Abstract
This paper argues that a selection of Caribbean writers has engaged an aesthetic that spotlights the idea of a living or divine landscape through a deployment of folkloric, mythological, magical or spiritual epistemological frames. This aesthetic foregrounds the expansive possibilities of nature and other life forms in the wake of empire and global modernity. By an engagement with these tools, the creative writer deconstructs the limits of colonial ecological damage and modern-day agricultural devastation, while simultaneously affirming the Caribbean landscape as an active and creative agent within articulations of community and belonging. Through a blend of eco-criticism as examined by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Wilson Harris's formulations of the "living landscapes" and Caribbean mythologies, this essay seeks to interrogate the manner in which Caribbean poet, Olive Senior, consciously deploys the literary imagination as a platform to plant seeds of reform and activism in the trail of environmental destruction. Senior accomplishes this through notions of mythic time and space that are unfettered by monolithic ideologies and linearity. This signposts an effort to posit a reliance on a spirit-infused universe—a deeply felt ideology which is pivotal to acts of environmental healing and societal recuperation.
Highlights
This paper argues that a selection of Caribbean writers has engaged an aesthetic that spotlights the idea of a living or divine landscape through a deployment of folkloric, mythological, magical or spiritual epistemological frames
Given this colonial and neocolonial context, the Caribbean landscape presents haunting paradoxes for Caribbean intellectual workers and creative writers who aim to recuperate an alternative history through an engagement with ecological metaphors
The necessitated ritual intervention served to recover a sense of humanity and reconstitution of the self in the diaspora. To mark this nexus of history, politics, and Caribbean identity as indelibly poetic and ecological in character, Olive Senior, in her collection of poems entitled, Gardening in the Tropics (2005), engages the metaphors of gardening and nature to chronicle the region's environmental upheaval in an attempt to demonstrate that the islands persist eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics as sites for consumption and ecological plunder
Summary
This paper argues that a selection of Caribbean writers has engaged an aesthetic that spotlights the idea of a living or divine landscape through a deployment of folkloric, mythological, magical or spiritual epistemological frames. To mark this nexus of history, politics, and Caribbean identity as indelibly poetic and ecological in character, Olive Senior, in her collection of poems entitled, Gardening in the Tropics (2005), engages the metaphors of gardening and nature to chronicle the region's environmental upheaval in an attempt to demonstrate that the islands persist eTropic: electronic journal of studies in the tropics as sites for consumption and ecological plunder.
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