, ‘some of the “rude” boys who hung around the bars and the side shops in the area or played cricket in the gully’ (176). Their attitude towards her is ambivalent; sometimes they greet her and sometimes they do not. She seems to belong to an affluent neighbourhood but to have a lasting association with people from a lower social stratum. The ‘“rude” boys’ may be offhand but her partial familiarity with them prevents them from becoming a source of danger in her eyes. The story’s description of the girl’s journey through the gully introduces a number of scenes suggestive of potential danger. The girl first walks past the prison, and looks at ‘the high wall that loomed just above the gully with 57 Jaffe, ‘Fragmented Cities’, p. 199. 58 Clarke, Decolonizing the Colonial City, p. 101.

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Urban Communities barred windows’, with a ‘thick mass of barbed wire that rose almost as high as the windows’ (175). She sometimes sees the prisoners’ hands hanging out of the windows but ‘the holes were too dark to make out faces’ (175). The inmates’ faces merge with the darkness of the prison interior, preventing any kind of identification with them. They remain unknown to the girl, and therefore potentially threatening, leading her to speed up her pace. Next the girl walks past a burnt down police station, and past a gardener who ‘had the reputation for being wild and violent’ (175). Later in her journey the gully is ‘narrowed by thick forests on either side’, leaving the gully quiet and ‘isolated’ (176). Towards the end of her journey through the gully, the girl passes a neighbouring house. It is the ‘largest and most elaborate house on the avenue, and the houses in the avenue were all quite large’ (176). The owner of the house is a wealthy politician, and the house is surrounded by a fence and a grill, and guarded by dogs. A guard dog chases her along the fence, encouraged by the politician’s psychologically disturbed son, Felix, who accuses her of trespassing, leading her to fear for her life. This moment anticipates later developments in the story, where the girl is raped and brutally murdered by the politician’s son. Despite the potential perils of the gully, the girl encounters real danger only when she enters this affluent and well-populated neighbourhood. Her experience invites us to question the association of danger with the urban poor. The story builds up our expectations of a tragic ending as the naive young girl negotiates her way through an impoverished part of the city, only to surprise us when the girl’s life is threatened just behind her own back yard, in a supposedly ‘safe’ uptown enclave. The idea of the uptown neighbourbood as a site of danger is further developed through the character of Caddy, one of the boys the girl greets in the gully on her way home. The narrator tells us that Caddy is a black child who works for the wealthy politician as his gardener and golfing caddy. We learn also that according to rumour, Caddy ‘was the most remarkable mango thief in the district’ who ‘went to places that most boys dared not enter’ and ‘went into the most affluent residential areas where the dogs were the fiercest, the yards the largest, but mangoes most abundant and sweet’ (180–81). In the description of Caddy’s escapades, suburban Kingston is as much a ‘no-go area’ for those who do not belong as the inner-city garrisons. On both sides, there is a fear of the consequences of trespassing on another community’s territory. Security measures designed to ensure the safety of a household are simultaneously a threat to outsiders, and an area of safety for one community is an area of danger for another. Dawes’ story comments on how violence in Kingston both emerges out of and intensifies the city’s perceived socio-spatial divisions. ‘In the Gully’ examines the role of the media industry in entrenching the uptown/downtown division within the city’s collective imaginary. When he hears of the girl’s murder, Caddy leaves the area to visit his grandmother in the country, but ‘the story followed him on the radio and in newspapers’ (189); 103

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories he is unable to escape the media discourse surrounding the event. Gossip spreading within the uptown neighbourhood informs the police investigation: people say that they have seen the petty thief, Caswell, walking in the gully at a similar time and that ‘He was the kind of fellow to do something like that’ (192). Comments such as this both draw upon and strengthen the stereotype of the impoverished black man as criminal, and the framing of Caswell provides an easy solution to the murder inquiry which reaffirms the city’s ‘geography of fear’.59 The exposure of the real murderer, the wealthy ­politician’s son, would undermine the association of criminality with the urban poor; the accusation of Caswell is a more familiar narrative and one which allows the city’s ­socio-spatial hierarchy to remain intact. Dawes’ story offers a very different account of Caswell to that provided by the newspapers and radio programmes. A short section of the story is presented from Caswell’s point of view. It becomes clear that his default response is to run from the police, whatever the situation, and that his crimes generally consist of fruit poaching in wealthy neighbourhoods and small-scale cultivation of marijuana (190). These activities could be seen as a minor act of rebellion against the country’s uneven distribution of wealth, and the robbery of the gold watch and jewellery from the politician’s house could be interpreted as a protest at the unfair conduct of the family, who have neglected to pay him for a week spent cutting the hedge around their house. Caswell reflects on the exploitation of people like him by wealthy families: ‘There was no point in trying to get them to pay. They wouldn’t. They were all like that. They worked people because they could’ (193). His theft of ‘a few small items’, calculated as ‘a fair wage for his labours’ (193), is therefore at least partly motivated by a need to reclaim his dignity and contest the family’s inequity. Aware that an appeal to the police would achieve nothing due to his lack of social power, Caswell acts according to his own internal moral framework. He ultimately falls victim to the injustice of the authorities when he is killed by a policeman before any evidence has even been found. The policeman’s decision to shoot him is based solely on gossip and media reports; he does not wait to hear Caswell’s own account of himself. Deborah Thomas observes that Jamaica has often been described by commentators as having developed a ‘culture of violence’, a ‘culture that is seen to be glorified through media and thereby reproduced’.60 Focusing on the representation of Jamaicans in the UK and North America, Thomas observes that ‘bloggers, editorialists, and policymakers, by positioning violence as external to the process of state formation, all reproduce the notion that violence is a cultural rather than a structural phenomenon’.61 Dawes’ story 59 Jaffe, de Bruijne and Schalkwijk, ‘The Caribbean City’, p. 9. 60 Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 55. 61 Ibid., p. 79.

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Urban Communities deals with the same issue in a different context, examining the representation of violence within rather than outside Jamaica. Like Thomas’ study, Dawes’ story foregrounds the idea of structural violence, by which I mean a form of violence embedded in the political and economic structure of a society.62 ‘In the Gully’ explores how the urban poor are subjected to the structural violence of a state which denies them legal rights. In doing so, the story challenges sensationalist media representations of inner-city Kingston’s ‘culture of violence’. ‘In the Gully’ complicates the correlation of the uptown/downtown opposition with oppositions such as safe/dangerous and good/bad which dominate the city’s media discourse and inform middle-class perceptions of the city. At the end of the story Caddy goes to see Mr Ernest, the rich politician whose son has killed the girl. He appears wearing ‘white pants and a white shirt carefully tucked into his pants’, with a ‘fresh clean look about him, as if he had just showered and shaved’ (195). The white, ordered neatness of Mr Ernest’s appearance here removes him from the messy disorder of the girl’s damaged body in an earlier scene, belying his connection to the murderer. When Caddy attempts to accuse Felix of the murder, Mr Ernest remains calm and puts on dark, reflective sunglasses which render his expression unreadable. He does not accept Caddy’s assertion and dismisses as ridiculous his plans to tell the police. Caddy observes how the ‘sky and earth were evenly divided in black and white in the reflection of his dark glasses’ (197). The polarised worlds of the sky and earth here – neatly divided into black and white – remind us of the division between uptown and downtown social worlds which empowers Mr Ernest and his family, while also illustrating the equilibrium of his state of mind, unshaken by Caddy’s accusation. Additionally, this image draws attention to the racialised nature of the city’s socio-spatial divisions. Mr Ernest then disappears behind the sign ‘No Trespassing. Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ and speaks discreetly to his guard, presumably ordering Caddy’s assassination. The capitalised words underline the authority of this statement. Caddy has trespassed into the territory of the family’s reputation, which is well protected, like the house itself. As we learn earlier in the story, Mr Ernest is a ‘very powerful man’ because he has men ‘who looked after his interests’ (181). Caddy’s ambition is to be promoted by Mr Ernest from the role of golfing caddy to the equally servile role of gunman. Instead, the story ends with the certainty of his death as a consequence of implicating Mr Ernest in the girl’s murder. Dawes’ story destabilises the assumption that danger and violence in Kingston are concentrated in the city’s economically deprived areas. He exposes the vulnerability of the lower-income communities whose lack of social and economic power allows them to become either a tool or a target of the city’s wealthy elite. 62 The concept of ‘structural violence’ was first introduced by Johan Galtung in his essay ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Studies, 6:3 (1969), 167–91.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories McKenzie’s story ‘Satellite City’ touches on similar issues as ‘In the Gully’, using the spectacle of two dead women as a focal point through which to critically examine middle-class perceptions of the inner city. The area nicknamed ‘Satellite City’ is identified as Meadowbrook Estates, which is in St Andrew. Meadowbrook Estates is northwest of Kingston, and situated in the Blue Mountains, as is indicated when the protagonist, Clinton, drives from downtown back home, ‘up into the hills overlooking the city’ (88). The narrator observes that Clinton’s neighbourhood ‘was remarkable for its big houses and the huge satellite dishes in front gardens and on rooftops’, and adds that ‘[t]he less privileged called the area Satellite City’ (88). The term ‘Satellite City’ resonates in the story in more than one way. In geographic terms, a satellite is a ‘community or town that is economically or otherwise dependent on a nearby larger town or city’.63 In this case, the satellite is a suburb of Kingston, reliant upon it for employment, although (as discussed at the beginning of this chapter) in the 1960s many businesses relocated to New Kingston, also in uptown St Andrew, reducing the number of commuters from the suburbs to Kingston proper. Metaphorically, the term ‘Satellite city’ evokes the way in which, in the minds of inhabitants, suburban Kingston exists in orbit, encircling but detached from downtown Kingston. The concept of a satellite can also be understood in political terms, as a ‘country or state politically or economically dependent upon and subservient to another’.64 This is equally appropriate to the neighbourhood described in this story, where – as is mentioned in the description above – everyone owns a satellite dish. The satellite dishes provide access to American soap operas, enabling members of this suburban community to immerse themselves in an alternative reality removed from the social unrest and political violence of their own country. As the story makes clear, this cultural influence is combined with Jamaica’s growing economic dependence on the US. Clinton recalls the political debates staged on TV shows, remembering a conversation where Canlie (a fictional version of Michael Manley) defends himself against Swagga (Edward Seaga): ‘My people come before the IMF. My people come before interest payment and international bailiff-man. And don’t let anybody tell you that I goin’ to devalue we dollar. Is only a little depreciation’ (90). The debate refers to the pressure put on Manley by the IMF and World Bank to accept the conditions of structural adjustment, conditions that would later cripple the Jamaican economy. As Gray observes, the political parties’ ‘ideological protestations’ were ‘largely irrelevant in the face of the country’s structural dependence’.65 In both cultural and economic terms, then, Jamaica could be seen as a kind of satellite to the US. Avoiding downtown Kingston, inhabitants of Meadowbrook Estates recognise Miami as their metropolitan centre. 63 OED online, 6b [accessed 30 July 2012]. 64 Ibid., 6a. 65 Gray, Demeaned but Empowered, p. 284.

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Urban Communities The Meadowbrook Estates neighbourhood differs significantly from the neighbourhood of August Town as depicted in the story ‘Natasha’. Architecturally, the ‘big houses’ contrast with the crowded tenement occupied by the August Town community. The mode and extent of interaction also differs. Clinton lives alone, surrounded by his own artwork. Despite his contempt for his neighbours’ obsession with American soap operas, he finds himself ‘looking around his living-room, his eyes resting on the place on the bookshelf where the TV used to be’ (90). This suggests that the TV operates as a substitute for company and conversation in middle-class households. Whereas the August Town community congregates in the street, engaged in everyday activities, the Meadowbrook Estates community socialises at extravagant parties, gathering inside enclosed gardens. At a party typical of the neighbourhood, described from Clinton’s perspective, ‘Volvo after Volvo was lined up on the street, even by people who could easily have walked’ (98). The unnecessary Volvos signify wealth and social status, and they are also part of an environment where driving is the norm. The absence of people from the streets distinguishes the neighbourhood from areas such as August Town where the streets are ‘full of life’ (47), and where the street as well as the yard are key features of the urban imaginary. As well as depicting the community dynamics of Meadowbrook Estates, the story comments on the attitude of its inhabitants to the inner city. Like ‘Natasha’, this story is narrated in the third person but from the point of view of the protagonist. Clinton is critical of the way his girlfriend Pearl and other acquaintances respond to violence on the island. The story centres on the image of two dead women on the highway near Renk Town (a fictional inner-city community in West Kingston), described on the first page. The focus of this scene soon shifts from the bodies to the reactions of commuters. On one level, the bodies are ignored, since no one has covered them up or called the police. On another, the bodies are the subject of intense curiosity; passing motorists deliberately slow down so that they and their passengers ‘could have a good look’ (86). This combination of disregard and fascination indicates how the inhabitants of Renk Town exist in the minds of the suburban-based commuters only as the subject of a media story; they watch the scene passively as they would a television, disconnected from the reality of the inner city. The observers augment their emotional distance from the scene by putting the deaths down to the immorality of the victims rather than considering wider social problems which might have led to the fatalities: ‘In all the onlookers’ minds was the thought that the women must have done something to deserve their deaths. Drugs? Politics? Prostitution?’ (86). The inclusion of ‘politics’ in the list of possible crimes enacted by the women suggests that the observers feel that political violence is something that is ‘done’ in the inner city. This assumption overlooks the fact that, as is explored in detail in McKenzie’s later story ‘Bella Vista’, inner-city politics is closely connected to the higher levels of society. The narrator goes on to suggest that this emotional detachment 107

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories is a survival strategy adopted by the middle and upper classes; a way of convincing themselves that they are not in danger. The narrator reflects that the ‘onlookers were sure it wouldn’t have happened to them, especially the ones with their nice cars, nice children and nice houses in decent areas’ (86). Here the repetition of ‘nice’ introduces a strain of anxiety into the thoughts of the onlookers and a need to establish the difference between themselves and the dead women. The word ‘nice’ here is informed by class values: ‘nice’ children are associated with expensive cars, houses and areas. This moment in the story draws attention to the social stigma attached to particular areas of the city. Although Clinton is critical towards the behaviour and attitudes he observes, it becomes evident as the story develops that he struggles to escape a middle-class mindset. To an extent, his perspective is aligned with that of the other onlookers: ‘And he, like everyone else, stared more in curiosity than shock’ (86). In the subsequent paragraph, the pronoun ‘you’ is used to interpellate a middle-class audience: ‘Late at night you pressed your foot on the accelerator and flew past Renk Town because you never knew when you might be ambushed’ (86). The comment illustrates a tendency among inhabitants of uptown and suburban Kingston to avoid the inner city due to the danger they imagine lurks around every corner. The narrator goes on to describe Renk Town from Clinton’s point of view: Renk Town was a stronghold of one or the other political party. Clinton didn’t know which. He only knew that outsiders were either shot on sight or shortly afterwards. But the highway that ran past Renk Town, flanked by trees that hid the zinc and cardboard houses, was only one of two routes linking the suburbs with the city, and the other was even worse. (86–87)

This extract demonstrates the limits of Clinton’s knowledge of inner-city areas. He does not know whether Renk Town is a JLP or a PNP enclave; a detail which would have been key to the identity of Renk Town inhabitants. He shows no interest in acquiring this information, satisfied with the knowledge – more relevant to him – that ‘outsiders were shot on sight or shortly afterwards’. It is not clear where this ‘knowledge’ has come from, but bearing in mind the examples he gives of ambushed commuters, based on a story told to him by a friend and a news story that had appeared in The Gleaner, we can assume that it is derived from anecdotes and media representations of the ‘ghetto’. The extract reflects how residents of Meadowbrook Estates, living northwest of Kingston, have to travel through the inner-city area of West Kingston in order to reach the downtown city centre. The commute of Clinton and other ‘Satellite city’ people brings them uncomfortably close to Renk Town. However, the design of the highway, lined with trees that conceal the poverty of the area it traverses, reduces the potential for contact between suburban and inner-city communities. In ‘Satellite City’, media discourse and commercial art are positioned alongside creative art and dancehall music and, as a result, the story shifts 108

Urban Communities between competing narratives of the city. Trained as an artist, Clinton provides illustrations for a greetings card company. He and his friend Boris had found a niche in the market with their ‘black line’, which converged with the ‘surge of nationalism and socialism’ and the emergence of black consciousness in the 1970s. However, in the 1980s they find themselves having to respond to a different ‘mood’: ‘bush jackets, dashikis and dreadlocks were out, and the three Vs had been in for some time – video, Volvo and visa to America’ (88). Material acquisitions and a share in the American dream are the priorities for the new generation. When Clinton refuses to tone down the African heritage of the figures on his cards, Boris tells him: ‘Is not me who don’t have no consciousness […] Is people out dere’ (87). Boris and Clinton are obliged to respond to changing trends in order to stay in business. The cards Clinton illustrates offer designs in bright colours, such as a ‘slim, beautiful woman walking barefoot along a beach in a flowing pink chiffon dress’ and a ‘handsome dark-skinned young man handing roses to his lightskinned girlfriend, against a yellow background’ (103). The scenery of the first card converges with tourist brochure discourse, while the second uses the borrowed symbolism of the rose to convey the concept of love, rather than featuring a local flower. The second card also expresses the idea of light-skinned women as desirable. The idealised images on the greeting cards contrast sharply with the picture of the two dead women which confronts us on the first page of the story: ‘One was black, fattish, her hair ragged and her feet bare, the soles dirty. […] Neither was beautiful. Blood stained the front of their dresses, and mango skin, bits of old newspaper and other litter surrounded them’ (85). The woman described here differs from the women on the greeting cards in terms of both skin colour and body shape, and thus does not conform to the ideal of beauty subscribed to by the greeting cards. While her bare feet associate her with the greeting card woman walking on the beach, her dirty soles suggest that missing shoes are a permanent feature of her attire, resulting from necessity, rather than a temporary pose designed to enhance her desirability. The surrounding litter accentuates the way in which these bodies have been carelessly discarded, and ignored by passing motorists. The scene echoes Orlando Patterson’s 1964 novel The Children of Sisyphus, which features a destitute community literally living on a rubbish heap in West Kingston. In its coverage of the two women’s deaths, The Gleaner reports that ‘someone had seen them leave a discotheque with a man the night before their bodies were found dumped on the roadside’ (92–93). Clinton is unconvinced by this statement, reflecting that the ‘dresses they had been wearing didn’t look like something you wore to a night-club’ (93). The newspaper report confirms the belief of the commuters that the women deserved their fate because of immoral behaviour. Whereas the greeting cards edit inner-city violence out of the national narrative, newspapers such as The Gleaner – as it is portrayed in this story – sensationalise it. Yet both modes of representation are driven by the market and both encourage emotional detachment 109

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories on the part of middle-class readers and consumers from the high levels of crime and violence in the inner city. As such, both media and greeting card discourses intensify divisions between uptown and downtown social worlds. Lyrics from L. G. Lovindeer’s best-selling single ‘Wild Gilbert’ (1988), included in the story, offer a different perspective on Kingston. Released soon after Hurricane Gilbert caused widespread destruction in the Caribbean region in 1988, Lovindeer’s song comically depicts the misfortune of residents whose satellite dishes were blown away by the storm. In McKenzie’s story, Clinton recalls this song, claiming that it is about his own affluent neighbourhood in the hills overlooking the city: ‘The [music] video showed a worried Satellite City man running about, asking everybody: “Oono see mi dish? Oono see mi dish? Anybody, oono see mi satellite dish?”’ (88). Unlike his girlfriend, who had lost her satellite dish in the hurricane, Clinton had found the song amusing, and later in the story he listens to the record on replay while reflecting on his transition from painting and sculpture to greeting card illustration. The lyrics from the refrain are quoted again twice during this scene and once more at the end of the story. Lovindeer’s song might seem to be making light of a serious catastrophe, but it has a satirical edge to it. He has explained how the song is partly based on the stories of residents of the uptown St Andrew areas of Constant Spring and Shortwood, who he spoke to after the hurricane.66 The speaker seems to be a fictional version of one of these residents. As well as mourning the loss of his satellite dish, the speaker laments that due to the power cut, ‘Mi fish and mi meat spoil in di freezer’, forcing him to live off canned ‘bully beef’.67 His complaints reveal both his relative wealth and his self-absorption. The plight of the speaker is humorous because it is not desperate. While other islanders have lost their lives or their livelihood, the speaker only has to deal with the discomfort of a monotonous diet of canned meat in place of fresh meat and fish, and the inconvenience of not having access to American soaps. The song exposes how natural disasters have a varying impact due to the uneven distribution of wealth on the island, and are much more devastating for poorer communities with substandard living conditions and limited access to employment. However, while on one level the song draws attention to the social inequalities foregrounded by the hurricane’s effects, on another it presents the hurricane as a kind of equaliser which generates social as well as physical upheaval. The speaker describes how ‘Di yout dem a loot in the raging storm’, and thank Hurricane Gilbert for the acquisition of a ‘fridge’, ‘colour TV’, ‘new stereo’ and ‘new video’.68 The storm provides 66 Mel Cooke, ‘“Wild Gilbert” A Song for All Seasons’, Jamaica Gleaner, 4 March 2010 [accessed 22 January 2013]. 67 L. G. Lovindeer, ‘Wild Gilbert’ [accessed 1 August 2012]. 68 Ibid.

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Urban Communities a unique opportunity for the impoverished to gain access to goods which would normally be out of reach. Lovindeer’s song mocks the materialism and insularity of Kingston’s suburban communities. The allusions to ‘Wild Gilbert’ in McKenzie’s story therefore illuminate Clinton’s own conflicted position within his ‘Satellite City’ neighbourhood. After criticising his girlfriend Pearl’s lack of concern for the urban poor, he reflects that in fact he ‘wasn’t much different from her’, since he lived in ‘Satellite City’ rather than Renk Town, ‘made greetings cards’ and ‘got rich’ (89–90). He has responded to, and profited from, the same commercial trends that he inwardly condemns. Pearl has been similarly fortunate in her clothing business, inherited from her second husband. Both Clinton and Pearl have succeeded financially by finding a ‘niche’ in the market and responding to its demands (97). A study by Derek Gordon, Patricia Anderson and Don Robotham explores the impact of structural adjustment in the 1980s on Kingston’s society and economy, and shows how it has had varying effects on different social groups. The study compares the views and situations of homeowners in the lower-middle and working-class suburbs to those ‘in between’, renting accommodation in Portmore, and ‘those left behind’, in low-skill jobs and inadequate housing.69 After only six years in the greeting card business, Clinton and his business partner both own two houses, and Pearl mentions that she is contemplating buying a second property. Meanwhile, as can be seen in other stories within McKenzie’s collection, families in less affluent areas of the city share a single room in buildings which do not meet health and safety standards. Given that the 1980s was a time of recession in Jamaica, dominated by inflation of the Jamaican dollar and cutbacks in government spending, the flourishing of Clinton’s and Pearl’s businesses during that time and their acquisition of property exemplifies the uneven and inconsistent impact of structural adjustment on Kingston; while some profited from the deregulation of the economy and the privatisation of public property, others were critically disadvantaged by it. Although the perspective of suburban residents dominates ‘Satellite City’, the story also presents us with a foreigner’s perspective on the city when Clinton meets a Dutch visitor, Benno Zoetmulder, who describes himself as a writer. He asks Clinton for a favour: I would really like to see the real island. Trench Town and Concrete Jungle, like Bob Marley sings about. Not this middle-class thing with mestizo people. Do you know Renk Town? I tried to get a taxi to take me there but nobody will do it. Could you be my guide? I’ll pay you well. American dollars. (100) 69 Derek Gordon, Patricia Anderson and Don Robotham, ‘Jamaica: Urbanization During the Years of Crisis’, in The Urban Caribbean: Transition to the New Cultural Economy, ed. by Alejandro Portes, Carlos Dore-Cabral and Patricia Landolt (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 190–223 (p. 221).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories The difficulty Benno has encountered finding transport to the inner city indicates that inhabitants of suburban St Andrew are as keen to avoid the area as he is to see it, and Clinton acknowledges his own complicity in that way of thinking when he realises that he has ‘never been inside Trench Town, Renk Town, Rema or Tivoli’ (100). Although ‘Satellite City’ residents’ fixation on North American products and on the prospect of migration to Miami might seem to identify this community with tourists visiting the island, the conversation draws attention to a discrepancy between foreigners’ perceptions of Kingston and the perceptions of the Jamaican middle and upper classes. ‘Satellite City’ residents’ experiences of the city may not belong to the ‘real’ Jamaica as Benno understands it, and yet they are not outsiders; their world is part of the city. Ironically, his notion of the ‘real’ Jamaica is based on the words of a singer who moved out of inner-city Kingston, first to an expensive property uptown, just north of New Kingston, and then abroad, where he became commercially successful on the world stage. Carolyn Cooper observes that Marley sang ‘in a language close to the English end of the language continuum in Jamaica, but with clearly rootsical vibes’, and ‘sold himself internationally’.70 The idea of an authenticity located in the ‘ghetto’ became a selling point for Marley’s music, appealing to a global audience. ‘Satellite City’ challenges the idea of a single authentic narrative of Kingston. McKenzie and Dawes critique middle-class perspectives on the inner city, and yet those perspectives form a substantial part of their stories. For both writers, the ‘real’ Kingston encompasses all social strata and all areas of the city. The range of intertexts within their stories – visual, verbal and sonic – along with the varying perceptions of the city expressed by characters within the stories, serve to convey the idea that Kingston consists of more than one reality. Both Satellite City and A Place to Hide present the city as collectively imagined. As will be discussed more fully in the final section of this chapter, this effect is enhanced by the generic mode of the texts. While the main emphasis of ‘In the Gully’ and ‘Satellite City’ is the divisive effects of Kingston’s ‘geography of fear’,71 and the role of the media industry in intensifying this fear, the forms of the short story cycle and collection enable McKenzie and Dawes to envisage connections between the city’s polarised social spaces.

70 Carolyn Cooper, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender, and the Vulgar Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 5. 71 Jaffe, de Bruijne and Schalkwijk, ‘The Caribbean City’, p. 9.

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Urban Communities Writing Kingston in Kwame Dawes’ A Place to Hide and Other Stories and Alecia McKenzie’s Satellite City and Other Stories In his introduction to a recent edition of Orlando Patterson’s 1964 novel The Children of Sisyphus, Dawes comments on the shortage of literary models of urban life in Jamaica. He observes that ‘prior to the 1950s, the narrative of Jamaican society was defined by a village and rural town existence based on small-scale farming and the declining sugar estates’.72 He suggests that, despite the wave of migration from the country to the city between the 1940s and 60s, literary writers ‘remained deeply committed to the rural landscape, with the implication that “real” Jamaicanness was to be found in the countryside’.73 According to Dawes, Patterson’s novel departed from the corpus of Jamaican writing which preceded it with its focus on the lives of the urban poor. Roger Mais, whose fiction of the 1940s and 50s focused on working-class communities in Kingston, is Patterson’s most obvious precursor, and yet in Dawes’ view, ‘Mais’s urban characters remain essentially rural people at heart’.74 Dawes identifies other Jamaican writers whose novels are set in Kingston, but criticises their predominantly middle-class focus. He claims that in Neville Dawes’ The Last Enchantment (1960), ‘what we see of the urban world is distinctly middle class’. He also contends that John Hearne’s Kingston of the 1950s is ‘an urban world that was largely suburban and secure’ and that Hearne generally presents ‘working-class black communities as a backdrop […] to middle-class white and brown lives’.75 In contrast, he argues, Patterson’s characters are ‘wholly city people’.76 Quoting C. L. R. James’ review of the novel, Dawes describes how Patterson’s fiction incorporates the ‘sharp, concrete realities’ of Kingston,77 including ‘the sounds, rhythmic patterns, idioms (and the worldviews embedded in them) of urban black Jamaicans’.78 In Dawes’ eyes, Patterson has made inner-city Kingston appropriate subject matter for Caribbean writers, writing ‘about the ghetto with the poetic intensity of someone who has found beauty even in the most brutish realities, and with persuasive care for the authenticity of detail’.79 Dawes’ remarks imply that not only the ‘real’ Kingston but also ‘real’ Jamaicanness is to be found in the stories of the urban poor. The idea that Patterson’s Kingston is the most ‘authentic’ is problematic. At 72 Kwame Dawes, ‘Introduction’, in Orlando Patterson, The Children of Sisyphus (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2012), pp. 5–23 (p. 6). 73 Ibid., p. 6. 74 Ibid., p. 8. 75 Ibid., p. 8. 76 Ibid., p. 8. 77 Here Dawes quotes from C. L. R. James, ‘Rastafari at Home and Abroad’, New Left Review, 1/25 (May–June 1964). 78 Dawes, ‘Introduction’, p. 14. 79 Ibid., p. 14.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories the time his novel was published, Patterson had completed a BSc in Economics from the University of the West Indies, Mona, and was undertaking a PhD at the London School of Economics; experiences far removed from those of his characters scraping a living on a rubbish heap in inner-city Kingston. The discrepancy between Patterson’s social status and that of his characters is revealed through his language choices in The Children of Sisyphus: the voice of the third-person narrator, presented in Standard English, contrasts sharply with the characters’ speech, which approximates Jamaican Creole. Rather than trying to identify the ‘real’ Kingston, it may be more productive to consider how the city accommodates multiple realities. Given the division of the city into socially polarised micro-communities, and bearing in mind its complex cultural and political history, it would be impossible for any writer to capture Kingston in its entirety; any account of the city is necessarily limited and partial. Although Dawes suggests that only Patterson’s characters – representing the inner-city communities of West Kingston – are ‘wholly city people’, both his short story cycle and McKenzie’s short story collection fictionalise the experiences of characters across a wider social and spatial spectrum. In their stories, Kingston extends beyond the inner city in West Kingston to the area just east of downtown, August Town, the university, uptown St Andrew, and the suburbs. The collections portray a diversity of social milieux, and while middle-class perceptions of the city are critiqued in the stories, they are nevertheless presented as part of the city’s collective imaginary. Dawes’ and McKenzie’s texts portray competing narratives of Kingston in various ways: through intertextual references, through an interplay of narrative voices, and through their narrative structure. A key intertext for both writers is Jamaican popular music, as I have shown in my reading of individual stories. Writing in 1973, Gordon Rohlehr looks back at the 1960s and ‘the creative flowering of the people’s music in Kingston’s dry desert of stone’.80 More recently, Robotham has commented on the concurrence of violence and creativity in West Kingston, which ‘remains the most impoverished part of the city, in which most political violence and homicides are concentrated and at the same time the source of apparently endless musical creativity’.81 Both Rohlehr and Robotham locate Jamaica’s popular music scene in West Kingston, and Rohlehr’s reference to ‘the people’s music’ associates reggae and dancehall with the inner-city communities. The narrative structure of A Place to Hide is informed by Dawes’ notion of a ‘reggae aesthetic’. In his 1999 study, Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing, Dawes explains: ‘I reached a point in my writing where I knew that it was reggae which provided me with an ethos and aesthetic framework unavailable in the writing of [an] earlier 80 Gordon Rohlehr, ‘An Award Winning Film about Jamaica Today … in the Language of Kingston’s Streets’, Tapia (17 June 1973), 6–9 (p. 6). 81 Robotham, ‘How Kingston was Wounded’, p. 115.

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Urban Communities generation [of Caribbean writers]’.82 In the work of Caribbean writers of the 1950s and 60s, he argues, the ‘ideological agenda was largely nationalistic and committed to the notion of independence but the formal practice, the aesthetics, remained uncomfortably defined by western literary models’.83 In contrast, he proposes, reggae as a ‘working-class aesthetic’ was able to assert itself ‘on its own terms’.84 Dawes’ comments raise some interesting questions. To what extent can a reggae aesthetic be translated into literary writing, and how is it transformed in the process? Can the language of a ‘working class art’ be effectively conveyed through literary writing, a cultural form which, before the 1960s at least, was – according to Dawes – confined to the colonially educated middle classes? Dawes’ self-conscious identification of his writing with Kingston’s music scene and against the city’s literary culture could be interpreted as an attempt to distance himself from the middle-class social milieu that he had experienced growing up in a home ‘full of writers’.85 However, it is significant that Dawes chose to develop a reggae aesthetic within his fiction and poetry rather than to reject literary writing in favour of music. This blending of two distinct modes of expression could be seen as part of his endeavour to bring together uptown and downtown worlds in his writing. Dawes’ creative work incorporates the sounds, structure and lyrics of Jamaican reggae. In A Place to Hide, stories such as ‘Sinatra’ and ‘Marley’s Ghost’ include lyrics from Marley’s songs and examine his legacy in the decades following his death. The stories alternate with five reggae ‘vershans’, which – closer to prose poetry than stories – feature a singer composing and performing his songs. These sections, like the stories, are narrated in Standard English, but the narration is broken up by lyrics, presented in italics, which are often in Jamaican Creole. The shift in font type reminds us of the difference between the written and the oral, the narrative voice and the singing voice. Despite the ease with which Dawes theorises his ‘reggae aesthetic’, the story cycle seems to articulate a conflict between music and text, and between inner-city and middle-class sensibilities. The semi-autobiographical elements of the ‘vershans’ hint at how the writer himself is struggling to negotiate his own position within the city he describes. The ‘vershans’ examine a singer’s relationship to Kingston. In ‘Vershan 1: Burdens’, he invents stories about his absent father as a heroic revolutionary as a way of dealing with his loss. In his music he ‘remakes’ his family (58), and imagines meeting them in Ghana. The myths he builds around his parents .

