Rhys's Pieces: Unhomeliness as Arbiter of Caribbean Creolization

Abstract

Any attempt to trace many resonances that historically have been attached to creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by long and pervading presence of colonialism in region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in contemporary Englishand French-speaking multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape substance of much of artistic and creative work emerging from region. The French Caribbean has been birthplace of two dominant cultural theories promulgated in this field in recent years: antillanite, or Caribbeannness, first broached by Martinican author and theorist Edouard Glissant in Le discours antillais in 1981, takes a geopolitical as well as a discursive approach to contesting ongoing pattern of island dependence and metropolitan domination engendered in French Caribbean by now half-century-long practice of overseas departmentalism. By taking cognizance of multi-relation that undergirds region, Glissant writes, a new creative and cultural framework for Caribbean identity can be effectively constructed. In coming to terms with the constantly shifting and variable process of creolization in Caribbean (15), he writes, its intrinsic doubleness will reveal not only distress and loss but also opportunity to assert a considerable set of possibilities ... no longer in absolute terms but as active agents of synthesis (16). The principles of creolite, on other hand, were first elaborated in Eloge de la creolite by Jean Bernabe, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant in 1989; although roundly critiqued for valorizing position over process, and for sometimes broaching slippery terrain of essentialism, it has quickly become a literary movement [that] has been for past ten years only noteworthy one in entire Caribbean, as