Caribbean Poet Research Articles

Maneuvering Colonial and Postcolonial Resistances with Poetry: A Comparative Study of Nazrul and Walcott

This article aims to place poems by Kazi Nazrul Islam of Bangla literature in a comparative study with those by the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott. Nazrul wrote when his country India was under British colonial rule and Walcott wrote when his Caribbean region was under British colonialism and in postcolonial period. The study becomes inevitable against a backdrop where comparative studies of Nazrul have been conducted with American and European authors who lack similar colonial backgrounds. Additionally, when Nazrul is compared with non-American and non-European authors, his Islamic identity, which transforms into his all-embracing humanity, is often omitted or sidelined. Thus, when poems by Nazrul and those by Walcott are in a comparative study, the two poets from two different marginalized nations exhibit conspicuous affinities in their poetic resistances. This is how this paper looks forward to doing a comparative study of the poems by Nazrul and those by Walcott by adopting the methods of Traditional Literary Criticism and a new comparative study as shaped by Zepetnek. The results which the study yields are that the poets maneuver identical poetic resistances by addressing the nation’s unity, revival of history, composition of unique literature, concern for the working-class people, and anti-colonial struggle. The results of the research may contribute to raising cultural awareness among marginalized nations about resisting aggression.

Political theology from the global south: Enrique Dussel and the poetics of liberation

In recent decades, thinkers like Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben have argued for a serious political engagement with early Christian thought and its emphasis on collectivity and community. Notwithstanding their important theoretical contributions, these writers often remain within a limited Eurocentric framework, foreclosing the possibility of a truly decolonial political theology. Crucially, their relatively recent reappraisals tend to ignore important precursors of Christian Marxism from the Global South, namely liberation theology and the philosophy of liberation, as elaborated by the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. This essay contextualizes Dussel’s liberational thought in the contexts of political theology and literary representation. It pays particular attention to Dussel’s study of the Theological Metaphors of Marx by synthesizing a model of literary inquiry based on his philosophy and applying it to a reading of counter-hegemonic poetry by the Caribbean poet Pedro Mir, namely his long poem “Countersong to Walt Whitman.” This reading makes explicit the implicit theological dimension of Mir’s poetic text. Finally, the essay conceptualizes this interpretive model as a poetics of liberation: a mode of engagement with mutually determining discourses – politics, poetics, aesthetics – as well as a mode of reading which unravels the transformation of these discourses in lyrical forms. Writing from the periphery of the US empire, Mir therefore constructs a mode of address which arms itself with both political and theological discourses, however implicitly. To the empire’s miraculous state of exception, Mir counterpoises a redemptive state of rebellion.

“A language of wet stones and mists”: The Caribbean Poet as a Traveller in Wales and England

“A language of wet stones and mists”: The Caribbean Poet as a Traveller in Wales and England

Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics

Reviewed by: The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics by Ren Ellis Neyra Pamela Zamora Quesada (bio) Ren Ellis Neyra, The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics. Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 222. The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics offers a compelling elaboration of poetics through a Latinx, Caribbean, and African diasporic archive. In terms of methodology, despite the title's focus on listening, Ren Ellis Neyra does not position "sound" as the most well-suited sense for critical analysis. Instead, they call for attuning to synesthesia "that erupt[s] from what was there before the US, and from places beyond and besides US regimes of representation" (xvi). These places are the territory of Puerto Rico and the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Each chapter shows how, by attending to Black, Latinx, and queer sonic audiovisual archives—namely, films, performances, music, literary texts, and a court case transcript—it is possible to embody more ethical solidarities within Latinx and Caribbean realities. Following Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation (1997), the introduction elaborates upon the paradigm of the cry as an inarticulate sound evoking unruliness (18). This sonic unruliness is demonstrated through the analysis of Nude Laughing, a performance by the Mexican American border artist Xandra Ibarra, and the concert of the Afro Puerto Rican group Macha Colón y los Okapi. Particularly illuminating in this regard is Ellis Neyra's reading of Ibarra's retching or laugh, which comes to represent the unruly sound of the Caribbean that rejects white gendered mandates and insists on possibilities of alternative modes of sense and being. Continuing with the analysis of performance, the first chapter addresses multisensorial listening as a variation of close reading. Ellis Neyra defines "unruly audition" as a mode of listening that derives from the excessive pleasure stimulated by salsa, in this case, a listening practice that disrupts market expectations placed on salsa dancers' bodies (31). For instance, Ellis Neyra investigates the riot that ended a Fania All-Stars concert at Yankee Stadium in 1973. Their reading of the riot suggests that an excessive pleasure engendered by salsa exceeded the expected behavior of the audience, troubling the commodification of the musicians and the listeners' status as consumers (35). Refusals of American sovereignty are at the core of the second chapter. Chapter 2 begins by analyzing Lady, a character in Nuyorican playwright Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses (2003), who is held captive in a toilet room by another [End Page 109] character, Gentleman. Lady, a farcical metonymy of Puerto Rico's political status (66), does not contest her subjugated position by verbally confronting her captor, but rather through excretory sounds. Ellis Neyra then reads Lady's refusal alongside a real-life refusal: that of Marie Haydée Beltrán Torres, "Puerto-and Chicago-Rican" member of the political group Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) (56), who declined to engage in court proceedings related to her part in the bombing of US infrastructure. Insisting on her incarcerated condition (referring, by extension, to the Puerto Rican colonial situation), she declares the trial is "illegal from her (collective) anticolonial position" (85). Lady and Beltrán Torres exercise agency that "does not restore narratives of 'self-possession' and individuation" (89). Thus, the chapter claims that their sonic performances resist "the patriarchalization of female gender as white, properly domesticated, and in existence for the increase of white individuated holdings on being" (88). The third chapter theorizes the concept of "sensorial errancy" in relation to the films of Puerto Rican filmmaker Beatriz Santiago Muñoz. For Ellis Neyra, each film recreates an escape of the touristic and military gaze of municipalities Ceiba, Culebra, and Vieques. This escape occurs by way of the chapter's anchoring concept of sensorial errancy, which refers to the displaced centrality of "white humanist narrative and its antiblack hierarchy of the senses," which make space for an alternative Puerto Rican history, still unknown and therefore only imagined (109). Sensorial errancy sonically orients viewers to images and sounds within an opaque relationship that requires an attentive and slow apprehension. For instance, in Otros usos (2014) Santiago Muñoz...

White Mythologies

This response essay engages the three book discussion essays by Ronald Mendoza–de Jesús, Petra R. Rivera-Rideau, and Rocío Zambrana on The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020). Following questions of anti-Blackness in Spanish Caribbean (especially Puerto Rican) aesthetics, culture, and history that are distinctly presented and theorized in each of the scholarly interlocutor’s book-forum essays, this essay thinks about reading itself and other perceptual modes, such as listening, qua Whiteness, “the ontic,” and “slow violence.” In its (re)considerations of the senses, it additionally critiques several foci of contemporary aesthetic and cultural theory and production, such as the current fashion of hyperbolizing aesthesis and poiesis as salvific and unquestionably relational in lieu of reckoning with ethical questions of reading, the perilous return of vitalism, and the discourse of White cultural nationalism afoot in representations of Puerto Rico today.

Contributors

Contributors

Modern Dermabrasions

This essay sketches out a protocol for reading Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) from the vantage point of Ellis Neyra’s more recent work on Brownness and (non)relation. The essay aims to explore further the tensions that Ellis Neyra has identified across the fault lines of “Black/Brown” racial formations in a post-1492 context by paying specific attention to how these tensions crystalize in Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean studies. The essay unpacks Ellis Neyra’s account of the breakdown of the concept of Brownness as articulated in José Estebán Muñoz’s work in order to detect an analogous breakdown in Bolívar Echevarría’s influential work on racial modernity. In conclusion, the essay poses a question about the emancipatory potential of abjection by putting Ellis Neyra’s compelling reading of Pedro Pietri’s The Masses Are Asses in dialogue with the work of the late feminist-deconstructionist thinker Mara Negrón.