82 Kwame Dawes, Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1999), p. 40. 83 Ibid., p. 16. While this may seem to contradict his praise of Patterson’s depiction of Kingston’s inner city (see above), Dawes views Patterson’s novel as an exception to this general trend in Jamaican fiction, and associates it instead with the reggae music which appeared after its publication (Dawes, ‘Introduction’, p. 13). 84 Dawes, Natural Mysticism, p. 18. 85 Dawes, ‘Kwame Dawes: An Interview with Walter P. Collins, III’, p. 40.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories become ‘as real as any actual memory he had of his parents’ (59). As a ‘middleclass boy, who kept coming downtown to find himself’ (63), the boy is doubly distanced from his ancestral roots, since ‘roots reggae’ of the late 1960s and 70s, closely intertwined with the Rastafarian and Pan-African movements, articulated the experiences of Kingston’s inner-city communities.86 ‘Vershan V: Scratch Madness’ deals with another kind of exile. The singer closes his eyes to imagine not Africa but Kingston, his childhood home. He and his band are in an unspecified North American city but he sings about Kingston, revisiting it in his memory. The sounds, sights and smells of the city have ‘given this song its meaning’ (245); the singer continues to return imaginatively to Kingston to find inspiration. As we progress through the five vershans, the narrative become increasingly layered and multivocal. In Vershan V, in collaboration with his accompanying musicians, the singer finds a way to bring uptown and downtown Kingston, Africa and North America into his song. Dawes’ reggae aesthetic informs the narrative structure as well as the content of A Place to Hide. The ‘vershans’ echo details from the stories we have read earlier in the collection; for example the setting of the story ‘In the Gully’ reappears in Vershan IV, where we encounter the image of the gully as a ‘scar of concrete’ (243). In this respect, true to its title, the episode functions like a dub version, a remix of ideas and themes explored in earlier pieces. A repeated motif in A Place to Hide is a journey up into the Blue Mountains, where the stories’ protagonists appear to find momentary respite from the pressures of city life. In ‘Flight’, the protagonist Hugh climbs Blue Mountain Peak in the hope that God will speak to him. He intends to fly from the top of the mountain. He does fly, but his flight takes him not up out of the chaos and confusion of the city but ‘down into the belly of the city’ (145). He descends through the wealthy suburbs into the central part of the city, skirting around the inner-city area of West Kingston, through a ‘dark stretch of highway’ (148) in his journey towards Spanish Town. The description of West Kingston as the city’s ‘belly’ conjures up an image of the inner city as Kingston’s innards – a vital part of the city necessary to its survival. At the same time, the word suggests an underbelly, a violent underworld from which the city’s middle and upper classes avert their eyes. ‘Flight’ therefore offers a dreamlike vision of the social and spatial mobility which the city resists. Sandra, the protagonist of the story ‘Tending Rosebuds’, escapes to St Ann in the Blue Mountains to get away from the ‘sordid fragmentation of the city’ (97). Like Hugh, she eventually descends back into Kingston, where the ‘dust and heat’ and ‘the complications that awaited her gathered around her like the evening’s humidity’ (98). These characters’ journeys illustrate that permanent detachment from Kingston is not the solution to the problems faced by the city’s inhabitants, even if they do seek temporary release from it. Ultimately, Dawes’ characters locate themselves within Kingston, even though their identification with the city may be ambivalent. 86 Howard, Kingston, p. 168.

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Urban Communities In creating poetry out of the city, the singer featuring in the vershans humanises its inhabitants. What looks at first like ‘the sprawl of a nation before him’ becomes ‘a place where bodies turned into faces into souls into stories into histories’ (242). Dawes’ collection works in a similar way, moving from panoramic impressions of the city, as seen in ‘Flight’ with its bird’s-eyeview narrator, into a detailed, close-range focus on the stories of individuals within particular parts of the city. In telling the stories of these characters, the collection also examines the cultural and political history of Kingston in the 1970s, 80s and 90s which underscores their lives and relationships. The narrative structure of the collection – as separate stories loosely drawn together by the episodic narrative of Vershans I to V – resembles the structure of Kingston as an ‘overlapping congeries of communities’.87 While individual stories within the cycle dramatise tensions and conflicts between communities, the cycle in its entirety moves us beyond the confines of the ‘community islands’ and seeks to bring the city’s disparate worlds together.88 The voices in McKenzie’s stories are more varied than in Dawes’, both in terms of their socioeconomic background, and in terms of their linguistic register. Even the language of individual characters fluctuates depending on the context of the conversation. In ‘Natasha’, awkward conversations between Andrea and Mrs Jackson illustrate the social gap between them. The narrator recounts that when ‘Mrs Jackson brought Natasha, she had tried to speak “properly”, but Andrea knew it was beyond her. She herself spoke Creole to the woman, to put her at her ease, but Mrs Jackson had been insulted’ (32). Andrea’s thought process here reveals two assumptions: firstly, that standard English is the ‘proper’ or correct form of English, and Jamaican Creole is, correspondingly, somehow inferior; secondly, that Mrs Jackson is not capable of code-switching in the way that she, Andrea, is. By responding to her address in Standard English with Creole, Andrea implicitly rejects Mrs Jackson’s attempt to interact with her on an equal footing, reminding her of her lower social status. Both characters alter their language to accommodate the other, but instead of easing the flow of conversation, their shifts in register bring the class tensions that underscore their relationship into the foreground, cutting short their exchange. Here and elsewhere in the collection, McKenzie’s use of language references the city’s socioeconomic stratification, showing how this complicates connections between individuals from different social spheres. Conversations between characters in McKenzie’s stories also dramatise conflicting experiences and perceptions of the city and divergent visions of its future. For example, later conversations between Andrea and Mrs Jackson reveal a clash between Andrea’s anti-Americanism, as a member of the UWI Student Communist Party, and Mrs Jackson’s relief at the availability of imported goods once the JLP came into power, coupled with her hopes of being relocated to the US by her absent husband. Similarly, arguments 87 Chevannes, ‘Jamaican Diasporic Identity’, p. 133. 88 Jaffe, ‘Fragmented Cities’, p. 195.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories between Clifford and Pearl in ‘Satellite City’ expose their differing attitudes towards their own wealth and the poverty visible elsewhere in the city. The short story form enables McKenzie to further expand the range of voices and perspectives in the collection, since each story explores a different locale within the city. In this way the collection conveys the complexity and diversity of life in Kingston. Reading the stories together, we gain an insight into the relationship between communities in different parts of the city. Despite the stories’ attention to Kingston’s social and economic polarisation, recurring characters generate a sense of community, which is built up through the stories. Grand Ma Scottie appears first in ‘Full Stop’, which consists of correspondence between her and her granddaughter, Carmen, who has migrated to New York. Later in the collection, ‘Jakes Makes’ takes us back to Carmen’s and her brother Richie’s childhood and adolescence, living with Grand Ma Scottie. Grand Ma Scottie and her two grandchildren return again briefly in ‘Bella Vista’ to support a neighbour in a time of trouble. The protagonist, Mavis, has stopped communicating with most of the neighbourhood, and ‘[o]nly Grand Ma Scottie from up the road had kept calling round, or sometimes sending her two grandchildren with a soursop or a breadfruit for Mavis’ (175). Whereas ‘Full Stop’ deals only with Grand Ma Scottie’s identity as a grandmother, and her role within the family, the later stories, which show her interacting with neighbours, identify her as an important figure within her local community. Another character, Marcia, features first in ‘Stuck in the Maid’s Room’, and then again in ‘The Grenada Defense League’. In the earlier story the protagonist is Marcia’s boyfriend Ray, and she is presented from his point of view. In the later story we gain access to her thoughts, and a fuller understanding of what motivated her behaviour in ‘Stuck in the Maid’s Room’. In the earlier story we only get a brief glimpse of Marcia’s friends, who Ray dislikes because they ‘were so obviously middle class, with their American clothes and fake accents’ (17), and were from ‘the same private high school Marcia had gone to’ (17). As an art teacher renting a tiny room, which used to be occupied by the maid, in a large family house, Ray’s circumstances differ from theirs. In the later story, Marcia’s relationship with that middle-class group of friends becomes the central focus. The collection returns to the same characters in different ways; in one story a character is the protagonist, and in another they are peripheral. Each of the stories shows another facet of the character by exploring their interactions with other people. Often – as is the case with Natasha and Andrea and with Ray and Marcia – the stories draw attention to connections between individuals from different backgrounds. The collection constructs an intricate network of relationships which sometimes intersect the city’s socio-spatial divisions. Both Dawes and McKenzie explore the prominence of the uptown/downtown dichotomy in the urban imaginary and its divisive effects on the city. Their stories analyse the way that media discourse reinforces this dichotomy and thus contributes to Kingston’s social and economic polarisation. Both writers 118

Urban Communities are critical of middle-class perceptions of the city, and yet their work offers more than a simplistic denigration of the middle class. Several of the stories in both collections focus on the experiences of affluent residents of uptown and suburban areas, taking time to examine with sympathy as well as scrutiny the challenges faced by these individuals in their everyday lives. The stories comment on the difficulty of escaping a middle-class perspective, even for those characters who consciously attempt to do so. In this way they consider how perceptions of Kingston are necessarily conditioned by socioeconomic circumstances. While drawing attention to the symbolic power of the uptown/downtown divide within the city, Dawes’ and McKenzie’s work also resists it. Although the stories in these collections portray in detail the diverging living conditions and economic circumstances of Kingston’s various communities, and assess the difficulty of bridging the social gap between them, they nevertheless attempt to write across the city’s divided social worlds. The forms of the short story collection and cycle allow them, in different ways, to envisage connections between communities in different parts of the city while at the same time remaining attentive to the symbolic and material factors which keep them divided. In both texts, several of the stories chart journeys between affluent and impoverished areas of the city. In ‘Natasha’, an inner-city girl and her mother visit a student on the UWI campus, and Andrea subsequently visits their home in August Town, described by her boyfriend as ‘the ghetto’ (37). In ‘Bella Vista’, a middle-class UWI student, Cherry, nervously negotiates her way through the crowds of higglers on King Street. At the end of ‘Satellite City’, Clinton overcomes his own fears and prejudices, and drives into the inner city. In ‘Tending Rosebuds’, a successful businesswoman, Sandra, descends from her expensive house in the hills above Kingston into Spanish Town, to visit a house she has purchased in an area to which she ‘did not belong’ (92). In ‘In the Gully’, Caddy and his friends enter uptown territory which is off limits to them. These journeys interrupt Kingston’s imagined divisions and hierarchies, conveying a city which is surprisingly mobile and unpredictable. Although the tensions between the city’s social spheres are not erased when these characters encounter new areas of the city, their travels offer them new ways of understanding Kingston, and in doing so open up the possibility of new affiliations. The anthropological and geographical studies of Kingston discussed at the beginning of this chapter focus primarily on the city’s socio-spatial divisions. Dawes’ story cycle and McKenzie’s story collection similarly comment on the fragmentation of Kingston, but at the same time explore the presence of, and potential for, connections across difference. Both the literary and social science perspectives on Kingston that I have considered in this chapter challenge simplistic conceptions of the city’s geography, examining a range of socioeconomic, political and historical factors which have contributed to the splitting of Kingston into uptown and downtown worlds. However, Dawes’ and McKenzie’s approach to their subject matter differs from that of 119

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories the geographers and anthropologists whose work is referenced here; rather than attempt to describe and analyse the city’s key characteristics, Dawes and McKenzie present us with a variety of competing perceptions of Kingston. In doing so they highlight the role played by representation in the shaping of urban space. Kingston in their stories is not a stable or singular reality but a site of multiple realities; a palimpsest where diverse experiences of the city collide. While their writing critiques representations of Kingston that reinforce its divisions and hierarchies, it also attests the power of fiction and other modes of cultural expression to destabilise them. Dawes’ and McKenzie’s stories explore the complex relationship between Kingston’s representations and its material conditions, while at the same time contributing to the collective imagining of the city.

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CHAPTER 3

National Communities National Communities

B

enedict Anderson defines the nation, in ‘an anthropological spirit’, as an ‘imagined political community’.1 The reason nations are imagined, he explains, is that ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.2 He draws here on Ernest Gellner’s theory of the nation. In Gellner’s view, nationalism ‘is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist’. 3 However, Anderson is careful to distinguish his own conception of the nation as an ‘imagined’ community from Gellner’s understanding of the nation as an ‘invented’ community. The word ‘invention’, he points out, suggests ‘falsity’ and ‘fabrication’, and contains the assumption that the ‘invented’ national community can be compared to ‘true’ or ‘real’ communities. In Anderson’s view, all communities are imagined, and the fact that they are imagined does not make them any less real.4 Anderson goes on to assert that the nation ‘is imagined as limited’ because it ‘has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations’. He adds that the nation is ‘imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’. The willingness to die for a nation, he argues, could not exist without such comradeship.5 Anderson 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 6. 3 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1964), p. 169. 4 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6. 5 Ibid., p. 7.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories attributes this kind of strong allegiance to, and emotional investment in, a nation to its ‘cultural roots’,6 and other theorists have similarly emphasised the nation’s cultural dimensions. According to Gellner, ‘nations can indeed be defined in terms of both will and of culture, and indeed in terms of the convergence of them both with political units’, so that ‘men will to be politically united with all those, and only those, who share their culture’.7 He thus posits an alignment between the nation as an imagined community, as a cultural artefact and as a political unit. The study of nations and nationalism is a relatively recent development within anthropology, due to the discipline’s origins as the study of ‘primitive’ peoples rather than modern and ‘Western’ social phenomena.8 Samah Sabra notes that most anthropological studies of nationalism followed the publication of Anderson’s Imagined Communities in 1983, and identifies the work of Anderson and Gellner as key theoretical reference points for anthropologists. She goes on to discuss critiques of their work in the 1990s and early twenty-first century which highlight the foundation of their theories on ‘eurocentric ur-narratives’.9 Similar critiques can be found in Caribbean anthropology. For example, in her ethnographic study of national culture and nation-building in Guyana, Brackette F. Williams reflects how ‘[i]deologies of nationalism, which linked territorial unity to cultural homogeneity and individual rights within, and loyalty to, such entities […] posed practical and conceptual difficulties before their introduction into non-European societies’.10 The theoretical models offered by Anderson and Gellner become particularly problematic if applied to post-independence Caribbean societies. Anderson’s idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ is a useful concept in the study of postcolonial nations, which have had to self-consciously re-invent or re-imagine themselves in opposition to colonial rule. However, his claim that nations as imagined communities are contained within ‘finite’ boundaries does not account for the tendency for Caribbean national cultures to extend beyond the territorial and political boundaries of the nation-state. As Stefano Harney notes, ‘the Caribbean diaspora, dispersed around the globe but often looking home in its imagination, presents a formidable task of understanding the limits and meanings of terms like “the Caribbean people” 6 Ibid., p. 7. 7 Ernest Gellner, ‘Nationalism and High Cultures’, in Nationalism, ed. by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 [1983]), pp. 63–70 (p. 64). 8 See Samah Sabra, ‘Imagining Nations: An Anthropological Perspective’, NEXUS, 20 (2007), 76–104 (p. 76); Veena Das and Deborah Poole, ‘The State and its Margins’, in Anthropology at the Margins of the State (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 2–32 (p. 3). 9 Sabra, ‘Imagining Nations’, p. 78. 10 Brackette F. Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 17.

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National Communities or “the Trinidadian nation.”’11 Furthermore, while Anderson contends that the nation is conceived as a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’ which somehow outweighs or cancels out any inequality that might be present within it, Caribbean societies contain deep-rooted inequality along the intersecting lines of race, class and ethnicity. Both the diasporic dimension of Caribbean nations and their tendency to incorporate a number of ethnic groups complicate Gellner’s theory of a neat alignment between the collective will of the nation, the national culture, and the nation-state as a political unit. The significance that both Anderson and Gellner attribute to ‘culture’ as a basis for cohesion within the imagined community of the nation becomes unworkable in the context of culturally heterogeneous Caribbean societies. Writing on the cusp of Trinidad’s independence in 1962, V. S. Naipaul describes the Trinidad of his childhood and adolescence: Everyone was an individual, fighting for his place in the community. Yet there was no community. We were of various races, religions, sets and cliques; and we had somehow found ourselves on the same small island. Nothing bound us together except this common residence. There was no nationalist feeling; there could be none.12

Punctuated with the words ‘no’, ‘nothing’, and ‘none’, this passage displays an attitude of extreme pessimism towards the prospect of a Trinidadian community. Trinidad’s multicultural and multi-ethnic inhabitants have nothing in common, Naipaul suggests, except a ‘common residence’ which obliges them to live in close proximity. His observations correlate with the ideas of M. G. Smith, a Jamaican anthropologist whose ‘plural society’ model, applied to Caribbean societies in 1960, generated heated debate within the fields of Caribbean sociology and anthropology.13 Smith puts forward the following argument: The common culture, without which West Indian nationalism cannot develop the dynamic to create a West Indian nation, may by its very nature and composition preclude the nationalism that invokes it. This is merely another way of saying that the Creole culture which West Indians share is the basis of their division.14

11 Stefano Harney, Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (London: Zed Books, 1996), p. 7. 12 V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Colonial Societies (London: Picador, 2001 [1962]), p. 36. 13 In a more recent essay Smith responds to the arguments of various scholars who opposed his pluralism model, such as Vera Rubin, Raymond T. Smith and Lloyd Brathwaite, who put forward an alternative model of social stratification. See Smith, ‘Pluralism and Social Stratification’ (1991), in Caribbean Sociology: Introductory Readings (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2001), pp. 118–38. 14 M. G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), p. 9.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Both Naipaul and Smith propose that the defining feature of Caribbean nations – their Creole culture – prevents the development of a national consciousness. Their comments imply that the imagining of the nation as a community is not only difficult but may be impossible, given the demographics of Caribbean societies. A number of more recent studies of Caribbean nationalism and nationstates identify problems with the imagining of nations as communities in the post-independence period. Shalini Puri examines the rhetoric of hybridity adopted by post-independence political leaders such as Trinidad’s first prime minister, Eric Williams. She presents Jamaica’s motto ‘Out of Many, One People’, Guyana’s ‘One People, One Nation, One Destiny’, Trinidad’s ‘Together we aspire, together we achieve’ and Haiti’s ‘Unity is Strength’ as examples of attempts by politicians to ‘manage difference by projecting an image of nonconflictual diversity’.15 Puri argues that these narratives of Creole nationalism, which celebrate the harmonious merging of cultural traditions, displace ‘the issue of social equality between and within groups’.16 Others have explored how discourses of Creole nationalism mask the continuing division of Caribbean nations into ethnic groups. Kevin Yelvington argues that while Trinidad was depicted by Eric Williams and his People’s National Movement as a multi-ethnic ‘melting pot’, the PNM’s brand of nationalism was based on ‘“national” symbols which were interpreted as Afro-Trinidadian-derived’, such as steelband, calypso and carnival.17 Brackette F. Williams describes a similar association of political parties with ethnic groups in post-independence Guyana. She explains how the opposition between Cheddi Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party and Forbes Burnham’s People’s National Congress in the build-up to independence ‘divided the population along the lines of its major ethnic segments, with Africans supporting the PNC and East Indians supporting the PPP’.18 Williams considers how after independence, an African elite controlled the political apparatus and appropriated the discourse of socialism in order to ‘represent their interests as the national interests’.19 The readings which follow explore the contribution of literary texts to the process of post-independence nation-building in the Caribbean. Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom (1992) focuses on Trinidad and Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement (2005) on Guyana. Both texts address the issue raised by Smith and Naipaul regarding the challenge presented by

15 Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 48. 16 Ibid., p. 50. 17 Kevin A. Yelvington, ‘Introduction: Trinidad Ethnicity’, in Trinidad Ethnicity, ed. by Kevin A. Yelvington (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), pp. 1–32 (p. 13). 18 Williams, Stains on My Name, p. 35. 19 Ibid., p. 36.

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National Communities these countries’ cultural and ethnic diversity to the imagining of the nation as a community: Witchbroom’s epic story of Trinidad through the centuries depicts a society divided into ethnically-defined communities, drawing attention to the self-imposed isolation of the island’s white Creole elite, and Suspended Sentences deals with a post-independence Guyana in which dreams of a multicultural nation have given way to racial polarisation. However, while Smith and Naipaul regard these countries’ plurality as incompatible with nationalism, Scott and McWatt see it as the foundation for a national culture. Drawing on Derek Walcott’s aesthetic of hybridity and Wilson Harris’ vision of ‘cross-cultural wholeness’,20 they revive the imaginings of their literary predecessors. Despite their critique of Dr Eric Williams’ failed democracy and Forbes Burnham’s dictatorial régime, Scott and McWatt continue to invest in the idea of the Trinidadian and Guyanese nation respectively. The formal experimentation of Witchbroom and Suspended Sentences is crucial to Scott’s and McWatt’s imagining of the nation. Variously described as a ‘novel’21 or a ‘collection of 11 short stories’,22 Suspended Sentences opens with a frame story which draws together the subsequent stories of 11 fictional writers, and therefore operates as a short story cycle.23 Witchbroom, although marketed as a novel,24 can be read as a story cycle since it consists of six ‘Tales’ framed by an ‘Overture’. McWatt’s self-conscious strategy of multiple narration enables him to draw together a diversity of voices, a process extended by the text’s intertextual allusions. In doing so, he expands the idea of a Guyanese national consciousness beyond the country’s political and geographic boundaries. Scott’s use of the musical conventions of the fugue as a structuring device in Witchbroom allows him to articulate a form of nationhood that encompasses social and cultural differences. Both writers rethink the nation as a concept, disrupting the alignment between the cultural, political and territorial boundaries of the nation as defined by Anderson and Gellner.

20 Wilson Harris, ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Andrew Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 237–47 (p. 240). 21 Rickey Singh, ‘UWI professor awarded two top literary prizes’, Jamaica Observer, 9 February 2006 [accessed 21 January 2013]. 22 Mary Hanna, ‘McWatt’s fresh, vibrant stories’, Jamaica Gleaner, 13 August 2006 [accessed 21 January 2013]. 23 Susan Garland Mann identifies as the distinguishing feature of classic short story cycles the ‘framing device (the prologue, epilogue or transitional paragraphs between stories)’. Susan Garland Mann, The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide (New York and London: Greenwood Press, 1989), p. 2. 24 The 1992 Allison & Busby edition of Witchbroom includes the subtitle ‘A Novel’. Lawrence Scott, Witchbroom (London: Allison & Busby, 1992). All further references to this edition will be marked in parentheses in the text.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Fugal voices in Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom is set on the island of Kairi, a fictionalised version of Trinidad. It contains six ‘Carnival Tales’ narrated by Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos, each set in a different plantation house and each dealing with a different generation of his family. Lavren’s stories are complemented by a ‘Journal’ positioned at the centre of the book, written by an unnamed narrator looking back upon his childhood and adolescence in Trinidad. Lavren is invented by Scott’s unnamed narrator and is a fantastical version of him.25 Both are born into a planter family of French Creole descent, but whereas the I-narrator is white, male and circumscribed within his own life span, Lavren is poised ‘between centuries, races and genders’ (59). The discrepancies between them lead to differences in the scope and style of their accounts. Their entwined stories dramatise on a structural level the text’s nuanced negotiations between personal memories and cultural history, and between individual and communal identity. As Patricia Murray points out, Witchbroom is ‘primarily about community’ in that its subject is ‘Trinidad rather than the individual’, and ‘the individual conflicts’ explored in Scott’s text ‘are always part of the wider community’.26 Witchbroom presents us with two distinct communities. The Monagas de las Macajuelos family saga, extending across Lavren’s six tales, tells the story of a white planter community whose members are keen to preserve their isolation from Trinidad’s wider population. Although this community is foregrounded, its survival is threatened by the prospect of a creolised Trinidadian community emerging during the build-up to independence. Attuned to the culturally diverse musics of calypso’s ‘steel drums’ (198) and ‘Hosay with tassa drums’ (208) drifting in through the windows of the plantation great house, Lavren enters this community from the moment of his birth, resisting his family heritage. As this example indicates, the idea of the nation as an imagined community is explored in Witchbroom through music, both as a metaphor and as a material presence within the Trinidadian society depicted. Music also operates as a structuring device in Scott’s story cycle. Witchbroom opens with an ‘Overture’ made up of fragments of the episodes that follow, and which anticipates the text’s main concerns and recurring tropes. Linked primarily through the repetition of themes, images and phrases rather than through plot or character development, Witchbroom’s ten episodes are organised in a similar way to a piece of music. 25 This is implied at various points in the text, culminating with the unnamed narrator’s realisation: ‘I was Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos, the great storyteller’ (98). 26 Patricia Murray, ‘Writing Trinidad: Nation and Hybridity in The Dragon Can’t Dance and Witchbroom’, in Caribbean Literature after Independence: The Case of Earl Lovelace, ed. by Bill Schwarz (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2008), pp. 94–110 (p. 106).

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National Communities Critics have commented on the musical aspects of Witchbroom. Curdella Forbes refers to the ‘musical metaphor’, implied in the ‘form and progression of the narrative’, which allows us to ‘conceive of the novel as a series of movements’ fusing ‘Carnival (Classical Caribbean) with Classical European rhythms’.27 Kwame Dawes applies a vocabulary of jazz to Scott’s narrative strategies, finding examples of ‘improvisation’ and ‘sampl[ing]’.28 My own analysis extends these associations of Witchbroom’s structure with forms of music. Taking my cue from the title of the opening section – ‘An Overture – Fugues, Fragments of Tale’ – I examine the fugal aspects of Scott’s story cycle. I consider how Witchbroom’s fugal voices serve as a means of conveying the dynamics of a Trinidadian community made up of various intersecting histories. As I will demonstrate, the fugal form of Scott’s text allows voices from different cultural backgrounds to sound together without merging. Reading Witchbroom in relation to Edward Said’s cultural theory and music criticism, I compare the obsessive recurrences characterising traumatic memory with the more productive mode of remembrance generated by the fugal practice of inventive repetition. My reading of Witchbroom draws on the work of Derek Walcott, a writer similarly concerned with memory and amnesia. I set Scott’s work in counterpoint to Walcott’s, presenting this intertextual relationship as part of Witchbroom’s fugal aesthetic. Scott was born in 1943 on a sugar cane estate in Southern Trinidad. He lived in Trinidad up to the age of 20, when he left to study in England just after Trinidad gained independence.29 In 1977 he returned to Trinidad to teach and work in the theatre, and it was at this point that he began to write seriously. Witchbroom was written after that period, once he had returned to England in the early 1980s. 30 Born in 1930 in St Lucia, Walcott moved to Trinidad in 1953, where he worked as a theatre and art critic. He made his name as a writer before the independence of Trinidad, publishing 25 Poems in 1948 and founding his Theatre Workshop in 1959. In a Green Night, his first collection of poems to be published outside the Caribbean region, appeared in 1962, the year of Trinidad’s independence. Walcott’s early work therefore predates Scott’s and emerges from a different era in Trinidadian history. In the ‘Journal’ episode of Witchbroom, Scott’s unnamed narrator reflects upon his relationship with his black nurse, Antoinetta: ‘She knows my pain but how do I approach hers, that double century of ancestral pain? How tell it? How presume to tell it? Yet I must not forget. I must keep the remembering’ 27 Curdella Forbes, ‘Review of Witchbroom’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 6:2 (1994), 97–111 (p. 100); italics in the original. 28 Kwame Dawes, ‘A Genuine Caribbean Text: A Review of Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures, 1:1 (1997), 121–26 (p. 125). 29 See Lucy Evans, ‘An Interview with Lawrence Scott’, Moving Worlds, 11:1 (2011), 93–103 (pp. 1–2). 30 Ibid., p. 97.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories (96). As a member of a white planter family, the narrator considers here the ethics of appropriating ancestral wounds removed from, although implicated within, his own family history. At the same time, with his repeated use of the imperative ‘I must’, he acknowledges the necessity of remembering those wounds. This conundrum is expressed structurally through the splitting of the text’s narration between the paralysing caution of Scott’s I-narrator, who dares not ‘presume’ to tell Antoinetta’s story, and the excessive presumption of the androgynous and mixed-race Lavren, who slips with ease between centuries, absorbing the pain of Amerindian and African Caribbean ancestors as he dives into a sea ‘silted with the refuse of the Orinoco whose mouth was crammed with wrecks, festooned with skeletons’ (11). The I-narrator’s questions, ‘How tell it? How presume to tell it?’, relate to the concerns of trauma theorists. In Unclaimed Experience (1996), Cathy Caruth compares trauma’s ‘belated impact’ to an unhealing wound, ‘a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’. 31 Writing over a decade later, Roger Luckhurst comments on the prevalence of wound metaphors in studies of trauma. Referring to the etymology of trauma, which ‘derives from the Greek word meaning wound’, 32 he reflects on how the ‘predominant popular connotations of trauma now circle around metaphors of psychic scars and mental wounds’, so that ‘[t]he metaphor of a psychological “impact” still retains the sense of a wound caused by an exterior agent’. 33 Luckhurst presents trauma as ‘worryingly transmissible’, leaking between not only ‘mental and physical symptoms’ but also ‘between victims and their listeners or viewers who are commonly moved to forms of overwhelming sympathy’. 34 In raising the ‘worry’ of transmissibility, he introduces what he sees as ‘a central ethical concern about the representation of and response to traumatic narratives and images’, asking questions such as ‘Can or should the right to speak of trauma be limited to its primary victims?’ and ‘Who can claim “secondary” status without risking appropriation?’35 The recurring trope of the wound in Walcott’s poem Omeros (1990) creates the kind of overlap between the physical and the psychical which Luckhurst 31 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 4, 7. 32 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 2. 33 Ibid., p. 3. 34 Ibid., p. 3. 35 Ibid., p. 3. In a study of the cultural politics of trauma, E. Ann Kaplan makes a similar distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ victims of trauma, stressing the significance of ‘one’s specific positioning vis-à-vis an event’ and placing at one extreme of a wide range of traumatic experiences the ‘direct trauma victim’, and at the other ‘a person geographically far away’. See E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 1.

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National Communities describes. Philoctete’s open sore is associated with the subjugation of his ancestors: he ‘believed that the swelling came from the chained ankles / of his grandfathers’. 36 The reflection of his own sorrow in an image of yams, ‘hacked’ at the root, ‘sap trickl[ing] from their gaping stems’, 37 associates his physical pain with the psychological effects of the Caribbean region’s history of violence and uprooting, and in this sense resonates with Caruth’s notion of the wound’s ‘belated impact’. However, the metaphoric proliferation of the wound image in Omeros suggests that for Walcott, ‘transmissibility’ is less a worry than a source of energy. The ease with which it transforms from an axed cedar to a sore to a sea-urchin to a flower to a volcano and back again during the course of the poem implies that the wound is all-pervasive and inescapable, 38 affecting in different ways the lives of all those who have come into contact with the region. 39 The distinction Luckhurst makes between ‘primary victims’ and ‘“secondary” status’ becomes irrelevant in this context, as is emphasised when the narrator recounts how ‘Philoctete waved “Morning” to me from far, and I waved back; we shared the one wound, the same cure’.40 Like Walcott, Scott removes the wound motif from the setting of the individual psyche, using it instead to depict a Trinidadian community bound through multiple experiences of trauma. In Witchbroom, a series of wounds with delayed, reverberating effects both allows for the kind of psychoanalytic reading offered by Caruth and confounds any attempt to reduce the island’s traumatic past to a single, foundational ‘reality or truth’. In the ‘Overture’, the narrator describes the crowded barrack-rooms occupied by Indian Trinidadian families: a child as small as the baby Lavren could upset a pot of boiling water all over his stomach and be scarred for life, and if you lived in the gabled house high up on the hill with the wide verandas and high ceilings, high above it all, the black hole of Calcutta, the fields of Uttar Pradesh in the new world, you would never have known. You might have only heard a terrible scream, and not knowing the cause have put it down to a foolish noise. Then Marie Elena or Auguste might ask Josephine, ‘What is that noise? Shut the window.’ (10)

The scalding of the Indian baby serves to highlight the racially inflected class divisions of 1940s Trinidadian society. The trajectory of the hypothetical 36 Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 19. 37 Ibid., p. 21. 38 As the poem opens, the narrator lifts an axe ‘to wound the first cedar’ (p. 3). Soon after, we are told that Philoctete’s ‘scar’ has ‘puckered like the corolla of a sea urchin’ (p. 4), and it is later described as a ‘foul flower’ (p. 247). The volcano at the centre of the island is described as a ‘wound’ which ‘closed in smoke, then wind would reopen it’ (p. 59). 39 For example, Major Plunkett suffers from a ‘wound in his head’ (p. 308) and Hector’s van transporting tourists is described as a ‘flaming wound’ (p. 118). 40 Walcott, Omeros, p. 295.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories scream connects the ‘harnessed and shackled whole families in single confined rooms with little light’ (10) with the spacious and elevated plantation great houses. Marie Elena’s response to the scream offers an insight into this planter family’s attempt to shut out the pain of the disadvantaged communities living in the shadow of their grandeur. The later description of the boy’s belly as ‘white as bait, raw as white raw fish, raw like pain, no pain like this body’ (10), echoing the title of Sonny Ladoo’s 1972 novel, invites a reading of the baby’s scar as representing the collective suffering of indentured Indians, itself an echo of transatlantic slavery’s painful legacy. Although physically the injury has healed, the narrator’s comparison of the boy’s discoloured skin to ‘white raw fish’ creates the impression of an open wound, and in doing so implies that the ancestral trauma alluded to has not been resolved. However, the above passage also opens up the prospect of empathy across difference. Set against the images of a spatially constricted Indian Caribbean community and an equally – although differently – isolated white planter community ‘high up on the hill’, cut off from the surrounding landscape, is the imaginative exchange of one baby for another glimpsed in the phrase ‘as small as the baby Lavren’. This partial identification of Lavren with the Indian boy is reinforced by the description of a wound he experiences. As Mr de Lisle’s golf ball collides with the back of Lavren’s head, it ‘shocks the cranium and shakes up, wakes up the memory of the last of the Monagas de los Macajuelos, whose stare was at that very moment locked into the eyes of the Indian boy’ (11). Here a traumatic event sets in motion Lavren’s obsession with previous generations of the Monagas family. Furthermore, his accident coincides with his first sight of the scarred Indian boy; his own pain is reflected in the eyes that ‘lock’ with his. The golf ball’s knock-on effect illustrates the way in which individual trauma in Witchbroom is tied up with the experiences of a community. Whereas Caruth’s notion of ‘a wounded psyche’ is fixed within the psychic experience of a traumatised individual,41 in Witchbroom the protracted impact of the Indian baby’s wound extends beyond the boundaries of the afflicted body, affecting those in its vicinity in various ways. The trauma depicted in Witchbroom is therefore ‘transmissible’, but not in the way Luckhurst describes. While Luckhurst examines the potential dangers of an ‘uncertain, unbounded outward movement of trauma from its original wound’,42 Scott places in question the notion of an ‘original wound’, since each wound in Witchbroom echoes an earlier one. The wounds suffered by Scott’s characters are inscribed within a landscape which is collectively experienced, an idea most clearly evoked in the narrator’s reference to ‘the red wound in the green of the forest which is the chaconia’ (2). The landscape itself is a site of trauma charged with the violence of intertwined histories. While the image of the scarred Indian boy is only partially registered 41 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 4. 42 Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, p. 4.

