History and the Poetics of Relation: The Early Plays of Anguilla’s Colonel Harrigan

Abstract

Between 1977 and 1979, Anguillian playwright Colonel Harrigan composed a set of three plays that were produced by the Anguilla Cultural and Social Society, of which he was a founding member. While this work has so far escaped scholarly attention, one can situate these plays productively in the larger context of Caribbean dramatic culture, serving as they do to incubate a sense of emergent national character while also problematizing notions of identity as absolute and unequivocal. Édouard Glissant’s paradigm of “Relation” allows us to see how Harrigan employs his own strategy of opacity, a “giving-on-and-with” that lies at the heart of “errantry” itself, to resist the false sort of absolute and coercive filiation that Glissant calls “root identity.” Inspired to undertake his dramatic work following a visit to Trinidad, where Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theatre Workshop had already risen to regional prominence, Harrigan crafts plays that must be understood as seeking to reflect large historical processes. His dramas are usefully read within the context of Anguilla’s Revolution of 1967–69, as they respond in complex ways to this particular moment in the history of Anguilla and to consequent processes of identity formation. Harrigan’s plays thus represent the sort of “creative friction” that Kamau Brathwaite sees as a critical component of a uniquely West Indian cultural achievement.