Caribbean Writers Research Articles

Von Spatz

the weight of figures, yet his emphasis on mundane interactions and their conversational subtleties ensures the novel’s gravity. Like the literary form of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, Ondjaki looks no further than these brief encounters to uncover life’s reverence. However, the novelist also instills a sense of fantasy through one of his protagonists, Odonato, a man whose body grows increasingly transparent as the comforts of an old life likewise disappear. Transparent City can still feel a bit eclectic at times, but more so due to the text’s insistence on reflecting a whole city’s demeanor. Some moments, such as the numerous exchanges between a seashell seller and a blinded curmudgeon, shine with an unexpected clarity. Ondjaki does stretch himself thin in some sequences, as the author’s critique of journalism through a former BBC contributor grows close to unnecessary and tangential. The sheer amount of commentary and characterization of not only Luanda but also its inhabitants is otherwise naturalistic and accessible. Notably, Stephen Henighan’s translation never appears to soften Ondjaki’s voice, preserving tonal subtleties amid the English adaptation. Ondjaki instills a sense of urban congestion throughout his discourse without unnecessary convolution. Through his examination of economic collapse and personal desperation, Ondjaki ’s wit rises. Transparent City never quite hits satirical notes as dire as a text like Mustafa Khalifa’s The Shell, but this also helps the commentary from feeling clinical or dogmatic. Ondjaki seems far more interested in observing his setting “as is” rather than prescribing a remedy. Transparent City is at its strongest when it is momentary with its prose. The thankfully sparse moments in which the text examines a single character or group of characters for too long are when it likewise drifts from its exceptional experimentation . Regardless, Ondjaki successfully reconciles the utility of a consistent narrative thread while maintaining an utterly unique form of transmission. Contrary to his text’s namesake, Ondjaki’s latest offering is far from invisible. Daniel Bokemper Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Anna Haifisch Von Spatz Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2018. 68 pages. Anna Haifisch’s absurdist graphic novel Von Spatz is brilliant, weird, and darkly funny. Von Spatz is a tribute to artists, by an artist, inhabited by the influence of comic strips and animation throughout history. Haifisch is a German cartoonist and printmaker who cofounded the indie comics festival The Millionaire’s Club, held Patrick Chamoiseau Migrant Brothers: A Poet’s Declaration of Human Dignity Trans. Matthew Amos & Fredrik Rönnbäck Yale University Press Migrant Brothers is a thick lyric critique of the immigration crisis in southern and eastern Europe, a book of deliberate poetic activism spurred by vicarious encounters with brutality in the heart of France. In wandering prose poems translated from the French, Caribbean writer Patrick Chamoiseau pleads “for a global politics of hospitality” stretching beyond Europe and into all places humanity is found. Patrick Chamoiseau Slave Old Man Trans. Linda Coverdale New Press In Martinique, a plantation slave makes his escape into the rain forest, only to be followed relentlessly by his oppressor. As the chase proceeds through the thick wilderness, the nature surrounding them begins to exert an ethereal power over the men, and their lives are radically changed. With surreal prose, Patrick Chamoiseau depicts the cruelty of slavery and the beauty of Creole culture. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 73 annually in Leipzig, Germany. Haifisch’s strip The Artist was published as a collection in 2016 by Breakdown Press. The Artist is an episodic peek into the world of an artist , with themes that reemerge in Von Spatz. Von Spatz is a fictional rehabilitation center for artists in crisis, featuring such restorative features as a penguin pool, hot dog stand, and art supply store. In the opening pages, Walt Disney has a breakdown, destroying his office and alienating those around him, and is brought to the center by his wife. With a visually fantastic color palette of yellow, pink, and teal, the world of Von Spatz is a candy-colored haven inhabited by cranky artistic geniuses. Once at the luxurious Von Spatz, Walt meets French artist and illustrator Tomi Ungerer and Romanian cartoonist and illustrator Saul Steinberg. The three men...

Between ‘home’ and migritude: Louise Bennett, Kamau Brathwaite and the poet as migrant

Abstract What is the relationship between migration and poetry? By examining poetry by Caribbean writers Louise Bennett and Kamau Brathwaite, this article provides historical context and alternative ways of answering this question. Theoretically speaking, this article embarks on the conceptual path of Aimé Cesairé’s use of négritude as a ‘compass of suffering’. It does so by adopting Vijay Prashad and Shailja Patel’s term migritude or an aesthetic attempt to live within the idea of the migrant subject. The article begins with a sketch that examines Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home’ in the context of the Syrian refugee crisis. It then looks into the archive of Bennett’s and Brathwaite’s poetry to see how poems written by migrant authors help to shape visions of migration and migrant subjects.