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National Communities at the time of Lavren’s accident, its intermittent return during the course of his life as it is presented to us leads to a belated appreciation of its full sociocultural significance.43 In one of the many repetitions of this image, the narrator catches a glimpse of ‘the small boy who always stood at the end of the gap with the burnt stomach as white as white fish-bait’ (142). The fact that the figure described as a ‘small Indian boy’ (10) many years earlier, when Lavren is a baby, remains a ‘small boy’ on the narrator’s ‘First Communion day’ (142), clarifies the boy’s status as internal to the narrator’s mind and developing sense of self. The detail of looking back at the boy ‘through the rearview mirror’ draws attention to the belatedness of the experience, as well as foregrounding the narrator’s indirect reception of the boy’s pain, which he encounters through the mediation and reversal of the reflective glass. The idea of trauma’s delayed impact, seen in Scott’s characterisation of Lavren in relation to the ghostly Indian boy, is a key concept in much recent research on trauma. Critics and theorists working in the field have often focused on the temporal dislocation effected by traumatic experience.44 In Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), Caruth focuses on the inaccessibility of trauma, arguing that ‘its truth is bound up with its crisis of truth’.45 She locates this crisis primarily in the ‘inherent belatedness’ of traumatic experiences.46 According to definitions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, she explains, a traumatic event ‘is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it’.47 Caruth explores the contradiction within this process of belated recognition, which offers a ‘testimony to the event and to the impossibility of its direct access’;48 despite the fact that it repeatedly returns with ‘overwhelming immediacy’, the past remains elusive.49 In an essay focusing on the perspective of Holocaust survivors’ children, Marianne Hirsch extends Caruth’s notion of trauma’s ‘inherent belatedness’ beyond the boundaries of an individual subject. She invents the term ‘postmemory’ as a way of describing the ‘secondary’ or ‘second-generation 43 See pp. 10, 142, 191, 213, 223, 267. 44 See, for example, Cathy Caruth, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 3–12; Susan J. Brison, ‘Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self’, in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 39–54; Anne Whitehead, Trauma Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetzee, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). 45 Caruth, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 46 Ibid., p. 11. 47 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 48 Ibid., p. 9. 49 Ibid., p. 6.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories memory’ of ‘collective traumatic events and experiences’.50 This ‘postmemory’, she suggests, is shaped ‘by our sense of belatedness and disconnection’, and yet ‘seeks connection’, ‘creat[ing] where it cannot recover’ and ‘imagin[ing] where it cannot recall’.51 This contradictory idea of an inaccessible past vividly evoked recalls Caruth’s sense of an ever-present yet elusive traumatic event. However, Hirsch’s concept of belatedness carries resonances specific to the cultural, temporal and geographic positioning of second-generation trauma ‘victims’.52 While Caruth and Hirsch confine their discussion to either individual or intergenerational trauma, Witchbroom consists of two imbricated narratives of personal and ancestral memory. Lavren’s tales of the Monagas de los Macajuelos family over five centuries surround an account of the unnamed narrator’s life. In the central ‘Journal’ episode, the idea of trauma’s belated impact is concisely expressed in the narrator’s positioning of the phrase ‘Then I did not reflect’ at the end of a paragraph, immediately followed by the present tense phrase, ‘Now I remember’, which opens the subsequent paragraph. The two contradictory statements are both prised apart by the paragraph break and linked by their immediate succession. Their relative location on the page offers readers a visual expression of the way in which traumatic memories operate through a complex interplay of forgetting and remembering; while the paragraph break evokes the dislocation of the traumatic event from the present moment, the physical proximity of the sentences conveys the involuntary intrusion of that event on the narrator’s present consciousness. The effect of these two phrases extends into the narrator’s incomplete yet graphic recuperation of a scene from his childhood where he is beaten by his father. The sensory details of the ‘bright space surrounded by shadow’ and the ‘sharp’ gravel grazing his knees and hands renders the experience painfully immediate, and yet it remains distant; as the narrator explains, ‘I feel that pain as if it were now and as if it had been, though I must say I cannot remember’ (127). The hold of this childhood experience on the narrator’s adult mind can be seen in the way that fragments of the memory resurface later in the journal, interrupting the narrator’s everyday musings; he begins a later entry of his journal with the words: ‘I repeat: it is a bright space. Shade at the edges. An open gravel yard’ (131). This personal narrative of remembrance is entwined with Lavren’s episodic family saga. Here, too, the past and the present are connected through an 50 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, in Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 418–46 (p. 420). 51 Ibid., p. 422. 52 Abigail Ward shifts Hirsch’s term ‘postmemory’ into a different cultural context, considering how postcolonial writers explore the remembrance of slavery in the absence of direct experience of this traumatic history. See ‘Psychological Formulations’, in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. by John McLeod (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 190–201 (p. 200).

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National Communities entanglement of memory and amnesia. We are told in the ‘Overture’ that ‘Amnesia ran in the family’ (7). Each generation of Monagas is afflicted by some form of memory loss. Lavren’s mother is ‘for pressing ahead with time, for forgetting, for forgetting what she wants to forget, what she does not want to remember’ (7), while his father Auguste ‘decided to forget everything because he could not bear what was happening in the world around him’ (228). Told stories by her nurse, Lavren’s great-grandmother Elena ‘would fall asleep because she did not want to be reminded about her sister. She did not want to remember’ (43). This denial of memory is illustrated in the female Monagas’ constant occupation of ‘sewing, mending, darning’ (102), passed on from mothers to daughters through the centuries, a compulsive attempt to suture the wounds inflicted upon New World landscapes and peoples by European explorers and settlers, and in doing so to suppress the darker side of their family history. This collective endeavour to forget strains against involuntary recall. In the third of Lavren’s tales, he describes how the ‘spirits’ of eradicated Amerindians ‘inhabited the rocks and their screams flew into the forests and became the hysteria of parrots’ (61). Amerindian people are glimpsed only as part of the backdrop to stories featuring a white planter family – for example as ‘drowned and exhausted bodies’ dredged from the sea (38), as prisoners ‘chained together and being dragged along the jungle floor’ (57), or as ‘pinpoints of light pricked out in the leaves’ of the forest (44). Their voices emerge obliquely and insubstantially through the noise of parrots. The displacement of the Amerindians’ suffering onto the sound of screaming parrots illustrates the difficulty of direct access to the region’s multiple histories of loss and dispossession for those of white Creole lineage. At the same time, the parrots’ piercing shrieks indicate the impossibility of escaping that past and its repercussions. In Witchbroom, then, trauma’s ‘crisis of truth’ is compounded by a legacy of cross-cultural conflict. Whereas Walcott’s wound images serve as a basis for identification between a diversity of characters and the island they inhabit, drawing them together in metaphoric resonance, Scott’s series of wounds expose deep-seated tensions within a racially and socially stratified Trinidadian society. In Omeros, the I-narrator’s personal history is seamlessly inscribed within a wider exploration of Caribbean cultural history; he enters the same textual frame as the afflicted Philoctete. The structure of Witchbroom prevents such a collapse of private and public narratives of remembrance. Instead, the distinct yet interlocking narratives of Lavren and the unnamed narrator are set in counterpoint, contributing to Witchbroom’s fugal dynamics. Paul M. Walker describes the musical technique of counterpoint as ‘one voice “chasing” another’, linking it with the etymology of the word ‘fugue’, a term in currency among European musicians since the fourteenth century: ‘the Latin fuga is related to both fugere: “to flee” and fugare: “to chase.”’53 53 Paul M. Walker, ‘Fugue’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories According to this definition, a fugue consists of voices which imitate each other but are separated by a time lag. Therefore, although fugues are characterised by repetitions, echoes and mirrorings of an initial theme or motif, the structural demands of this musical form do not allow its contrapuntal voices to ever catch up with one another and be expressed in unison. As a result, Edward Said explains, each voice in counterpoint sounds ‘against, as well as with, all the others’.54 In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Said transfers the concept of counterpoint to his analysis of the relationship between ‘metropolitan and formerly colonized societies’, considering them ‘contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories’.55 Scott develops a contrapuntal style in Witchbroom through the interweaving of narrative voices. This can be identified within Lavren’s fantastical tales as well as in the positioning of those tales alongside and against the narrator’s autobiographical fragments. In the ‘Overture’, the narrator expresses his indulgence for Lavren’s ‘fugues’, told ‘with the help of his beloved Marie Elena, his mother and muse, and with the help of black Josephine: cook, housekeeper, servant, nanny, nurse, doer of all tasks, comforter in the darkness’ (2). The subsequent episodes are structured around these two voices, which ‘sound against, as well as with’ one another. This is conveyed partly through Lavren’s mode of narration, as Josephine ‘breaks through’ the carnivalesque narrative inspired by Marie Elena ‘with tales of another life’ (170), her Creole language and oral style of storytelling interrupting Marie Elena’s poetic extravagance. The simultaneous rivalry and interdependence of these two voices also becomes a dominant theme in the text, explored in a variety of ways. We are told that Marie Elena ‘is impatient with Josephine without whom she can’t live for a moment of her life’ (7). With her ‘rebellion and her servitude’, Josephine displays a similar ‘schizophrenic’ attitude towards Marie Elena (220). Developing subtle forms of resistance to Marie Elena’s authority, through which she maintains her pride, Josephine nevertheless ‘knew she [accessed 24 February 2009] (np). 54 Edward W. Said, ‘The Music Itself: Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Vision’, Vanity Fair, May 1983. Reprinted in Music at the Limits (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 3–10 (p. 5). 55 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994 [1993]), p. 19. In his analysis of Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995 [1947]), Antonio Benítez-Rojo considers how the intermingling of voices within the text’s ‘fugue system’ illuminates the complex power relations operating within Caribbean societies. See The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. by James E. Maraniss, 2nd edn (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996 [1989]), p. 174. However, Said’s work is more pertinent to my reading of Witchbroom, since he offers in his music criticism a more detailed discussion of fugal music which moves beyond the now familiar concept of counterpoint.

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National Communities would stay [with the Monagas family] until the end’ (217). The narrator later explains how ‘between the two women there was an allegiance which history had shackled them to, and they had made out of its inequality a kind of partnership’ (249). The coincidence of their simultaneous childbirth, and the suggestion that Josephine’s child is also Auguste’s, intensifies this sense of painful entanglement. Witchbroom’s horticultural imagery offers a figurative accompaniment to the contrapuntal voices of Josephine and Marie Elena. ‘The Tale of the House in the Cocoa’ opens with a ‘silence’ which ‘grew hard and deep and knotted itself in the lianas which tangled themselves in the bois canot. It bewitched the cocoa. It lived in the parasite, witchbroom’ (60). This backdrop of a parasite ‘knotted’ in vines which themselves are ‘tangled’ in trees vividly evokes the idea of interdependence combined with antagonism seen in Josephine and Marie Elena’s unequal partnership. Alongside the interplay of Josephine’s and Marie Elena’s voices, these images of plant life illustrate the conflictual relations which constitute Trinidadian society, past and present, where ethnically and socially diverse communities co-exist uneasily, in close proximity. Witchbroom therefore sets Said’s notion of ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ within a specifically Trinidadian framework. Said’s words take on an alternative meaning if we consider Scott’s relative positioning of the I-narrator’s personal history and Lavren’s family history. Addressing his childhood nurse Antoinetta as he looks at an old, faded photograph of a white family with a black servant in the background, Scott’s unnamed narrator reflects: ‘My pain is not your pain, but the edges blur’ (96). His desire to empathise with this surrogate mother figure is checked by an awareness of the disparity in their position and in their experience of trauma. The narrator explains: ‘There were stories I could not tell, and I hoped their voices in Lavren’s preposterous narratives would speak out from where they stood’ (96). This statement elucidates how the narrator invents a mixed-race, androgynous, time-travelling version of himself in order to overcome the constraints of his position as the twentieth-century descendant of a white Creole family. Lavren’s ‘exaggerations and fantasies’ (95) and his ‘flowery extravagances’ (3) equip him with the necessary presumption to enter the experiences of characters remote from the unnamed narrator in terms of cultural background, social standing and life span. At the same time, however, the narrator’s statement sets him apart from Lavren, allowing him to relinquish authorial claim over his stories. His endorsement of Lavren’s imaginative acrobatics alternates with critical commentary on their absurdity and self-indulgence. The simultaneous overlap and tension between the unnamed narrator’s and Lavren’s trajectories draws attention to associations between the narrator’s personal history and the wider cultural history of Trinidad, while at the same time maintaining a careful distance between these two narratives of remembrance. The ethical dilemma of what it might mean to appropriate other people’s pain, raised in the narrator’s rhetorical question, ‘How tell 135

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories it? How presume to tell it?’ (96), ties in with the problem of speaking for a community. In the pairing of these two divergent fictional versions of himself, Scott at once assumes and steps back from the role of spokesperson. The contrapuntal pattern of voices speaking with and against each other is crucial to Witchbroom’s articulation of community precisely because it prevents the merging of painful experiences, even as it draws attention to where the ‘edges blur’. A contrapuntal style can be discerned not only in the interaction of narrative voices within Witchbroom, but also in the relationship between Scott’s and Walcott’s approach to the cultural significance of memory. In his essay ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’ (1974), Walcott argues that in the Caribbean region, ‘[w]hat has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention’.56 Walcott implies here that the ‘imagination’ and ‘invention’ necessary for cultural renewal are the result of collective amnesia. In contrast, as can be seen in the Monagas family’s hereditary impulse to forget unsettling elements of their history, for Scott amnesia lies at the root of the old world’s corruption. Whereas, in Walcott’s view, ‘invention’ is the fortunate product of amnesia, Witchbroom’s narrator asks: ‘Is there invention in […] remembering?’ (136). With this question, Scott challenges the idea that to remember is necessarily to become, in Walcott’s words, ‘a creature chained to his past’.57 In doing so, he opens up the possibility of an imaginative engagement with the past which does not ‘[yellow] into polemic or [evaporate] in pathos’.58 While Walcott asserts the need to escape the repetition of history in ‘tiring cycles’ of oppression,59 Scott introduces the notion of inventive repetition. In order to explore in depth how the idea and practice of inventive remembering operate in Witchbroom, it is useful to consider the musical sense of ‘invention’ as it functions in Bach’s fugal compositions and Said’s analysis of them. In On Late Style (2006), Said describes how ‘Bach’s gift translated itself into a capacity for inventing, creating a new aesthetic structure out of a preexisting set of notes’.60 Said relates the concept of ‘invention’ as used by Bach to ‘a rhetorical tradition going back to Quintilian and Cicero’, which he explains as follows: Inventio has the sense of rediscovering and returning to, not of inventing as it is now – for example, the creation of something new like a lightbulb 56 Derek Walcott, ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. by Robert D. Hamner (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1993), pp. 51–57 (p. 53). 57 Derek Walcott, ‘The Muse of History’, in What the Twilight Says: Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 36–64 (p. 37). 58 Ibid., p. 37. 59 Ibid., p. 39. 60 Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (London: Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 129.

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National Communities or a transistor tube. Invention in this older rhetorical meaning of the word is the finding and elaboration of arguments, which in the musical realm means the finding of a theme and developing it contrapuntally so that all of its possibilities are articulated, expressed, and elaborated. […] Invention is therefore a form of creative repetition and reliving.61

This sense of invention as the rediscovery of and elaboration upon an existing theme sheds light on Scott’s literary practice in a number of ways. Witchbroom is structured around acts of rediscovery and return which shape both its private and public narratives of remembrance; through the fantastically mobile figure of Lavren, the narrator finds a way of ‘reliving’ not only his own childhood, but also the four centuries of family history which precede it. Furthermore, Witchbroom consists of expansive elaborations on a limited set of themes, motifs, images and phrases introduced in the ‘Overture’. Every component of the subsequent episodes is present in a condensed form within this prelude. Despite the scale and intricacy of Lavren’s ‘high-flown’ stories (3), they introduce nothing new. The process of inventive repetition is central to Witchbroom’s critical engagement with the past as well as its imagining of a collective future. In his discussion of Bach’s technique, Said expands upon the idea of invention as elaboration on a theme with a reference to Theodor Adorno’s reading of counterpoint as ‘the decomposition of the given thematic material through subjective reflection on the motivic work contained therein’.62 Adorno suggests here that with each variation, the composer reflects back upon on the initial motif, considering it from a series of critical angles and in so doing pulls it apart, so that composition becomes ‘decomposition’. A similar technique can be identified in Witchbroom, where the romance of the initial ‘love story’ (35) is repeatedly undone in subsequent episodes. The ‘love story’ features Gaston de Lanjou, a traveller ‘seeking a new world’ and ‘drawn by tales of El Dorado’ (15). The myth of El Dorado, which fuels Gaston’s quest for Clarita, is subjected to a series of interrogations in the episodes that follow. The second story features Gaston’s brother Georges Philippe, who ‘like Raleigh’ is ‘persistently obsessed’ with finding the ‘gleaming city’ of El Dorado, and undertakes repeated expeditions up the Orinoco in search of it (39). However, whereas Gaston’s El Dorado is the cloister containing Clarita, an ‘Eden or a piece of heaven’ (20), Georges Philippe seeks El Dorado ‘not as a glimpse of heaven, not as an Eden, but as a mountain of gold, a horizon of fractured crystal’ (39). In the story of Gaston and Clarita, pearls are used as part of the formula for a romantic quest narrative; the narrator focuses on their delicate beauty and fantastical size, describing them as ‘white as blanched almonds’ and ‘shadows of the moon’ (17). Only in the story featuring Georges Philippe and Elena, where we are faced with an image 61 Ibid., p. 128. 62 Theodor W. Adorno, quoted in Said, On Late Style, p. 126.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of ‘the drowned and exhausted bodies of Amerindian divers, forced to dive for the last of the pearls on the sea bed’ (38), do we glimpse the uncomfortable history of the pearls’ source. In this way, the second story undercuts the romance of the first, exposing the El Dorado myth’s undertones of violence and greed. As we progress through episodes of Witchbroom, Lavren traces the myth’s legacy of suffering through three distinct eras, each giving rise to the next, from the eradication of Amerindians in the European explorers’ pursuit of gold, to the oppression of enslaved Africans and, later, indentured Indians in the white planter community’s commercial enterprises. The idea of invention as ‘rediscovering and returning to’ therefore operates on more than one level; in reworking the El Dorado myth within each of Witchbroom’s tales, Lavren at once returns to the theme of his initial story and at the same time ‘rediscovers’ the region’s dominant narrative of ‘discovery’. Repetition as ‘decomposition’ can also be seen in Scott’s depiction of colonial architecture. As their titles indicate, each of Lavren’s ‘tales’ features a different house belonging to the Monagas family. The motif of the plantation great house is first introduced in the ‘Overture’. In this opening episode, we are invited to ‘[r]emember the house on the hill, the gabled house on pillars with gingerbread arches, high balconies and wide verandas’ (5), towering above and sealed off from ‘the galvanize barrackrooms in the gully’ (6) which house the indentured Indian labourers. The narrator’s word ‘remember’ refers partly to the workings of his own memory, since this scene revives his childhood experience of a house that is now in an advanced stage of decay. However, the fact that the word is issued as a command in the second person indicates a simultaneous concern with the memory of readers; we have to retain this image in order to recognise how it is modified later in the text. Both the seemingly solid and enduring structure of this building and its isolation, spacious and ‘high above it all’ (10), from the crowded and troubled island community which surrounds it, are repeatedly undermined in subsequent episodes. In ‘The Tale of the House in the Cocoa’, which deals with the moment of the slaves’ emancipation, Lavren describes the impact of the Canboulay riots on his ancestors’ house: The fires burnt the cane, the drums shook the night, the dance shook the ground. Fear entered the bedrooms; one added to another, doors opening one into the other, creating an openness belying the secret that the household kept from themselves and from each other, as the children were born and soon died. The secret was mercantile, fiscal and the colour of black skin. (64)

Here, the previously self-contained space of the plantation great house is invaded by a social unrest which its inhabitants can no longer shut out or disregard. We are told that Elena Elena’s memories ‘bleed through her writing paper and come up through the floorboards of the great house in the 138

National Communities cocoa’ (64),63 an image which evokes the entanglement of Lavren’s family history with a colonial history of violence. The opening of doors in the passage above coincides with the exposure of this ‘secret’, previously locked away within the building’s numerous cavities and enclosures. If the gutting of the house in the cocoa and the concomitant disclosure of its secrets illustrates the breakdown of boundaries between those within its formerly protective space and those outside during the build-up to emancipation, later images of Auguste and Marie Elena’s house on a sugar cane estate convey the threat presented by the promise of Trinidad’s political independence to the survival of the island’s plantocracy. Wearing his sister Elena Maria’s black lace début dress in the seclusion of the ‘black cave without much light under the house’ (213), the androgynous and racially indeterminate Lavren becomes one of the Monagas family’s ‘secrets brushed beneath the carpet’ (214). His enjoyment of his/her own sexual difference strains against its containment within the house, which ‘creaked, expanding with the heat and the miracle of his sex’ (213). Embodying the dream of a creolised and socially inclusive post-independence Trinidad projected by the anti-colonial political leader, Dr Eric Williams,64 Lavren has the potential to break apart his childhood home and with it the colonial foundations of Trinidadian society. Later in the same episode, we learn that ‘the house on the hill could not at times hold’ the force of Lavren’s vision of a post-independence Trinidad. The house begins to disintegrate, as the ‘pitchpine planks […] suddenly split’, and ‘the galvanize from the roof would fly off and had been known to hurtle through the air and cut ordinary working people in half’ (222). Joining the ‘march’ for independence in the street outside the house, hand in hand with the scarred Indian boy, Lavren positions himself below the ‘windowsills of the Demerara window’ at which he had previously sat surveying the island from above, ‘looking up at the house to blow it down’ (223). The image of the colonial great house is thus subjected to progressive decomposition as Lavren guides us through significant moments in Trinidad’s history. Although a dominant motif in the text, its influence recedes with each repetition, as a culturally exclusive planter class gives way to the prospect of an ethnically and socially diverse Trinidadian community. As this last example shows, inventive repetition in Witchbroom involves not only a dismantling of old structures, but also the development of something new. In fact, the processes of decomposition and composition are correlative, as is emphasised in the penultimate section, entitled ‘J’Ouvert’, where the 63 Elena Elena is the daughter of Elena and the grandmother of Marie Elena, Lavren’s ‘muse and mother’ (149). She is also the great-grandmother of Elena Maria, Lavren’s sister. The recycling of names illustrates the family’s obsessive attempt to preserve their cultural purity. 64 Dr Eric Williams became the first prime minister of independent Trinidad and Tobago. For a discussion of Williams’ use of a rhetoric of cultural hybridity, see Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial, pp. 47–49.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories characters of all previous episodes mingle and slip into each other’s roles as part of a carnival procession, temporarily crossing boundaries of race, class and gender. In this section, the narrator hears a line from Walcott’s ‘The Spoiler’s Return’ (1981), a poem about a Trinidadian calypsonian: ‘Tell Desperadoes when you reach the hill, I decompose but I composing still’ (266). If Bach’s fugues, in Said’s reading, involve the creation of ‘a new aesthetic structure out of a preexisting set of notes’,65 in another context calypsonians have generated a mode of expression which is unique and specific to their Trinidadian setting in their reworking of traditions derived from elsewhere, including the European tradition to which Bach’s music belongs. Combining European and African styles and rhythms, calypso enacts an inventive repetition of earlier musical forms. This idea is reinforced in Lavren’s description of calypso as a ‘sound that was to transform the world’s music’ (190), and the narrator’s later reference to ‘the invention of pan, calypso and the spoken voice which had come out of the yard of this archipelago’ (278, my italics). The transformative nature of calypso can also be seen in its fashioning of instruments: steel pans, made from oil drums, offer an example of how ‘the imagination of the poor had transformed the greed of capital, the new El Dorado, oil, into the music of liberation’ (190). With this statement, Lavren extends his elaborations on the theme of El Dorado. While in earlier episodes his various retellings of the myth serve primarily to subject it to scrutiny, here its components are reconfigured within a new mode of cultural production. In one of his many attempts to stall Lavren’s fast-flowing narrative and expose its inaccuracies, Scott’s unnamed narrator informs us that ‘Lavren is back to his old tricks of falling under the spell of names, the sound and music in words’ (237). Yet the musical elements of Witchbroom’s structure and narrative strategies are fundamental to the text’s articulation of community. The fugal voices of characters within Lavren’s stories, such as Josephine and Marie Elena, illustrate the pattern of concurrent antagonism and interdependence which has shaped social relations on an island made up of ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’, to return to Said’s phrase.66 Furthermore, the contrapuntal interweaving of Lavren’s fantastical tales with the less ambitious account of the I-narrator allows Scott to explore intersections between individual and collective trauma without resolving the friction between them. The text’s fugal structure enables Scott to acknowledge Trinidad’s cultural and ethnic plurality and at the same time to envisage connections across difference. Finally, the fugal practice of invention as elaboration around an initial motif leads to an engagement with the creative potential of memory. Recurring motifs such as the plantation house and the El Dorado myth are at some points interrogated and unravelled, at others revised and reworked. Through these literary examples of ‘invention’, Scott illustrates how the island’s traumatic past prefigures but does not necessarily determine its future. 65 Said, On Late Style, p. 129. 66 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 19.

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National Communities Due to Witchbroom’s formal complexity, Scott’s narrative of Trinidad differs from Dr Eric Williams’ rhetoric of ‘nonconflictual diversity’, which, according to Puri, displaces the issue of social equality.67 Indeed, the discourse of Creole nationalism associated with Williams’ People’s National Movement is satirised in ‘The Tale of the Last House’. With thinly disguised references to Trinidad’s first prime minister, Lavren gives us the media’s ‘version of the truth’ (231), offering a detailed account of the ways in which the government of a newly independent nation perpetuated the social and economic imbalances it had proposed to challenge. With his comment that Williams ‘would push against the door which the British Foreign Secretary held open, and call that freedom’ (188), Lavren presents us with a post-independence Trinidad unable to step away from the shadow of its colonial past. Furthermore, his reference to ‘the people (his people once)’ implies that the policies of a supposedly democratic party have become divorced from the collective desire for freedom that gave rise to it. However, just as the ‘Last House’ is not the final house to feature in Witchbroom, the PNM’s national narrative is not the end of Scott’s story. The ‘Postscript’ features an ephemeral ‘future’ house ‘built of every part of us’, and filled ‘with a music which drew in more of our peoples’ (271). In this house ‘there was place for all people’; the narrator imagines it ‘open, its doors and windows banging in the breeze, awaiting new people’ (271–72). While acknowledging the failures of the island’s postcolonial nation-state, Witchbroom persists in imagining a socially and ethnically inclusive Trinidad. The journey upriver in Mark McWatt’s Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement In a memoir, the Guyanese poet and short story writer Cyril Dabydeen explores the relationship between Guyana’s landscape and the development of a Guyanese cultural tradition. ‘The spirit of the place’, he explains, ‘always forming, became ingrained in us: everything intertwining, more than just geography of the imagination’.68 This relationship, as described by Dabydeen, is complex: while his writing has been informed by direct contact with Guyana’s landscapes as a child and adolescent growing up in the Canje district, it has also been influenced by his reading of Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris. As a result, Dabydeen’s sense of place extends beyond his own limited experience of the sugar plantations on the coastline to the urban environment of Mittelholzer’s New Amsterdam and Harris’ ‘elusive or mysterious Guyana 67 Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial, pp. 48–50. 68 Cyril Dabydeen, ‘Shaping the Environment: Sugar Plantation, or Life after Indentured Labour’, in Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, ed. by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renee K. Gosson and George B. Handley (Charlottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 2005), pp. 58–69 (p. 58).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories hinterland’.69 The recurrent use of the first person plural in Dabydeen’s memoir therefore refers not only to the close-knit social community of the village where he grew up, but also to a more loosely associated community of literary voices. These voices, Dabydeen suggests, are connected through a shared aesthetic that is at once imbued with Guyana’s geography, and at the same time ‘more than just geography’; an aesthetic based on the juxtaposition of irreconcilable ‘polarities of place’ along with ‘other juxtapositions of feelings, sensibility’.70 Mark McWatt engages with this shared aesthetic in Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement. Suspended Sentences combines the stories of 11 fictional writers within the frame narrative of a court case, where each writer is sentenced to two weeks in prison due to an act of vandalism they committed as school-leavers celebrating a newly independent Guyana in 1966. Their sentences are suspended for two years on condition that within that time they write a short story ‘for or about their country’.71 McWatt casts himself as a fictional editor faced with the difficult task, 30 years later, of collecting the stories from the fictional writers who by then have, all except one, left Guyana. The narrative structure of Suspended Sentences therefore speaks to Dabydeen’s idea of a Guyanese shared aesthetic as a basis for connections across ‘polarities of place’. Furthermore, the ethnic and social diversity of McWatt’s group of fictional writers, clearly delineated in the Introduction, opens up the possibility of associations across Guyana’s deep-seated divisions along the lines of race and class. Indeed, reviewers have read both the formal complexity and the intertextuality of Suspended Sentences as strategies that allow McWatt to address Guyana’s problems of racial prejudice, social unrest and economic instability. For example, Jan Lowe Shinebourne makes the following point: Through the different voices of the writers that find unity in McWatt’s voice, we are transported to a Guyana beyond the pettiness of social and political materialities, to a Guyana previously presented by Wilson Harris, Edgar Mittelholzer and Martin Carter.72

In a similar vein, Lisa R. Brown claims that ‘Suspended Sentences is not an interrogation of the failures of Guyanese independence, nor is it a commentary on the nature of social injustice in a country torn by ethnic strife and stagnating economic policies’. Instead, she suggests, McWatt ‘steps confidently into the tradition of Guyanese novelists’ in order to ‘recreate a homeland that embraces all: those who leave and those who remain; those who violate the nation’s 69 Ibid., p. 59. 70 Ibid., p. 59. 71 Mark McWatt, Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2005), p. 17. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 72 Jan Lowe Shinebourne, ‘Review of Suspended Sentences’, Wasafiri, 21:2 (2006), 95–99 (p. 95).

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National Communities rules and those who conform’.73 For both Shinebourne and Brown, McWatt’s involvement in a community of literary voices enables him to move beyond social critique by drawing upon the transformative power of a Guyanese cultural heritage. While I agree that the Guyana of Suspended Sentences is filtered through the work of an earlier generation of Guyanese writers, I intend to probe in greater detail the tensions within these literary relationships. The reading that follows reveals how McWatt writes against, as well as within, a Guyanese cultural tradition. Focusing on his engagement with the work of Wilson Harris, I explore how McWatt’s admiration for Harris strains against a critique of his vision of community. Writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with knowledge of the debilitating economic effects of communism and the social turbulence resulting from an increasing ethnic communalism, McWatt cannot approach the idea of a cross-cultural Guyanese community in the same way as writers of an earlier generation. His backward glance at visions of the future therefore combines a longing to share in the optimism of his literary predecessors with a critical distance from them. In a memoir, Harris explains how his expeditions into the Guyanese interior set the pattern for his later migration ‘across other hazardous oceans rich and dangerous as the rainforest’. Harris insists that his migration to Britain as an adult has by no means led to a social or cultural dissociation from his country of origin; in his view, since ‘Guyana stems from the Amerindian root word which means “land of waters,”’ it follows that ‘the voyaging archetype is as native to Guyana as the homing instinct’.74 McWatt’s trajectory is similar to Harris’. He spent his childhood in the Guyanese interior, left Guyana to study in Canada and Britain, and eventually returned to the Caribbean, settling in Barbados. In Suspended Sentences, his multiple self-figuring as a fictional editor, a fictional writer and a character within his own story implies a more fraught and conflicted position in relation to Guyana. He cannot, as Harris does, celebrate his own migration as an act which identifies him with Guyana as a ‘land of waters’. Of the 11 stories that make up Suspended Sentences, four chart a journey upriver through the Guyanese interior. In this sense, the text’s structure resembles Wilson Harris’ The Guyana Quartet (1960–63), a sequence of four novels set on named and unnamed rivers in the interior. The trope of the journey upriver in Guyanese writing can be traced back beyond Harris’ novels to Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596). In his essay ‘The Two Faces of Eldorado’, McWatt explores the significance of this repeated journey. As a plundering of the South American continent by European explorers in search of an illusory ‘promise’ of gold, it 73 Lisa R. Brown, ‘Suspended Sentences’, Journal of West Indian Literature, 15:1/2 (2006), 213–17 (p. 216). 74 Wilson Harris, ‘Memoir’, in All Are Involved: The Art of Martin Carter, ed. by Stewart Brown (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2000), pp. 292–94 (p. 292).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories can be seen as ‘a cruel lie that is at the heart of the settlement of the New World’.75 On the other hand, he suggests, in the work of writers such as Wilson Harris, ‘Eldorado is seen as a kind of mental fossil’, which, despite being part of the debris of a history of plunder, acts as a ‘gateway to imaginative participation in the past’, and therefore ‘creates another arc of community, the re-birth of lost worlds and peoples’.76 Through his intertextual engagement with Harris’ 1960 novel Palace of the Peacock, McWatt both displays a strong indebtedness to Harris’ work, and at the same time critically examines his celebratory reading of the El Dorado myth as the source of a new ‘arc of community’. Harris’ description of the legend as an ‘open myth’ gives it a sense of infinite possibility;77 Raleigh’s one-track trajectory spills outwards into a multitude of ‘far-flung journeys’ which exceed its limits.78 However, as I will argue, McWatt considers how contemporary uses of the El Dorado myth can be as constrictive and damaging as Raleigh’s ‘narrow expedition’.79 While Harris presents the multiple retracing of Raleigh’s journey as a means by which ‘one relives and reverses the “given” condition of the past’,80 McWatt explores in Suspended Sentences how contemporary versions of the El Dorado myth, articulated as part of the rhetoric of the tourism industry, present a continuing threat to the development of a Guyanese national consciousness. Harris’ essay ‘Profiles of Myth and the New World’ (1996) offers a framework through which to read Suspended Sentences as a short story cycle. In this essay, Harris comments on the ‘partial stance’ of ‘realistic narrative’, which does not ‘illuminat[e] the legacies of the past, the motivations of the past that run much deeper than the surfaces of fact’. This past, he argues, requires ‘windows into reality that are other than the frame of realism’.81 It can be glimpsed only ‘through a series of windows, more or less abreast of each other’.82 Harris’ word ‘series’ implies, at first glance, a pattern of succession. However, a chronological ‘story-line’ or a ‘linear addiction’ is challenged in both Harris’ and McWatt’s writing.83 The episodes ‘Two Boys Named Basil’, ‘Sky’ and ‘The 75 Mark McWatt, ‘The Two Faces of Eldorado: Contrasting Attitudes towards History and Identity in West Indian Literature’, in West Indian Literature and its Social Context: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on West Indian Literature (Cave Hill, Barbados: University of the West Indies, 1988), pp. 33–47 (p. 33). 76 Ibid., p. 45. 77 Wilson Harris, ‘Tradition and the West Indian Novel’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Bundy, pp. 140–51 (p. 144). 78 Wilson Harris, ‘New Preface to Palace of the Peacock’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Bundy, pp. 53–57 (p. 55). 79 Ibid., p. 55. 80 Harris, ‘Tradition and the West Indian Novel’, p. 144. 81 Wilson Harris, ‘Profiles of Myth and the New World’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Bundy, pp. 201–11 (p. 206). 82 Ibid., p. 207. 83 Ibid., p. 206.

