Abstract
Introduction
Unfortunately, three of the most influential figures of Caribbean literature left us in 2018: Guyanese author Wilson Harris, known for his poetry, novels and essays; St Lucian-born and California-based novelist Garth St. Omer and Trinidad and Tobago author V. S. Naipaul, Booker Prize winner in 1971 and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature. The impact of their works can be noted in the literary production of new generations of Caribbean writers as well as in the critical work published by scholars worldwide.
In 2018, some prestigious literary prizes were awarded to established and debut Caribbean authors. Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison was one of the recipients of the 2018 Windham Campbell Prizes whilst two Trinidad and Tobago poets, Vahni Capildeo and Shivanee N. Ramlochan, were shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection and Best First Collection, respectively. Another Trinidadian author, Celeste Mohammed, was one of the winners of the PEN America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for her short story “Six Months”. Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite received the 2018 PEN America/Voelcker Award for Poetry for his outstanding contribution to American literature. Finally, Man Booker Prize winner Marlon James was also presented with an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his exceptional accomplishments in literature.
Some notable works of Caribbean creative and academic writing were published in 2018. Trinidad-born poet and 2016 Forward Prize winner Vahni Capildeo published her eighth collection of poems, Venus as a Bear, where she explores the animal world and its relationship with humans. Although migration, her most recurring motif, is still present in this collection, the rhetoric of movement and change is illustrated through the use of a number of cross-cultural and transnational metaphors marked by inanimate and non-human dimensions. Other themes of the collection include affection, shapeshifting, the natural world, language and the arts.
In fiction, Caryl Phillips, one of the Caribbean’s most celebrated authors, launched a new novel entitled A View of the Empire at Sunset in which he offers a fictional account of Jean Rhys’s life in both England and the Caribbean. Little attention is paid to the writing career of the protagonist in the novel as, of course, this is not a biography. Instead, Phillips explores the relationship that Gwen Williams, Rhys’s real name, established with Dominica, her country of origin, and London, the place of her early adulthood. The tone of the narrative fluctuates to illustrate the complexity of displacement, as she felt belonging neither to the Caribbean nor to Britain. The novel explores issues of race, migration, alienation and the postcolonial exotic.
2018 literary production is also characterised by a number of innovative works. Maroon Comix: Origins and Destinies is a graphic novel that elevates the legend of Maroons to new forms of representation. Maroon fighters have traditionally been presented in fiction as brave subjects that defy the powers that be, yet, in this publication, they are not only presented as heroes, but also as the precursors of a new social order. Juanita Cox gathers some of Edgar Mittelholzer’s short stories, poetry, drama and essays in Creole Chips and Other Writings, a collection of texts that includes some unpublished works dated before the Guyanese author arrived in the UK in 1947, showing the versatility of his writing. Peepal Tree Press offers another compilation of texts, this time short stories, by some of the most important Caribbean contemporary authors. The Peepal Tree Book of Contemporary Caribbean Short Stories collects the works of more than 25 young and established writers from the Caribbean and its diaspora. These short stories explore a diverse range of narrative forms and techniques: magical realism, horror, crime and erotic fiction, amongst others, illustrating the richness of this output.
In the non-fiction section, David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter represents a good example of epistolary reflection on the current world. Written by the acclaimed author of Soucouyant (2007) and Brother (2017), this essay deals with issues related to race and politics. Born in Canada to Trinidadian black and South Asian parents, Chariandy has confronted his in-between status in those two previous novels. In this new publication, the author goes one step further to talk about some of his personal experiences as the member of a visible minority in a multicultural nation.
Critical studies this year explore issues of gender, race, class, politics and the arts. Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean: Narratives, Aesthetics and Politics, a collection of essays, analyses historical connections between the Caribbean and other territories in literature and politics. The Caribbean appears to represent an example of a transnational and transcultural locus, constantly negotiating its place between power and resistance. Colonial practices are questioned to expose the oppressive structures that have reduced the Caribbean to a peripheral region. Instead, Practices of Resistance in the Caribbean presents the islands as geopolitically central, of paramount importance in the interrogation of issues of race, gender, migration and artistic production.
Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean: Islands in the Stream is another collection of essays focused on locating Caribbean literary production within a wider canon. Early Caribbean texts are used to illustrate the fact that the region has its own native literary traditions, that Caribbean literature existed before the emergence of Postcolonial Studies. In this book scholars explore texts related to pre-Columbian, colonial and post-colonial times in order to exemplify the importance of previous traditions in the development of a particular consciousness of Caribbean literature, covering genres as varied as religious and medical writing, folklore and historical texts.
Another collection of essays, Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature: On the Edge, examines the topic of mental health in Anglophone literature and its subversive dimension. The articles included in this anthology analyse both recent and classic works by authors of Caribbean origin in order to demonstrate that madness can also be read politically, as a social construct. Literary representations of mental breakdowns, anxiety, delusions and various psychopathologies are explored in works by Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, Junot Díaz and Marlon James, amongst others. The book points to the need for further research towards extending our understanding of madness and its representation in literature, in Caribbean, and more broadly, in postcolonial traditions.
The life and career of two Caribbean female authors, both of Haitian origin, have inspired two publications which have been included in Studies on Individual Writers in the bibliography that follows. Edwidge Danticat is one of the most popular Caribbean authors of our time. She was born in Port-au-Prince but moved to New York at the age of 12 with her parents. Danticat reflects on her migrant experience in both her fiction and her essays. In Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadège T. Clitandre offers one of the first full-length academic studies on Danticat’s creative work, ranging from novels to short stories and essays. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994); her first published collection of short stories, Krik? Krak! (1996) and her famous collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010) are some of the works examined. Danticat’s diasporic identity prominently informs Clitandre’s analysis. Issues of dislocation, alienation, folklore and globalisation are related to her political and cultural sensibilities.
The other Haitian subject of an academic publication in 2018 is playwright, novelist and poet Marie Vieux-Chauvet, who was also born in Port-au-Prince but immigrated to the United States, where she died in 1973. Although most of her literary works were originally in French, her writing has influenced many Caribbean authors, for example, Edwidge Danticat. Vieux-Chauvet’s theatrical work is the focus of Marie Vieux Chauvet’s Theatres: Thought, Form, and Performance of Revolt, a study aimed at exploring the author’s revolutionary vision of dramatic expression. This collection of essays reminds the reader of the obstacles that female playwrights have needed to navigate around in order to get their plays performed. Theatre itself also plays a very important part in Vieux-Chauvet’s novels as some of the articles in this anthology show. Critical attention is also given to some less explored issues in the author’s literary oeuvre.