Exploring Literary Voices in The Lost Child

In The Lost Child (2015) Phillips weaves an intricate web of multiple stories that move in time from post-war Britain to the nineteenth-century Yorkshire setting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which is here imaginatively reworked. In this novel, it is also possible to trace the influence of the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys and references to aspects of Phillips’s autobiography. This article discusses intertextuality in the novel and argues that literary refractions and the ensuing polyphony contribute to Phillips’s ongoing project of critically engaging with the English cultural and literary heritage.

Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood

Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood

Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics

Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics

Interfaces entre práticas de linguagem e políticas linguísticas: diglossia, crioulidade e ensino de línguas crioulas nas Antilhas francesas

Neste artigo buscamos analisar os contextos pedagógicos de ensino/aprendizagem das línguas crioulas nos departamentos ultramarinos franceses de Martinica e Guadalupe. Nossas análises se organizam em três eixos que articulam línguas, ensino e culturas literárias. De início, examinamos as diretrizes pedagógicas da Educação nacional francesa para compreender as políticas públicas de ensino das línguas crioulas nas ilhas caribenhas a partir da departamentalização (1946). Em seguida, privilegiamos a importância das línguas crioulas na formação identitária dos povos insulares e na plenitude de suas cidadanias. Por fim, pretendemos observar como a literatura se tornou espaço de tomada de consciência e de questionamento dos rumos identitários, sociais, políticos e culturais na pós-colonização. Neste contexto, muitos escritores caribenhos acolhem em suas produções o ambiente escolar e suas facetas. Trata-se de denunciar escolas dissociadas da realidade crioula e reivindicar um espaço escolar capaz de privilegiar as artes de dizer e viver da crioulidade.--- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2017n42a867

Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination by Sarah Phillips Casteel

Reviewed by: Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination by Sarah Phillips Casteel Laura Arnold Leibman (bio) Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination by Sarah Phillips Casteel. Columbia University Press, 2016. 336pp. + ill. Sarah Phillips Casteel’s marvelous new tome Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination explores the literary representations of Jewishness in postwar Caribbean literature. Casteel’s work differs from most previous explorations of Jewish-Black relations in literature and history by shifting the discussion southward to the Caribbean. In doing so, Casteel foregrounds the overlap between Jewish and Black diasporic histories. Previous scholars’ focus on the United States, she argues, has skewed the way we understand Jewish-Black relations. Whereas discussion of Blacks and Jews in the United States tend to be a competitive “interaction of different collective memories…[that] takes the form of a zero-sum struggle for preeminence,” Caribbean writers’ invocation of 1492 allows writers to evoke Jews in a shared moment of trauma and “unexpected convergences” (15, 10). Casteel shows how Caribbean writers take a “multidirectional” approach to interracial relations. This approach invokes Jews in order to “unsettle dominant narratives of slavery, empire, and race” (2). Casteel breaks the evidence for her argument into two main sections: 1492 and Holocausts. In the first part of Calypso Jews, Casteel explores the Jewish influence on Caribbean literature through the trope of 1492, which has great resonance as it marks not only the Jewish expulsion from Spain, but also the “onset of European colonization” of the Americas (12). By placing 1492 at the start of her discussion, Casteel not only pays heed to chronology but also distances Caribbean literature from “Ashkenormativity.” Casteel argues that “a specific awareness of the Sephardic Caribbean past underlies the persistent presence of Jews in Caribbean literature” (28, emphasis mine). She breaks this presence down into four main tropes: Sephardism, Marranism, Port Jews, and Plantation Jews. Casteel borrows the term “Sephardism” from Yael Halevi-Wise and John Docker, who use the term to describe literature that harnesses “Sephardic motifs to contest normative cultural and historical narratives” and works that are “characterized by an entwining of histories and a pluralistic conception of identity” (37). Sephardism tends to appear in Caribbean literature written following the 1992 quincentennial celebrations. A second but [End Page 99] related motif found in Caribbean literature is that of the Marrano, the “secret of crypto-Jews who preserved a connection with Judaism after their forced conversion.” Casteel argues that in Caribbean literature, the Marrano metaphor is used by writers “preoccupied with personal and collective pasts that have been concealed or buried…[and] writers who seek to explore the creolized character of Caribbean identity” (71). In the chapters on Port and Plantation Jews, Casteel shows how Jews “for better or for worse become the primary subjects of the slavery narrative” (167). In the second part of Calypso Jews, Casteel reveals how in Caribbean literature the “Holocaust memory and the post slavery landscape intersect in a more concrete and historically grounded fashion” than discussions of slavery and the Holocaust in the United States, which tend to “understand the analogy as an abstract one between disparate historical traumas” (176). This different use of the Holocaust in Caribbean literature has its roots in Caribbean history, since during the 1930s many Caribbean islands became refugees for Jews escaping from the Nazis (176). This second section of Casteel’s book is divided into three chapters. “Calypso Jews” examines the trope of Jewish refugees in Caribbean literature. “Between Camps” explores the Holocaust “as a site of surrogate memory for Caribbean/diaspora writers who came of age during the war or the decades immediately following” (204). “Writing Under the Sign of Anne Frank” asks “Why would a writer from the Caribbean want to write about the Holocaust?” and answers by analyzing how the Holocaust becomes a “surrogate for the memory of slavery and a catalyst for decolonization as well as for the act of writing itself” (238). This is a fantastic book that makes a significant contribution to the fields of both Jewish American and Caribbean studies. One of Casteel’s great strengths is her juxtaposition of Black-Jewish relations in the Caribbean with the...