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National Communities Tyranny of Influence’ in Suspended Sentences, all of which involve a journey upriver and the scaling of a waterfall in the Guyanese interior, can be read as a series of ‘windows into reality’, linked by the trope of the waterfall but with no connecting narrative line. A consecutive reading of these three episodes involves another kind of journey from one of the simplest and most accessible narratives to a narrative overloaded with associations. A reader’s journey through the stories, during which layers of meaning accumulate while the same setting is returned to, can be compared to the artist’s journey upriver in ‘The Tyranny of Influence’, where the ‘confusion of ideas and images in his head’ is intensified, rather than clarified, the closer he gets to the waterfall (216). Both the narrative frames of the stories and the visual frames of pictures represented within them can be seen as windows which, when juxtaposed, break through the ‘surfaces of fact’, ‘illuminating’ a multifaceted landscape in greater depth than any factual account. The parallel I have drawn between Harris’ theory and McWatt’s literary practice becomes more complicated if we consider McWatt’s engagement with a Guyanese literary heritage as another way in which the text moves between a number of ‘windows into reality’. By examining the ways in which McWatt departs from the ideas and literary practice of a writer to whose work he is heavily indebted, I will explore how he sets his own writing not neatly within, but ‘more or less abreast of’, the intertextual frame of Harris’ oeuvre. In charting journeys upriver towards a waterfall, the three episodes analysed here repeat the perilous voyage of Donne and his crew in Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, a voyage which itself ‘relives and reverses’ Raleigh’s expedition. This invites a reading of the episodes as rewritings of Harris’ novel. As I will argue, through this sequence of journeys McWatt enters Harris’ textual landscape in order to question his vision of community. ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ seems, at first glance, to offer an unexamined affirmation of Harris’ vision. The events of the story are almost identical to those of Palace of the Peacock: a struggle between twins followed by a journey towards reconciliation. Like Harris, McWatt uses the trope of the double in this episode. Harris’ concern with ‘vanished cultures’84 adds historical and sociological elements to the concept of doubling which is commonly theorised in purely psychological, and often universalising, terms.85 In his essay ‘Interior of the Novel’ (1968), he describes ‘ghostly’ footnotes in history books, insubstantial evidence of an Amerindian presence which ‘sometimes speak volumes of the interior of a landscape within which men lose themselves to find themselves’.86 Here the collapsing of the self/other opposition becomes a communal concern; Guyanese people, in order to ‘find 84 Harris, ‘New Preface to Palace of the Peacock’, p. 55. 85 See, for example, Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 219–52 (pp. 234–36). 86 Wilson Harris, ‘Interior of the Novel: Amerindian/European/African Relations’, in

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories themselves’ and move towards the future, must acknowledge a vanished Amerindian population as a shared ancestry. In ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ there is a similar focus on the Guyanese landscape as a medium of self-discovery and a basis for communal identifications. Two inseparable and yet fiercely competitive friends, Basil Ross and Basil Raatgever, go on a school trip to the Baracara Falls in the Guyanese interior. Ross climbs the waterfall, engaged in an argument with Raatgever, but turns around to find him vanished. The rest of the story deals with Ross’ struggle to come to terms with Raatgever’s fate and his own sense of complicity in it. We learn that, years later, Ross sees Raatgever’s face in a tourist brochure photograph of the Baracara Falls. The fact that Ross finds his ‘long lost dimension of self’ (50) in this picture invites us to consider the interior as the ‘lost dimension’ of contemporary Guyana, where the majority of the population lives on the narrow strip of coastline. As Cyril Dabydeen explains, living as a child on a sugar plantation on the coastline, the rest of the country, the ‘interior, or hinterland’, was ‘like unknown territory’.87 Basil Ross’ backward glance to the falls from the urban setting of Georgetown can therefore be regarded as a rediscovery of an unknown past, inhabited by ancestral figures as spectral as Raatgever’s face in the falls. As the above reading suggests, this episode of Suspended Sentences in many ways endorses Harris’ ideas. However, certain aspects of ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ complicate Harris’ vision of a cross-cultural Guyanese community. Ross’ rediscovery is not the only one; the picture in which he sees the face of his long-lost friend is in the brochure of an eco-tourism company which has opened a resort in the interior and ‘rediscovered the Baracara Falls’ (48). Unlike the ‘imaginative re-discovery of the past’ which Harris calls for,88 this rediscovery clearly has an economic rather than a psychological motivation; the concern of the company is exploitation of, rather than reconnection with, the landscape. The advertisement of ‘a bathe in the “therapeutic waters” of the falls’ recalls Sir Walter Raleigh’s presentation of Guiana as an ‘Arcadia’, a world ‘in which the senses, needs, life itself, can be extended’.89 The idea of ‘therapeutic waters’ also cleanses the landscape of both a violent past and a politically turbulent present, creating a fiction more pleasant and appealing to foreigners than the unsettling reality. While Ross’ rediscovery gestures towards the acknowledgement of a vanished past, the eco-tourism company’s idyllic image depends on its erasure. Although it is possible to contrast Ross’ self-fulfilling rediscovery of a ‘lost Explorations: A Selection of Talks and Articles, ed. by Hena Maes-Jelinek (Mundelstrup: Dangaroo, 1981), pp. 10–19 (p. 10). 87 Dabydeen, ‘Shaping the Environment’, p. 58. 88 Wilson Harris, ‘The Unresolved Constitution’, Caribbean Quarterly, 14 (1968), 43–47 (p. 44). 89 V. S. Naipaul, The Loss of El Dorado: A Colonial History (London: Picador, 2001 [1969]), p. 91.

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National Communities dimension’ with the eco-tourism company’s exploitative rediscovery of the Guyanese interior, the two are not entirely separate, as can be seen from the fact that Ross imaginatively re-encounters Raatgever through the medium of the tourist brochure. Raatgever appears to Ross ‘behind the veil of falling water’ in the photograph of Baracara Falls (48). In Palace of the Peacock, the ‘veil and window’ of the waterfall, in which Donne sees various mythical figures, is shattered by the carpenter’s hammer, breaking the ‘distance between them’.90 Conversely, in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ the distance imposed by the ‘veil of falling water’, partially concealing and perhaps distorting Raatgever’s face, is increased by two further perceptual frames: the camera lens, and Ross’ emotional investment in the photograph, which causes him to ‘recognise’ a face which ‘no one else could see’ (49). This aesthetic distance is combined with Ross’ physical distance from the Guyanese interior; he sees the photograph from the tourist office in Georgetown. The location of the fictional writer of this episode, Hilary Augusta Sutton, who, as we are told in the ‘Remainders’ section, left Guyana without any intention of returning and ‘ended up re-writing her story’ from her home in rural England (246), adds yet another complication. Although the story appears to end with the recovery of a ‘lost dimension’, this series of distancing devices points to its inaccessibility, and in doing so demonstrates the difficulty of achieving Harris’ redemptive vision. While the trope of the double affects Palace of the Peacock at every level – disrupting plot, destabilising character and pluralising language and imagery – in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ it is no more than a concept articulated within a formally and stylistically conventional framework. Read in isolation, ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ is structurally unambitious. However, re-read in connection with the subsequent story, ‘Sky’, this episode becomes part of a more complex narrative framework. The two Basils, we are told, exist in a ‘strange symbiosis’ (35). This concept of a symbiotic relationship, simultaneously associative and antagonistic, becomes a formal device if the two narratives are read alongside and against each other. ‘Sky’ can be seen as a repetition with differences of the previous story. Like ‘Two Boys Named Basil’, ‘Sky’ involves two friends who, one of them asserts, are ‘really alike’ (59), and a journey upriver towards a waterfall in the Guyanese interior. Like Ross and Raatgever, upon reaching the waterfall Robbie and Desmond have an argument. There are overlaps between the stories not only in setting, plot and character, but also small details; for example, the narrator of ‘Sky’ describes how during their playful fight, he is pursued by Robbie, ‘his heavy footfalls thumping behind me’ (62), just as Ross ‘had heard Ratty’s footsteps splashing behind him’ (44). Here the echo of Ross’ and Desmond’s footsteps in those of their pursuers coincides with the echo of ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ in ‘Sky’, effecting a doubling of the two stories. 90 Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock, in The Guyana Quartet (London: Faber & Faber, 1985), pp. 15–117 (pp. 102–03).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories These correspondences encourage readers to connect the stories, and in doing so facilitate comparison. Robbie and Desmond travel to Kurukabaru, in the region of Potaro-Siparuni, which borders the region of Cuyuni-Mazaruni, the location of the Baracara Falls in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’. This geographical discrepancy is accompanied by a shift in tone. Raatgever’s mysterious disappearance is part of a series of disappearances running through Suspended Sentences, beginning with the information that the originator of the project, Victor Nunes, ‘disappeared somewhere in the Pomeroon in 1991’ (9). This recurring motif evokes Guyana’s extended history of loss stretching from the extermination of Amerindians in the seventeenth century to the emigration of a large proportion of the population in the 1980s due to Forbes Burnham’s policies. ‘Sky’ deals with this theme obliquely by exploring a returning migrant’s confrontation with the effects of his own disappearance and the social trend it was part of. Desmond’s departure has had an impact not only on himself, but also on those who have stayed behind; he is lost in terms of his own sense of direction, ‘stumbling into changes and memories’ (53), and at the same time ‘a member of a lost generation’ (54), contributing to the decline of the Georgetown community. While Harris argues that attention to the ‘ghostly, sometimes apparently irrelevant footnotes in the history books’ recording an Amerindian presence is a necessary basis for communal identifications,91 McWatt demonstrates in ‘Sky’ that such identifications are compromised by the continuing migrations of Guyanese people of all ethnic groups. The affirmation of Harris’ vision of community in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’, already rendered ambiguous by the intervention of a tourist brochure, is thus further unsettled by the scepticism of ‘Sky’. Just as ‘shadows’ appear between the two protagonists of this episode and the ‘clear Pakaraima sky’ (69), the pessimistic tone of ‘Sky’ casts a shadow over the happy ending of the previous episode, challenging its sense of closure. As suggested above, the photograph in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ merges Ross’ psychological rediscovery of a ‘long lost dimension of self’ with the eco-tourism company’s economically motivated ‘rediscovery’ of the Guyanese interior. The photograph therefore generates a slippage between a Harrissian literary discourse and the promotional rhetoric of the tourism industry. Shona N. Jackson explores the risks of such a slippage in a 2005 essay on the relationship between the legend of El Dorado and the construction of community in contemporary Guyana. She comments on how the El Dorado myth, the ‘existing narrative of domination for the region’, continues to shape Guyana’s landscape and society. After independence, she claims, this narrative was not rejected by Forbes Burnham and his People’s National Congress, but rearticulated within an ‘anticolonial, black nationalist discourse’.92 She goes 91 Harris, ‘Interior of the Novel’, p. 10. 92 Shona N. Jackson, ‘Subjection and Resistance in the Transformation of Guyana’s Mytho-Colonial Landscape’, in Caribbean Literature and the Environment, ed. by DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley, pp. 85–98 (p. 85).

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National Communities on to argue that in post-independence Guyana, the El Dorado legend repeats itself as the Guyanese interior is plundered as a site of ‘mineral excavation’ and ‘tourist excursion’.93 These examples of economic exploitation of the land involve a continuing subjection of Amerindian people, driven further and further into the interior in the name of ‘postcolonial development’ and nation building.94 For Jackson, then, the translation of the El Dorado myth into a narrative of national identity does not liberate Guyanese people; instead it perpetuates the unequal, racially inflected power relations of colonial times. She suggests that while Harris’ Palace of the Peacock can be read as a ‘critical intervention’ into political and ‘cultural-nationalist’ constructions of independent Guyana, it has nevertheless become ‘part of the discourse of a new nationalism’.95 A similar point is made by Antonio Benítez-Rojo in a discussion of Alejo Carpentier’s and Wilson Harris’ writing. Writing in 1989, he explains how the ‘search for El Dorado’ is ‘now carried out by present-day Guyanese society beneath the slogan of “repossessing the interior,” which refers to the economic exploitation of the inland territory, potentially rich in natural resources’. He then observes how the same phrase can be used to describe ‘the discovery of a collective psychic state which would allow a feeling of cultural identity, extended towards the hinterland, which Guyanese society has lacked’.96 Benítez-Rojo thus presents the Guyanese government’s slogan ‘repossessing the interior’ as a site of overlap between aesthetic visions of community in literary texts and an economic policy of continuing plunder which threatens those visions of social, cultural and psychic integration. Jackson and Benítez-Rojo reveal how economic exploitation of the Guyanese interior, both through excavation of the land and through the marketing of the landscape for consumption by foreign visitors, operates as part of a narrative of national identity articulated within the political discourse of post-independence Guyana. Both critics are concerned with the troubling proximity between this discourse and literary engagements with the El Dorado legend. In ‘Sky’, McWatt considers the implications of this kind of overlap. Whereas ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ incorporates a tourist brochure, the narrator of ‘Sky’ inhabits one. In comparison to his bewildering re-encounter with Georgetown, the prospect of a trip into the Guyanese interior fills Desmond with anticipation: he feels ‘certain that the holiday will be an idyll of sun, sky and fresh mountain air’ (60). Desmond and Robbie’s joint obsession with the ‘pure perfection’ of the sky (57) is related to their status as returned migrants. Upset and disappointed by an altered and diminished Georgetown, Desmond makes a decision to ‘be off home. Home’ (54). Only once he has established 93 Ibid., pp. 85, 89. 94 Ibid., p. 85. 95 Ibid., p. 90. 96 Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, p. 189.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories England as ‘home’ can he begin to ‘enjoy the city’ as an outsider (54). This mode of temporary appreciation aligns Desmond’s perspective with the tourist gaze. Returning to Guyana in order to run an eco-tourism business, his friend Robbie not only identifies with the tourist gaze, but capitalises upon it. Desmond’s aesthetic appreciation of the sky is commercialised by Robbie. The video ‘preview’, which takes place in an ‘air-conditioned office’ sealed off from the uncomfortable climate (58), packages the Guyanese interior for easy accessibility. Where Jackson and Benítez-Rojo focus on the role of Guyanese post-independence governments in producing the interior as a ‘treasure’ to be consumed in different ways by tourists and excavators,97 McWatt, in ‘Sky’, considers the complicity of Guyanese people in this process. Desmond’s and Robbie’s idealisation of the Guyanese landscape implicates them in the shaping of contemporary Guyana as a place to be visited rather than inhabited. This is made clear in the extract from the poet A. J. Seymour’s ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’, printed on a poster in the tourist office: […] And they go rushing across the country Staining the land with shadow as they pass. Closer than raiment to the naked skin, that shadow, Bringing a pause of sun over and across Black, noiseless rivers running out to sea […] (58)

From a poem of four hundred lines covering several centuries of Guyanese history, five lines describing clouds are used.98 This version of the poem excises not only all social and political content, but also any traces of community. Ironically, the work of a poet whose aim in founding the literary magazine Kyk-Over-Al was ‘to help forge a Guianese people, to make them conscious of their intellectual and spiritual possibilities’ is used to evoke an image of Guyana as not only untroubled, but also unpeopled.99 The promotion of Guyana as a place of natural beauty, by bringing in ‘the eco-tourism dollar’ (58), may contribute to its economic development. However, as this appropriation of Seymour’s poem suggests, it may also hold back the development of a Guyanese national consciousness. In ‘Sky’, McWatt examines the friction between Seymour’s vision of a Guyanese community and the reality of post-independence Guyana. Gemma Robinson describes the role Seymour envisaged for the magazine not just in the development of a Guyanese cultural tradition, but in the shaping of Guyanese society: ‘The fort [Kyk-Over-Al] became a new site of cultural cohesion – a symbol of 17th-century conflict and colonialism creolised into a 97 Jackson, ‘Subjection and Resistance’, p. 89. 98 For the full version of the poem, see A. J. Seymour, ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’, in A. J. Seymour: Collected Poems 1937–1989, ed. by Ian McDonald and Jacqueline de Weever (New York: Blue Parrot, 2000), pp. 49–64. 99 A. J. Seymour, ‘Editorial Notes’, Kyk-Over-Al, 1 (December 1945), 7.

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National Communities symbol of collective Guyanese identity’.100 Robinson goes on to suggest that Seymour’s ideas informed Burnham’s politics: In presenting Guyanese independence as a cultural condition, Burnham added his voice to the debate, begun by N. E. Cameron and A. J. Seymour in Kyk-Over-Al, about the distinctive nature of artistic and cultural expression in Guyana and its relationship to the political future of Guyana.101

However, prose pieces by the Guyanese poet and political activist Martin Carter suggest that this smooth transition between the arenas of culture and politics was not achieved in the post-independence period. While Seymour hoped for ‘cultural cohesion’, Carter describes how in the 1960s, ‘ideological commitment’ in politics was being replaced with ‘racial solidarity’, leading not to cohesion, but to a ‘cultural impasse’.102 Later, in an ‘Open Letter to the People of Guyana’ written after over a decade of Burnham’s repressive government, a year after he was beaten for demonstrating against it, Carter describes the failure of its socialist ideals: ‘What the PNC régime has brought the people to experience as socialism is a system based on degradation, the end of which is the régime’s self-perpetuation’.103 This comment illustrates how Guyana’s post-independence politics suspended not only the cultural cohesion Seymour had anticipated, but also civil liberties. Writing after the failure of Seymour’s vision in Burnham’s régime, McWatt cannot approach the idea of a Guyanese nation with the enthusiasm of an earlier generation of writers and cultural figures. In ‘The Tyranny of Influence’ he engages closely with Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, a novel written before the political independence of Guyana and the onset of Burnham’s régime. By examining the story’s intertextual dialogue with both Harris’ novel and the work of the fifteenth-century Italian artist Antonello Da Messina, the reading below will explore the twofold nature of the ‘tyranny’ with which McWatt contends. Added to the already complex legacy of colonial conquest, against which a postcolonial cultural tradition has to be defined, is a legacy of Guyanese writing within which McWatt uneasily positions himself. As the book’s fourth account of a journey upriver, ‘The Tyranny of Influence’ both forms part of a ‘series of windows’ into the Guyanese interior and contains a multitude of aesthetic ‘windows’ within it. The episode is framed by its first and final sentences, which describe the painter in his studio, before starting to paint and then as he completes his painting. 100 Gemma Robinson, ‘Introduction’, in Martin Carter, University of Hunger: Collected Poems & Selected Prose, ed. by Gemma Robinson (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2006), pp. 15–46 (p. 17). 101 Ibid., p. 35. 102 Martin Carter, ‘Why Guiana Needs Independence’, New Statesman, 5 November 1965, reprinted in Kyk-Over-Al: A Martin Carter Prose Sampler, 44 (1993), 97–100 (pp. 97–98). 103 Martin Carter, ‘Open Letter to the People of Guyana’, in Carter, University of Hunger, pp. 216–18 (p. 218).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories As readers, we step through this frame when our perspective is aligned with the artist’s, and at the same time the artist steps through the frame of Antonello’s painting, entering a three-dimensional world in which the original picture appears as a ‘large wooden cutout’ behind him (217). The ontological complexity intensifies as the narrative progresses; on reaching the waterfall, the artist, already within his own picture, interacts with the figures of Antonello’s painting. At the same time he distances himself from the imagined worlds he inhabits with the lens of a tourist’s camera. This confusion of perspectives and narrative levels can be seen as a comment on the difficulty Guyanese writers and artists face in their attempt to make sense of a multiple and disjointed cultural heritage. ‘Tyranny’ begins with the artist’s dilemma of how to start his painting: It was easy for God, the painter thinks, but how to begin a world fashioned out of the gifts and materials of others? For everything in and out of his head was made by somebody else, including the deep morning light that comes in through the high windows smelling of the sea and the blue distance and the dust of the old, old world. (216)

To an extent, the artist is grappling with a problem faced by all artists and writers: how to create original work, and respond in a unique way to a world already full of the representations of others. However, the idea of the world as ‘made by somebody else’ has a particular resonance for Guyanese writers. It evokes a past where the ‘old world’ of Europe created a New World in the Americas. The question becomes not simply how an artist can derive a new way of looking at the world, but also how the New World can define itself anew, faced with a legacy of conflict and subjugation. This notion of defining a world anew carries additional connotations for a writer in McWatt’s position. In a 2002 interview, George Lamming reflects on an earlier stage in his career as a writer: ‘There is a period when (I see it now as almost innocence in a way) I believed – and I think this was shared by certain people of my generation – that the writers, the artists, were actually creating something new’.104 With this in mind, I suggest that McWatt faces another level of difficulty to Lamming and his generation. Caribbean writers in the mid-twentieth century were presented with the challenge of creating a ‘new’ cultural identity, and of developing a literary tradition in a region with a literary history stretching back only as far as the 1930s, when Caribbean-based literary magazines first introduced and promoted the idea of a West Indian aesthetic.105 McWatt, in 2005, is writing within an already established tradition of Caribbean, and more specifically Guyanese, literature. 104 David Scott, ‘The Sovereignty of the Imagination: An Interview with George Lamming’, Small Axe, 12 (September 2002), 72–200 (p. 161). 105 See Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature (Oxford: Routledge, 2006), pp. 13–14, for a discussion of the role of Caribbean literary magazines in the development of a regional aesthetic.

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National Communities Unlike Lamming and his generation, he does not begin with the sense of a blank canvas. His canvas is already crowded, like that of the fictional artist who simultaneously enters Antonello’s imagined world and Harris’ textual landscape. Knowing the outcome of Guyanese political independence, McWatt is unable to approach the idea of a Guyanese aesthetic with the ‘innocence’ which Lamming recalls. He participates in a conversation of literary voices less in order to envisage community than to re-examine, in the light of his knowledge of post-independence Guyana, earlier conceptions of community ‘fashioned out of the gifts and materials of others’. The various layers of intertextual dialogue operating within ‘The Tyranny of Influence’ are part of McWatt’s engagement with this dual legacy. Leaving the ‘wooden cutout’ of Antonello’s painting behind him as he enters its imagined world, the artist has ‘no urge to look at the front of it again’ (217), immersing himself instead in a Guyanese landscape reminiscent of Harris’ Palace of the Peacock, complete with a version of the Amerindian guide Mariella. The skulls faintly visible in the background of Antonello’s painting remain, but are brought into the foreground, as the artist stumbles over them on his journey upriver. The trope of the double, seen in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’ and ‘Sky’ and in the relationship between those stories, returns in this episode in the guise of a female figure, described by the narrator as a ‘doppelgänger’ (225) who shifts between Antonello’s angel and Harris’ Amerindian guide. The dialogue between the Antonello paintings reproduced within the text and the narrator’s critical response to them is similarly crosscultural; for example, in transferring our focus from the eponymous subject of the painting ‘Saint Jerome in his Study’ to his ‘pet peacock’ which ‘is liming on the step outside’ (223), the narrator invokes the title of Harris’ novel Palace of the Peacock, as well as shifting the painting, with the word ‘liming’, out of the elitist and Euro-American dominated discourse of art criticism and into the realm of Caribbean popular culture.106 Antonello’s painting is not only transformed through its translation into a Guyanese context, but also critiqued. While the merging of Antonello’s angel into an Amerindian woman challenges the cultural purity of Antonello’s ‘holy images’ (223), the artist’s sexual relations with the woman undermines their religious purity. ‘Purification’ (226) is shown to be a painful and dangerous procedure: in attempting to wash the blood away from the wound of the Christ figure, the angel dissolves his flesh. Although it may appear that in resisting the influence of Antonello’s work, the artist is embracing Harris’ vision of ‘cross-cultural wholeness steeped in the freedom of diversity’,107 this is only partially the case. Significantly, the artist ‘realises that he is nearing the present in his journey upstream’ (219). The narrative of this episode is therefore – in temporal terms, if not spatial – running in the opposite direction to Palace of the Peacock, which 106 See Appendix I. 07 Wilson Harris, ‘Creoleness’, p. 240. 1

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories deals, on one level at least, with a journey towards an eclipsed past. The painter’s observation, along with the appearance of a ‘tourist plane circling the falls’ (219), indicates that the present is never forgotten in Suspended Sentences; there is no escape into a semi-mythic past. The mysticism of Harris’ Amerindian figures is also interrogated. In ‘Interior of the Novel’, as we have seen, the Amerindian presence central to Harris’ sense of community is insubstantial, accessible only through ‘ghostly’ footnotes in history books. In ‘The Tyranny of Influence’, the presence of Amerindian characters is overwhelmingly material; joining the artist in his journey, ‘they all eat and the children’s mouths are yellow and loud with laughter’ (220). While in ‘Two Boys Named Basil’, Raatgever’s face as the ‘lost dimension’ of Ross was obscured by the ‘veil’ of the waterfall, here the Amerindians come into the foreground, standing in front of the waterfall to have their photograph taken ‘with the wall of falling water as background’ (219). In this way, a touristic narrative is superimposed upon Harris’ fictional universe. Where Palace of the Peacock focuses on the possibility of imaginative reconnection with Guyana’s ‘vanished cultures’, McWatt’s story alerts us to the presence of Amerindian communities who are very much alive and have become part of a commercialised landscape consumed by foreigners. Tracked by the tourist plane, they climb ‘wildly, recklessly’ (219) over the falls, seeking the ever-diminishing privacy of the interior. Dramatising the struggle suggested in its title, then, ‘The Tyranny of Influence’ at once draws heavily on Palace of the Peacock and at the same time challenges its utopian elements, introducing a contemporary slant into the dreamlike space of Harris’ Guyanese interior. The fictional artist’s reflections on the aesthetic motives behind Antonello’s paintings – for example, his suggestion that the suffering of their subjects is ‘not really dreadful, more like trying to be really beautiful’ (223) – draws attention to the power of a visual image to distort its subject matter. Having conceived a cherubic child and disturbingly christened him Antonello, the artist paints the world envisaged by the child, but edits out the detail of ‘lots of crosses, enough for everybody in the whole world to be crucified for ever and ever’ (226). This image casts a shadow over the finished picture, a ‘lovely world, one without crosses’ (226), leaving readers with the troubling question of whether the traumatic history and ‘continuing sin and sorrow’ (221) of Guyana have been smoothed over to fit an aesthetic ideal. The artist’s painting and the story describing the creative process behind it are therefore positioned as two windows ‘more or less abreast of each other’, but not exactly aligned. Through their juxtaposition, McWatt illuminates the dangers of aestheticised representations of the interior, linking the purification of Guyana’s landscape within twenty-firstcentury tourist brochure discourse to the painful ‘cleansings’ (226) of Guyana’s indigenous population during colonial times. In ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’ (1970), Harris celebrates the transformative potential of the ‘creative imagination’, insisting on the need to ‘bridge the gap’ between art and history, or art and 154

National Communities politics.108 In Suspended Sentences, McWatt does not question the idea that works of literature and art can have a social impact. Indeed, the sequence of stories examined here explores in various ways the complex and sometimes problematic interplay between Guyana’s cultural production and its political and economic development. Nevertheless, Harris’ belief in the redemptive power of art, or its capacity to ‘atone’ for the past – to borrow from the subtitle of Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement – is overshadowed in McWatt’s stories by his awareness of the way in which Guyanese writers’ hopes of cultural cohesion and social democracy have given way to racial polarisation and the corruption of socialist ideals. Whereas Harris is concerned with liberatory retellings of the El Dorado legend, McWatt examines its reinscription within exclusionary, commercially oriented narratives. Yet Harris’ journey upriver is not fully eclipsed by McWatt’s less hopeful trajectory. The episodic structure of McWatt’s text, offering a ‘series of windows’ into the Guyanese interior, each of which retraces the same journey differently, allows McWatt to revive Harris’ vision of a cross-cultural Guyanese community even as he draws attention to its fragility.

108 Wilson Harris, ‘History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Bundy, pp. 152–66 (p. 161).

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CHAPTER 4

Global Communities Global Communities

As groups migrate, regroup in new locations, reconstruct their histories, and reconfigure their ethnic projects, the ethno in ethnography takes on a slippery, nonlocalizable quality, to which the descriptive practices of anthropology will have to respond. The landscapes of group identity – the ethnoscapes – around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous.1

I

n this extract from Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1992), Arjun Appadurai draws attention to changing configurations of community in the late twentieth century where, due to increased levels of transnational migration, group identity is no longer straightforwardly attached to a specific locale, and communities are often split by internal cultural and ethnic differences. He considers the challenge this presents to the traditional practice of anthropology which took as its subject matter the spatially bounded and culturally homogenous community: this ‘familiar anthropological object’, he proposes, no longer exists, and anthropology as a discipline will need to respond to new forms of group identity. Appadurai’s observation raises questions which have subsequently been debated by anthropologists: Is ‘community’ still a viable concept in a globalised world? What new methods are needed to identify and analyse transnational, diasporic and deterritorialised communities? Is it still possible to think about the local? Writing in 2002, Ted C. Lewellen comments on the shift in the attention of anthropologists from ‘bounded cultures and communities’ to ‘transnationals,

1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) p. 48.

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Global Communities diasporas’ and ‘deterritorialized ethnicities’.2 Xavier Inda and Renalto Rosaldo similarly build on Appadurai’s observation in remarking that in the twentyfirst century it is impossible ‘to think of culture strictly in […] localized terms’ and ‘to view it as the natural property of spatially circumscribed populations’, since globalisation ‘has radically pulled culture away from place’. 3 In a world characterised by increasing movement and an ‘intensification of global interconnectedness’,4 they suggest, anthropologists have had to reconceptualise culture. This has involved a concomitant reconceptualising of community, since in a globalised world the parameters of community are ‘no longer, if they ever were, simply confined within the limits of a single territorial national space’.5 Here the words ‘if they ever were’, implying that the notion of the bounded community only ever existed within the imaginations of anthropologists, indicate how Inda and Rosaldo view the developments in anthropology as not simply a response to a changing world, but additionally a rethinking of the assumptions underpinning the discipline. They acknowledge that ‘[n]ational, regional, and village boundaries have never enclosed culture in the manner that classical anthropological depictions have often indicated’, and they consider how the heightened mobility of cultures and communities has rendered it impossible for the fiction of the bounded community to be maintained.6 Thomas Hylland Eriksen comments on how new theories of culture and community have generated new methodologies within the discipline of anthropology, since the traditional technique of participant observation fieldwork undertaken within a particular community over a sustained period of time is not appropriate to the study of more mobile and diffuse configurations of community. He explains that fieldwork often has to be ‘translocal’ or ‘multisited’ in order to address the social and cultural complexity of contemporary communities, and that fieldwork is now just one of many methods used by anthropologists, undertaken alongside the analysis of ‘additional sources giving access to the wider contexts of the phenomena being explored through participant observation – statistics, mass media, locally produced texts and so on’.7 While drawing attention to significant shifts in anthropological research since the 1990s, these studies simultaneously identify common ground between classic anthropology and more recent developments. For example, 2 Ted C. Lewellen, Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 30. 3 Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renalto Rosaldo, ‘Introduction: A World in Motion’, in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 1–34 (p. 11). 4 Ibid., p. 29. 5 Ibid., p. 20. 6 Ibid., p. 29. 7 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology (New York: Pluto Press, 2010), p. 322.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories they assert that anthropologists continue to focus on the local and the specific, even if these are now examined in relation to globalisation. According to Inda and Rosaldo, anthropology ‘is most concerned with the articulation of the global and the local, that is, with how globalizing processes exist in the context of, and must come to terms with, the realities of particular societies’.8 In their view, it is this emphasis on the local that distinguishes anthropological perspectives on globalisation from studies of globalisation in other disciplines: whereas many theories of globalisation focus on ‘the macro scope of the phenomenon’, examining ‘large-scale economic, political, or cultural processes’, anthropologists examine how these processes impact on particular communities. Lewellen makes a similar claim for the significance of anthropology to the study of globalisation. A full understanding of globalisation is only possible, in his opinion, if we study it ‘at the level of real people who imagine new lives, make plans, travel, form networks, assume identities, and socialize their children’.9 Here too they extend the ideas put forward in Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, which examines the tension between the transnational and the local, looking at how ‘large-scale realities’ are embedded within ‘concrete life-worlds’.10 While the articulation of the global and the local is a concern of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century anthropologists responding to new configurations of community in a globalised world, it has long been central to debates within Caribbean literary and cultural studies. Due to the region’s history of colonialism and plantation agriculture, the idea of the spatially bounded and culturally homogenous community has never been a model applicable to Caribbean societies. Diaspora, transnationalism and deterritorialisation may be key terms within the discourse of globalisation prominent since the 1990s, but they are not new concepts for Caribbean writers and cultural practitioners, since they underpin the development of Caribbean societies over several centuries. As Alison Donnell points out, ‘historically Caribbean populations have always already been informed by the transactions and interactions of a series of (forced) migrations’.11 This has led some scholars to present Caribbean societies as paradigmatic of a broader global culture. For example, with his claim, in The Predicament of Culture (1988), that ‘we are 8 Inda and Rosaldo, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 9 Lewellen, Anthropology of Globalization, p. 26. 10 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 55. Appadurai’s work is frequently cited as a key example of a post-1990 form of anthropology which explores the articulation of the global and the local. See, for example, Ulf Hannerz, ‘Several Sites in One’, in Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology, ed. by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (London: Pluto, 2003), pp. 19–38 (p. 36); Lewellen, Anthropology of Globalization, p. 31; Karen Fogg Olwig, ‘Global Places and Place-Identities – Lessons from Caribbean Research’, in Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology, ed. by Eriksen, pp. 58–77 (p. 59). 11 Alison Donnell, Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 89.