Sensorial Errancy in Decolonial Key

This reflection on Ren Ellys Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) engages their reading of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz’s cinema, paying particular attention to sensorial actualities that offer apprehension of the past of colonial violence that is the present. It focuses in particular on Santiago Muñoz’s Otros Usos (2014), which specifically explores Vieques, Puerto Rico. To apprehend the past that is the present requires indexing the continuity of the plantation economy, and thus its racial order, in the military complex, in the tourist economy, and in the current rounds of colonial settlement through tax haven conditions in the realm of real estate. The essay shifts the language of anticolonial sensorial errancy to decolonial sensorial errancy to focus on the forms of “slow violence” of economic invasion/ control, the productivity of which presses us to attend to the forms of insidious, ubiquitous racial violence they represent.

When Tía Ate the Telegram

This essay applies Ren Ellis Neyra’s concepts of defiance, solidarity, and mulitpoetic sensorial listening from The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics (2020) to the author’s own family story about how her great-aunt ate the telegram announcing her brother’s death in the Korean War. Through interpreting the story with multipoetic sensorial listening as a potential methodology, the author uncovers how this brief act so ingrained in her family lore might serve as a form of defiance against colonialism and militarization in Puerto Rico. The essay also questions what it means to have a productive form of defiance and protest. Overall, the author uses the story of her aunt eating the telegram to demonstrate how Ellis Neyra’s multipoetic sensorial listening could excavate alternative archives and ways of knowing left out of Western modernity.

Colonial Representation of Caribbean in Rosaline Bacchus’ Haiku Poems

The Caribbean has a long history which is reflected in their literature. The existence of Haiku poems in Caribbean literature is an interesting thing to be analyzed. The object of this research is Haiku poems written by a Caribbean poet, Rosaline Bacchus. A Haiku poem is a short poem originally from Japan, usually consisting of 5-7-5 or 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Although it is a short poem, Haiku can depict the reality and experience of Caribbean people. This research aims to describe the diction and imagery that appear in Rosaline Bacchus’s Haiku poems and to reveal the colonial representation in the poems. The researcher uses the explication theory to analyze the diction and imagery and postcolonial theory to reveal the colonial representation inside the poems. This research is descriptive qualitative research. The textual analysis method is used to find out the meaning of each line of the poem. From the analysis, it can be seen that the diction of the Haiku poems is dominated by denotative and concrete words. Denotative and concrete words help the poet to describe the situation during the Caribbean’s colonization explicitly. Besides, the poems are also dominated by visual, auditory, and kinesthetic imagery. The imagery and the diction bring the reader to feel the reality that happened during the colonization era. The researchers hope that this research will give positive contributions to the development of literature, especially Island studies.

Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics.

4Poetics

Abstract This review examines three books published in the field of poetics in 2020: Candice Amich’s Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas; Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses: Listening to Latinx and Caribbean Poetics; and Anthony Reed’s Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. I show that these three books, which discuss poetry in connection with other art forms, each call for a reordering of the senses through which we perceive and analyze poetry (and other texts). While Ellis Neyra advocates multisensorial listening and Reed calls for a mode of listening attentive to what remains unnamed within current perceptual and political schema, Amich shows the importance of paying attention to the embodied rhythms and tactility of poetry and performance texts. For all three authors, these alternatives to individualized, detached, and indeed deadened linguistic contemplation proffer strategies for remaking not only common sense, but the common itself. The chapter is structured under the following headings: 1. Introduction; 2. Poetics; 3. Sensoria; 4. Politics.