Poetry of Haitian Independence ed. by Doris Y. Kadish, Deborah Jenson

Reviewed by: Poetry of Haitian Independence ed. by Doris Y. Kadish, Deborah Jenson Marlene L. Daut (bio) Poetry of Haitian Independence Edited by DORIS Y. KADISH AND DEBORAH JENSON Translated by Norman R. Shapiro New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015 301pp. Contemporary Haitian literary criticism has often focused on questions of language and audience: for whom does the Haitian author write? In which language should she or he write, French or Haitian Kreyòl? And who read will read those works? No reader with even a cursory knowledge of Haitian society can be left unaffected by the fact that the majority of Haitians today (as in the nineteenth century) remain monolingual Kreyòl speakers, for whom the vast and rich Francophone literary tradition of the country dating back to the eighteenth century is largely inaccessible. Contemporary Francophone Caribbean novelists Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau in their famous 1989 manifesto “In Praise of Creoleness” decried the fact that the majority of mainstream Caribbean authors express themselves in European-origin languages rather than the varying Creoles spoken by the majority of Caribbean peoples. This fact led the trio to make a bold claim: “Caribbean literature does not yet exist” since it is a part of a “written production without a home audience.” The choice of Caribbean authors to publish primarily in English, French, or Spanish suggested to Bernabé, Confiant, and Chamoiseau that the writers themselves were ignorant of “the authors/readers interaction,” which is the “primary condition of the development of a literature” (886). The relative lack of Creole-language texts from the French Caribbean, signaled by these Caribbean writers, dominated the attention of much of twentieth-century Francophone postcolonial literary criticism.1 One of the continuing effects of these debates is that nineteenth-century Haitian authors (who wrote almost uniquely in French) have often been dismissed [End Page 789] as unimportant by those who suggest that their writings are bereft of originality, home audience, and rupture from French literature, and that furthermore this writing lacks the Creole-Kreyòl linguistic innovation that sets late twentieth-century Haitian letters apart from other Francophone Caribbean literary traditions. At first glance, the poems in The Poetry of Haitian Independence, all of which were originally composed in French, might appear to confirm the idea that nineteenth-century Haitian authors directed their texts to foreign (Francophone) readers rather than to Haitians themselves. However, this is far from the truth. These poems are filled with apostrophes to the Haitian people and brim with references to Haitian history, demonstrating the fervent and robust existence of a Haitian national culture that dates back to the earliest days of independence. The introduction to Doris Y. Kadish and Deborah Jenson’s edited collection of nineteenth-century Haitian poetry in translation, Poetry of Haitian Independence, which contains a beautiful foreword by the US-based Haitian novelist Edwidge Danticat, puts these historically minded poems into the context necessary for understanding them beyond the limits of past scholarship on the topic, while also soundly refuting any singular charge of imitation that might be leveled at the poets themselves. Kadish and Jenson observe, for example, that “[t]he charge of imitation directed at the poetry of Haitian independence was also leveled at [Jacques] Delille, whose critics focused, among other things, on the stilted language that recurs so predictably in neoclassical writing” (xxx). The editors further contextualize both the form and language in which early Haitian poetry appears by explaining that the adoption by Haitian poets of certain neoclassical structures and symbols was a part of many nineteenth-century literary cultures. The neoclassic style may have been attractive to Haitian poets partly because, as they write, “Neoclassicism’s orientation was toward the public. . . . [and] served to fuel public consciousness.” They continue, “Thus, the seemingly incongruous references to mythology and antiquity in early Haitian poetry reflect a tribute to the democratic values of Greek society” (xxx). With these highly (and expertly) annotated poems, Kadish and Jenson urge a more broadly historicized method of understanding nineteenth-century Haitian literature, one that can help us to move beyond Jean Price-Mars’s famous charge of “collective bovaryism.” Kadish and Jenson write, “Although Price-Mars was advocating...