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Global Communities all Caribbeans now in our urban archipelagos’,12 James Clifford suggests that Caribbean societies have become representative of a global phenomenon of mass migration and cultural intermixture. Others have highlighted the problems of drawing easy parallels between Caribbean cultures and contemporary discourses of globalisation. Mimi Sheller considers how in post-nationalist diaspora theories of the 1980s and globalisation theories of the 1990s, creolisation has been ‘wrested from its Caribbean location and appropriated as a free-floating signifier of the border-transcending encounters of globalization’.13 Distanced from its original usage as part of a discourse of anti-colonial nationalism, she argues, the concept of creolisation is dehistoricised and depoliticised. Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) and Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000) both present us with Caribbean communities of global scope. Moon features an extended family spanning 200 years and moving between Trinidad, Europe, the US and Canada. Through its simultaneous representation of and address to a variety of reading audiences, Folktales evokes a globalised Trinidadian community where distinctions between insiders and outsiders, and between authentic and commodified cultural products, are becoming increasingly blurred. All of the story collections and cycles examined in this book reflect in some way on the global contexts of Caribbean communities. However, to a greater extent than the writers whose work I have analysed in earlier chapters, Brand and Antoni move beyond national and regional frames of reference in their imagining of community; the communities portrayed in their fiction are fluid and expansive, with indistinct boundaries. It is therefore productive, to an extent, to read these texts in relation to theories of diaspora and globalisation. Yet both texts interrogate discourses of global culture. As I will argue in the two sections which follow, Brand’s story cycle comments on the limitations of oceanic metaphors as they operate within the diaspora discourse of the 1980s and 90s, questioning their viability as a basis for communal identifications. Equally, Antoni’s story cycle complicates notions of a global consumer or a global audience, extending diaspora discourse to incorporate new ways of conceptualising reading communities. Brand’s text is marketed as a novel,14 but since it consists of discrete stories framed by the first, second and final story, it can be read as a short story cycle. Additionally, the invocation of a tidal cycle in the title At the Full and Change

12 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 173. 13 Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 195. See also Alison Donnell’s critique of Clifford’s statement in Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature, pp. 84–85. 14 The Grove Press edition includes the subtitle ‘A Novel’. Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon (New York: Grove Press, 1999). All further references to this edition will be marked in parentheses in the text.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of the Moon draws attention to the text’s cyclical structure. Antoni’s text is marketed as a short story collection, but reads more like a short story cycle, since the handful of characters featuring in most of these stories provides it with a continuity not usually seen in short story collections. Furthermore, the narrative voice of Mrs Domingo and her second person address to her grandson Johnny, present in the majority of the stories, invite us to read each story as part of a longer narrative. The contents page reflects this; divided into five parts, the stories are linked with the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘including’. Digression functions in this text as both a theme and a structuring device, generating a maze of stories within stories. In both cases, the form of the text emerges out of its subject matter. The digressive structure of Folktales is a crucial element of the text’s address to readers, working against the exoticist discourse to which it appears, on the surface, to contribute. By drawing on the idea of a tidal cycle, Brand embeds the form of the short story cycle within the geographic and historical landscapes of Caribbean regional and diasporic spaces; the trope of the tide not only foregrounds the multiple migrations which have shaped and continue to impact upon Caribbean societies, but also evokes the recursive patterning of a history where one mode of exploitation has followed another. The diasporic family in Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon Dionne Brand was born in Trinidad in 1953 and emigrated at the age of 17 to Toronto, where she now lives. In her memoir A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), she says of her ‘large and unwieldy’ family: ‘Our origins seemed to be in the sea’. Quoting Derek Walcott’s words, ‘the sea is history’,15 she reflects: ‘I knew that before I knew it was history I was looking at’.16 In relating the idea of the sea to genealogy, Brand not only draws on Walcott’s idea, but also shares the approach of a number of other Caribbean writers. Notably, in Caribbean Discourse (1981), Édouard Glissant uses Kamau Brathwaite’s phrase ‘the unity is submarine’17 as the basis for his own model of ‘rhizomatic’ identity18 as ‘[s]ubmarine roots: that is floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches’.19 Antonio Benítez-Rojo presents Caribbean culture 15 See Derek Walcott, ‘The Sea Is History’, in Collected Poems 1948–1984 (London and Boston, MA: Faber & Faber, 1992 [1986]), pp. 364–67 (p. 364). 16 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001), p. 12. 17 See Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean (Mona, Jamaica: Savacou, 1974), p. 64. 18 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]), p. 11. 19 Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1989 [1981]) p. 67.

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Global Communities as ‘not terrestrial but aquatic’, since the Caribbean is the ‘realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity’.20 Both writers make use of the concept of fluidity to put forward a model of Caribbean identity that takes into account the region’s complex history of multiple migration. For Glissant, the notion of rootedness is not rejected but rearticulated within an aesthetic of movement and interconnection. For Benítez-Rojo, the ‘flow’ of Caribbean culture ‘outwards past the limits of its own sea’, beyond essentialising frameworks of place or ethnicity, is a distinguishing feature of the region.21 In the theoretical work of both writers, the sea is a powerful metaphor through which to imagine community in a Caribbean context. As these connections demonstrate, the use of oceanic metaphors as a means of conceptualising Caribbean cultural identity is a familiar strategy. Evoking in its title the idea of a tidal cycle, Dionne Brand’s short story cycle At the Full and Change of the Moon contributes to an intertextual conversation which echoes through earlier Caribbean writing, literary and theoretical. The pertinence of Brand’s late twentieth-century text lies in its interrogation of, and departure from, previous engagements with the trope of the sea. In Brand’s writing the figurative function of the sea, like the ocean itself, is unstable and shifting; it appears to offer now a source of, now a threat to, collective identity. Opening with a story entitled ‘… But a Drink of Water’, words taken from an account in V. S. Naipaul’s The Loss of El Dorado (1969) of a female slave responsible for a mass poisoning on a plantation,22 Moon problematises from its outset any purely celebratory reading of its liquid imagery. Beginning in 1824 with a mass suicide on a plantation in Trinidad, orchestrated by the rebel slave Marie Ursule, Moon charts the journeys of this character’s descendants through almost two centuries. Brand’s interconnected stories configure community as an extended family, as is emphasised by the family tree which maps out the complex relationships between the stories’ protagonists. In fictionalising this family and tracing its members’ divergent yet intersecting paths, Brand’s text portrays a dispersed Caribbean community which extends beyond the region. The stories move away from the Trinidadian setting of the opening narrative to Europe, the US and Canada, their protagonists spilling out in various directions. This outward movement is countered in the final episode, which pulls readers back both temporally and spatially to Marie Ursule’s daughter Bola and to Trinidad. Moon’s structure is therefore circular, and the repetition of the title story, ‘At the Full and Change of the Moon’, at the close of the narrative, adds to this effect. 20 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. by James E. Maraniss, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 [1989]), p. 11. 21 Ibid., p. 4. 22 See Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, p. 205, where Brand acknowledges this allusion.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories I am concerned here not only with the structure of Brand’s story cycle, but also with the idea of circular movement as it operates on thematic and figurative levels, in a complex interplay of form and content. Focusing first on the notion of a tidal cycle, and second on the overlapping circulatory systems of the body and the economy, my reading probes the ambivalence of Brand’s aesthetic of fluidity. Placing the text’s liquid imagery in the context of Zygmunt Bauman’s analysis of ‘new, fluid global powers’ which circulate transnationally,23 as well as Appadurai’s contention that power is articulated within the increasingly ‘disjunctive’ and ‘irregular’ global flows of ‘economy, culture, and politics’,24 I argue that Moon questions the political efficacy of aquatic metaphors as they have operated within theoretical discussions of a shared Caribbean or diasporic consciousness. Tidal Poetics The final episode of Brand’s text, ‘At the Full and Change of the Moon’, returns us to both the setting and the title of the second story, also featuring Bola. Perched on her isolated rock off the coast of Trinidad, Bola observes from a distance her abundant offspring: She loved them, these children strung out across the beach. They wandered after their own thoughts then remembered her and waved at her. Straying along the sand, waiting for her but doing their own business. […] Culebra was not large enough to be anyone’s harbour but hers. She hovered over its stray woods and shells and boats washing in and out. Some things that go out come back again and other things never return. (295–96)

This passage indicates the way in which both the narrative structure of Moon and the family featured within its stories are shaped by a double movement of rejection and ‘love’, dispersal and convergence similar to the ebb and flow of the tide. The image of Bola’s children ‘strung out across the beach’ suggests a fishing line flung out to sea and waiting to be pulled back in. One moment these children ‘wander’ and ‘stray’ from her, the next they remember and acknowledge her. In this way, the freedom of their movement as they are washed out to sea is checked by the tide’s gravitational pull as it hauls them back in. The idea that Bola ‘hovered over’ the debris washing in and out implies that her descendants cannot escape the spectral presence of their ancestry. Yet we are told that ‘Culebra was not large enough to be anyone’s harbour but hers’; its limited geography cannot contain the text’s extensive diasporic family. Despite the cyclical form of Moon, the various protagonists of Brand’s interconnected stories do not return full circle after their meandering journeys. Like the sea, Moon’s aesthetic of fluidity is erratic and unpredictable, resisting the neat closure which some of its characters long for. 23 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 12. 24 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, pp. 32–33.

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Global Communities Following the reference to a tidal cycle in the title At the Full and Change of the Moon, in this section I explore how Brand’s text engages in various ways with the idea of circular movement, reading this as part of the book’s aquatic trope. Identifying differences between the cyclical patterns of Moon and Forrest Ingram’s theoretical discussion of short story cycles, I relate Brand’s narrative strategies to the tidal poetics of Glissant’s and Brathwaite’s work. I then go on to identify tensions between Glissant’s and Brand’s approach to circular movement, considering the differing relationship of their ideas to those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Focusing on the recurring concepts of drifting and maroonage, I read Moon as a critical intervention into discourses of deterritorialisation. As a series of separate but interlinked stories which begins and ends in the semi-fictional setting of Culebra Bay, Moon is cyclical in form, and yet Brand’s text does not fit the geometric model proposed by Forrest Ingram, who compares the ‘dynamic patterns’ of ‘recurrence and development’ in short story cycles to the motion of a wheel. According to Ingram, the rim of the wheel ‘represents recurrent elements in a cycle which rotate around a thematic center. As these elements (motifs, symbols, characters, words) repeat themselves, turn in on themselves, recur, the whole wheel moves forward’.25 Recurrence is certainly integral to the structure of Moon. Nevertheless, Brand’s text eludes the stability of a ‘thematic center’, offering instead a fluid and expansive network of stories. Furthermore, Moon’s repeated tidal dynamic of dispersal and reconnection prevents the kind of linear progression implied in Ingram’s image of a wheel ‘mov[ing] forward’. In contrast to Ingram’s abstract model of cyclical movement, Brathwaite and Glissant both engage with the idea of a tidal poetics closely informed by the specifics of, in Brathwaite’s case, the island landscapes of the archipelago, and in Glissant’s case, a history of plantation which resounds beyond the Caribbean region into the southern states of the US. Brathwaite considers how the ‘psychology’ of Caribbean people is ‘not dialectical – successfully dialectical – in the way that Western philosophy has assumed people’s lives should be, but tidalectic’.26 His term ‘tidalectic’, Elizabeth DeLoughrey explains, engages with what he calls an ‘“alter/native” historiography to linear models of colonial progress’, and ‘resists the synthesizing telos of Hegel’s dialectic by drawing from a cyclical model, invoking the continual movement and rhythm of the ocean’.27 Brathwaite illustrates his ‘tidalectics’ through the image of a woman sweeping sand from her yard. He discovers that her feet, which appeared to be walking on the sand, are ‘really […] walking on the 25 Forrest L. Ingram, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century: Studies in a Literary Genre (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), pp. 20–21. 26 Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERsations with Nathaniel Mackey (New York: We Press & Xcp, 1999), p. 34. 27 Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), p. 2.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories water’,28 and as such her daily ritual of sweeping is ‘like the movement of the ocean she’s walking on, coming from one continent / continuum, touching another, and then receding (“reading”) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future’.29 This transoceanic movement is recursive, refusing the linear progression of a Hegelian resolution. Nevertheless, it does offer a form of progression; through the perpetual lack of synthesis is glimpsed a future of ‘perhaps creative chaos’. As Anna Reckin observes, the ‘back-and-forth flow of the tidalectic’ is very different to Brathwaite’s ‘negative paradigm for Caribbean repetition which always ends, like Sisyphus’ stone, back where it started, hope and effort wasted’. 30 While Brathwaite’s term ‘tidalectic’ is used to explore the dynamics of Caribbean culture, Glissant adopts a tidal metaphor to examine the circularity of William Faulkner’s work. Glissant focuses on elements of Faulkner’s writing which can also be found in Moon: the tracing of a family genealogy and a narrative structure of interlinked stories. He describes how by ‘adding a particular story to a finished novel or a larger saga’, Faulkner creates composite texts which are ‘off-centre, endlessly multiplied’. 31 This reading unsettles Ingram’s sense of the short story cycle as ‘recurrent elements’ which ‘rotate around a thematic center’. He suggests that in Faulkner’s work we approach the American South ‘only through spurts of disclosure, the way water withdraws in successive waves, each following its own current, leaving behind muddy streaks and silt and spores of life from the deep’. 32 Although the notion of ‘successive waves’ implies a repetitive pattern similar to that of Ingram’s rotating wheel, the less manageable movement of the waves in various directions, ‘each following its own current’, exceeds the wheel’s narrow trajectory. Here recursive movement is combined with the sense of a build-up of history like the accumulation of silt on a beach. The circular movement of the waves is therefore not atemporal, but rather enacts a layering of time in a context where the past is only visible as multiple, intersecting ‘trace[s]’. 33 Like Brathwaite’s, Glissant’s tidal poetics involve an alternatively configured progression. The narrative structure of Moon is similarly attentive to the social and cultural specificity of Caribbean regional and diasporic spaces. However, the effects and implications of Brand’s tidal poetics differ from both Brathwaite’s and Glissant’s. An area of overlap between my reading of Brand’s and Glissant’s analysis of Faulkner is the way in which the concept of an extended family 28 Brathwaite, ConVERsations, p. 33. 29 Ibid., p. 34. 30 Anna Reckin, ‘Tidalectic Lectures: Kamau Brathwaite’s Prose/Poetry as Sound/ Space’, Anthurium, 1:1 (2003) [accessed 22 January 2013]. 31 Édouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. by Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1996]), p. 208. 32 Ibid., p. 228. 33 Ibid., p. 29.

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Global Communities shapes the structure of their texts. Glissant observes how in Faulkner’s work, ‘the pileup of patronyms, of mixings of blood whether forced or not, of double lineages (black and white), relentlessly reproduces […] the extended family style that has so long contributed to the formation of the Caribbean social fabric’. 34 He compares families structured around ‘laws of filiation’ to ‘an extended family [which] is circular and meshed, as is the web of Faulkner’s work’. 35 Here, the resistance of a cyclical narrative dynamic to linear progression is expressed in terms of cultural identity: for Glissant, the circularity of Faulkner’s work replaces the coherence and purity of bloodlines with the ‘dispers[ion]’ and ‘diffract[ion]’ of creolisation. 36 He compares the form of the traditional epic, the purpose of which is ‘a restoration of lost unity’, to the ‘Faulknerian intervention’ which, rather than reaffirming the legitimacy and land ownership which have been placed in question during the course of the narrative, extends ‘into multiplicity’. 37 Glissant asks us to imagine a form of epic literature which would leave the ‘dissolute dispersed’ as a ‘wandering people, whose worth would be that they wander’. 38 According to Glissant’s reading of Faulkner, then, circular wandering can lead to an affirmation of identity, or ‘worth’, which defies the certainty of bloodlines. Moon begins with a genealogical chart which challenges patrilineal logic. At the head of the chart is the rebel slave Marie Ursule, connected by a single line to her daughter Bola. The sprawling family beneath is characterised by an absence of father figures. Kamena, who, it is implied, may be Bola’s father, is placed to the side of Marie Ursule and Bola with no connecting lines, cut off from the family tree in a way which reflects his description as ‘marooned to his last direction’. Furthermore, the majority of figures in the chart are nameless, alluded to in phrases such as ‘The one unrecalled’, ‘The ones left in the sea’ and ‘The ones she made in the dry season’. 39 These absences and anonymities frustrate the tracing of a bloodline. The naming of other figures adds to this difficulty. Marie Ursule’s name closely resembles that of a goddess from the Haitian Voodoo pantheon, Erzulie. This mythical figure, according to Melanie Otto, fought in the Haitian slave rebellion in the late eighteenth century. Erzulie could therefore be seen as a precursor for the fictional character Marie Ursule, who organises a slave rebellion on a plantation in Trinidad in the early nineteenth century. Otto describes Erzulie as ‘an independent childbearing woman, who offers the possibility of having a child without a man’, and in doing so ‘also offers an alternative family structure’ which ‘reflects the all-female households characteristic of many 34 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 58. 35 Ibid., p. 58. 36 Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, p. 229. 37 Ibid., p. 98. 38 Ibid., pp. 99–100. 39 These descriptions are noted on the family tree, inserted before the main text of At the Full and Change of the Moon. See appendix II.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Caribbean societies’.40 Like the figure of Erzulie, Brand’s genealogical chart presents an alternative structure of family and community which disrupts linear conceptions of cultural heritage, but which in doing so draws on an existing ‘circular and meshed’ Caribbean ‘extended family style’. As such, it can be compared to Deleuze and Guattari’s model of the rhizome, which replaces hierarchical ‘arborescent systems’ with an ‘anti-genealogy’.41 Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic system is fluid, relative, shifting, always pushing towards ‘deterritorialization’, but at the same time dependent upon a continual process of random and unpredictable connection: the ‘genealogical trees’ are ‘scramble[d]’ not by fracture but by ‘[t]ransversal communications between different lines’.42 If Brand’s genealogical chart offers readers a rhizomatic ‘anti-genealogy’, the narrative structure of Moon can similarly be read in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas, due to the text’s formal engagement with the trope of fluidity. Brand includes in her memoir a passage written by the eighteenth-century cartographer Thomas Jefferys. This ‘theory of directions’, she tells us, is at once where Moon ‘begins’, and at the same time subject to ‘unravelling’ during the course of the narrative, since ‘[b]y the end of the twentieth century what the lines on Jefferys’ map have conspired to hold has burst out’.43 In the second episode of Moon, she describes the map on the Lieutenant-Governor’s desk, reflecting on its inadequacies: This map cannot note the great fluidity of maps, which is like the fluidity of air. Paper rarely contains – even its latitudinal and longitudinal lines gesture continuation. […] The best cartographer is only trying to hold water, to draw approximations of rocks, inclines, bays, depths, plains. (52)

The landscape of Brand’s novel exceeds the cartographic narrative from which its title was extracted.44 The image of the lives of Marie Ursule’s descendants ‘spill[ing] out’ over the world and through the centuries (20) suggests that in the writing of Moon, Brand is not, like these cartographers, attempting to ‘hold water’, but rather to chart its movement. This image of spillage is reflected formally in the dispersal of the text into stories set at different points in time and space, spanning two centuries and moving from the Caribbean to Europe, the US and Canada. The language used to describe Kamena, who returns episodically to Bola from his wanderings, makes clear this interplay between the imagery and the structure of the text. Kamena returns each time ‘with rags of stories, droplets of suggestions to directions, which he show[s] Bola, cupping his hands around them as if they 40 Melanie Otto, ‘The Caribbean’, in The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. by John McLeod (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 94–107 (p. 102). 41 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 11, 16. 42 Ibid., p. 10, p. 11. 43 Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, pp. 200–01, p. 207. 44 See Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, p. 200, where the phrase ‘At the full and change of the moon’ appears in the extract from Jefferys’ narrative.

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Global Communities would fall’ (54). This impression of stories as droplets of water slipping through Kamena’s fingers invites a reading of Moon as consisting of self-contained units which momentarily merge, but which nevertheless resist containment within a single narrative frame; as in Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic system, in Moon connections are ‘transversal’, cutting across narrative lines. In both the genealogical chart which precedes Moon and in its narrative structure, Brand therefore invokes a Deleuze and Guattarian model which replaces the fixed ‘filiation’ of the ‘tree’ with the shifting ‘alliance[s]’ of the rhizome.45 However, Moon simultaneously complicates this model. While Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘subterranean stems and flows’ are part of an abstract sense of fluidity as multidirectional and disorganised, the aquatic trope to be found in both the imagery and form of Brand’s text calls to mind the dual movement of a tidal cycle. Its stories escape from any unifying narrative frame, causing Marie Ursule’s descendants to scatter in various directions across the Atlantic. Yet the cyclical structure of Moon, beginning and ending in Culebra Bay, ultimately pulls readers back from the various diasporic settings of the intervening episodes. Equally, the genealogical chart, after a proliferation of unnamed offspring and untraceable connections, circles back on itself with the final name, Bola.46 The push towards ‘deterritorialization’ in Moon thus strains against the gravitational pull of history, place and familial identification, in a movement comparable to the ebb and flow of the tide. Rather than setting the fluidity of the rhizome against the rigidity of the ‘tree or root’,47 as Deleuze and Guattari do, Brand draws on a model of fluidity which is already antagonistic. In her discussion of the text’s genealogical chart, Johanna X. K. Garvey refers, as I have, to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.48 Garvey sees Moon as endorsing deterritorialised identity, arguing that the female characters ‘express a repeated need to leave the place they occupy – where their bodies may resemble occupied territory – and to find a space of empowerment’. In her view, the ocean, located ‘at the center of the narrative’, provides such a space.49 Similarly, Marlene Goldman proposes that in both Moon and A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand puts forward an ‘aesthetics and politics of drifting’ as an ‘alternative to the boundedness of home and the nation-state’, and as a means of configuring diasporic consciousness.50 45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25. 46 The Bola who features in the penultimate story is the great-granddaughter of the Bola who is the subject of the second story (the daughter of Marie Ursule). See Appendix II. 47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 7. 48 Johanna X. K. Garvey, ‘“The place she miss”: Exile, Memory, and Resistance in Dionne Brand’s Fiction’, Callaloo, 26:2 (2003), 486–503 (p. 495). 49 Ibid., p. 491. 50 Marlene Goldman, ‘Mapping the Door of No Return: Deterritorialization and the Work of Dionne Brand’, Canadian Literature / Littérature Canadienne, 182 (2004), 13–28 (pp. 13, 22).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Building on Goldman’s discussion of the trope of ‘drifting’, Maia Joseph argues that Brand’s work ‘tend[s] to push toward deterritorialization’.51 In all three cases, the movement towards deterritorialisation is presented in a positive light: for Garvey it leads to the ‘empowerment’ of Brand’s female characters; for Goldman it allows Brand to highlight the exclusionary practices of the nation-state and offer an alternative mode of belonging; and for Joseph it enables Brand to ‘imagin[e] possible collective futures’ which extend ‘across socially constructed boundaries’.52 While Garvey, Goldman and Joseph consider the liberatory potential of an aesthetic of deterritorialisation, I suggest that within Brand’s story cycle the motifs of drifting and wandering are presented ambivalently. This can be seen, for example, in the circular wanderings of her character Kamena, a maroon slave who has escaped from the plantation. Kamena’s perpetual search for the maroon camp Terre Bouillante is a repetitive cycle which ultimately takes him nowhere: watching him ‘circling himself’ and ‘returning without it’, Bola learns that ‘searching [is] useless’ (65). Despite Kamena’s increasing familiarity with the island, as he ‘double[s] and redouble[s]’ each corner in his search for its ‘interior’, gathering stories and ‘directions’ (54), his ‘wanderings’ (54) do not result in a ‘new relationship with the land’,53 as is the case in Glissant’s model of ‘circular nomadism’.54 Rather than identifying him with the terrain he traverses, Kamena’s fruitless search for Terre Bouillante ‘only took him farther into his own mind’ (54). His journeys therefore lead to an increasing detachment from, rather than a deepening association with, the island’s landscape. While Faulkner’s work, in Glissant’s reading, moves beyond filial identification in a productive entanglement of plot lines, Kamena’s ‘circling [of] himself’ (65) in search of Terre Bouillante is regressive. His journeys suggest an attempt to re-grasp bloodlines, rather than to ‘dispers[e]’ and ‘diffract’ them. His incessant efforts to return to Terre Bouillante, a place he has only experienced imaginatively,55 brings to mind the Pan-African movement, a way of thinking which involved a backward glance to an ‘original “Africa”’ which, as Stuart Hall argues, is ‘no longer there’, existing only as ‘part of the Caribbean imaginary’, and which as a result ‘cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered’.56 Like Glissant, Hall uses the notion of a circular journey in order to explore the possibility of new cultural identities; he describes the 51 Maia Joseph, ‘Wondering into Country: Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return’, Canadian Literature, 193 (Summer 2007), 75–92 (p. 79). 52 Ibid., pp. 76, 92. 53 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 147. 54 Ibid., p. 18. 55 Kamena’s discovery of Terre Bouillante is ‘dreamed’ (26) rather than experienced directly, and is followed by a series of unsuccessful attempts to replicate it. 56 Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. by Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 222–37 (pp. 231–32).

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Global Communities ‘displaced “homeward” journey’ of African Caribbean people as ‘necessarily circular’, a return ‘“by another route”’ not to Africa but to ‘what Africa has become in the New World, what we have made of “Africa”’.57 Kamena’s circular movement lacks this sense of becoming, expressing instead the monotony of obsessive behaviour. He is held back by an unrealisable desire to return to the beginning. Whereas the wanderings of Glissant’s errant figure involve the location of the self and of communities within the movement of a ‘rhizomed land’, Kamena’s circular journeys are symptomatic of an inability to locate himself. Goldman’s view of ‘drifting’ as a politically charged metaphor which offers an ‘alternative possibility’ of belonging, beyond national frameworks,58 is also complicated by Brand’s use of the related metaphor of maroonage. In a discussion of Moon, Brand uses the word ‘adrift’ alongside the words ‘bereft’, ‘abandoned’ and ‘marooned’.59 These associations emphasise the way in which ‘adrift’, a passive version of Goldman’s ‘drifting’, may suggest free movement, but may also imply a lack of direction and a lack of control over movement, which compromise that freedom. The word ‘marooned’ performs a similarly contradictory role in Moon. Cynthia James explores the multivalence of the word ‘maroon’ through its etymology. She explains how an ‘Afro-centred ideology has limited the concept of the maroon to a focus mainly on flight, resistance, and survival’,60 obscuring the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, ‘the word was used to refer to the adventurous European entrepreneur as much as to the non-European and could simply mean “shipwrecked” or “isolated”’.61 Brand plays on the double meaning of this word when she describes Kamena, a runaway slave broken by his unproductive search for a place of refuge, as ‘[m]arooned’ (65). The positive connotations of the term ‘maroon’, in its evocation of a history of maroon slaves escaping the oppression of plantation life, are undercut in Moon by images of shipwreck. Ironically, the trope of maroonage, with its connotations of shipwreck and isolation, functions as a point of connection between characters, locations and episodes. Kamena’s sense of his own exhausted body, disfigured by his profitless search for a place he has only known in dreams, as ‘what the forest leaves, like what a shark leaves’ (30), creates an overlap between the 57 Ibid., p. 232. 58 Goldman, ‘Mapping the Door of No Return’, p. 13. 59 Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, p. 211. 60 Cynthia James, The Maroon Narrative: Caribbean Literature in English across Boundaries, Ethnicities, and Centuries (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002), p. 1. Here James is referring to the meaning of ‘maroon’ as a fugitive plantation slave. In the Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, ed. by Richard Alsopp (Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad: University of the West Indies Press, 1996), the word ‘maroon’ is defined as follows: ‘Any of the descendants of those slaves who freed themselves by escape and guerrilla fighting, establishing isolated communities which have survived in mountain or forest country’ (p. 371). 61 James, The Maroon Narrative, p. 12.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories forest surrounding the maroon camp Terre Bouillante and the shark-infested waters of Culebra Bay (11). Later, the description of Culebra Bay as ‘arrested’ in rock, rain and wind, and as ‘abandoned, a Maroonage of two’ (51) further develops the association between the two places. ‘[A]lone in the water like a […] shipwreck’, Bola is ‘never tired of drowning’ in the sea and the sky (61), just as Kamena feels that ‘[i]f he was not to drown in the sea he would drown in the rain’ (29). The connecting motif of maroonage also extends to Kamena’s twentiethcentury descendants, as can be seen in Eula’s perception of Toronto as ‘human wreckage’ (241), and in the image of drowning used to describe Adrian’s drug-induced convulsions as he lies on a kitchen floor in Amsterdam, imagining ‘sea turtles and sea cockroaches coming out of his mouth’ (204). It is through these repeated images of shipwreck, rather than a more positive aesthetic of ‘drifting’ or of maroonage as an act of liberation, that Kamena’s circular journeys can be related to the trajectories of characters in later episodes. We are told that Adrian is, ‘like Kamena’, ‘trying to find a destination’ but ‘going nowhere’ (180). The circle of iron which ‘choreograph[s]’ Marie Ursule’s ‘walk’ and ‘thoughts’ (4), the ‘circle’ of the sea, as the rock’s horizon, which encloses Bola (58), and Maya’s immersion in the rhythms of her own menstrual cycle (221) can be compared to the circumscription of Kamena’s movement as he ‘double[s] and redouble[s]’ the island, restricted by his own fixation on an impossible return. The effect of these connections is to highlight disconnection, rather than identification, between Brand’s characters, sealed within the closed circles of their own individual experiences. Brand links Kamena’s character to later descendants of Marie Ursule in the following observation: Kamena’s unending and, as history will confirm, inevitably futile search for a homeland is the mirror of the book’s later generations – their dispersal, their scatterings to the extreme and remote corners of the world: Amsterdam, New York, Toronto. Their distraction and flights resound in him and back to him. It is their condition of being.62

If, as I have argued, Kamena’s search for Terre Bouillante is non-progressive, involving a fixation on an unattainable past rather than a more constructive movement towards self-affirmation, Brand’s comment implies that to link Kamena to the other characters in Moon is to see this pattern recur within a wider narrative framework. The idea of Kamena’s journey as a ‘mirror’ for later, equally ‘distract[ed]’ and aimless wanderings suggests that like Kamena, Brand’s twentieth-century characters in Europe and North America can only locate themselves by looking backwards, their own journeys ‘resound[ing] in [Kamena] and back to him’.63 Despite its wide-ranging movement across 62 Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, pp. 202–03. 63 The journeys of these characters will be explored fully in the section which follows, which focuses on stories set in the US, Canada and Europe.

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Global Communities space and time, the narrative structure of Moon lacks the ‘spiral progression’ Glissant reads into Faulkner’s work.64 Whereas for Brathwaite, the repetitive to-and-fro ritual of sweeping leads to a productive lack of synthesis, through which the ‘perhaps creative chaos’ of the future might be glimpsed,65 the recursive structure of Brand’s story cycle, which ‘loop[s] and repeat[s]’ like Marie Ursule’s memory (9), implies a struggle on Brand’s part to envisage a future for the diasporic family she depicts. Twentieth-century characters such as Adrian and Maya, wandering between the US, Canada and Europe, are at the mercy of the tide. The formal elasticity of Moon may allow Marie Ursule’s descendants to escape the restrictive framework of Jefferys’ colonial map, and thus potentially to move in new directions. However, these characters’ lack of purpose renders them vulnerable to the gravitational pull of the past. Just as a tidal cycle is not complete like a circle, but ongoing, Moon’s cyclical structure does not offer readers a sense of closure. Instead, the antagonism of ebb and flow is maintained up to the very last sentence. The final episode ends with Bola’s threat to her children: ‘Or I’ll go back in the sea’ (299); the movement of the narrative back to Culebra is therefore fraught with the expectation of another outward movement. By exploring the ambivalence of words such as ‘adrift’ and ‘marooned’, Moon complicates associations of fluidity with liberation or empowerment. The text’s oceanic imagery serves primarily as a means of exploring the Caribbean region’s traumatic past and uncertain future. The energy of Brand’s work lies in its interrogative approach to aquatic metaphors as they operate within both poststructuralist theory and Caribbean cultural theory. Negotiating circular flows The truth is that North America does not need Black people any more; neither Canada nor the US need the cheap labour assigned to our skins […] New technologies and the easy movement of capital through free-trade agreements and free-trade zones have eliminated the need for a work-force in situ […] These conditions fill up the jails with unemployed, underemployed, unemployable.66

In her 1994 essay ‘Brownman, Tiger …’, Brand explains how in the US and Canada of the 1960s and 70s, there was a need for the ‘cheap and degraded labour’ black people have ‘represented across the centuries of our lives here’,67 64 Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, p. 202. 65 Brathwaite, ConVERsations, p. 34. 66 Dionne Brand, ‘Brownman, Tiger …’, in Bread out of Stone: Recollections Sex Recollections Race Dreaming Politics (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994), pp. 101–21 (pp. 116–17). 67 Brand describes how African Caribbean women had been ‘imported [to Toronto] by the thousands to work its kitchens and factories in the sixties and seventies’.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories but in the ensuing decades the situation changed, leading to rising levels of unemployment and criminal activity within these countries’ immigrant and diasporic populations.68 In the above extract, she suggests that the expansion of ‘trans-national capitalism’,69 which involves the free flow of money and commodities across national borders, has led to the enforced immobility of these communities, whose members ‘fill up the jails’. The fluid processes of late twentieth-century global capitalism, she claims, are by no means liberating for all. With these comments, Brand reacts against a power structure which has moved beyond the framework of the nation-state. The adverse conditions she describes result not from what Deleuze and Guattari term the territorial power of the ‘State-apparatus’,70 but rather from the ‘easy movement of capital’ and the deterritorialising process which results from this, as cheap labour forces are increasingly sourced beyond national borders. Episodes five to eight of Moon detail the journeys of Marie Ursule’s late twentieth-century descendants attempting to make a life for themselves in the US and Europe. These four successive stories point to repetitions in the history of the African diaspora across the centuries, showing how the exploitation of immigrant bodies as part of the capitalist enterprise of transatlantic slavery is echoed within a new mode of capitalism almost two centuries later. In this section I examine first the positive figuring of fluidity in recent theories of diasporic consciousness, looking at how within this discourse, mobile formulations of collective identity are defined against the fixity of the nation-state. I then go on to suggest that Brand’s writing questions the efficacy of this approach in a climate where, as noted by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, nation-states are no longer ‘primary actors’ in the organisation of ‘global production and exchange’.71 Brand’s work has often been read as operating either within or against national frameworks. George Elliott Clarke views Brand as a ‘primarily Canadian’ writer, arguing that her writing has always been concerned with ‘Canadian regionalism’.72 Like Clarke, Rinaldo Walcott presents Brand as a Canadian writer, but he proposes that Moon is a text in which ‘national She later refers to various jobs available to immigrants who came to Toronto to ‘pick apples, clean house, sew sweatshirts, build cars, clean the sick’. See ‘Brownman, Tiger …’, pp. 104, 116. Her essay makes clear, then, that the ‘cheap and degraded labour’ provided by immigrants in the 1960s and 70s is distinct from the enforced labour of the transatlantic slave trade. Brand’s words ‘across the centuries’ draw attention to echoes rather than aligning these two very different contexts of immigrant labour. 68 Brand, ‘Brownman, Tiger …’, p. 117. 69 Ibid., p. 117. 70 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 23. 71 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 150. 72 George Elliott Clarke, ‘Harris, Philip, Brand: Three Authors in Search of Literate Criticism’, Journal of Canadian Studies, 35:1 (2000), 161–89 (p. 164).

