Forms of exile: Experimental self-positioning in postcolonial Caribbean poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I want to draw attention to the distinctive experience of exile by looking at the ways in which Caribbean poets from the 1960s to the 1980s responded to it. I discuss selected examples from their poetry to argue that as a specific way of experiencing departure and migration, exile inspires specific strategies of artistic mediation and even innovation. The combination of a desire for emplacement and an openness to metropolitan influences that characterizes the situation of exile results in a distinctive strategy within Caribbean poetry that can be described as experimental self-positioning. In their negotiations of the experience of exile, poets adapt and juxtapose formal and linguistic elements from various cultural backgrounds. This hybrid poetics encompasses a wide range of manifestations; one particularly common technique is that of taking on Western poetic forms and transforming them through Caribbean and exilic elements. In the poetry this phenomenon is most immediately evident where the typographical pattern indicates Western stanzaic patterns or even specific formations such as the sonnet. In such poems, form is both a medium through which the poet can negotiate the experience of exile and a way of situating oneself in the new cultural environment: a “position-taking,” in Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological terminology, but a position-taking not just in the new literary field but in between the various cultures, languages, and literatures that the exile has to deal with. Against this background, I will examine three manifestations of experimental self-positioning in Caribbean exile poetry: Derek Walcott’s “Tales of the Islands” (1962), Anthony McNeill’s “Saint Ras” (1972), and NourbeSe Philip’s “Sprung Rhythm” (1983). Each uses a different Western form and transforms it along different lines. Read one after the other these poems form a trajectory of spatial and temporal distancing: whereas Walcott’s speaker is just leaving his home island, McNeill’s is already living in exile, and Philip’s looks back to a Caribbean childhood from a considerable temporal and geographical distance.