Creolization in Robert Antoni’s Blessed is the Fruit

Abstract

With the exception of reggae, creolization is no doubt one of the major Caribbean contributions to the world of universal culture. Originating in the area's complex and often painful early experience of migration and cosmopolitanism, it has recently been summed up as syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities. Although cultural interbreeding, and the unique forms of civilization it has led to, have characterized the Caribbean from the fifteenth century onwards, they were not openly acknowledged before the end of the twentieth century. Indeed, in spite of earlier individual attempts to highlight the cross-cultural roots of the area, for example that of the Cubans Jose Marti and Nicolas Guillen, racial purity and national compartmentalization long remained the norm under the influence of the colonial agenda. Now, however, plurality and impurity have been recognized and praised, even to the point of becoming stereotypes, as potential wombs of ontological enrichment. One cannot help thinking, however, that the popularity of these notions has been facilitated by the fact that they now more clearly apply to a Western world that is increasingly on the move, thus undergoing intensive creolization as well. If 'creolization' has become one of the key notions in the field of cultural studies and their interest in identity issues, one should nonetheless beware of its ideological appropriation and of its idealization, which, as J. Michael Dash points out, can turn the Caribbean into a centre of exemplary creolity. Major Caribbean artists like Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Wilson Harris, and Derek Walcott have sidestepped such a pitfall by constantly highlighting creolization as a process (as opposed to a state or an end in itself) but also by presenting it as a site of cross-cultural harmony as much as one of conflict. This complex view of creolization has, it seems, much affected the younger generation of West Indian writers. Many of them address this phenomenon of cultural hybridization from their point of view as artists who, in their majority, belong, yet do not fully belong, to the West