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Global Communities boundaries’ are ‘resisted and in many ways refused’.73 He sees this not as a rejection of Canadianness, but rather as part of Brand’s renegotiation of Canadian national space. Diana Brydon makes a similar point, placing Brand’s work within a tradition of ‘black Canadian writing’ which ‘reroutes the black Atlantic discourse of Gilroy and others to stress settlement and the putting down of new roots in Canada’.74 Whether they see her as contesting or remoulding national discourses, Clarke, Walcott and Brydon all set Brand’s writing within a framework of national identity. Even for critics who reject such a framework in order to foreground the diasporic elements of Brand’s writing, the nation-state remains a critical point of reference. For example, according to Goldman, Brand’s notion of ‘drifting’, by moving her beyond nationalist conceptions of belonging, allows her to ‘underscor[e] the inadequacies of the nation-state’.75 Similarly, Garvey sets Brand’s gender politics against the inflexibility of the nation-state; she reflects that in neglecting to marry the fathers of her children, Bola ‘refuses to enter into national citizenship as determined by marriage and its resultant family lines’.76 In the theoretical work of Paul Gilroy and James Clifford, an aesthetic of movement is similarly defined against the rigid socioeconomic structures of the nation-state. Gilroy uses the image of ‘ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean’ to put forward the possibility of communal identifications which extend beyond both ‘nationalist’ and ‘ethnically absolute’ approaches.77 Like Gilroy’s black Atlantic model, Clifford’s conception of diaspora is a ‘signifier’ of ‘transnationality and movement’.78 He argues that diaspora discourse engages with ‘forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference’.79 The idea of transnational movement is an essential element of both writers’ liberatory poetics. Critics such as Walcott, Brydon, Goldman and Garvey read Brand’s fiction through the lens of these kinds of theoretical articulations of diasporic consciousness. Against their various positionings of her work, I propose that in the writing of Moon Brand neither restructures conceptions of national 73 Rinaldo Walcott, ‘Rhetorics of Blackness, Rhetorics of Belonging: The Politics of Representation in Black Canadian Expressive Culture’, Canadian Review of American Studies / Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines, 29:2 (1999), 1–24 (p. 18). 74 Diana Brydon, ‘Detour Canada: Rerouting the Black Atlantic, Reconfiguring the Postcolonial’, in Reconfigurations: Canadian Literature and Postcolonial Identities, ed. by Mark Maufort and Franca Bellarsi (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 109–22 (p. 120); italics in the original. 75 Goldman, ‘Mapping the Door of No Return’, p. 13. 76 Garvey, ‘The place she miss’, p. 496. 77 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 4, 15. 78 James Clifford, ‘Diasporas’, Cultural Anthropology, 9 (1994), 302–38 (p. 308). 79 Ibid., p. 308.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories identity from within, nor defines alternative constructions of community and belonging against national models. Instead, in exploring the social and cultural repercussions of what she calls ‘trans-national capitalism’,80 Brand interrogates practices of exclusion and exploitation which operate beyond the political and economic structures of the nation-state. It is therefore necessary to read Moon’s liquid imagery in relation to discussions of global capitalism which comment on the fluid nature of power in the late twentieth century, for example in the work of Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Appadurai describes a ‘new global cultural economy’ which ‘cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models’. He suggests that a more flexible, less hierarchical model is necessary in order to take into account the impact of ‘disorganised capitalism’, and formulates such a model by identifying ‘five dimensions of global cultural flows’ as ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’, ‘technoscapes’, ‘financescapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’.81 Appadurai’s use of aquatic metaphors allows him to illustrate the increasingly unstable and asystematic nature of a world where the relationship between these various flows has become ‘deeply disjunctive and profoundly unpredictable’.82 While Appadurai emphasises the ‘volatile’ nature of a globalised world in which ‘people, machinery, money, images, and ideas now follow increasingly nonisomorphic paths’,83 Bauman explores the opportunities offered by this disjuncture for new modes of control. He argues that in the contemporary world, political and economic power is not eroded by the growing mobility of capital, ideas and people, but rather rearticulated within this experience of ‘liquid modernity’. For Bauman, fluidity is less a means of resisting territorial structures of power, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, than a state of affairs conducive to alternative configurations of power; ‘travelling light’, he proposes, ‘is now the asset of power’.84 Whereas Bauman focuses on the social impact of ‘new, fluid global powers’,85 Hardt and Negri consider the implications of changing ‘structures and logics of power’ for postcolonial criticism and theory.86 They suggest that cultural theorists who ‘advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power’. In the context of new manifestations of global power as ‘highly differentiated and mobile structures’, Hardt and Negri question the validity of postcolonial and 80 Brand, ‘Brownman, Tiger …’, p. 117. 81 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 33 (italics in the original). Appadurai takes the phrase ‘disorganised capitalism’ from Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 82 Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 35. 83 Ibid., p. 37. 84 Bauman, Liquid Modernity, pp. 12–13. 85 Ibid., p. 12. 86 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 146.

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Global Communities postmodernist theories which celebrate difference and mobility as liberatory strategies.87 Brand’s story of Priest, in particular, offers a critique of the fluid configurations of power discussed above. We encounter Priest, formerly Carlyle, as he breaks out of a detention camp for deportees in Florida. We later learn that this follows his escape from the stifling environment of Terre Bouillante, a small town in Trinidad’s forested interior which features as a maroon camp in the earlier story of Kamena’s flight from Culebra Bay. Oppressed by an ‘enveloping sense of shame’ which ‘wrapped around them all’ in Terre Bouillante (139), Priest turns to delinquency and crime in order to liberate himself. Released from a youth detention centre, he feels elated by the sensation of ‘something like electricity running through him, something like water too, electricity and water’ (139). Later, returning to a life of crime after being let down by Baptist revivalists, he reflects on his position as ‘a free man’ operating ‘outside the strictures of a street or a family or a building or other expressed powers’ (148). Both in freeing himself psychologically from the ‘prison’ of Terre Bouillante (141) and later physically from the deportee camp in Florida, Priest eludes state control. As a migrant figure whose initial journey from Trinidad to the US is followed by a makeshift existence where ‘running was just part of life’ (159), Priest to some extent embodies the affirmative poetics of movement put forward in the theoretical writing of Gilroy and Clifford. With his stolen green card and his ability to liquefy himself, ‘[s]lipping from the knowable to the unknown’ and ‘from one personality to another’ (163), he defies the legal restrictions imposed on immigrants by the US government. This mobility, expressed through aquatic metaphors, is empowering in that it frees him from the constraints of the nation-state; we are told that there is ‘room for creativity’ and even ‘virtuosity’ in Priest’s meandering journey, ‘bobbing and weaving, dipping and diving around big people and bigger life’ (167). However, as a petty criminal whose lust for violence extends beyond his involvement in drug dealing to his strained relations with his own family with his need to ‘test love, to probe love, to break it open, to see how far it would go’ (141), Priest’s character introduces a profound ambivalence into the text’s dynamics of movement and flow. At the end of his story, Priest offers the following reflection on the US and his relationship to it: This was the heart of the world, he thought, palpable and brutal, sucking in blood and pumping it out callously without thought, just instinct, that was its only mission and he was like a vein in it, hungry and just as ruthless. This was love. So he took the trip on the bus or the train gouging whichever artery of America, his hands on the weed or cocaine. (173–74)

In this passage, the image of blood flow circulating in the body serves as a 87 Ibid., p. 137.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories metaphor for the circulatory systems of the US economy. Hardt and Negri present circulation as a source of profit for capitalist organisations. They describe how in a climate of dissolving national boundaries, ‘[c]irculation, mobility, diversity, and mixture’ are the ‘very conditions of possibility’ for the world market.88 With this in mind, I suggest that Priest’s physical and psychological versatility is less a mode of resistance to, than a symptom of complicity with, an exploitative power structure. To be a ‘vein’ in the heart of a worldwide circulatory system, absorbing its seemingly inexhaustible energy, gives Priest a sense of empowerment. Resisting the legal option available to him of fruit picking, since he is unwilling to do ‘the circuit with a raggedy horde of poor people like him […] travelling up and down the fat belly of America’ (154), he chooses instead to ‘gouge’ the country’s vital organs, criminally profiting from its oversized economy rather than be crushed beneath it as an immigrant worker without money or prospects. Priest’s mobility is achieved through his manipulation of the capitalist ‘game’ (173), as he learns its logic and adapts himself accordingly. As a result, his interactions with others are consistently described in financial terms; we see him ‘calculating’ what to do with his lookalike, Adrian (167), his sister Eula reflects on his tendency to ‘swindle people’ (169), he watches the eyes of strangers in New York ‘measuring and balancing how much you were good for’ (173) and, crucially, he ‘multiplied and doubled and divided with ease’ (174), capitalising upon his own fluid sense of self. His fluidity therefore allows him to survive within a fluid environment, but not to challenge it. It liberates him only within the terms of a dominant system. The twinning of Priest’s and Adrian’s characters and stories further unsettles readings of Brand’s aquatic metaphors as part of a liberatory poetics of movement. Distant relatives both descended from the rebel slave Marie Ursule, Adrian and Priest closely resemble each other in their appearance and life journeys. Whereas Priest was born in Trinidad, Adrian comes from Curaçao, another island off the coast of Venezuela, which is part of the Netherlands Antilles. Like Priest’s, Adrian’s journey to Florida is an escape route from an unbearably tragic ancestral history. Unwilling to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, both of whom have suffered an untimely death in the oilfields, Adrian flees in the opposite direction; his father’s ‘stories of courage’ teach him to ‘flinch, run like hell’ (200). After meeting Priest in a deportee camp in Florida and joining him in his illegal pursuit of money, Adrian moves on to Amsterdam, where he continues to deal in drugs and falls prey to his own addiction. Despite these overlaps in their background and trajectories, Adrian’s and Priest’s experiences of the US are widely discrepant. Adrian reflects how during his circular journeys carrying drugs between Miami and New York, the wheels of his bus ‘were grooving a sore through the belly of America’ (172). His thoughts are conveyed through the same visceral images as Priest’s, who later 88 Ibid., p. 150.

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Global Communities describes being ‘on the bus or the train gouging whichever artery of America’, but with different implications. Whereas Priest views the US as a source of wealth from which he can profit, Adrian’s observations present it as a diseased body. His image of himself crawling ‘through the body of America as small bags crawled through his own body’ (172) suggests that he regards himself as both corrupted by and a corrupting influence on the country, as part of its criminal underworld. Where Priest sees only money and the challenges of accumulating it, Adrian sees poverty and illness, ‘raw-boned pain and anguish’ (172). Adrian is sickened not only by what he sees, but also by the experience of perpetual motion; while Priest’s ‘game wasn’t wired to wait’ (159), Adrian longs to ‘stand still’ and ‘stay in some small place between those two cities [Miami and New York]’ (172). By yoking together the conflicting experiences of these two physically identical migrant figures, Brand illustrates the uneven impact of global capitalism as an economy of ‘volatile’ and ‘unpredictable’ flows, to borrow Appadurai’s terms, from which not everyone profits. The combination of doubling and asymmetry in Brand’s characterisation of Priest and Adrian also draws our attention to the divergent paths of Caribbean migrants, highlighting how transnational movement may be as incapacitating for some as it is enabling for others. The image of a human heart returns in ‘A Soft Man’, but with different connotations. Here, fluidity is negatively figured in the detail of spilt blood. The opening and closing scenes of this story present us with an image of Adrian immobilised by a drug-induced coma. Priest’s impression of the US as a pulsating life source gives way to an equally graphic depiction of a broken heart: Every day you wake up and there’s something trying to break your heart. Not a day there isn’t something just waiting there lashing your blood right open […] every day something was waiting to break his heart so much he had to clamp it shut quick or pick it up piece by breaking piece. (175)

Once again, the physical properties of internal organs carry metaphorical significance, but to different effect. Whereas Priest is intent on spilling blood, ‘gouging whichever artery of America’ for his own profit, Adrian feels something ‘lashing’ his blood ‘open’ and desperately tries to ‘clamp’ his heart ‘shut’. As Priest’s mirror image, Adrian is a casualty of capitalist expansion, the object rather than the subject of violence and bloodshed. Furthermore, while Priest’s pumping heart metaphor refers to the economic landscape of the US in the late twentieth century, Adrian’s broken heart image evokes the shattered dreams of migrants who make attempts to escape their ancestral legacy only to be confronted with its echoes in metropolitan centres. He is nauseated by the overcrowding in the Biljmer neighbourhood of Amsterdam, and feels the need to free himself from the ‘stinking tenement’ he inhabits along with other immigrants, which ‘smelled like everybody’s dreams all chewed up, all mashed together like toes, sweating in cardboard and breath in these small spaces’ (177). Here the distorted ‘dreams’ which have fuelled these migrants’ 177

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories journeys mingle with the memory of earlier immigrants, transported between Amsterdam and other locations in the similarly constricting spaces of slave ships. This description of compressed bodies and lives illustrates the way in which his own dreams and those of the rest of Amsterdam’s immigrant population are contaminated by ghostly traces of the city’s colonial past. The trope of spillage is differently inflected elsewhere in the text. In ‘Priest’, Eula is nauseated by what she sees as the decay of US cities: She passed them with a nervous fear at their largeness, their spillage. […] These cities were like mounds of refuse, scourings and dregs. Bridges seeming to lead nowhere climbed over the cities, even the concrete seemed rotted to her, the steel underneath weeping brown stains down the side. (134–35)

Here the liquidity of the words ‘spillage’, ‘dregs’ and ‘weeping’ introduces the idea of overspill, both in terms of waste material – ‘mounds of refuse’ – and in terms of an overspill population of immigrant workers. This second connotation is more overtly suggested in Priest’s reflections on ‘the dead wasteful country of the immigration detention camp’ (130); Priest’s word ‘wasteful’ links the detained immigrant workers to the ‘refuse, scourings, dregs’ Eula sees in the cities. In Amsterdam, Adrian uses words which convey the same idea: the blocks from Dam Square to the station are ‘littered with men like him […] A debris of men selling anything’ (180). The immigrants depicted within stories set in the Netherlands, the US and Canada are disposable material unnecessary to capitalism’s deterritorialised expansion and excluded from its profits. Whereas Priest’s and Adrian’s bodies are used to transport capital, circulating in the US as part of its drugs trafficking, Adrian’s sister Maya’s body is mobilised as capital. Having, like Adrian, left Curaçao in order to escape the burdensome legacy of a grandfather burnt alive and a father beaten to death on the oilfields, Maya earns her living in Amsterdam’s red light district. She is introduced to us as a static image, ‘[f]ramed in a window’ (207), caught within the enclosed space of her display glass. Even when the glass is shattered and her career as a prostitute over, Maya’s body remains a commodity, passed from the ownership of a controlling employer to a rich client who ‘walked her like an exotic, showed her like spun silk from some other country’ (211). The previous episode’s dominant theme of a broken heart implicitly pervades Maya’s story of unfulfilled dreams wordlessly transmitted to her child, who is ‘flooded in whatever she, Maya, is feeling at the moment’ (225). The structural fluidity of a text which extends across two centuries and between three continents, visualised in Kamena’s story with the notion of stories as dispersed droplets of water, strains against images of containment within the episodes discussed above. As we progress through this sequence of three consecutive stories, we encounter first the ‘fenced-in’ immigration detention camp in Florida (130); next the cramped tenement rooms in Amsterdam; and then the enclosure of Maya’s display window. This 178

Global Communities succession of confined spaces, repeated through the stories, works against the text’s formal elasticity, and in doing so challenges the idea of transnational movement as liberating, or as involving a widening of horizons. These images also illustrate how the free flow of money and commodities across national borders, which characterises the era of late twentieth-century global capitalism, has led to restricted movement within immigrant populations. While theorists such as Appadurai and John Urry focus on the multidimensional ‘global cultural flow’ or the ‘new fluidities’ produced in this new phase of capitalism,89 Brand alerts us to examples of immobility produced as a by-product of an increasingly fast-paced world, presenting us with characters whose movement is circumscribed. According to Diana Brydon, Moon and A Map to the Door of No Return anticipate ‘forms of imagined and unimagined community that transcend nation and the terms of its imagining’,90 and in doing so enter new territory, escaping the restrictions of national spaces. She sees Brand as moving towards a ‘new form of community’ which reaches beyond both racial identifications and the specificity of place, based instead upon the shared experiences of ‘the dispersed and the dispossessed’.91 Moon’s narrative framework of stories scattered across time and space, in which experiences of exploitation are repeated episodically, certainly depicts a diasporic community characterised by dispersal and dispossession. However, the contradiction within this idea of social cohesion predicated on dispersal – or a communal solidarity expressed through liquid imagery – is never overcome in Brand’s work. Brand’s various protagonists flee both from their past and from each other; Adrian travels to Amsterdam to escape Priest and his criminal activity, and Maya in turn saves money to leave Amsterdam in order to escape Adrian and his drug addiction. In movements which reflect the ebb and flow of the tide, Marie Ursule’s descendants converge temporarily only to split apart. The text’s fluid narrative structure – an attempt, Brand comments, to ‘write what looks like journeys across water’92 – on the one hand draws attention to the limitations of cartographers’ attempts to ‘hold water’, attempts which do not acknowledge ‘the great fluidity of maps’ (52). On the other hand, Brand’s text raises the question of whether metaphors of fluidity ‘hold water’ as a basis for communal identifications in a socioeconomic context where the global organisation of power is becoming increasingly mobile, dispersed and circulatory. In drawing attention to the limits of affirmative figurings of fluidity in a climate of late twentieth-century global capitalism, Brand engages critically with the writing on diasporic consciousness which proliferated in the 1980s and 90s. In doing so, she alerts us to the need for new theoretical 89 John Urry, Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 5. 90 Brydon, ‘Detour Canada’, p. 115 91 Ibid., p. 116. 92 Rinaldo Walcott and Leslie Sanders, ‘An Interview with Dionne Brand’, Canadian Women Studies, 20:2 (2000), 22–26 (p. 23).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories models and critical paradigms which take into account the altered and still changing cultural, political and socioeconomic landscapes of the twenty-first century. Mobile readerships in Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales With a front cover image of a semi-clad woman holding a mango, the US edition of Robert Antoni’s short story cycle, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (2000), makes a direct appeal to an international reading audience, presenting the text as a cultural product of the Caribbean to be consumed abroad. The response of reviewers based in Europe and the US suggest that this marketing strategy has succeeded. Entitling her piece ‘Eros and Mangoes’, Rowan Pelling comments that Antoni’s ‘rhythmic sentences, dazzling imagination and descriptive powers seduced [her] utterly’.93 For Dorothy L. Ferebee, Antoni’s stories are ‘way out and very spicy-Caribbean style’, bringing readers ‘the flavor of Caribbean creole and patois’,94 and Jamie Carstairs describes the book as ‘a joyous, bubbling stream of short stories speckled with sunny asides and lush Caribbean vitality’.95 In these reviews the reading process is figured through metaphors which allude to the various ways in which the Caribbean has been, and continues to be, consumed in a global market: as sexualised bodies, as exotic food or as fertile landscape. Sales figures further evidence the marketability of Antoni’s text; it has been translated into several languages, and has sold more copies in the Finnish translation alone than his previous two novels, both of which were critically acclaimed and the first of which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1992.96 The relative commercial success of Folktales raises the question of whether Antoni has succumbed to market forces and is ‘pandering to Western tastes through an appeal to Caribbean exoticism’.97 Moving beyond Eric D. Smith’s focus on the text’s address to a ‘Western consumer of Caribbean culture’,98 my analysis considers how Folktales 93 Rowan Pelling, ‘Eros and mangoes: Rowan Pelling is seduced by spicy island tales, but bored by an angel’, Daily Telegraph, 17 June 2000 [accessed 22 January 2013]. 94 Dorothy L. Ferebee, ‘September 11, 2001, and Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales’, http://booksforblacks.net [accessed 22 January 2013]. 95 Jamie Carstairs, ‘Tall Caribbean Stories’, Geographical Magazine [accessed 22 January 2013]. 96 Eric D. Smith, ‘Pandering Caribbean Spice: The Strategic Exoticism of Robert Antoni’s My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 39:3 (2004), 5–24 (p. 5). 97 Ibid., p. 5. 98 Ibid., pp. 20–21.

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Global Communities opens up a variety of reading positions, and in doing so produces an overlap between consumed and consumer cultures, and between insider and outsider perspectives. Framed within the stories is a listening audience of US soldiers based in Corpus Christi – a semi-fictional Trinidad – during the Second World War. The soldiers are guests in the boarding house of Antoni’s narrator, Mrs Domingo, who offers them both food and stories in abundance. Beyond this 1940s fictional audience is the figure of the second person addressee, the narrator’s grandson Johnny. She relates the stories to him much later, as is indicated through anachronistic allusions to American fast food chains. Mrs Domingo’s occasional references to earlier tellings of the same stories to Johnny’s then adolescent father, brothers and friends adds a further level to an already complex mode of address. Although the fictional audience of US soldiers highlights the status of Antoni’s text as a consumable appetising to foreign readers, the superimposition of alternative audiences and time frames introduces the idea of multiple and intersecting reading communities. Bearing in mind Antoni’s position as a writer of Trinidadian descent, brought up in the Bahamas, based in New York, and possessing passports for all three countries, I examine how a text which is multi-layered in terms of its address to readers and comic devices allows for movement between local and global reading positions. In doing so, I argue that Folktales anticipates a Caribbean reading community which in the twenty-first century is becoming increasingly fragmented, dispersed and globalised. My analysis of Antoni’s text both draws on and complicates Benedict Anderson’s theory of the role of ‘print-capitalism’ in the imagining of community.99 Anderson proposes that the collective act of reading a national newspaper leads to a ‘community in anonymity’ which is ‘the hallmark of modern nations’.100 Critics of Anderson’s work have built on his ideas while pointing to the limits of his model for considering a range of modes of writing, types of community and contexts of reading.101 Karin Barber updates Anderson’s ideas to a twenty-first-century context, arguing that one of the ‘most important historical phenomena of global modernity is the emergence and multiplication of publics’.102 Looking beyond Anderson’s conception of national communities, Barber considers reading publics as they exist both as smaller units of sociality within national boundaries, consolidating ‘local 99 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991 [1983]), p. 25. 100 Ibid., p. 36. 101 See, for example, Partha Chatterjee, ‘Anderson’s Utopia’, Diacritics, 29:4 (1999), 128–34; Jonathan Culler, ‘Anderson and the Novel’, in Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 29–52; Karin Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, Persons and Publics: Oral and Written Culture in Africa and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 102 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 139.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories ethnic and other identities’, and as ‘supra-national communities’ operating across national boundaries.103 Furthermore, she challenges the idea, implied in Anderson’s work, that audiences are ‘passive recipients of interpellation’, arguing instead that ‘they have the capacity to say whether they will occupy the position of addressee’.104 Barber’s discussion of reading publics introduces tensions into Anderson’s model of imagined communities. Further tensions can be identified if we compare the earliest form of ‘print-capitalism’ in the sixteenth century, which operates as a basis for Anderson’s model, to the late twentieth-century context of global corporate publishing within which Folktales was produced. Anderson is concerned with the way in which capitalist expansion in the realm of book publishing led to a reduction of languages and a resulting unification of ideas, and in doing so ‘laid the bases’ for cohesive and easily identifiable national consciousnesses.105 Theorists of late twentieth-century international publishing describe a very different process. Dismissing fears of cultural ‘massification’ and ‘standardisation’ in the publishing industry, Elizabeth Long contends that increasing levels of commercialism have instead led to an ‘expanded market’ containing a ‘diverse and sophisticated set of reading publics’.106 Where Anderson sees in early print-capitalism a movement towards consolidation and unification, Long identifies in contemporary commercial publishing a growing trend of specialisms directed at a diversifying market. Sarah Brouillette considers the significance of this transformation in the structure of the publishing industry for postcolonial writers. She challenges homogenising representations of the ‘global consumer’ with her claim that ‘[a]ttention to the material organization of the current literary marketplace does not reveal a single market, but rather a fragmenting and proliferating set of niche audiences’.107 In light of these developments in the make-up of global audiences, Robert Fraser calls for an innovation in the way readership is conceptualised. His discussion of mobile reading constituencies problematises the idea of a Western consumer positioned in opposition to an indigenous postcolonial writer.108 With this in mind, my reading of Folktales situates the notion of a ‘diverse and sophisticated set of reading publics’ or a ‘fragmenting and proliferating set of niche audiences’ in the context of a twenty-first-century Caribbean readership which, due to mass migration and 03 Ibid., p. 145. 1 104 Ibid., p. 174. 105 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 143–44. 106 Elizabeth Long, ‘The Cultural Meaning of Concentration in Publishing’, in The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s, ed. by Fred Kobrak and Beth Luey (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction, 1992), pp. 93–117 (pp. 93, 99). 107 Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 2007), p. 24. 108 Robert Fraser, Book History through Postcolonial Eyes: Rewriting the Script (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 186.

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Global Communities the large proportion of Caribbean writing produced in the US, Canada and Europe, is geographically extensive and culturally diverse.109 The discussion which follows is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the narrative structure of Antoni’s text and the second with its tonal ambiguity. The first part focuses on the digressive form of both the individual stories and their organisation within a longer sequence, considering the challenge this presents to exoticist reading practices. The second part looks at Antoni’s use of Trinidadian calypso humour, examining how his comic strategies facilitate mobility on the part of readers, confounding distinctions between local and global reading communities. Losing the plot: unsettling digressions After five or six of those big eden-mangoes, of course, Moyen had reached she limit. Still, she continued slicing off more cheeks. She continue crisscrossing the orange flesh, turning the rosy cheeks inside-out and biting off the cubes of flesh, until she have consumed the entire pile of mangoes. […] All in a sudden Moyen realised she wasn’t feeling too good a-tall. The poor child’s stomach was so full – so bloat-o with all those big lovely mangoes – that Moyen began to fear she belly might burst in truth. […] And poor Moyen continued to vomit and vomit until she had emptied out she stomach of every one of those mangoes she’d just taken such a great pleasure in filling it up!110

At first glance, this passage resembles the cover image of the US edition of Folktales.111 The cover design incorporates a photograph by Dorit Lombroso, whose work has been used in advertising campaigns for various multinational corporations as well as the Tahiti and Mexico tourist boards. According to her website, Lombroso has developed a ‘signature style suggesting nostalgia and sensuality’. Many of her photographs feature mixed-race women in exotic settings, often alongside tropical fruit.112 Both the style and the dissemination of these images suggest that they contribute to the ‘branding and marketing

109 The problems I encountered in my attempt to obtain sales figures for Antoni’s text within the Caribbean region highlight the difficulty of identifying a local Caribbean readership in the twenty-first century. Antoni’s book was most successful in the US, where 1,381 copies have been sold since its publication in 2000, and in the UK, where 1,258 copies have been sold (Nielsen BookScan data, 2011). However, bearing in mind the growing Caribbean diaspora in both of these locations, these figures do not necessarily represent a foreign audience. 110 Robert Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (London: Faber & Faber, 2000), pp. 52–53. All further references to this edition will be marked in parentheses. 111 See Appendix III. 112 Doris Lombroso, promotional website [accessed 22 January 2013].

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories of Paradise’, which, according to Mimi Sheller, ‘underwrite[s] performances of touristic hedonism’.113 Like the seductive young woman in the picture, the pubescent Moyen has ‘rich musala skin’ and ‘long black hair’ (47). The word ‘musala’ invites a comparison to massala, a term used in Trinidad to mean ‘a mixture of spices (cumin, turmeric, parched coriander seeds, etc)’,114 and therefore emphasises Moyen’s status as a consumable. In addition, both Moyen and the figure on the cover are accompanied by a generous ‘pile of mangoes’. On the surface, then, the extract draws on and contributes to an exoticist discourse which associates the sexualised bodies of Caribbean women with tropical fruit. However, the textual version of this scene takes us beyond the cover image, unsettling the exoticist reading it incites. Whereas the figure on the cover is delicately poised above uneaten mangoes, Moyen unrestrainedly devours the ‘entire pile’. While the cover girl remains the object of viewers’ desire, Moyen assumes an active, even predatory position as she attacks the mangoes’ ‘rosy cheeks’ and ‘cubes of flesh’. During the course of the extract, Moyen therefore shifts from the role of consumable to that of consumer. Some way into the third main episode of Folktales, Antoni’s narrator, Mrs Domingo, remarks that ‘[e]verybody was thinking this was the end of the story, but this story was not finished yet’ (84). Her comment draws attention to the digressive structure of Folktales, with its unending sequence of stories which each run into the next without pause and which often contain within them shorter embedded stories. As an aside addressed simultaneously to readers and to her listening grandson, the narrator’s words are themselves a digression from the act of storytelling. Additionally, the story in which the words appear, ‘The Tale of the Boy Who Was Born a Monkey’, interrupts a longer narrative: told to US soldiers in order to appease their appetite for the exotic, this tale is inserted within a story about those soldiers told to her grandson at a later date. Just as the consumption of too many mangoes unsettles Moyen’s stomach, the copious acts of digression operating on various levels in Folktales render the text unsettling for readers. The stories within Folktales repeatedly evoke the book’s cover through numerous associations of local women’s bodies with tropical fruit.115 However, the narrator’s baffling maze of stories serves less to reinforce than to destabilise the power dynamics put into play by the cover image. As I will argue, Antoni deliberately disorients readers in order to encourage more reflective reading practices. Both in its address to readers and in its figuring of fictional consumers, 113 Mimi Sheller, ‘Natural Hedonism: The Invention of Caribbean Islands as Tropical Playgrounds’, in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana, ed. by Sandra Courtman (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2004), pp. 170–85 (p. 170). 114 Richard Alsopp, ed., Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (Jamaica, Barbados and Trinidad: University of the West Indies Press, 1996), p. 375. 115 See, for example, pp. 43, 81, 144, 154.