On “The Burning Beach”: Immersion, Errantry, and Caribbean Relation

ABSTRACT In the 1980s and early 1990s, as relational psychoanalysis was gaining ground in the United States, French Caribbean poet and writer, Édouard Glissant, used the same term, Relation, to describe his creolized human experience of the flow of the world. Glissant’s relational subject is a beachwalker, parsing the shoreline with his footsteps, traversing the edge between land and water in a mixture of grounding and flow that he also termed errantry. In Stacey Novack’s discussion of Marion Milner’s psychoanalytic account of creativity and self-immersive states in her 1950 work, On Not Being Able to Paint, a sense of aliveness that comes from an experience of the relational flow of the world is likened to the plunge into a body of water. For Glissant, however, the sea is part of a landscape that is corrugated, punctuated, staggered and staged. Even the most inward state is lapped and tickled by the tendrils of the Other, and this interlapping interplay is generative and creative. Novack’s discussion offers an occasion for thinking about how both Caribbean and psychoanalytic relationality understand immersive inward states, as frightening, oceanic, and boundless or as a staged descent, a dipping one’s toes in-and-out of the waters on, as Glissant termed it, the burning beach of reality.

Body and Gesture in Derek Walcott’s Theatre

Reflecting on Derek Walcott’s early relationship with movement, dance and ritual, this article sheds light on the centrality of embodied memory in Walcott’s work for the stage and reflects on the relationship between memory and materiality in his epistemology of performance. Walcott’s ideas shaped his approach to dramaturgy in the late 1950s and position his work in relation to global debates around materialism (Brecht) and ritualism (Grotowski) in the theatre. A discussion of two plays, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Pantomime, examines the use of gestural language in specific performances of each. Such an approach demonstrates that the importance of embodied memory, as reflected in the staging of these plays, relates to certain Afro-Caribbean belief systems, which have exerted much influence on Walcott’s work. The article also emphasizes how Walcott’s theatre functions as a decolonial praxis that fosters the emergence of empowered subjectivities and Africanist modes of humanness that challenge the cultural order of colonialism. Jason Allen-Paisant is a lecturer in Caribbean Poetics and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds, and Director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. He is currently at work on the monograph Staging Black Futures in the Twenty-First Century.

Tribute to Kamau Brathwaite (May 11, 1930 to February 4, 2020)

A tribute to the life and works of Kamau Brathwaite , a prominant Caribbean poet and scholar born and raised in Barbados, by close friend Dr.Timothy Reiss.

Subjection and Resistance: Landscapes, Gardens, Myths and Vestigial Presences in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics

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.

“Sing the Bones Home”: Material Memory and the Project of Freedom in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! represents maritime materialities below the sea’s surface in relation to aesthetic geographies of the sea in the aftermath of slavery as an abyss of loss, thereby extending modernist aesthetics while offering a strategic and revisionary response to male-centered modernist writing. Keen attention into the sea as an innovating and renewing source reveals that the poem imagines the sea as a literal, formal, and thematic agent for the “decontamination” of language—which, Philip maintains, is contaminated by imperialism—and of the received history about slavery. The poem focuses its investigation on the case of the 1781 Zong massacre and the Gregson v. Gilbert maritime insurance case that arose in its wake. Zong! mourns the massacre of 150 Africans who were thrown overboard so that owners of the slave ship could collect insurance money on lost “cargo”. In conversation with Caribbean poets and thinkers, such as Grace Nichols, and African oral traditions, the poem explores forms of memory that go beyond the non-history officially afforded to the enslaved and their descendants. Throughout the poem, the sea is a site of decontamination through which Zong! stages its attempt to recover the unrecoverable. While many scholars have understandably focused on the events aboard the ship, a small number of ecocritical readings have highlighted the poem’s engagement with the materiality of the sea. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism and black feminist theories of the human, this article will discuss the sea as a material geography, going deeper to investigate the poem’s rarely discussed focus on biological and chemical materiality as juxtaposed to representations of black women’s flesh, arguing that it functions as a feminist provocation to both human exceptionalism and the racial boundaries of the human.