Caryl Phillips' The Lost Child: A Story of Loss and Connection

Abstract: Through a reading of Caryl Phillips' most recent novel, The Lost Child (2015), this article examines a paradox at the heart of Phillips' work: the tension between the ruptures and continuities brought about by the historical encounter of north and south (specifically, eighteenth-century northern Britain and the Caribbean). The novel focuses on the lot of the lost children who were born in the wake of such a fateful meeting and whose narratives are often missing from the literary and historical records even as their ghostly traces haunt today's British society and indeed the British literary canon. Yet, as this essay demonstrates, the family disruptions and sense of loss, a legacy of slavery that mars the lives of the characters, are compensated at the fictional level by a form of literary parenthood. The novel relies on a fruitful intertextual conversation with other novels that, like The Lost Child, invest in the narrative reclamation of absent stories, the unvoiced accounts of orphans and lost, stolen, or denied children of the Empire. These texts include Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) as well as Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and some of Phillips' earlier works, notably Cambridge (1991). Keywords: Caryl Phillips, The Lost Child, Wuthering Heights, intertextuality, family I. This essay focuses on loss as a condition and consequence of the violent meeting of the northern and southern hemispheres and, more specifically, Britain and its African others in the theatre of the Caribbean. We ask how it might be possible to conceive of the of those who centuries ago were brought from one world to another under coercion, or who came with expectations of transformative possibilities that often proved devastatingly illusory, and who were all bound together by a sense of exile in whatever home they found themselves. It would appear that, in the absence of a balanced and unbiased official record, the most effective imaginative evocations of this state of lostness have been articulated in Caribbean literature. Writers like Maryse Conde, George Lamming, Caryl Phillips, Jean Rhys, and Derek Walcott--to name only some of the best-known--have engaged with the (historical and literary) colonial archive of this world-changing contact and clash of cultures and races. Such an engagement is framed by the dialogue between two literary traditions, that of the British canon and that of the tropical south, which revisits and rewrites the narratives of the former, thereby claiming those lost, silenced, and invisible children of Empire whose presence (or absence) haunts the pages of British fiction. We focus on Phillips' latest novel, The Lost Child (2015) and how it combines such historical loss with connections between these two worlds. Paradoxically it is set exclusively in England and covers a time span that ranges from eighteenth-century Liverpool, through nineteenth-century Haworth, to Leeds, London, and Oxford between the 1950s and 1980s. In particular, we consider how this many-stranded narrative puts the northern English realm of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847) in conversation with writing from the Caribbean and its diaspora, thereby performing what Walcott calls the gathering of broken pieces to restore shattered histories (Antilles 69). For Phillips, as for Walcott, this re-membering is at the very heart of Caribbean writing. From its opening, The Lost Child calls attention to the lost children of the first encounter of eighteenth-century northern England and the Black Atlantic, meaning formerly enslaved Caribbean people who, for various reasons, found themselves in Britain; it also tells the story of their lost children and their children's children. Through our discussion of the text's conversation with Wuthering Heights and works by other Caribbean writers (specifically those of Rhys and several of Phillips' earlier works), we unravel how The Lost Child engages in an intricate web of intertextuality and elaborate on the structural and hermeneutic patterning of its dialogue with other writers and their books. …

In El Batey, My Father’s Foot Lit a Fire

First published in The Caribbean Writer Volume 31 New Vistas: An Evolving Caribbean (2017): 91-93. “In El Batey, My Father's Foot Lit a Fire” is inspired by Juan Bosch's short story “Luis Pie,” narrated from the perspective of Luis Pie's son.

