The (Un)Exploded Volcano: Creolization and Intertextuality in the Novels of Daniel Maximin

Abstract

In The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820, Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite defines creolization as way of seeing Jamaican [and, by extension, Caribbean] society, not in terms of white and black, master and slave, in separate nuclear units, but as contributory parts of a (307). Notwithstanding tremendous injustices that characterized white-black, master-slave relationships in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Jamaica, Brathwaite finds a great, if relatively unexplored, potential in confluence of these two worlds: both groups had adapt themselves to a new environment and to each other. The friction created by this confrontation was cruel, but it was also creative. At that point in history, Brathwaite goes on to argue, Jamaican society not recognize these elements of its own creativity, and this blindness to potential that creolization brought with it resulted in the failure of Jamaican society; the movement towards cultural wholeness or homogeneity was halted, and island would remain caught in trap of a dualistic thinking that did not correspond to cross-cultural realities of Caribbean. As Brathwaite has insisted throughout his career, in both his poetry and his theoretical works, it is this cross-cultural challenge that not only diverse worlds of Caribbean but world as a whole must learn how to confront. Brathwaite's claims clearly run counter to manichean rhetoric of colonialism and decolonization, each of which is grounded in a vision of essential apartness of colonizer and colonized, as well as to equally polarizing aesthetics of Negritude (at least in Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor's early formulations of it). Rather than stressing separation of cultures, Brathwaite identifies hybridity, cultural me'tissage, as necessary pre-condition of future emergence, at local level, of successful Caribbean societies and, at global level, of a functional world order, and he is certainly not alone in this enterprise: it is this anti-essentialist way of thinking that postcolonial critics are increasingly promoting, as old certitudes about Other, what Sara Suleri has referred to as the simple pieties that idiom of alterity frequently cloaks (9), give way to a newfound sense of ambivalence of cultural