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Global Communities Folktales engages in existing critical debate on the global consumption of postcolonial cultural products. Stating as his subject the ‘commodification of cultural difference’,116 Graham Huggan asserts the need to interrogate the ways in which postcolonial writing has been made not only ‘available’ but also ‘palatable’ for a ‘target consumer public’.117 In a later study, Mimi Sheller situates this idea of cultural commodification within the specific social and historical context of the Caribbean and its relations to ‘The West’, considering ‘the myriad ways in which Western European and North American publics have unceasingly consumed the natural environment, commodities, human bodies, and cultures of the Caribbean over the past five hundred years’.118 Huggan and Sheller both attribute agency to writers, considering their ability to work against the demands of a metropolitan consuming public. Although Huggan views postcolonial writers as necessarily embroiled in ‘neocolonial market forces’, he also considers their ability to ‘contend with’ and ‘negotiate’ those forces by subverting exoticist codes from within.119 Similarly, Sheller explores ways in which Caribbean writers have confronted processes of ‘commodification and consumption’.120 These critics are less concerned with the ways in which readers, as well as writers, might ‘contend with’ or ‘negotiate’ global market forces. In the writing of Folktales, Antoni addresses similar concerns to Huggan and Sheller, but in his work satirical commentary on exploitative reading practices is combined with a more positive appeal to a global audience; Mrs Domingo’s intricate web of stories initiates new modes of reading. Strategies of digression are a key element of this appeal to readers. Ross Chambers considers how digressive techniques offer writers ‘ways of spinning out the narrative and at the same time clogging it so that its movement is slowed down’.121 He proposes that in a text characterised by digression, ‘time, constructed in narrative configurations as end-oriented, becomes more episodic and extendable’. He further suggests that digression entails a ‘blow[ing] up’ of narrative both in the sense of to ‘distend or extenuate’ and in the sense of an ‘exploded’ plot line.122 Digression in Folktales can be read in a similar way, but in Antoni’s writing the forms and functions of digression hold resonances specific to the content and settings of the stories. Within the 116 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), p. vii. 117 Ibid., p. viii. A similar argument is made by Timothy Brennan, who focuses on the marketability of the ‘cosmopolitan’ novel to ‘metropolitan reading publics’. See ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Nation and Narration, ed. by Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 44–70 (p. 63). 118 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, pp. 1, 3. 119 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, p. viii. 120 Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean, p. 187. 121 Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 35. 122 Ibid., p. 118.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories fictional frames of the first, third and fifth episodes, the narrator’s culinary and anecdotal digressions have a conscious political motive. Aware that because of the US naval base, her island is rapidly transforming into ‘nothing but one big brothel to service all the soldiers’ (71), Mrs Domingo attempts to appease the considerable appetites of her American visitors through an unstoppable flow of food and stories, combining the novelty of local dishes with that of Creole words and idioms. The narrator repeatedly insists upon the innocence of her hospitality, assuring readers that although she feeds the soldiers, tells them stories, and allows in her boarding house ‘a little music and dancing when the girls came around’, she ‘didn’t permit no nastiness!’ (71). However, it becomes increasingly clear that the soldiers’ enthusiasm for authentic Caribbean cuisine – ‘only West Indian that was all they wanted to eat’ (68) – masks a darker desire for the bodies of local women. The embedded story within the fifth episode is structured around an elaborate and protracted meal of many stages presented at intervals to the fictional audience of US soldiers by the narrator and her daughter Gregoria; a ‘big big pot of bull-foot soup’ (156) is followed by a ‘big bowl of macaroni-pie’ (158), a ‘bowl of pounded yams with butter’ (160) and finally a ‘big bowl of coconut-cream’ (164). These gastronomic delights are both suggestive of the soldiers’ ultimate object, and designed by the narrator to divert attention from it. Combining the serving of food with a humorous episodic account of Gregoria’s unfortunate encounter with a pin-cushion, Mrs Domingo sets up a succession of diversions which challenge the ‘end-oriented’ linearity of the soldiers’ sexual conquest. Antoni’s stories not only feature digression, but are also structured in a way which formally enacts it. In the first episode of Folktales, Mrs Domingo is initially taken in by the King of Chacachacari’s stories of buried treasure, but later reflects that ‘this story was smelling blanchyfoot to me yes, so now I decided to try to catch up this king in a good boldface lie’ (14). Dramatising verbal combat between the narrator and the king, the episode is shaped by an alternating pattern of duping and catching out. Increasingly fantastical stories are blown up out of proportion, beyond the limits of plausibility, only to be deflated. In parallel with this, extortionate amounts of counterfeit money exchange hands only to be cancelled out, so that the narrator’s bank balance remains the same as at the story’s opening. Therefore, despite the fast pace of the narrative, it lacks a sense of linear progression. The continuity leading us seamlessly from one escapade to the next strains against an absence of causal logic. If the narrator is ‘perplexed’ (32) by the end of the episode, this is matched by our bewilderment as readers trying to keep track of events as the convoluted plot, complicated by numerous subplots, spirals out of control. The elasticity of a narrative which expands to incorporate a proliferation of elaborate twists reflects the distended stomachs of the overfed soldiers depicted within the stories. The image of stomachs stretched to bursting point recurs in various episodes. In this first story, the narrator has ‘the 186

Global Communities entire American Army immobilized’ by squeezing the blood of the Venus Flytrap plant onto ‘all the food and cerveza, and even the channa and the plantain chips’ (31). In ‘The Tale of How Crab-O Lost His Head’, fearing that ‘she belly might burst in truth’ due to a stint of compulsive mango eating, the unfortunate Moyen ‘felt so weak after all that vomiting she only had strength remaining to drag sheself back to she little coconut-fibre mattress’ (53). Towards the end of the story, we are told that the eponymous Crab-O ‘was so big and bloated after eating so much mango – so fat and chuff-chuff – that no matter how hard he pushed and shoved and strained, he could never fit heself back inside he hole’ (64). In the final episode, after a pizza-eating ‘marathon’ (83), the narrator and her American guests ‘could only sit there groaning with all we bellies bloat-o beyond belief’ (82). In all these cases, excessive consumption incapacitates the eaters. In a similar way, the excessive digressions which form the substance of the book’s first episode potentially incapacitate readers. If the book’s cover image draws us in, presenting its contents in an appetising way, the unwieldy structure of Antoni’s stories renders them less palatable than the exoticist narratives they parody. Like the narrator in her role as hostess to the American soldiers, Antoni offers us more than we can manage, presenting us with an indigestible labyrinth of plots, subplots, anecdotes and asides. As well as shaping the content and structure of individual stories, digression operates as an organising principle within the collection, which consists of stories within stories. In a study of Italian novels, Olivia Santoretti lists a range of digressive techniques including the ‘embedded story’.123 In his reading of Bartolomé de Las Casas’ Historia de las Indias (1875), Antonio Benítez-Rojo uses the term ‘intercalated tale’ to describe the same technique. He comments on the Real Academia de la Historia’s censoring of Las Casas’ document due to its fictional ‘digressions’ from the main historical narrative.124 Benítez-Rojo relates how a spokesman for the Academy saw Las Casas’ ‘digressions’ as ‘subversive nodules that eroded the truth and rhetorical unity of the discourse of the conquest’.125 Against this, he positions the critic Enrique Pupo-Walker’s reading of Las Casas’ ‘imaginative insertions’ as ‘not always fortuitous spaces in the tale’, but instead often ‘a significant and integral component of the discourse’.126 Although they might appear as insubstantial interludes, the embedded tales in Folktales are similarly a key component of the text. The first, third and fifth episodes of Folktales are set in the semi-fictional location of Corpus Christi, clearly recognisable as 1940s Trinidad. The spatial and temporal frames of these episodes are interrupted by the shorter stories 123 Olivia Santoretti, Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), p. 21. 124 Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, p. 87. 125 Ibid., p. 88. 126 Pupo-Walker, quoted in Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, p. 88.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories contained within them, which shift to less historically identifiable moments in the narrator’s childhood, and which – in some cases – relocate geographically from a pseudo-Trinidad to Venezuela. In their adoption of folkloric conventions, for example the inclusion of supernatural occurrences which readers are expected to accept as given, these stories within stories also interpose an alternative style. As such, they appear to distance us in various ways from the more overtly political material of the three main episodes. Following Benítez-Rojo, I suggest that these brief fantastical diversions from the social commentary of the longer narratives in fact inform and intensify that commentary. An important thematic concern of the text is the idea that Trinidadian people inhabit a social reality underwritten by fantasy. In the third main episode, the narrator’s son informs her of the arrival of Colonel Sanders. She orders him to ‘stop playing the fool’, telling him that the Colonel is not a ‘real person’, but ‘only the story those Americans thought up to sell they chicken’ (69). As a ‘story’ made up by the Americans, the figure of Colonel Sanders is one of many myths which have infiltrated Trinidad’s social reality; the figure of Colonel Sanders may not be ‘real’, but as an icon of global corporate expansion it has had a material impact on the Caribbean region. Despite her scepticism, the narrator peppers the ensuing story with allusions to 1940s Hollywood movie stars; she sighs ‘like if I was Scarlet sheself out the picture’ (70), and compares the Colonel to ‘John Wayne heself in one of those pictures of the Wild West’ (71), details which suggest an absorption of US popular culture into her own colloquial mode of expression. At the same time, with his theme of buried treasure in the initial story, Antoni comments obliquely on the way in which the historical experiences of Caribbean people have been built upon the fantasies of colonisers, beginning with Sir Walter Raleigh’s unfounded dreams of gold mines. This idea is explored more overtly in a later story, ‘The Tale of How Iguana Got Her Wrinkles or The True True Tale of El Dorado’, where the narrator tells Johnny: ‘the truth is that all this El Dorado business wasn’t nothing more than the fantasy of everybody’s imagination’ (122). These examples highlight the way in which foreign fantasies shape Caribbean realities, past and present. Antoni’s embedding of fantastical interludes inside the collection’s longer narratives emphasises the constitutive role of imported fantasies in the formation of Caribbean societies. The third main episode contains within it ‘The Tail of the Boy Who Was Born a Monkey’, which transports us from the time and place of the narrative it intrudes upon to the Venezuela of the narrator’s childhood, almost a century earlier, and a series of implausible events positions it within the fantastical realm of folklore. Like many of the text’s embedded tales, it is offered to the listening soldiers along with food and alcohol in order to satisfy their request for entertainment. In this story a man and his pregnant wife embark on a hunting expedition to the jungle, since they have been told that their sick child can only be cured with monkey blood. After shooting a monkey, they discover that it has left behind a baby. 188

Global Communities As a mother herself, identifying with the dead monkey, the woman takes the baby monkey home and cares for it until one day it escapes back to the jungle. Traumatised by the loss of the monkey child, the woman insists that she will ‘accept no baby that was not a monkey’ (85). Subsequently, her own baby is born with a ‘real monkey tail’ (85), a detail which, in elucidating the pun in the title, appears to offer closure. For Nicole Matos, this story exemplifies Antoni’s ‘uniquely generative vision’. Matos suggests that like the frog-child of Antoni’s earlier novel Divina Trace (1991) and the unborn child of Blessed is the Fruit (1997), the monkey baby represents Antoni’s defiance towards the ‘stranglehold’ of history in favour of ‘renewal, recombination, and the certainty of that foetal shape, the coming future’.127 At first glance, the internal position of this embedded tale within the collection fits neatly with this image of a womb-like imaginary space. Following Matos’ reading of the episode, it could be argued that the monkey baby – as an emblem of regenerative creativity – is both figuratively and structurally at the heart of Antoni’s vision of a creolised Caribbean community. However, with her claim that the story ‘sport[s] the world’s most unlikely happy ending’ in the birth of the monkey baby,128 Matos excludes from her analysis the final twist of the tale: It’s a true story Johnny, because I saw this child myself. They called him The Boy Who Was Born a Monkey, and they painted a sign to say it too, even though it was a bit dishonest because the only thing he had was the tail. They used to make money with him on the wharf, and take out photographs with the tourists when they came in off the big ship, and they made a little pants special with long sleeve behind for that tail to fit perfect inside. (85)

In Matos’ view, the unusual biological make-up of the monkey child posits creolisation as a powerfully revitalising force in Antoni’s work.129 In this passage, however, an emphasis is placed on the marketability of the child’s mixed origins. In displaying their child as a freakish object of curiosity, his parents not only reduce him to the status of capital but deliberately misrepresent him as a means of enhancing his monetary value: we are told that the painted sign ‘The Boy Who Was Born a Monkey’ was ‘a bit dishonest’, since he has only the tail of a monkey. The exploitative process described within the story is replicated in the narrator’s act of storytelling, as she serves up the fictionalised monkey child to the morbidly fascinated US soldiers. The final passage removes the story from the local and ‘old-time time’ of folklore (35) to the contemporary climate of global tourism. The central concern of this story is less the creative power of creolisation than the commercial context of Caribbean cultural production. 127 Nicole Matos, ‘Doctoring the Improbable Life: The Obstetric(k)s of Robert Antoni’, Torre: Revista de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 9:32 (2004), 201–10 (p. 209). 128 Ibid., p. 209. 129 Ibid., p. 209.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories While the folkloric style of this embedded story might lead readers to anticipate the discovery of an authentically Caribbean vernacular culture, this is belied by its content. On reaching the inner recesses of Folktales, readers encounter instead the consumer figures of the cruise-ship tourists, just as at the structural centre of Divina Trace, we are faced with an inserted mirror, followed by the words: ‘SEEING IN DE PAGE you own monkeyface’.130 Within this embedded tale at the heart of Antoni’s layered narrative, readers external to the Caribbean region find versions of ourselves as consumers of Caribbean culture. By incorporating reflections on the text’s reception as an internal trope, Antoni highlights the formative role played by foreign consumers in the production of Caribbean realities. However, while Divina Trace offers readers a faithful reflection of ourselves, Folktales features an assortment of satirised consumer figures with which actual readers may experience differing levels of identification. Indeed, the stories’ critique of exoticist modes of reading invites us to distinguish ourselves from the fictional reader figures we encounter.131 In the passage from Folktales with which I began this section, Moyen first turns numerous mangoes ‘inside-out’ in order to access their flesh and subsequently ‘emptie[s] out she stomach’, externalising her own insides. A glance at the contents page of Folktales suggests that Antoni subjects his own writing to a similar process. Extensive titles such as ‘Further Adventures of the Kentucky Colonel and the King of Chacachacari, and How My Grandmother Became a Disk-Jockey and the First Female Calypsonian, and Managed By Accident to Decode a German Message so America Could Win the War including Gregoria la Rosa’s Story of the Time She Got the Pin-cushion Stuck Inside Her Bamsee, and My Grandmother Attempted to Operate and Almost Pulled out Her Whole Asshole’ display in such detail the intricacies of the stories so as to externalise their contents. Conversely, as I have shown, readers external to both the text and the Caribbean region are internalised within Antoni’s embedded stories; representations of touristic consumers form the text’s unsettling core. Digressions within the structure of individual stories and as part of the broader narrative framework of Antoni’s collection therefore contribute in various ways to the text’s strategic frustration of exploitative modes of reading. If the stories’ meandering plotlines prevent their swift consumption, the embedded stories confound the expectations of readers in search of an insider perspective on the Caribbean region. At every level, digression serves to disorient readers; caught up in Antoni’s unfathomable maze of stories within stories which shift between time frames, ontological levels and generic modes, we inevitably lose track of where we started and where we are heading. In this sense, Folktales does not generate the kind of ‘cumulative’ or ‘progressive’ reading experience foregrounded in Robert Luscher’s and 30 Robert Antoni, Divina Trace (London: Robin Clark, 1991), p. 205. 1 131 This issue will be explored more fully below.

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Global Communities J. Gerald Kennedy’s theories of the short story sequence.132 Readers drawn in by the stories’ exoticist tropes lose their footing, entering unfamiliar territory. This process of disorientation is productive in that it obliges us as readers to reorient and reposition ourselves. As such, the text not only incapacitates exploitative reading practices but also generates new ways of reading. In their expansion of narrative temporality, Antoni’s digressions create space for a more critical and self-conscious reading process. In this way, Folktales actively intervenes in the global consumption of the Caribbean region and its cultural products. Calypso humour and mobile readerships Humour is no joke in Trinidad, because if you cannot appreciate it, you do not belong.133 James M. Jones and Hollis V. Liverpool We laugh at the pain […] Our music laughs a cutting kind of laugh […] like the ship is sinking and we laughing [… it] is like the music has the power to laugh – cut through everything with a laugh.134 David Rudder

The observations above offer some insight into the forms and functions of humour in Trinidadian popular culture. For James M. Jones and Hollis V. Liverpool, calypso humour is a cultural marker which distinguishes those who ‘belong’ from outsiders. David Rudder similarly considers the role of calypso humour as a basis for communal solidarity; with his idea of laughing ‘at the pain’ and his use of the first person plural, he presents it as a collective affirmation of survival, a gesture of defiance in the face of difficulty, developed in a society with a history of hardship dating back to the time of slavery.135 Folktales makes multiple allusions to the Trinidadian tradition of calypso. In light of Jones and Liverpool’s and Rudder’s comments on 132 Robert M. Luscher, ‘The Short Story Sequence: An Open Book’, in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. by Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge, LA and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp. 148–67 (p. 149); J. Gerald Kennedy, ‘Introduction: The American Short Story Sequence – Definitions and Implications’, in Modern American Short Story Sequences: Composite Fictions and Fictive Communities, ed. by J. Gerald Kennedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. vii–xv (p. vii). 133 James M. Jones and Hollis V. Liverpool, ‘Calypso Humour in Trinidad’, in Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications, ed. by Anthony J. Chapman (London, New York, Sydney and Toronto: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), pp. 259–86 (p. 259). 134 David Rudder, ‘Trinidad’, New York Times, 31 March 1991. Quoted in Cynthia Mahabir, ‘Wit and Popular Music: The Calypso and the Blues’, Popular Music, 15:1 (1996), 55–81 (p. 55). 135 He compares calypso to the less light-hearted music forms of other islands with a longer history of slavery (e.g. Jamaican reggae).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories calypso humour, I explore in this section how Antoni’s comic strategies produce a tonal ambivalence in the text’s address to readers, combining lighthearted entertainment with a more serious instructive purpose. I situate Antoni’s stories in the context of Trinidadian popular culture and its global marketing in order to probe further the questions of community and cultural specificity raised by Jones and Liverpool and Rudder. As I will demonstrate, Antoni’s multi-layered jokes open up the possibility of mobile and overlapping reading constituencies, generating a more inclusive and elastic imagining of community than Benedict Anderson’s model allows for. Much of the critical writing on Caribbean popular music addresses the question of authenticity. In a study of the impact of globalisation on Caribbean culture, Jennifer Rahim laments that ‘at stake’ in the international commercial success of calypso is ‘the integrity of cultural representation’.136 In a discussion of international intellectual property legislation in Trinidad, Robert Balliger expresses similar concerns, asking ‘how it is possible to foster both a sense of culture as historically shared and as a commodity’, and posing the question: ‘When much of the population becomes excluded from “their” culture’s expressions and profits, what then constitutes community?’137 For Gordon Rohlehr and Earl Lovelace, mass migration and the global marketing of calypso have led to a deterioration in Caribbean cultural production. Rohlehr describes how soca, a contemporary form of calypso which is faster paced and less lyric-centred, ‘has begun to behave like many other popular musics: a kind of fast-food, mass-produced, slickly packaged, and meant for rapid consumption and swift obsolescence’.138 In his view, contemporary soca music reflects and panders to the demands of a new generation of twentyfirst-century listeners, ignorant of the ‘heritage’ of calypso and willing to accept ‘mediocrity’: this ‘listening public’, he reflects, ‘gets “the kaiso that it deserves”’.139 In this he echoes Lovelace’s concern with the lack of critical acuity in contemporary audiences.140 In Folktales, both the representation of consumers within the stories and the narrator’s address to readers beyond the text complicate the notion of a purely 136 Jennifer Rahim, ‘“A Quartet of Daffodils” Only: Negotiating the Specific and the Relational in the Context of Multiculturalism and Globalization’, in Caribbean Literature in a Global Context, ed. by Funso Aiyejina and Paula Morgan (San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon Trinidad, 2006), pp. 31–64 (p. 47). 137 Robin Balliger, ‘The Politics of Cultural Value and the Value of Cultural Politics: International Intellectual Property Legislation in Trinidad’, in Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, ed. by Garth L. Green and Philip W. Scher (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 198–215 (pp. 199, 215). 138 Gordon Rohlehr, ‘“We Getting the Kaiso That We Deserve”: Calypso and the World Music Market’, The Drama Review, 42:3 (1998), 82–95 (pp. 87–88). 139 Ibid., p. 95. 140 Earl Lovelace, ‘Progress and Calypso’, in Growing in the Dark (Selected Essays), ed. by Funso Aiyejina (San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon Trinidad, 2003), pp. 131–34 (p. 133).

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Global Communities local cultural product or audience, challenging distinctions between insider and outsider positions, and between ‘authentic’ and commercialised culture. Antoni’s stories remain culturally specific and politically charged, despite their international marketability. In fact, the stories’ underlying politics derive in large part from their critical engagement with the commercial processes in which they are embroiled. With its cover image of the young woman holding a mango, Folktales may be, like soca, ‘slickly packaged’, but beneath that appealing outer packaging are undertones of social commentary which hinder ‘rapid consumption’. Readers anticipating an appetising Caribbean consumable do not get ‘the kaiso that [they deserve]’ but something more challenging and thought provoking. In The Middle Passage (1962), V. S. Naipaul considers the lyrics of Trinidadian calypso as part of a culturally insular ‘local language’. He claims that ‘the pure calypso, the best calypso, is incomprehensible to the outsider’.141 Antoni’s writing inducts readers unfamiliar with Trinidadian popular culture into an appreciation of calypso, encouraging rather than – as Naipaul does – prohibiting movement between insider and outsider positions. Although at some points in the text references to calypsos are subtle and likely to slip the notice of readers unacquainted with the lyrics, at other moments the references are accompanied by contextual information which would be superfluous for readers conversant with the history of this cultural form. For example, the narrator’s enthusiasm over the ‘Ten-thousand Yankee dollars’ (77) she has received from the American army echoes almost imperceptibly Lord Invader’s refrain of ‘Working for the Yankee dollar’ in his 1943 calypso ‘Rum and Coca Cola’, which deals with the burgeoning sex trade during the Second World War as a result of the presence of a US naval base in Trinidad. However, should any readers miss this association, it becomes overt on the following page, where there appears an entire verse from the calypso. The narrator glosses it as ‘the famous calypso that everybody was singing that year’ (78), a comment which invites readers to relate the lyrics to the wartime setting of Antoni’s stories. Subsequently, readers are in a position to pick up on further mentions of the calypso, as is acknowledged by the narrator with her comment in the final story: ‘and of course everybody will recognize this one’ (185). In this way, Antoni’s address to readers blurs the boundaries between local and global audiences. In rendering Invader’s calypso accessible to a foreign readership, Antoni is not simply opening up a formerly insular cultural product to a wider audience. Harvey R. Neptune draws attention to the way in which US soldiers occupying Trinidad in the 1940s supported the calypso tradition both financially and socially, and argues that their endorsement shaped the output of calypsonians, who in their focus on US soldiers’ cuckolding of local men, often ‘created material aimed at satisfying the vainglorious narrative desires and earning the 141 V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Colonial Societies (London: Picador, 2001 [1962]), p. 66.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories rewards of Americans’.142 At odds with Naipaul’s claim that the ‘best’ and ‘pure’ calypso would be ‘incomprehensible to the outsider’, Neptune suggests that Invader’s calypso ‘cannot be fully comprehended minus consideration of the taste of American audiences’.143 Neptune’s account of the soldiers’ patronage of calypsonians in the 1940s and the wealth of calypsos of that era figuring US soldiers illustrates how the island’s calypso tradition has emerged out of interactions between locals and foreigners, presenting US audiences as bound within Trinidadian popular culture. Antoni’s concern with the reading process and reading communities is explored in Folktales through the dominant theme of consumption; of food, alcohol and female bodies within the stories, and of the stories themselves by listening and reading audiences both within and beyond the text. Consumption is also the topic of the Mighty Sparrow’s 1965 calypso ‘Congo Man’. Like Folktales, Sparrow’s calypso engages with an exoticist discourse usually associated with external perceptions of the region. Antoni therefore draws upon a vernacular tradition which already involves an interplay of inside and outside. ‘Congo Man’ begins as follows: Two white women travelling through Africa Chorus: Africa Find themselves in the hands of a cannibal Witch doctor Chorus: Witch doctor He cook up one and he eat one raw They taste so good he wanted more Chorus: more more more He wanted more I envy the Congo man Ah wish it was me I wanna shake ’e han He eat until he stomach upset (what about you?) And I never eat a white meat yet.144

Sparrow’s subject matter is the exoticist stereotype of black men as ‘savage’ and oversexed, a stereotype structured around the trope of excess, as excessive appetite and excessive carnal desire merge in the sexually suggestive image of the Congo Man’s consumption of white women’s bodies. With the words ‘I wish it was me’, Sparrow partially identifies with the Congo Man character he describes, and this is emphasised in the growls and raucous laughter that accompany many of his performances. The calypso could be seen to simply reinforce the cannibal stereotype. However, laughter in the calypso is aimed in more than one direction. Sparrow incites laughter at the cannibal figure he impersonates, only to redirect it back at viewers 142 Harvey R. Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 143. 143 Ibid., p. 144. 144 The Mighty Sparrow, ‘Congo Man’, in Congo Man/Patsy (7” National NSP-052, 1965).

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Global Communities with his aside ‘What about you?’ This question aligns them, as consumers of an exoticist narrative, with the Congo Man as consumer of human flesh; Sparrow’s audience becomes the object of his satire. The focus of laughter in ‘Congo Man’ is therefore unstable, shifting from the cannibal figure to the audience who laugh at it. In this way, the Congo Man character continually slips between the roles of consumer and consumable. Antoni’s ‘The Tale of How Crab-O Lost His Head’ further complicates the consumer/consumable power dynamic articulated in Sparrow’s calypso. In this story, Antoni explores racial and sexual stereotypes which continue to have currency not only in external representations of the region, but also within Caribbean popular culture. Dressed ‘head-to-foot only in white’, with ‘layers upon layers of white frills rippling down she long neck, down over she ripe tot-tots, and down around she smooth, shapely bamsee’ (37), the formidable character Blanchisseuse wears a cutlass ‘tucked beneath the hair’ (37). This image of feminine beauty combined with a threat plays into myths of female sexuality as dangerous. As such, it draws on the Diablesse figure which has often been the subject of songs by male calypsonians, for example Lord Invader’s ‘La Ja Blesse Woman’ (1937) and Lord Executor’s ‘Lajabless Woman’ (1938). Rohlehr sees this figure as ‘the Caribbean version of the most powerfully anti-feminist European myth’.145 Like Rohlehr, Antoni traces the European roots of the Diablesse character; the narrator’s comment that what the helplessly fixated audience of male ‘wadjanks’ feared ‘most of all, was nothing more than the cutlass tucked beneath she jackspaniard-nest of hair’ calls to mind the Freudian castration complex. However, while Rohlehr is concerned with the translation of European into Caribbean mythology, in Antoni’s text the mystification of Blanchisseuse extends into African folklore, since the ‘wadjanks’ also believe her to be ‘an obeahwoman – or worse still a sukuyant, a lagahoo’ (40). The ambivalent figure of Blanchisseuse is therefore a projection of the desires and fears of a culturally diverse collection of viewers. The range of viewing audiences suggested in Antoni’s characterisation of Blanchisseuse is reflected in the narrator’s multiple address to groups of listeners and readers both depicted within and anticipated by the story. Inside the fictional frame of the narrative is a voyeuristic crowd of village inhabitants, ‘[a]ll hiding behind the bushes and the boulderstones’ (39) to catch a glimpse of Blanchisseuse’s daily routine. Beyond this audience is a group of local adolescent boys, ‘sitting around [the narrator] in a big circle’ (35) in order to hear her account of Blanchisseuse. Just as these two fictional audiences are entranced by what they see or hear, readers external to the text are potentially drawn in by the narrator’s lyrical descriptions of exotic fecundity – for example ‘a tall poui bursting out only in pink’ (38), and ‘trees laden with fruits of every kind that you could ever dream’ (48) – images 145 Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Gordon Rohlehr, 1990), p. 171.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories which adopt the conventions of tourist brochure discourse. This alignment of local fictional audiences with an anticipated international audience of readers raises the question, crucial to Folktales, of who consumes and who is consumed in the context of twenty-first-century Caribbean societies characterised by increasing migration out of the region as well as a growing population of returnees who contribute to cultural production within the region.146 Antoni’s figuring of, and appeal to, a varied but overlapping set of audiences in the ‘Crab-O’ story reflects the difficulty of demarcating a Caribbean readership which is becoming increasingly fragmented and dispersed. Just as the laughter of Sparrow’s audience doubles back on itself, in Antoni’s story readers ultimately become the target of the narrator’s satire. However, there are significant differences between Sparrow’s and Antoni’s attitudes towards their audiences. In the ‘Crab-O’ story, the co-presence of watching, listening and reading audiences becomes most pronounced in the scene where Blanchisseuse removes her clothes in order to bathe in the river. The narrator tells us that Blanchisseuse’s undressing is ‘very slow and careful, garment by garment by garment’ (38), and then goes on to describe the process in a manner which is equally slow and meticulous, beginning with ‘first the white bodice, one by one unfastening the bright mother-ofpearl buttons following along she spine, before she would unclasp the long frilly skirt’ (38), and continuing to the end of the paragraph. Here, the act of narration converges with Blanchisseuse’s physical act, so that readers and listeners are invited to follow the process as gradually as the fictional voyeurs. However, the hypnotic effects of this passage are undercut by the appearance of the village inhabitants ‘assembled like a band of bobolees with they eyes opened wide wide and they long red tongues dripping down’ (39). At this point, the mesmerising figure of Blanchisseuse is replaced with the comic spectacle of these viewers, shifting our attention from the object to the subjects of desire. Richard Alsopp identifies ‘bobolee’ as a derogatory Trinidadian term for a ‘gullible person’ or a ‘victim of ridicule’.147 The ‘band of bobolees’ can therefore be compared to readers of Antoni’s story taken in by the sensuality of the language and imagery only to become the object of the author’s satire. This encounter with Blanchisseuse’s fictional audience to an extent encourages readers to reflect critically upon our own reception of the story, and in this way closely resembles Sparrow’s persistent inquiry into his listeners’ cannibalistic propensities. However, the cartoon-like ‘band of bobolees’ offer us an exaggerated and highly unrealistic version of ourselves rather than a straightforward reflection. As a result, a full identification on 146 See Philip W. Scher, ‘When “Natives” Become Tourists of Themselves: Returning Transnationals and the Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago’, in Trinidad Carnival, ed. by Green and Scher, pp. 84–101 (pp. 86–90). 147 Alsopp, Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage, p. 109.

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Global Communities the part of readers with the fictional consumers is impossible, or at least far-fetched. Here and elsewhere in the collection, the viewing and listening audiences fictionalised within Folktales facilitate in the minds of readers a simultaneous sense of alignment and disavowal. Sparrow’s dialogue with his audience confronts them with their own exoticist consumption practices, exposing their complicity in the perpetuation of the cannibal stereotype. Antoni’s appeal to readers in the ‘Crab-O’ story is similar but not identical. While on one level Folktales reveals the dangers of exploitative modes of reading, the satirised consumer figures within the stories also perform another, more affirmative function. Antoni’s fictional audiences inhabit positions which actual readers are not obliged to accept as our own. Following Karin Barber’s assertion that readers are not ‘passive recipients of interpellation’, since they ‘have the capacity to say whether they will occupy the position of addressee’,148 I suggest that as readers of Folktales, we are free to define ourselves against the consumer figures within the text, and moreover that the stories ask us to recognise an asymmetry between ourselves and the caricatured readers. Whereas the visiting US soldiers are ‘immobilized’ (31) by the narrator’s Venus Flytrap trick, Antoni encourages mobility on the part of his readers. There is therefore a discrepancy between the processes of consumption featured within Antoni’s text and the kinds of reading it enables. The embedded tale ‘Gregoria La Rosa’s Story of the Time She Got the Pin-Cushion Stuck Inside She Bamsee, and My Grandmother Attempted to Operate and Almost Pulled out Her Whole Asshole’ offers further evidence of the ways in which Antoni’s comic strategies mobilise readers. In this story, jokes operate simultaneously on a number of levels, generating a split in the story’s tone and purpose. In a study of bilingual communities, Doris Sommer explains how bicultural jokes allow people to ‘pass from one position to another’ and ‘become agents of jokes where they had been objects’. As a result, they are ‘double-barreled jokes that shoot off in more than one direction’, breaking down ‘distinctions between inside and outside’.149 A similar kind of duality is at play in the narrator’s and Gregoria’s farcical double-act; light-hearted jokes aimed at a fictional audience of visiting US soldiers have darker connotations to be picked up by a more critically aware audience beyond the text. This duality is underscored by Antoni’s allusions to Invader’s ‘Rum and Coca Cola’ (1943). Neptune notes that Morey Amsterdam, ‘an American emcee who had come to work at the Port of Spain USO in late 1943’, altered some of the lyrics of ‘Rum and Coca Cola’ and ‘presented Lord Invader’s composition to the Andrews Sisters as his own’.150 Rohlehr gives details of the court case 48 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 174. 1 149 Doris Sommer, ‘Be-Longing and Bi-Lingual States’, Diacritics, 29:4 (1999), 84–115 (pp. 101, 103). 150 Neptune, Caliban and the Yankees, p. 141.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories following this, eventually won by Invader in 1947, where Amsterdam’s lawyer claimed that Invader’s song was folklore and therefore uncopyrightable.151 Amsterdam’s version of the calypso extended its popularity beyond Trinidad to a much wider audience. Selling at least 2.5 million copies,152 the Andrews Sisters gave a local cultural form global prominence. A comparison of the Andrews Sisters’ lyrics with Invader’s indicates that their promotion of the calypso came at the cost of reduced topicality: Invader:

When the Yankees first came to Trinidad Some of the young girls were more than glad They said that the Yankees treat them nice And they give them a better price.153

Andrews Sisters:

Since the Yankee come to Trinidad They got the young girls goin’ mad Young girls say they treat ’em nice Make Trinidad like paradise.154

Invader’s first verse is barely changed by the Andrews Sisters, but a minor alteration is telling: in replacing ‘better price’ with ‘paradise’, the US version at once underplays the financial basis of liaisons between US soldiers and local women, and evokes the exoticist trope of the Caribbean as a ‘new Eden’.155 This produces an image of the region which accentuates its physical beauty while disguising its social problems. It is possible to compare Folktales with the Andrews Sisters’ calypso; in both cases, the writers employ exoticist tropes in order to entice a foreign audience. However, the narrator’s use of Invader’s lyrics distinguishes Antoni’s text from the Andrew Sisters’ calypso. The exoticist narrative which Folktales seems, on the surface, to present to foreign readers is undermined by Antoni’s selection of the words ‘better price’ (158) rather than ‘paradise’; this detail reminds us of the status of ‘paradise’ as a commercialised image and its cost to local Trinidadians. The pin-cushion story features a comic performance staged for a fictional audience of US soldiers, whose meal of numerous courses coincides with the increasingly spectacular stages of the operation. It is embedded within a longer narrative in which the same audience reappears, eating a similar meal and enjoying the performance indirectly as a story. This mirroring effect draws attention to correspondences between the meal, Gregoria’s body 51 Rohlehr, Calpyso and Society, p. 362. 1 152 Ibid., p. 21. 153 Lord Invader, ‘Rum and Coca Cola’ (1943), reproduced in Donald R. Hill, Calypso Calaloo: Early Carnival Music in Trinidad (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993), pp. 239–40 (p. 239). 154 The Andrews Sisters, ‘Rum and Coca Cola’ (1944). Lyrics by Morey Amsterdam (Canada Decca 10205). 155 Sheller, ‘Natural Hedonism’, p. 180.