Nature-Function in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge

Abstract: The consensus in ecocriticism today is that deconstructing the human/nonhuman binary is crucial if we want humanity to care for the environment. Indeed, viewing the environment as something to which we are connected is seen as more conducive to producing an environmentalist consciousness than seeing it as something categorically other. By contrast, my ecocritical reading of Caryl Phillips' Cambridge (1991) reveals the extent to which nonhuman landscapes in Caribbean fiction are paradoxically represented as categorically other. In Phillips' novel, this reification of the binary works in tandem with sites of difference such as race and gender to expose how the very category of is constructed through this process of othering. Instead of discussing the environment as backdrop to the human affairs and relations that it may or may not influence, in Cambridge the environment operates as form of nature-function that echoes Michel Foucault's of authorship. For Foucault, the author is not the originator of meaning but function of discourse, of the set of assumptions that govern the production, circulation, classification, and consumption of texts. Similarly, the notion of nature-function challenges approaches that foreground the environment as pre-existing space that evolves outside of the subject and instead sees it as function of discourse. In Phillips' text, this discursively produced environment then goes on to produce the human subject. Keywords: ecocriticism, Caryl Phillips, Cambridge, environment, human ********** At first sight, Caryl Phillips' fiction may not be an obvious candidate for an ecocritical analysis. Indeed, unlike Caribbean writers like Wilson Harris or Derek Walcott, whose work explicitly engages with the environment, (1) Phillips seems interested in it only peripherally or insofar as it helps him provide context for his characters. At recent colloquium in Belgium, he inquired about ecocritical studies in way that revealed his lack of active engagement with the discipline. (2) I argue that an ecocritical study of his work is nonetheless in order in the same way as feminists have shown the study of gender as a social category of analysis (Scott 1053) to be relevant in texts in which gender is not mentioned explicitly. After all, Kate Millett's Sexual Politics (1970), classic work of feminist literary criticism, focuses exclusively on male writers who were not priori writing about gender politics, and Helene Cixous identifies her transgressive ecriture feminine as embodied by the writings of male authors such as James Joyce and Jean Genet. Similarly, I argue that Phillips' fiction lends itself to an ecocritical reading not because his texts showcase the environment as motif but because of his noted adeptness at exposing the construction of boundaries between self and other, male and female. Insofar as our understanding of the environment is predicated on culture/nature, human/nonhuman binary and Phillips masterfully deconstructs binaries throughout his work, it is therefore unsurprising that his fiction provides excellent fodder for an ecocritical analysis. Two of ecocriticism's significant impacts have been to show that humans are part and parcel of the very environment from which they had previously seen themselves as separate (3) and that the so-called nonhuman other is always already part of the human body (Timothy Morton's strange strangers and Donna Haraway's companion species, for example). For instance, William Cronon's anthology The Trouble With Wilderness (1995) was instrumental in raising consciousness about humanity's imbrication with the natural world in way that contested the elitist concept of Nature-as-tableau-in-natural-parks-for-the-rich that often defined the nineteenth century's environmentalist movement la John Muir. (4) Similarly, Morton's Ecology Without Nature (2007) and The Ecological Thought (2010) emphasize the interdependence of humanity and the environment in order to make people more accountable to an environment that is as much part of them as they are of it. …

Communication across cultures: ideological implications of Sam Selvon’s linguistic inventiveness

Abstract In the postcolonial context, language represents one of the crucial tools of cultural communication and is therefore often a subject of heated discussion. Since language constitutes the framework of cultural interaction, postcolonial authors often challenge the privileged position of Standard English within their writing by modifying and substituting it with new forms and varieties. The Trinidad-born writer Sam Selvon belongs to a handful of Caribbean authors who initiated linguistic experiments in the context of Caribbean literature and is considered one of the first Caribbean writers to employ dialect in a novel. His 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners reflects the possibilities of vernacular experimentation and thus communicates the specific experience of a particular cultural group in an authentic way.

