E.A. Markham’s St. Caesare: the other “Ulster”?

Abstract

This essay examines the invented Caribbean island of St. Caesare and its relation to the representational space of “Ulster” in Montserratian poet E.A. Markham’s collection Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems (1993). As the title of the book implies, it unites two of the poet’s home islands, Ireland and Montserrat. Ireland was Markham’s home at the moment when he drafted many of these poems, as he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine from 1988 to 1991. However, as a Caribbean writer of Afro-Irish heritage, Ireland is also home in that it represents a “hinterland”. Of the Caribbean islands, Montserrat is the most closely identified with Ireland owing to its Irish cultural inheritance, which has earned it the nickname “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This article surveys Markham’s depictions of St. Caesare and “Ulster” as analytical spaces that enable him to chart the palimpsestic topologies of Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The author argues that Markham limns St. Caesare and “Ulster” as transatlantic mirror images to allow for critical relationality between Montserrat and Northern Ireland.