Abstract
Introduction
Velma Pollard’s Considering Woman I and II embodies an overarching concern that is ever-present in the Caribbean literature and literary criticism offerings listed below – that is the engagement with the past to articulate, theorize and, at times, challenge long-standing discourses and assertions concerning postcolonial subjectivities in liminal and marginal spaces. Pollard’s collection is not simply a republication of Considering Woman (1989); rather, it incorporates a second collection, Considering Woman II that is placed in explicit dialogue with the previous one. For example, narratives that are unambiguously set in the past are accompanied by commentaries written by contemporary women. Conversations between elderly and young women straddle genre, time and space, making it readily apparent that contemporary Caribbean women are plagued by many of the same issues that informed and shaped the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. Pollard’s collection is also emblematic of this list in that it is not confined to one genre. Her use of short stories, fables, and memoirs appeals to multiple aesthetic and intellectual values. These values are mirrored not only in Opal Palmer Adisa and Donna Aza Weir-Soley’s collection, Caribbean Exotic – which includes poems, fiction, critical essays, and pieces designed to celebrate desire – but also in the multivalent approach to discourses on Caribbean postcolonial subjectivity as represented in this year’s list.
The poetry offerings feature collections by Kamau Brathwaite, Wayne Brown, Una Marson and Geoffrey Philip as well as an anthology of Black British poetry, edited by Kwame Dawes. Brathwaite’s Elegguas continues his focus on the relationship between Africa and the New World by drawing upon the African tradition of speaking to the dead, a practice firmly rooted in the Caribbean. The title itself is a play on the words “elegy” and “Eleggua”, the Yoruba deity that inhabits the crossroads between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Like much of his oeuvre, this collection is decidedly political, including elegies for assassinated revolutionaries such as Walter Rodney. Red, edited by Dawes, is unique in that each poem, written by both firmly established Black British poets as well as newcomers, is based on the colour red. As can be expected, these poems inevitably deal with subject matters such as politics, violence, and anger; but they also unexpectedly associate the colour with mood, memory, and sounds. The reissue of Wayne Brown’s On the Coast and Other Poems not only reintroduces Brown’s revolutionary style but also emphasizes his seminal role in Caribbean poetry. Una Marson: Selected Poems brings together in one collection her most noteworthy poems. In addition to Marson’s better-known works, Una Marson includes unpublished poems written between the 1930s and the 1950s. It highlights her seminal role in articulating issues of gender and racial oppression in the Caribbean as well as her use of Jamaican vernacular. Geoffrey Philip’s Dubwise employs the metaphor of “Dub”, a Jamaican musical invention that embraces urban life, to engage concerns of family, migration, home and loss.
Significant strides have also been made to recover and reintroduce into circulation writings that have long been unavailable but seminal to the foundations of Caribbean literature and anti-colonial and nationalist discourses. Andrew Salkey’s Drought, Earthquake, Hurricane, and Riot; Austin C. Clarke’s The Survivors of the Crossing, amongst Thistles and Thorns; Earl Lovelace’s While God’s Are Falling; George Lamming’s Of Age and Innocence and Wilson Harris’s The Eye of the Scarecrow have been republished through Peepal Tree Press’s “Caribbean Modern Classics” as part of this continued effort. Earl Lovelace’s novel, Is Just a Movie, is one of the most highly anticipated novels on the list. It is his first novel since the 1996 publication of Salt, winner of the Commonwealth Prize. Is Just a Movie follows the everyday experiments of Trinidadian townsfolk after the failed Black Power Rebellion of 1970 as they experience moments of magic and rebellion that help to reshape and redefine their identities as postcolonial subjects. The list’s fiction also includes novels by Myriam Chancy and Jan Lowe Shinebourne. While placing Haiti in a global context, Chancy’s The Loneliness of Angels is narrated by multiple voices that recall their often-tumultuous past during their search for redemption and alternative futures through the exploration of spirituality in Caribbean life and culture. In her novel, Chinese Women, Jan Lowe Shinebourne juxtaposes the racial past of Guyana with contemporary Islamic radicalism. Albert Azis, a Guyanese Indian Muslim, clings to racial resentments nurtured by the treatment he receives as a child despite his success as an engineer in the Canadian nuclear system. His story illustrates how the oftentimes vexed racial history of the region informs postcolonial subjectivities in sometimes disturbing ways.
Much in the same way that the fiction offerings engage the past to contemplate postcolonial subjectivities from interdisciplinary, multi-genre and diasporic perspectives, so does the literary criticism turn to the historical past to engage contemplations on postcolonial subjectivities in multivalent ways. Paul B. Miller’s Elusive Origins focuses on writing by Alejo Carpentier, C.L.R. James, Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, Reinaldo Arenas, and Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá that represent the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolution in the Caribbean. Miller asserts that these authors deploy the use of historical fiction to re-evaluate their own conflicted relationship to modernity.
The role of the historical past is also central to discourses concerning female sexuality as represented in Caribbean literature. In her Fictions of Feminine Citizenship, Donette Francis chronicles an alternative history by paying keen attention to the historical context for the socialization of female sexuality as well as sexual violence that have been instrumental to imperial and nationalist understandings of citizenship. Francis draws attention to how contemporary diasporic Caribbean women writers have revised the romance novel to create a body of feminist literature she terms “anti-romance”. She argues that anti-romance literature reveals the sexual realities of Caribbean women and girls and challenges conventional regional histories. Finally, resisting the impulse to underscore female agency, Francis calls attention to both liminal spaces of vulnerability and possibility for Caribbean women.
The criticism offerings make significant contributions to the field of Caribbean Literary Studies. Mark McWatt’s The Caribbean Short Story is the most comprehensive study of its kind. The collection of essays explores the pivotal role the Caribbean short story has played in cultural production during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, traces key figures as well as literary and critical history in Anglophone Caribbean literature. It also examines new perspectives on long-standing and vexed discourses as well as new approaches to literary criticism such as eco-criticism and queer studies.
In her latest work, Create Dangerously, Edwidge Danticat observes that to protect shattered psyches, society cultivates collective and historical amnesia. In response, she premises that the salient and dangerous role of the immigrant writer puts not only the writer’s life at risk for writing uncomfortable truths but also the reader’s life, for reading them. Danticat counters this historical amnesia by writing dangerous and deeply personal stories that refuse the praxis of rewriting history in a manner that is more palatable and less disturbing. She unapologetically tells the stories of suffering, torture, AIDS, rape and death. Even more subversive, through an interrogation of the aftermath of natural disasters in her native Haiti and the United States, Danticat suggests that the histories of these two countries are not all that different and, also, inextricably connected.