Making Connections

PreludeThey gave me a job title: Special Collections Librarian. I curate writers' papers. I see their successes, their chaos and their attempts to produce order as they go through a creative process that can be messy, frustrating and ego-breaking. I have to understand these writers. Sometimes it is hard. But I try because their families have entrusted me, and the organisation I represent, with the responsibility of protecting their heritage and making it accessible. I am the absent and silent friend. So, sometimes I get scared too because of this responsibility.Another one of my roles is that of a conduit for researchers using these papers. So I prepare guides that help them find what they want from these archives. I often wonder whether researchers are finding what they want, and I am always thinking, How can I do this better?Overall, there is pleasure. I do not think they suspect how much pleasure I derive from this job. Pleasure in new archival discoveries made; pleasure in reading new writings based on the resources in the archives; pleasure in meeting the writers and their families. Pleasure in seeing joy on the faces of researchers.Literary archives at the UWI, St AugustineLiterary archives, also referred to as papers and collections, have traditionally been used to probe the works of writers. Within recent times, the cultural studies approach used in the study of literature has made literary archives more prominent as these resources are used to unveil the circumstances impacting on authors' lives, writing, artistic production, and reception, as well as post-publication afterlives of their works.The nature of such archives varies and may consist of any combination of the following: manuscripts; reviews; correspondence; diaries; ephemera surrounding the research and publication of the works; photographs; art; multimedia; and electronic files from personal computers. The archives of Caribbean writers held at the University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine campus repository in the Alma Jordan Library are of a similar character, with a cross-section of these material types. The collections hold the papers of authors who have contributed significantly to the development of literature in the Anglophone Caribbean; and collectively, these materials provide primary resources on the evolution of Caribbean literature and cultural thought. Among the holdings at the St Augustine campus library are the collections of celebrated Caribbean writers including Derek Walcott, Sam Selvon, C.L.R. James, Monique Roffey, Eric Roach, and materials from individuals who broadcast on the BBC radio series Caribbean Voices, 1945-58. While academia benefits from new discoveries of unpublished manuscripts, correspondence, diaries and so on, there are also insights to be derived in unearthing connections among writers and anecdotes about their lives which can further contribute to scholarship. Having these resources housed in a single repository has made the interrelationship that existed among these writers even more apparent to the curator's eye.Using the St Augustine West Indiana and Special Collections as my primary source, and focusing on the collections of Derek Walcott and C.L.R. James in particular, in this essay I demonstrate how these two archives reveal a wider web of correspondence and interconnections between other literary figures in the repository.Literary encountersThe relationship among Caribbean writers emerges clearly in the correspondence they shared. The Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James communicated with a wide cross-section of influential persons in Caribbean literature. James was a political activist and Marxist intellectual whose ideas continue to be debated and to generate scholarship. He was also an avid reader and prolific writer, and as such he accumulated materials in several locations, leading to an amassment of his papers in at least two repositories, at UWI St Augustine and Columbia University, New York. …

