Poetry and the Visual Dynamics of Race in the West Indian Readers

Abstract

Poetry and the Visual Dynamics of Race in the West Indian Readers Casie Legette (bio) This essay takes as its object of study the West Indian Readers, a set of Caribbean schoolbooks first published in the 1920s and reprinted throughout the twentieth century. Though these texts may seem an unlikely choice for an analysis of poetry and the Victorian visual imagination, I argue that both Victorian poetry and Victorian visual culture are on full display in these twentieth-century school readers, which are constructed of pieces—poetic and visual—of imperial Victoriana. The West Indian Readers were the first school readers from the Scottish textbook powerhouse Thomas Nelson & Sons to incorporate Caribbean content, the first to be designed with Caribbean students in mind. Nonetheless, these schoolbooks were still deeply British in their orientation, and the vast majority of the selections of poetry are by British authors, many Victorian. The West Indian Readers include a variety of visual material: simple line drawings, full-color illustrations, and black-and-white photography. The elaborate, full-page colored illustrations tend to be linked to British literature: paintings of Robinson Crusoe, scenes from Shakespeare. Poems by the Victorian poets Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Kingsley are accompanied by full-color images of white children at play. The photographic images are quite different; they depict people of color at work. Black and Brown Caribbean laborers—sometimes children—are shown harvesting sugarcane, husking coconuts, transporting goods.1 These very different types of illustrations set up a powerful opposition in the West Indian Readers, between Caribbean people of color, who are represented almost exclusively in the act of manual, agricultural labor, and white British children, who are instead represented at leisure. Despite the attempts by the editor, J. O. Cutteridge, to make the West Indian Readers speak to Caribbean children's needs, these textbooks nonetheless contribute to the long tradition of colonial education, in which colonial textbooks instruct their readers in the superiority of Britishness and whiteness.2 This article examines how [End Page 583] the combination of poems and images in these books ties poetry to images of whiteness and disrupts the ability of Brown and Black Caribbean children to imagine themselves occupying these illustrated, poetic spaces. The poems I examine are for and about children, but the illustrations make clear just which children the poems are for. Of course, despite the ways these textbooks, and the ones before them, sought to associate poetry with whiteness and Britishness, generations of Caribbean readers and writers of color did make spaces for themselves in the worlds of poetry and the imagination, responding to—and rewriting—the British poetic canon with a fascinating and compelling canon of their own. Here, I analyze editor J. O. Cutteridge's imperial project in the West Indian Readers, while also remembering the range of ways that actual Caribbean students might have responded, including by reimagining, resisting, or simply ignoring the kind of education these schoolbooks propounded. In relying on British poetry to reinforce white supremacy, the West Indian Readers continue the project of the many colonial textbooks that came before them. These books were preceded by the Nelson publisher's hugely popular Royal Readers. The Royal Readers had long been used for education throughout the British Empire, in the Caribbean, in Canada, and in Australia and New Zealand. Though they were constructed with British students in mind (as a look at the content makes clear), they were read—and memorized—by students in very different geographical, and colonial, contexts. The most exploitative version of this encounter was probably in the Caribbean, where children were required to memorize and recite poems like Wordsworth's "Daffodils," about a plant they had never seen. Many twentieth-century Caribbean authors—Lorna Goodison, V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Kamau Brathwaite—represent or respond to scenes of colonial instruction in nineteenth-century British poetry; this experience of colonial education is sometimes called "the daffodil gap."3 Though the prose sections of the West Indian Readers were much more likely to feature Caribbean plants than British ones, when it comes to the poetry, the problem of primarily British content remained. The Royal Readers were composed for white British students...