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Global Communities and the narrator’s story as consumables, blurring the boundaries between viewing, listening and reading audiences. On all three levels, Gregoria’s distress potentially heightens the enjoyment and amusement of consumers. The soldiers’ laughter is often elicited through a reinforcement of racial and sexual stereotypes. For example, the narrator compares her act of operating upon Gregoria to ‘peering inside the deep dark hole of Calcutta’ (160). Although she insists she is referring only to the bad lighting in the kitchen, the pun on ‘hole’ depends upon an inaccurate association of Gregoria with a place she has neither been to nor is ancestrally linked to; as we have learned in an earlier story, she is descended from Amerindians. As such, the joke draws on the exoticist trope of replacing individuality and cultural specificity with a homogenising fantasy of otherness. While the narrator’s jokes certainly cater to the exoticist desires of the soldiers – just as she literally caters for them with her meals of many courses – they also contain the potential to undermine exoticist reading practices. On one level, it is possible for readers to share the laughter of the listening US soldiers. On another level, the near-rape of Gregoria by one of those soldiers reveals the dangers of this form of humour. The ridiculous image of the soldier Tanzania wearing the tattoo’s shell ‘like as if he was trying to fulfil the fiction of me in my firechief hat’ (168) allows the narrator to make a serious point regarding the active role that her entertaining story has played in Tanzania’s subsequent assault of Gregoria. To return to David Rudder’s comments on calypso humour, laughter at this point becomes a ‘cutting kind of laugh’ which ‘cut[s] through everything’, laying bare the exploitative nature of the soldiers’ relations with the local women, as well as the complicity of the narrator in that exploitation. Two jokes therefore operate at the same time, as the demeaning laughter of the soldiers is set against the narrator’s ironic reflections on that laughter. To borrow Doris Sommer’s words, Antoni’s humour here is ‘double-barreled’, shooting ‘off in more than one direction’ and in doing so deliberately destabilising readers. The layering of different kinds of laughter invites us to ‘pass from one position to another’, shifting between sharing in the soldiers’ amusement and appreciating the narrator’s joke against them. Both in its depiction of consumer figures and in its nuanced interpellation of readers, Folktales complicates the idea of a ‘metropolitan reading public’ which is both distinct and distant from a local audience.156 The stories help to reformulate conceptions of readerships and reading practices in the context of a twenty-first-century Caribbean characterised by a heightened mobility of people and products. Furthermore, by encouraging readers based outside the Caribbean region to position themselves as insiders, Folktales potentially influences the shaping of reading communities. Karin Barber considers the dynamic role of texts in the formation of reading constituencies, looking at how an address to readers can ‘play a part in constituting new forms of 156 Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, p. 63.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories sociality’.157 Folktales performs such a role, contributing to the emergence of a Caribbean readership of permeable and negotiable borders. Through his ambivalent appeal to readers and his multi-layered comic devices, Antoni envisages a globalised Caribbean community.

157 Barber, The Anthropology of Texts, p. 139.

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Conclusion Conclusion

B

elow is the opening to Sugar Aloes’ 1997 calypso, ‘One Caribbean’:

I would like to dedicate this song to all the heads of the CARICOM countries. Maybe if you just take this little advice, this could be the solution to find the light at the other end of the tunnel From Cuba to Guyana We could be stronger than ever, bad as a tiger One people, one destiny With a super powerful economy What we do is simply Break down all the boundaries […] our leaders Talk and find the answers People of the Caribbean Time for we to be one nation Come on let’s be one One people One destiny One Caribbean You hear what I tell you One people One identity One Caribbean.1 1 Sugar Aloes, ‘One Caribbean’, in The Sugar Man (JW Records, 2010).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Sugar Aloes’ calypso draws attention to the importance of a shared Caribbean regional consciousness within a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century globalised world. It celebrates the strength which could result from joining together as ‘one people’, connecting small island nations which have relatively little geopolitical power in a global context, to form a ‘super-powerful economy’. Directing his calypso to the heads of the CARICOM countries and proposing that they ‘take this little advice’, Sugar Aloes suggests that the region’s writers, artists, musicians and other cultural practitioners have a role to play in this endeavour; a point reinforced in a later verse when he stresses the need to ‘unite our arts and culture’ as a way of strengthening the region.2 By associating the Caribbean community (CARICOM), which focuses on economic collaboration between Caribbean nations, with the potential for collaboration in the arenas of arts, culture and sports, the calypso comments on the importance of linking up economic, political, sociological and cultural perspectives in order to achieve a meaningful sense of community. The vision of community which Sugar Aloes presents here is utopian, in that the calypso appears to offer an easy solution to long-standing problems. With a repetition of the word ‘one’ (‘one people’, ‘one destiny’, ‘one identity’, ‘one Caribbean’), the refrain glosses over the considerable difficulty of reconciling differences both across a region which is politically and geographically fragmented, and within Caribbean nations divided along the lines of race, ethnicity and class. The calypso can be read as a simple affirmation of possibilities for integration within the Caribbean region. However, by incorporating political rhetoric into his lyrics – for example, Guyana’s slogan ‘One people, one nation, one destiny’, and in a later verse, Haiti’s slogan ‘unity is strength’, 3 – Sugar Aloes provides an implicit commentary on the ways in which the region’s politicians have tended to project, as Shalini Puri puts it, an image of ‘nonconflictual diversity’ which masks tensions and inequalities without resolving them.4 Despite this critical edge, the kind of vision offered in the calypso is nevertheless important in that it encourages listeners to believe in the potential for cohesion. Sugar Aloes’ calypso raises issues pertinent to this book, such as the concurrent necessity and difficulty of articulating community in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Caribbean, the value of cultural representations of community, and the importance of positioning these as part of wider thinking on community beyond the realm of arts and culture. Whereas ‘One Caribbean’ focuses on the ideal of unity and the eradication of difference, the eight literary texts examined in this book offer more complex models of connection across difference. For instance, in At the Full and Change of the Moon Dionne Brand’s tidal poetics generate a double movement of 2 Sugar Aloes, ‘One Caribbean’. 3 Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 48. 4 Ibid., p. 48.

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Conclusion convergence and dispersal, and the fugal structure of Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom allows a variety of voices to sound together without merging. Common features of the communities portrayed in these texts are fracture, dissonance and heterogeneity, and as such they bear little resemblance to the regional ‘happy family’ envisaged in Sugar Aloes’ calypso.5 The writers discussed here do consider the potential for communal solidarity within Caribbean societies, if not as assuredly as Sugar Aloes. However, they also explore the difficulty of attaining any kind of unity, as well as the problems ensuing when a community attempts to operate as ‘one’; in Olive Senior’s and Kwame Dawes’ stories, for example, the value of communal identifications in generating a supportive network is pitted against the capacity of communities to regulate behaviour and suppress individuality. I have examined interconnected stories by eight Caribbean writers – Olive Senior, Earl Lovelace, Kwame Dawes, Alecia McKenzie, Lawrence Scott, Mark McWatt, Dionne Brand and Robert Antoni – looking at how this mode of writing facilitates the imagining of community. Highlighting the centrality of short story writing to the emergence of an Anglophone Caribbean literary aesthetic, this book draws attention to the resurgence of the short story form within Anglophone Caribbean writing since the 1980s. My chosen texts attest to the prevalence of interconnected stories, in particular, within late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures. I have argued that the narrative structure of short story collections and cycles is an integral element of these writers’ engagement with the dynamics of Caribbean communities, allowing them to develop effective methods of negotiating and working through difference. The texts studied here range from collections of loosely linked stories to story cycles with a more intricate narrative structure. The communities depicted within these texts are similarly varied, since they are organised around different kinds of collectivity: the household, the village, the small town, the urban neighbourhood, the city, the nation, the region and the diaspora. Yet these locales overlap, so that it becomes difficult to ascribe just one of them to any of the writers considered here: texts focusing primarily on the village, small town or city also inevitably deal with the nation, region and diaspora. Senior’s portrayal of families within Jamaican rural communities extends to the diaspora with the stories’ commentary on family land traditions; Earl Lovelace’s story collection features cricket as representative of social cohesion at the level of the nation as well as the small town; Kwame Dawes’ and Alecia McKenzie’s critique of socio-spatial divisions in Kingston corresponds to debates on the ‘two Jamaicas’,6 so that the city becomes a microcosm of the nation; Mark McWatt’s depiction of Guyana extends into 5 Sugar Aloes, ‘One Caribbean’. 6 See Barry Chevannes, ‘Those Two Jamaicas: The Problem of Social Integration’, in Contending with Destiny: the Caribbean in the Twenty-first Century (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2000), pp. 179–84.

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories the Caribbean diaspora; and Scott’s Trinidad blurs with a broader archipelagic vision of community. These texts not only present us with different kinds of community, but also approach the subject of community differently. Whereas Senior’s and Lovelace’s story collections convey the dynamics of existing communities, Scott’s fugal strategies and Dawes’ reggae aesthetic allow them to visualise alternative models of community. Brand’s and McWatt’s story cycles are, by contrast, retrospective and interrogative, reflecting on the limitations of earlier constructions of community circulating within Caribbean cultural theory and diaspora discourse. In the Introduction to this book, I discussed the work of Édouard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo and Wilson Harris. Pointing to resonances between Glissant’s poetics of ‘Relation’,7 Benítez-Rojo’s notion of ‘discontinuous conjunction’8 and Harris’ ‘bridges across chasms’,9 I considered how their differently configured models of association across difference offer insights into the dynamics of Caribbean communities. These models also provided me with a basis for embedding the formal properties of short story collections and cycles, texts consisting of discrete yet interconnected episodes, within the historical, cultural and socioeconomic background of the region. The ensuing chapters have indeed illuminated intersections between the theoretical ideas of Glissant, Harris and Benítez-Rojo and the literary practice of the writers analysed. I looked at how both Harris’ and Benítez-Rojo’s appropriations of the El Dorado legend as a founding narrative of community serve as an intertext for the repeated journey upriver in Suspended Sentences. Glissant’s tidal poetics also informed my discussion of circular movement in At the Full and Change of the Moon, and his ideas on formal and linguistic innovations in Caribbean writing as a response to the region’s abrupt encounter with modernity provided a context for my reading of Senior’s and Lovelace’s short story collections as part of a Caribbean tradition of modernist writing. More generally, Glissant’s, Harris’ and Benítez-Rojo’s variously articulated notions of a geographically extensive yet culturally specific Caribbean resonate with some of these writers’ textual mapping of community; for instance, the globalised Caribbean reading audience featured within and anticipated by My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, Brand’s scattered diasporic family fighting against the gravitational pull of Trinidad, and the physically dispersed yet aesthetically connected community of literary voices which Suspended Sentences both participates in and fictionalises.

7 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. by Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997 [1990]), p. 11. 8 Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. by James E. Maraniss, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996 [1989]), p. 2. 9 Wilson Harris, ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. by Andrew Bundy (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 237–47 (p. 238).

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Conclusion That said, the literary representations of community examined in this book by no means correspond neatly to the theoretical models offered by Glissant, Harris and Benítez-Rojo. Glissant uses the botanical example of ‘the co-existence of sea olive and manchineel’ in order to illustrate how ‘[d]istancings are necessary to Relation and depend on it’.10 This perfect equilibrium between proximity and distance is thrown off balance by the structural instability of At the Full and Change of the Moon, where the double movement of convergence and dispersal takes the form of a violent struggle on the part of individual characters against the constraints of an ancestral legacy recurring through the centuries. Equally, Harris’ call for an imaginative reconnection with Guyana’s ‘vanished cultures’ is overshadowed by McWatt’s concern with continuing threats to communal solidarity in a twenty-firstcentury Guyana torn apart by the mass migration, racial polarisation and political corruption of the post-independence period.11 The optimism expressed in much of Glissant’s, Harris’ and Benítez-Rojo’s theoretical writing distinguishes it from the literary texts examined in this book, where positive figurings of community repeatedly strain against a recognition of the difficulty of envisaging community in a Caribbean context. My approach to a form variously defined as the short story sequence, cycle or composite departs significantly from the universalising perspectives of genre theorists such as Forest Ingram, Susan Garland Mann and Maggie Dunn and Anne Morris. My concern has been less to identify distinguishing features of the short story collection or cycle than to investigate the diverse ways in which this mode of writing has enabled Caribbean writers to address the question of community in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. My readings have illustrated the flexibility of this literary form; in each of the eight texts, the stories are connected in different ways. Moreover, the narrative structure of these texts has proved to be inextricable from their subject matter; they incorporate an interplay of form, theme and imagery. In Brand’s text this is organised around the idea of a tidal cycle, in Scott’s the fugue, in Robert Antoni’s the act of digression, in Dawes’ the notion of a reggae aesthetic. In each case, the text’s narrative structure is closely associated with its representation of community, rendering a purely formalist analysis inadequate. As discussed in the Introduction, alongside universalising theories of the short story cycle, sequence or composite, there exists a body of scholarship which presents it as a mode of writing distinct to the US or Canada. While contesting the idea that any genre or subgenre belongs exclusively to a particular nation or region, this book extends debates on the cultural specificity of interconnected stories, investigating the significance of this narrative form within an Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition. 10 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 157. 11 Harris, ‘New Preface to Palace of the Peacock’, in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris, ed. by Bundy, pp. 53–57 (p. 55).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories As a discipline primarily concerned with community, anthropology has been an important frame of reference in this book. I have situated Caribbean literary texts alongside anthropological studies, presenting them as different kinds of representation, neither of which can claim to be authoritative. Both modes of representation are partial, and influenced by the social and cultural position of the writer. In addition, both are ‘literary’, in James Clifford’s sense of the word, in that narrative strategies and language choices impact on the way in which the subject matter is presented to readers. Caribbean literary studies and Caribbean anthropology have developed in parallel. As discussed in the Introduction, despite multiple points of convergence, there has been very little dialogue between the two fields – a situation which may partly be due to the apparent incompatibility of postcolonial literary studies with anthropology, because of the latter’s colonial foundations. However, as we have seen, key moments of upheaval within anthropology in the 1970s and 80s have complicated the discipline’s association with colonialism. Furthermore, simplistic perceptions of the anthropologist as ‘outsider’ and the creative writer as ‘insider’ no longer apply, if they ever did.12 A number of anthropologists whose work focuses on the Caribbean region are of Caribbean origin, and six of the eight literary writers whose work is explored here are primarily based outside the Caribbean region, a position they share with many other Caribbean writers. My textual readings have shown that there are connections as well as tensions between literary and anthropological representations of Caribbean communities. Senior shares the interest of Caribbean structural functionalist anthropologists in family networks within rural Jamaican communities of the mid-twentieth century, but challenges their assumption that the nuclear family is a norm from which Caribbean families deviate. Whereas the structural functionalists tend to view individuals as determined by social structures, Senior’s stories emphasise the agency of individuals to negotiate their position within a community. The form of the short story collection, featuring a different protagonist in each story, enables her to foreground individual identity while at the same time exploring the dynamics of a community. Like Daniel Miller’s and Steven Vertovec’s ethnographies, Lovelace’s story collection explores the impact of consumerism on Trinidad’s rural communities, but the texts differ in their mode of representation; Lovelace’s collection incorporates conflicting perspectives on the oil boom and its aftermath. In the case of both Senior’s and Lovelace’s story collections, the combination of a modernist literary aesthetic with oral storytelling strategies allows them to convey the collective voice of a community more effectively than is possible within the format of a traditional ethnography. Scott’s and McWatt’s texts both invoke and contend with M. G. Smith’s ‘plural society’ model in their imagining of Caribbean nations. Anthropological studies of Kingston which comment on 12 Janet Tallman, ‘The Ethnographic Novel: Finding the Insider’s Voice’, in Between Anthropology and Literature: Interdisciplinary Discourse, ed. by Rose de Angelis (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 11–22 (p. 12).

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Conclusion its socio-spatial polarisation inform my reading of Dawes’ and McKenzie’s work, but, in turn, their fictional engagement with the city accentuates issues overlooked by anthropologists, such as the role played by representation in the shaping of urban space, and the presence of, and potential for, connection between the city’s divided communities. This book has identified differing trajectories in literary and anthropological representations of Caribbean communities. While anthropologists since the 1990s have taken a new direction in moving beyond the discipline’s traditional subject matter of the spatially bounded and culturally homogenous community, positioning their fieldwork observations within wider historical, political and socioeconomic contexts,13 Caribbean literary writers have long been attentive to the complexity and global scope of Caribbean communities. As discussed in Chapter Four, anthropologists writing in the early twentyfirst century have commented on the need to reconceptualise culture and community in a socioeconomic climate where globalisation ‘has radically pulled culture away from place’.14 While the literary texts I have analysed draw attention to changing configurations of community around the turn of the millennium, they also remind us that Caribbean communities have never had a straightforward relationship to place, founded as they are on displacement and multiple belongings. My comparative reading of Lovelace’s, Senior’s, Brand’s and Antoni’s fiction suggests that the turn of the millennium generated in Anglophone Caribbean short story writing not a radical change in conceptions of community, but a subtler shift in negotiations between the local and the global. In ‘One Caribbean’, Sugar Aloes insists on the need to unite cultural, sociological, political and economic perspectives in the common project of imagining community. Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories has similarly asserted the value of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of Caribbean communities, although it has concentrated on overlaps and tensions between models of community produced within literary and cultural studies, and those produced within the social sciences, rather than seeking to identify unity and accord across these various fields. As my readings of eight literary texts have indicated, anthropological research can provide critics with useful contexts within which to situate literary portrayals of Caribbean communities, familiarising us with issues pertinent to the texts but absent 13 Although this is often regarded as a recent development in anthropology (see Vered Amit, ‘Reconceptualizing Community’, in Realizing Community: Concepts, Social Relationships and Sentiments ed. by Vered Amit (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–20 (p. 2)), the earlier anthropological research of Sidney Mintz and Jean Besson is an exception, as we saw in Chapter Two, since they too position Caribbean rural communities within wider historical and socioeconomic contexts. 14 Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renalto Rosaldo, ‘Introduction: A World in Motion’, in The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 1–34 (p. 11).

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories from critical debates within literary and cultural studies. Equally, anthropologists could gain from a more sustained engagement with literary studies, which might allow them to extend the range of ways in which they think about and represent Caribbean communities. Although this book focuses on the benefits of interdisciplinary exchange between Caribbean literary studies and anthropology in particular, it also contributes to and demonstrates the need for a broader dialogue between literary and cultural studies and the social sciences in the study of Caribbean cultures and societies.

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Appendix I

Antonello Da Messina, ‘Saint Jerome in his Study’ (c. 1475)

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Appendix II

Family tree from Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon (New York: Grove Press, 1999) 210

Appendix III

Front cover image of Robert Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (New York: Grove Press, 2002 [2000])

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224

Index Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 137 Aloes, Sugar, 203, 207 ‘One Caribbean’, 201–2 Alsopp, Richard, 196 Amit, Vered, 27, 67, 207n13 Anderson, Benedict, 121–23, 125 Imagined Communities, 121–22, 181–82, 192 Anderson, Patricia, 111 Anglophone Caribbean literary cultures see Caribbean literary cultures Angrosino, Michael V., 25–26n128 anthropology Caribbean, 24–29n129, 43–46, 47–48, 66–68, 206 globalization, 156–59 interchange with literary studies, 25–26n129, 28–29, 43–46, 48–52, 206, 207–8 Antillean see Caribbean Antoni, Robert, 34, 203, 207 Blessed is the Fruit, 189 Divina Trace, 189 My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 17, 20, 32–33, 34, 159, 160, 180–200, 204, 205 Appadurai, Arjun, 32, 174, 178, 179 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 156, 157, 158, 162 Asad, Talal, 26

Balliger, Robert, 192 Barbados, 14 Barber, Karin, 181–82, 197 Barnes, W.T., 14 Barrow, Christine, 49, 50, 61–62 Bauman, Zygmunt, 32, 162, 174 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 9–10, 12–13, 21, 22–23, 28, 134n55, 149, 150, 160–61, 187–88, 204–5 Besson, Jean, 26–27, 45, 46, 55, 58, 65, 207n13 Martha Brae’s Two Histories, 45, 55, 59n91, 61 Bim, 6, 13–14, 15 Birbalsingh, Frank, 20, 40 Black Power movement, 7n30, 9 Brand, Dionne, 1–2, 32, 34, 203–4, 207 ‘… But a Drink of Water’, 161 A Map to the Door of No Return, 160, 167, 179 At the Full and Change of the Moon, 17, 32, 34, 159–80, 202–3, 204, 205 ‘At the Full and Change of the Moon’, 162 ‘Brownman, Tiger …’, 171–78 oceanic metaphors, 161 trope of ‘drifting’, 168–69, 173 trope of ‘maroonage’, 169–70

225

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 8–9, 10, 32, 160, 163–65, 171 Contradictory Omens, 8–9 Brathwaite, Lloyd, 12, 123n13 Brennan, Timothy, 185n117 British Guiana, 5, 14 see also Guyana Britton, Celia, 3 Brodber, Erna, 62 Brouillette, Sarah, 182 Brown, Lisa R., 142–43 Bruijne, Ad de, 101 Brydon, Diana, 173–74, 179 Burnham, Forbes, 124, 125, 148, 151 calypso, 71, 78, 124, 140, 183, 190–95 Campbell, Chris, 81 Caribbean anthropological interchange with literary studies, 25–26n129, 28–29, 43–46, 48–52, 206 anthropology, 24–29n129, 43–46, 47–48, 66–68 ‘associated but different’ analogy, 23–24 community of the nation, 121–23 creolisation, 10–11 cultural theories, 21–23, 24 family and kinship structures (child shifting), 47–52, 57–58 oral storytelling practices, 20–21, 36–37, 40, 206 Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), 6–7 Caribbean literary culture connection to oral storytelling tradition, 20–21, 36–37, 40 impact of colonialism and plantations, 3, 35–36 major theme of community identity, 3, 7–8 origins of modernism in Caribbean literature, 35–36, 37 phenomenon of interconnected stories, 1–2 tradition of short story writing, 13–14, 19–20 see also literary magazines Caribbean Voices radio programme, 7, 14–15, 16 Carmichael, Stokely, 7n30

226

Carnegie, Charles V., 83 Carpentier, Alejo, 149 Carstairs, Jamie, 180 Carter, Martin, 142, 151 Caruth, Cathy Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 131–32 Unclaimed Experience, 128, 129, 130 Cesareo, Mario, 25n126 Chambers, Ross, 185 Chekhov, Anton, 40 Chevannes, Barry, 12n65, 27, 31, 89, 96–98 Clarke, Colin, 85–86, 102 Clarke, Edith, 26, 29, 45, 48–49n72, 51, 59, 65 My Mother Who Fathered Me, 48–49, 50 Clarke, George Elliott, 172–73 Clifford, James, 28, 175, 206 The Predicament of Culture, 158–59, 173 Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 24–25, 43–44, 66, 67 Collymore, Frank, 14 community concepts plural society, 8–9 stratified society, 8–9 Cooper, Carolyn, 112 Cozier, Christopher, Tropical Night sequence, 2 creolisation, 10 Dabydeen, Cyril, 141–42, 146 Dash, J. Michael, 9–10 Dawes, Kwame, 33, 87–88, 101, 118–19, 127, 203, 206–7 A Place to Hide and Other Stories, 17, 30–31, 85, 89–90, 114, 116 ‘Flight’, 116, 117 ‘Foreplay’, 85 ‘In the Gully’, 102–6, 112, 116, 119 ‘Marley’s Ghost’, 115 Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing, 114–15 notion of a ‘reggae aesthetic’, 114–16, 204, 205 on shortage of depictions of urban life in Jamaica, 113 ‘Sinatra’, 90, 91–95, 115 ‘Tending Rosebuds’, 116, 119

Index Dawes, Neville, 87–88 The Last Enchantment, 113 de Angelis, Rose, 25n126 deCaires Narain, Denise, 60, 65 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 163, 166, 167, 172, 174 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 163 Donnell, Alison, 7n30, 38, 43, 158 Dunn, Maggie, 18n93, 205 Emery, Mary Lou, 37 Evans, Lucy, The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, 15 Faulkner, William, 164–65, 168, 170–71 Federation of the West Indies, 6, 16 Ferebee, Dorothy L., 180 Ferguson, Suzanne C., 38n22 Forbes, Curdella, 127 Francophone Caribbean societies, 3 Fraser, Robert, 182 Galtung, Johan, 105n62 Garland Mann, Susan, 18, 24, 90n24, 125n23, 205 Garvey, Johanna X. K., 167, 168, 173–74 Gellner, Ernest, 121, 122, 123, 125 Gikandi, Simon, 8, 36, 37 Gilroy, Paul, 173, 175 Glissant, Édouard, 9–10n44, 10–11, 12–13, 21, 22, 28, 32, 163, 168–69, 170–71, 204–5 Caribbean Discourse, 160–61 on modernity in Caribbean literature, 35–36, 37 tidal metaphor, 164–65 Goldman, Marlene, 167–68, 169, 173–74 Gordimer, Nadine, 38, 39–40 Gordon, Derek, 111 Gray, Obika, 91n34, 106 Guattari, Félix, 11, 163, 166, 167, 172, 174 Gunning, Dave, 35, 37 Guyana, 3, 4, 122, 124, 203–4 ethnic composition, 4–6 post-independence, 31 Hall, Stuart, 168–69 Hanson, Clare, 41–42 Hardt, Michael, 174–76 Harney, Stefano, 28, 122–23 Harriott, Anthony, 92n35

Harris, Wilson, 9n44, 11–13, 21–22, 28, 37, 125, 141, 142, 143–44, 145, 148, 153, 204–5 ‘Creoleness: The Crossroads of a Civilization?’, 11–12 Palace of the Peacock, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153–55 ‘Profiles of Myth and the New World’, 144 The Guyana Quartet, 31, 143–44 Harvey, David, 99–100n52 Hearne, John, 113 Hintzen, Percy, 75 Hirsch, Marianne, 131–32, 132n52 Howard, David, 86, 87n11, 101 Huggan, Graham, 185 Hunter, Adrian, 38 Huyssen, Andreas, 86–87 Hylland Eriksen, Thomas, 157 Inda, Jonathan Xavier, 157, 158 Ingram, Forrest L., 17–18, 24, 163, 205 Jackson, Shona N., 148–49, 150 Jaffe, Rivke, 12–13n66, 25–26n128, 27, 31 study of Kingston, 88–89, 90n25, 101–2 Jagan, Cheddi, 124 Jamaica, 3–4, 14, 34, 203 ethnic composition, 4–6 see also Kingston James, C.L.R., 6, 113 James, Cynthia, 169 James, Louis, 13, 46n59 Jones, James M., 191–92 Joseph, Maia, 168 Kalliney, Peter, 36 Kaplan, E. Ann, 128n35 Kennedy, J. Gerald, 18, 190–91 Kingston (Jamaica), 85–87, 203, 206–7 garrison communities, 90, 96–97 inner-city crime, 86, 90, 92n35 political clientelism, 86, 90 uptown/downtown division, 85–86, 87–90, 96–97, 112, 113–14, 118–20 Kuttainen, Victoria, Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite, 19 Kyk-over-al, 6, 14, 15

227

Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Lamming, George, 37, 152–53 In the Castle of my Skin, 8n36, 50, 83–84 Lewellen, Ted C., 156–57, 158 Lindo, Gladys, 15 literary magazines, 13, 15–16 ‘West Indian’ outlook, 6–7 Liverpool, Hollis V., 191–92 Lombroso, Doris, 183–84 Long, Elizabeth, 182 Louvel, Liliane, 38 Lovelace, Earl, 28n138, 33–34, 45–46, 192, 203–4, 206, 207 A Brief Conversion and Other Stories, 17, 29, 30, 40–41, 46–47, 66, 66–67, 69–70, 74–85, 89 relationship between rural and urban communities, 74–83 portrayal of Christmas, 70–74 ‘The Coward’, 75–77 The Dragon Can’t Dance, 25–26n128 ‘The Fire Eater’s Journey’, 75–76, 78–80 ‘The Fire Eater’s Return’, 75–76 The Schoolmaster, 81 use of modernist and oral storytelling devices, 37, 42, 43, 46–47 ‘Victory and the Blight’, 79, 83 Lovindeer, L.G., ‘Wild Gilbert’, 110–11 Luckhurst, Roger, 128, 130 Lundén, Rolf, 24 The United Stories of America: Studies in the Short Story Composite, 19 Luscher, Robert, 190–91 Lynch, Gerald, 24 The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles, 19 McKay, Claude, 37 McKenzie, Alecia, 1, 33, 88, 118–19, 203, 206–7 ‘Bella Vista’, 90, 99–101, 107, 118, 119 ‘Full Stop’, 118 ‘Natasha’, 90, 95–99, 107, 117–18, 119 ‘Satellite City’, 102, 106–12, 117–18, 119 Satellite City and Other Stories, 1n2, 17, 30–31, 86, 89 Stories from Yard, 1n2

228

‘Stuck in the Maid’s Room’, 118 Sweetheart, 1n2 ‘The Grenada Defense League’, 118 McWatt, Mark, 203–4 Eldorado myth, 143–44, 148–49, 155 ‘Sky’, 144–45, 147–48, 149–51, 153 Suspended Sentences: Fictions of Atonement, 17, 23, 31, 33, 124–25, 141–55, 204, 205 ‘The Tyranny of Influence’, 144–45, 151–53, 154 ‘Two Boys Named Basil’, 144–47, 148, 149, 153, 154 Mais, Roger, 113 March-Russell, Paul, 41 Marcus, George, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 24–25, 43–44, 67 Marley, Bob, 112 Marson, Una, 37 Mascia-Leeds, Frances E., 24–25 Matos, Nicole, 189 Matthews, Brander, 84 Maupassant, Guy de, 40 Meeks, Brian, 12n65, 90 Miller, Christopher, 26n129 Miller, Daniel, 27, 30, 45–46, 68n127, 69–70, 71, 74, 84, 206 Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach, 25–26n128, 66, 77, 82, 84 Mintz, Sidney, 45n55, 46, 58–60n91, 65, 82, 207n13 Caribbean Transformations, 45 Mittelholzer, Edgar, 141, 142 Morris, Ann, 18n93, 205 Murray, Patricia, 126n26 Nagel, James, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre, 19 Naipaul, V.S., 25n127, 37, 123–24, 125 The Loss of Eldorado, 161 The Middle Passage, 193–94 Negri, Antonio, 174–76 Nettleford, Rex, 49n72 O’Callaghan, Evelyn, 60, 65, 81 O’Connor, Frank, 41–42 O’Faolain, Sean, 41–42 Otto, Melanie, 165–66

Index Page, Eimer, 9n44 Patterson, Orlando, The Children of Sisyphus, 109, 113–14, 115n83 Patteson, Richard, 40 Peake, Jak, 41, 46n59 Pelling, Rowan, 180 Phillips, Caryl, 9, 10 Poe, Edgar Allan, 40n32, 84 Powys, T.F., 41–42 Pratt, Mary Louise, 26 Procter, James, 40–41 Pupo-Walker, Enrique, 187 Puri, Shalini, 3, 124, 202 Rahim, Jennifer, 192 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 146 Ramchand, Kenneth, 6 ‘The West Indian Short Story’, 1, 13, 16 Ramraj, Victor, 16, 20 Reckin, Anna, 164 Reid, Ian, 18 Rhys, Jean, 37 Robinson, Gemma, 150–51 Robotham, Don, 27, 86, 111, 114 Rodney, Walter, 7n30 Rohlehr, Gordon, 7, 114, 192, 195, 197–98 Rosaldo, Renalto, 157, 158 Rubin, Vera, 123n13 Rudder, David, 191–92, 199 Sabra, Samah, 122 Said, Edward, 127, 140 Culture and Imperialism, 134n55, 135 On Late Style, 136–37 St Lucia, 14 Schalkwijk, Aart, 101 Schwarz, Bill, 82n156 Scott, Lawrence, 1–2, 33 Witchbroom, 17, 23, 31–32, 124–41, 202–3, 204, 205 memory and trauma, 127–29 musical aspects, 127 Selvon, Sam, 7, 20, 36, 37 ‘The Humming Bird’, 15n77 Senior, Olive, 1, 20–21, 28n138, 29–30, 33–34, 51n81, 65–66n117, 203–4, 206, 207 Arrival of the Snake Woman and Other Stories, 1n2

‘Ballad’, 60–61, 62, 63–64 ‘Bright Thursdays’, 51–52, 53–54, 56, 57, 62–63, 64 on the connection between oral storytelling and writing, 36–37, 40, 42 portrayal of Jamaican family structures, 47–48, 55, 57–58 Discerner of Hearts and Other Stories, 1n2 ‘Do Angels Wear Brassieres?’, 63, 64 portrayal of Jamaican rural communities, 60–61 ‘Real Old Time T’ing’, 54–58, 60, 64 ‘Summer Lightning’, 51–53, 54, 56, 57 Summer Lightning and Other Stories, 1n2, 16, 17, 20, 29, 37, 38, 42–43, 46–47, 61 ‘The Boy Who Loved Ice Cream’, 47–48 use of modernist devices, 37, 38–40, 46–47 Working Miracles: Women’s Lives in the English-Speaking Caribbean, 50–51 Seymour, A.J., 14 ‘Over Guiana, Clouds’, 150–51 Sharpe, Patricia, 24–25 Sheller, Mimi, 159, 183–84, 185 Shinebourne, Jan Lowe, 142 short story as articulation of multicultural national identities, 18–19 collections as narratives of community, 17–18, 18–19 effect of local publishing practicalities, 13–14 importance in Caribbean literary culture, 1, 13, 13–14, 19–20 location in modernist movement, 38n22 revival of short story form in 80s and 90s, 16–17 rooted in oral storytelling, 20–21, 36–37, 206 see also Ramchand, Kenneth Simpson, Hyacinth, 16 Sives, Amanda, 90–91 Smith, Eric D., 180–81 Smith, M.G., 12, 26, 29, 32, 45, 48–49n72, 51, 65, 123–25n13, 206 anthropological study of kinship networks, 58, 59

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Communities in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Short Stories Smith, Raymond T., 64, 123n13 Smith, R.T., 12, 45, 58 Sommer, Doris, 197, 199 Sprouse, Keith Alan, 9n44 Stewart, John, 25–26128 Stewart, John O., 44 Swanzy, Henry, 14–15 The Beacon, 6 Thomas, Deborah, 5n23, 25–26n128, 27, 104 Thomas, Nicholas, 25n126 Thompson, Alvin O., 6 Trinidad, 3, 14, 30, 32, 41, 203–4 ethnic composition, 4–6, 7 post-independence, 31 racial tension, 7 Trinidad and Tobago see Trinidad Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 27–28, 47n63, 49n72

Walcott, Derek, 9, 32, 125, 127, 133, 160 Omeros, 128–29, 133 ‘The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?’, 136 ‘The Spoiler’s Return’, 140 Walcott, Rinaldo, 172–74 Walker, Paul M., 133–34 Walmsley, Anne, 6–7 Ward, Abigail, 132n52 Webb, Barbara J., 9n44 West Indies attempts to foster a cultural consciousness, 13–14n69 Federation see Federation of the West Indies Wickham, John, 14 Williams, Brackette F., 27, 122, 124 Williams, Eric, 124, 125, 139n64, 141 Williams, Raymond, 74 Wilson, Peter J., 61–62, 64, 65

Urry, John, 179 Vertovec, Steven, 27, 30, 45–46, 84, 206 ‘Oil Boom and Recession in Trinidad Indian Villages’, 66–67, 68–70, 75n147

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Yelvington, Kevin, 44, 45–46, 49–50, 84, 124 Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace, 66–68, 70, 82, 84