Writing the Haitian Earthquake and Creating Archives

HOW TO TELL THE STORY OF THE HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE? Ever since 4:53 p.m. on 12 January 2010, this is the question many of Haiti's writers have been asking. In the face of such a catastrophe with widespread death, destruction and suffering, what can writers do? In terms of aftershocks, how have the thematics and representational form of Haitian writing developed in the wake of this seismic event? This article examines responses in Haitian writing to the earthquake through the prisms of a premonitory play entitled Melovivi ou Le Piege (The Trap) by Franketienne, and of chronicles and essays written by Dany Laferriere, Yanick Lahens and Gina Athena Ulysse, who, this article argues, react to threats to and material culture by creating a unique 'aura' of archival documents in the very form of their books themselves.1In terms of archival matter, my reading is based upon the literary manuscripts of Franketienne's play Le Piege, and Yanick Lahens's Failles (Fault Lines) and Guillaume et Nathalie.2 For the analysis of the actual manuscripts, this article exploits methodologies for studying literature in statu nascendi from genetic criticism - a predominantly French phenomenon, which has rarely been considered in the same context as postcolonial studies.3 Genetic criticism's methodology for studying the dynamics of stages of creation from first to final drafts of literary manuscripts is here extrapolated beyond the point of publication to the printed works. In the Haitian context, this article proposes that there is no clear-cut dividing line separating manuscript genetics from textual genetics; instead the transitions between the two zones are more blurred. Normally, the cut-off point for genetic critics falls at the publication of the text, but my approach to Caribbean and Haitian literature also considers multiple printed versions of the works in question.In previous work, I have shown that rewriting is one of the foundational pillars of Caribbean literature.4 Here, I explore how that process of rewriting is linked with another: that of archivisation, through which chronicles and essays on the Haitian earthquake try to preserve what remains.5 Archival and rewriting impulses highlight a preoccupation with Haitian in written works that seek to produce them textually as well.6 In the Haitian context, these archive stories and rewriting practices are at their most highly concentrated because the stakes and the scale of the destruction are more widespread and catastrophic. Caribbean writers, especially in Haiti, had always been archivists preoccupied with saving the word long before the earthquake struck and the cultural search and rescue operations began. As for rewriting, this is a process to which almost all authors subject their literary texts. Yet, while all writers rewrite to some extent, Caribbean, and particularly Haitian, writers subject their own texts and essays to a near-obsessive degree of rewriting. My argument is that these rewriting and archival impulses have become even more concentrated since 2010, and nowhere more so than when they are shaping and reshaping the accounts of the Haitian earthquake which are examined here.This article contributes to debates around by suggesting that gaps and silences in the colonial archive, as identified by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, are now increasingly being actively and transitively challenged and filled in by the emergence of new postcolonial archival-type writing.7 This article builds especially on the approach of Laurent Dubois, who puts historians and novelists in the French Caribbean (Guadeloupe) in dialogue, discussing how Guadeloupean creative writers use archives in the fiction, highlighting what is missing from in this context by using the archive itself as a literary form in their work.8 However, this emphasis on fiction does not quite fit the Haitian earthquake narratives discussed here, many of which concern non-fiction and the recounting of real events. …

Sea passages: cultural flows in Caribbean poetry

ABSTRACTIn Caribbean poetry, it is time and again the sea, as site of the Middle Passage and as a marker of island experiences, of displacement and belonging, which gives shape to an inherently polyvalent poetics of location. The sea pervades many Caribbean poems, both as a historical contact zone and as an imaginative principle of a new kind of nomadic and mobile epistemology. While the “Black Atlantic” paradigm fruitfully emphasizes transit and transcultural exchange, recent scholarship has also explored the sea as a site of dwelling and a more localized Caribbean place. Ecocritical readings in particular have highlighted the role of regional environments. Moreover, they have pinpointed a long-standing intellectual concern by which Caribbean writers have turned to land and sea as a way of reconstituting poetic traditions and historical narratives. Similarly, this article will discuss “sea passages” in a double, though always complementary, sense: passages across and to the sea, that is, precisely in order to accommodate the complex cultural flows to, fro and within the Caribbean, rather than reiterating spatial binaries which writing from and about the region frequently deconstructs itself. Taking current reappraisals of poetry and place in the Caribbean as a point of departure, the article will analyse a range of little discussed and more recent works in which the sea supplies poetic themes, fluid metaphors and symbolic forms that are in the process of becoming.

Intersections

In the context of the 2015 meeting of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences in Ottawa, Ontario, two academic associations––the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) and the Association for Canadian and Québec Literatures (ACQL)––hosted a collaborative event to honour the work of Ottawa-based poet Cyril Dabydeen. Cyril read from God’s Spider, which was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014.ACQL and CACLALS are grateful to the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for their financial support of this event, and I am personally grateful to Dorothy Lane, then president of CACLALS, for her willingness to collaborate in order to bring the reading to fruition.As then Vice-President of ACQL, I was happy to introduce Cyril to a room full of scholars, writers, community members, and friends:“Born in Guyana, Cyril immigrated to Canada in 1970. His forty-five-year residence in Canada coincides neatly with the histories of both ACQL and CACLALS, both founded in the mid 1970s (1975 and 1973, respectively), and the coincidence speaks to the multiple ways in which Canada’s literary cultures have changed in the wake of Cyril’s arrival. Comprising a significant body of short stories, novels, and poetry, Cyril’s writing is particularly intriguing for its meditations on the intersections of Guyanese, Indian, and Canadian identities.As an anthologist, Cyril has also been an active shaper of literary culture: his Shapely Fire (an anthology of Black and Caribbean writing in Canada), Another Way to Dance (which collects the work of Asian poets in Canada), and Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today have been important tools in the teaching of an increasingly diverse selection of writers in Canadian classrooms and are key compilations of contemporary diasporic writing. In addition to his active career as a poet who is widely recognized for his contributions to Canadian and Caribbean writing, Cyril is also a teacher: he has taught creative writing here at the University of Ottawa for many years.”Jody MasonAssociate ProfessorDepartment of English, Carleton University

Belize — A Nation (Still) in the Making

Zee Edgell published Beka Lamb in 1982, a year after Belize attained its independence from the UK, and at a moment when anglophone Caribbean women writers and critics were establishing their space ...