(B)Orders of Immobility

Abstract Against the promise of free movement and mobility celebrated by the narrative of capitalism and globalization, the border stands as a stark reminder of the terrorizing history of death, destruction, and humiliation at the frontier. Like the Atlantic Ocean, home of the invisible and brutalizing memory of the slave trade, the Mediterranean and the Sonoran Desert today have become a dead zone, a dark trail of loss and sufferance amidst faint dreams of open lands and seas and freedom to roam. The growing militarization and securitization of the border unleashed by sophisticated technologies and algorithms of surveillance reflect a disturbing precariousness of empathy which seeks to conceal and banalize the trauma of crossing frontiers. By framing the debate of borders around security, threat and territory, the narrow calculus of border thinking multiplies and mutates beyond the physical spaces of the frontier, animating in the process a narrative of invasion, cultural purity, and territorial privilege. This article offers a critical reading of the politics, performance, and poetics of the border, border practices and border thinking in our current fractious conjuncture. Using the works of Caribbean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant, I argue for a different interpretation and poetics of the border, one which does not nullify rootedness but refutes the tyranny of the “totalitarian root”. Under this alternative imaginary, the degeneration of borders into zones of non-being and the converse image of mobility as a human right force us to re-visit old fundamental questions about the distribution of the earth.

Whose Troy? Whose Rome? Whose Europe? Three Medieval Londons and the London of Derek Walcott’s 'Omeros'

What does it mean that so many medievalists, especially in the United States and in Canada, study the European middle ages without being from or of Europe? What does it mean if we specify, further, those who don’t come from the United States or Canada either, but from areas of the world that experienced western European empire, as most of the globe did, as a systematic political and psychological subordination to Europe? I take the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s depiction of late twentieth-century London in his long narrative poem Omeros as a way to pose the question of what Europe might look like from the other side of the relationship of domination, that is, to define Walcott’s Europe. Walcott’s London repudiates Europe, and with it what he calls History, exactly the kind of history made by the European epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante in the form of the world-destinies they constructed for Europe in the cities of Troy and Rome, and made by their would-be successor London. But he does so with difficulty: the Troy of Homer and Virgil has long sought to seduce him into rendering his own island into its terms, elegiac and nostalgic. He seeks instead a poetry of the local, the small, the unvarnished, and the present tense. In doing so, he constructs a point of view that exposes the presumption and the brutality that sits inside medieval texts offered to the reader as celebrations of London and the history it contributes to making; but his perspective also brings out of the same texts their half-conscious efforts, repressed in the name of History, to speak for the local, the small, the unvarnished, and the present, on behalf of the desire for human adequacy to self, sociality, and community without war. Roughly speaking, desire, or history, shows up in the view from Walcott’s St. Lucia in the face of the History for which Europe is a metonym. Medieval texts read from outside the European frame are liable to be different from those read from within that frame; we need medieval readings from underneath and outside the European matrix that can put Europe in question, though it may be that History, and the project of a dominating Europe, remains too seductive to renounce.

The Ruth in (T)ruth: Redactive Reading and Feminist Provocations to History in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

This essay coins the concept of redactive reading to describe a method for interpreting women’s absences in racialized and gendered histories of collective trauma through M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poem, Zong! In 1781, the Zong crew murdered as many as 150 African captives following a water shortage and tried to claim insurance on victims. Gregson v. Gilbert denied plaintiffs the right to profit from murder without indicting anyone for the atrocity. This diasporic Caribbean poet revives mythological figures—notably, the biblical Ruth—to expose Western law and the English language as insidious tools of epistemic violence. In naming three archetypes that reincarnate “ruth”— the rebellious slave, the lady of society, and the raped whore—this article interrogates the white, patriarchal, imperialist imaginary behind the massacre. Redactive reading is a strategy for reading femininity as a structuring absence on which canons of exclusion—from legal rights to representational politics and the sympathetic imagination—are built.