‘Des fils invisibles nous relient’

This article contributes to debates on comparative approaches to the memory of the Holocaust and Atlantic slavery. It examines comparisons between colonial and Second World War histories in the recits d’enfance by three French-speaking Caribbean writers, Patrick Chamoiseau, Gisele Pineau and Maryse Conde. It argues that because there are significant difficulties involved in approaching the Caribbean’s colonial history directly, these authors approach it obliquely through the more recent history of the Second World War. The comparative approaches of these literary texts anticipate events in the public sphere such as the 2001 recognition by the French government of slavery as a crime against humanity or Nicolas Sarkozy’s failed 2008 proposal that every French school child should be assigned one of the child victims of the Holocaust to remember. Attention to these comparative approaches is valuable because it points to connections between literature, collective memory and public policy and brings to light th...

Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction, by Stanka Radović

Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction, by Stanka Radovic. University of Virginia Press, 2014.192 pages. Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction goes beyond the promise implicit in its title not only to locate the destitute, those placed outside of colonial systems of legitimacy, but also to help readers recognize those Caribbean spaces and the identities they shape that do not appear on colonial maps. In locating those people who are excluded on the basis of space as it is configured by colonial ideologies, Radovic also makes visible these peoples' acts of creative resistance against colonial practices and denials. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre's concept of "third space," she articulates how the destitute shape and claim their own spaces, and thereby themselves in the world. They do so, Radovic argues, by drawing upon both the material and the imaginative resources accessible through narrative. According to Radovic, postcolonial studies still stumbles over its reliance on binaries and/or its promotion of an in-between solution to the problem of spatial and communal autonomy. As a result, it fails to take into account the "mutually constitutive relations between space and identity" (181). Locating the Destitute does the slippery and careful work of analyzing space as both a material lack and a metaphor. Drawing upon Henri Lefebvre's concept of "third space," she articulates how the destitute shape and claim their own spaces, and thereby themselves in the world. With Lefebvre's aid, the book explores how Caribbean literature, with its common use of spatial symbols, highlights material inequities by way of the social, economic, psychological, and linguistic exclusions that often characterize postcoloniality. Radovic posits that while literature cannot correct these inequities, it can--by communicating both the practice and representation of space--potentially challenge material lack and imaginatively claim spaces of belonging. The book's argument is divided into six well-ordered chapters that make its discussion of Caribbean spaces and identities accessible to both scholars of the region and those who may be engaging with it for the first time. After an introduction stating the text's argument, goals, and methodologies, the first chapter offers one of Radovic's greatest contributions, putting pan-Caribbean postcolonial discourse into dialogue with contemporary spatial theory from Europe. The second chapter illuminates the unique particularities of Caribbean spaces and communities that evade Western (colonial) methods of identification, and thereby undermine Western pretensions to universality. Following these preliminary discussions, each of the subsequent four chapters analyzes a different Caribbean novel's use of space as both physical divider and crafted tool of agency. These text-based chapters move from exploring the West's traditionally exclusive conceptions of physical space to the more imaginative and thus inclusive notions of Caribbean cultures. Radovic's first chapter, "Caribbean Spatial Metaphors," establishes that the region's spatial identity and location have always been contested, "torn between fact and fiction," and argues that the notion of a third space best characterizes Caribbean lived experience (28).The chapter draws upon Caribbean theorists such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Edouard Glissant who articulate the region's difficulty in representing its own reality within Western classifications of realism that exclude what they cannot account for. Within the Caribbean counter-imaginary, the slave ship, the sea, the archipelago, the island's landscapes, flora and fauna, weather and constructed shelters all "maintain their geographical specificity while being transformed into a metaphor (and subsequently an emblem) of cultural location" (38). Radovic posits that readers of spatial metaphors in Caribbean literature and theory enter into a network of history and poetics whose metaphors work to create intimate connections between readers and the region, and thereby require readers to care in order to understand. …

Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing

Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing