the shape of lightgatheredin your wings, and the windallowing rain and black leaves to fallon your clothes~ Pablo Nerudaрдоेрд░ो рдорди рдЕрдирдд рдХрд╣ाँ рд╕ुрдЦ рдкाрд╡ै। рдЬैрд╕े рдЙрдб़ि рдЬрд╣ाрдЬ рдХो рдкंрдЫी, рдлिрд░ि рдЬрд╣ाрдЬ рдкै рдЖрд╡ै॥~ рд╕ूрд░рджाрд╕
Sandstone To Ink
Of sandstone dust my spirit formed
a love of stone and water in
the dreaming of the Hawkesbury rift;
I dared to shape this nature and art
to carve and grind and penetrate
and share the vision of our primal source
to fire the souls of others.
---Rob Maddox-Harle
Rob Maddox-Harle continues to surprise through an evolved and nuanced idiom and syntax.
Sunil Sharma
His oeuvre is rich and multi-layered---hallmark of great art.
The inaugural poet for the occasional column “My Favorite Works"---initially suggested as "My Best Poems" by the eminent poet Sanjeev Sethi and further expanded as a welcome idea into works that might include prose and other modes of expression. It is a place for select creatives to share their best, published or unpublished pieces---Rob comes up with the poems typical of his craft and weltanschauung.
Rob Harle---his popular name---is an important voice. His voice brings sanity and clarity. Worth listening!
In future, Setu shall be sharing this window on the worldview of the invited artists. Works---textual; visual; digital---that aspire to "dare" and "fire" human souls with visions of primeval force: The perennial fountainhead of creativity across the spatial-temporal continuum.
This poem can function as a manifesto for the entire range of the artistic endeavours in words, images, stone, film or colours---the Project Art and articulation of ideal and reality, and resultant tensions, gaps between the two poles.
Art that gives shape to an enlightening vision rooted in nature and finer values, the civilizational and foundational axis and praxis that frame the Republic of Equal Humans---and make us thinking and critical species that continues to move forward and progress, despite many challenges. The Climate Crisis is most pressing.
.
This June, Setu bilingual completes seven years of monthly service to the discerning community of readers and writers alike. It is the 169th issue. There are 850 authors and 7,000 works published so far.
We could reach this stage and 3,672,260 views, due to your unstinted support and kind patronage of the bilingual journal published from Pittsburgh, USA.
A journal that showcases the best and relevant content in Hindi and English. Apart from that, Setu (English) often runs bilingual poetry and translations of prose and poetry in order to create mutual dialogue between languages and their audiences.
Besides that, publication of protest and political writings by committed writers further aims to question the status quo and official narratives. The main mission is to spread finer values of liberal humanism and strive towards a better and more equitable world, minus the hatred and fundamentalism and promotion of a clean forested and breathable world via verbal and other interventions.
This issue carries these concerns raised by our eminent authors.
Writers like Rob Harle are a shining example of such critical thinking as an involved artist impatient with the political system that has stopped caring for nature and welfare of human and other beings and tends to cling to power by dividing people along false issues.
The main purpose of art is dissidence.
And propagation of diversity, coexistence and interdependent universe, as the ideal, not a bigoted one driven by polarities and politics of identity and sectarian violence.
In this journey of aiming for slow changes in the general mindset, we remain grateful for your understanding, overall encouragement and participation, and hope to have your loving support in coming months as well.
Happy Anniversary, Setu!
Take care!
Sunil Sharma
 SetuVolume 8; Issue 1; June 2023Setu PDF Archives Editorial
Poetry
Short FictionEkphrasticBilingual Poetry (Hindi-English)Critical EssayHaikuMy favourite WorksAuthor InterviewGreen Reflections
Author of the MonthTranslated Short Fiction (Hindi to English)Photo EssayNovel in Instalment: Sixth PartBook ReviewSetu Video Series of Literary and Critical Conversations
Setu Initiative: Setu Series of Virtual Readings
|
 |
| John Clark Smith |
15
Titus awoke and had his breakfast.
When the bus arrived, the driver was in a medical
mask. He handed Titus a mask and instructed him to enter by the rear door.
Titus sat at the back seat that faced the aisle. No
one else sat beside him. The people kept apart. All had masks on. No one spoke.
A boy attempted to run up the aisle, but his mother caught and scolded him.
“Is that you, sir?” a woman’s voice spoke a few rows
up. “Professor Ketkar?”
Titus saw a lady with a scarf around her neck wave.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You haven’t aged a day,” she said. “It’s good to see
you.”
Titus did not recognize the woman. Perhaps it was one
of the parents of one of his students.
“You don’t know me?” she asked. “I’ve changed a lot,
what with having children and fighting the virus. I’ve had it twice. Lost my
husband. It’s Midia.”
As he focused on her eyes, he could now see a
resemblance to Midia.
“Are you going to the clinic too?” she asked. “I’m
told they’re looking for volunteers for the new vaccine. I’m going to try it.”
“No, I’m on my way to class. Good to see you. Glad
you’re well.”
The bus continued for several blocks and then Midia waved
as she got off.
“The university’s closed, sir,” a woman who sat near
him said. “Been closed for two years.”
At his usual university stop, Titus got off and took
the short walk to the quad up King’s College Road. On both sides of the road,
people were sitting on the ground separated from one another, as if waiting for
someone. Each of them held out their hand or cups for donations. Each also had
a hand-written sign in front of them that told how the virus had cost them
their job or killed one of their family.
When he reached King’s College Circle, the grass on
the quad was completely worn away. Tents and squatters in ragged dirty clothes
filled the entire area. The glass sculpture remained but was covered with
graffiti. The bench that encircled it was there too, but the paint on it was
chipped and one of the legs was teetering. A marker with a word was taped above
it: “Pamoghenan.” Above the word was a circle with a cross below it and a
half-circle above. In the center of the circle was the number 20.
A crowd had gathered around him, each with the hand or
cup out. His suit and overall neat appearance made Titus look out of place and
a target. Signs indicated the buildings were open, but most of the rooms were
for those in need of housing, the rest were reserved by public health for
temporary hospital beds for those fighting the virus. He quickly walked to his
office. At his office the window was smashed, and his books, paintings,
knick-knacks, computer, and printer were gone. There was no chair to sit down.
“What are you doing in here?” a woman in uniform asked
at his office door in an Irish accent. “You need an installation pass.”
“I was just leaving,” Titus said. “This was my
office.”
“Well now, isn’t that sweet,” she quickly said.
“Remember anything? Personally, I prefer not to remember.”
“There’s always hope,” Titus said. “The economy will
recover. The spirits of people will return.”
“Will they now?” she said with a caustic tone.
“There’s not enough food. The water is questionable. Come winter, and again
there’ll be no heat. We need medical supplies and protective gear. There are
constant blackouts. Most of the essential workers are sick, a good portion of
the farmland has gone to waste without farmhands, and the electrical
infrastructure is working intermittently. The government, such as it is or was,
is on the run or hiding. There’s no one in authority. Now tell me, laddie, does
that lift up your spirit?”
“There’s you. There’s still a police force.”
“Me? Ha! I’m not the police. There’s only a few police
left. Most are dead or sick. I’m a security guard. Public Heath gives me my
meals and a bed in exchange for protecting spaces for the sick. But I won’t be
around long. I’ll get the virus and take one of those beds here. They promised
me I’ll get one.”
“I’m sorry,” Titus said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.
I’ve been away. How did this virus happen?”
“Oh no. This wasn’t caused by the virus. We were
managing the virus fine. We would have beat it. That wasn’t it. It was the
government and the lack of leadership.”
“The government?” Titus said with a tone of surprise.
She laughed loudly as if Titus had made a joke.
“OK, you’re right,” she said. “What they call a
government. I know, I know. The government is people like you and me. The
choices of those in government. But let’s be completely honest. We elected
them. Or did we? We supported them if nothing else. The government knew it
would lose and was unwilling to concede. So the government let its most fanatic
supporters run amok and the army helped them.”
“In the middle of a pandemic?”
As she was talking, she was ushering Titus out of the
building.
“People in power think only of themselves and staying
in power. In fact, it seems to attract selfish people, doesn’t it? Which of
course breeds failure and chaos. Well, I suppose, you must be selfish to want
to be a politician. But again, let’s be fair. You and I are no better, are we?
We’re that kind of people, aren’t we? So, as someone said, you get the
government you deserve. Well, we got a selfish, uncaring, bunch of nitwits who
worry only about their own necks. The leaders used the pandemic for political
reasons to try to defeat the opposition. But they’re pretty much done now,
waiting around somewhere at Queens Park, waiting for I-don’t-know-what. The
cavalry? It ain’t coming. And you know? I don’t care. Because the Zapatas
aren’t going to surrender.”
“The Zapatas are--?”
“--where you from? The insurgents. They’re holed up in
several buildings on King Street East pinned down by what’s left of the army.
But it won’t be long.”
“So the army’s in control?”
“Ha! Not exactly. They’re weakening because they keep
losing people. The military doesn’t know what to do. They just hope they get
paid. Well, goodbye now. I’d suggest you leave the area for your own safety.”
Titus thanked her and looked for a stand to rent a
bicycle.
There was one at the corner of King’s College Road and
College Street, but none of the bikes were secure and there was no way to pay.
Titus took a bicycle and started down College Street east to Yonge, then south
on Yonge to King Street East.
Along the way, there were few people walking, even
fewer cars on the road. Stores were closed, some boarded up. On each side of
Yonge, many were camped and sitting on sleeping bags in front of the stores.
The trip lacked the sounds of cars, buses, and people talking. Instead eyes
with dark circles met his all the way.
As he approached King Street, the quiet ended.
Conversations and the sounds of soldiers walking on pavement replaced the
quiet.
Titus set his bike in another bicycle stand north of
King Street and walked south along Yonge to the intersection.
Barriers and a line of soldiers were set up across
King Street East. A block east at Victoria Street the crowd of soldiers became
much thicker. Clearly the buildings where the Zapatas were controlling started
there. The army contingent went from Victoria to St. James Park, but hardly
enough to withstand a serious attack.
Titus walked back up Yonge Street one block to
Adelaide Street, which was also barricaded, but with far less soldiers. Titus
was able to slip by and walk east two blocks to Toronto Street. Titus hurried
down Toronto Street until he came to Old Post Office Lane, a tiny alleyway that
ran behind a building near the west corner of Toronto Street and King Street
East. The soldiers were there, along the Lane, but Titus entered a building he
knew on the north side of the lane owned by the Black Firm, a powerful and
wealthy holding company. He had worked in the building on a project with a
carpenter who hand-made much of the office furniture and the Boardroom table.
In the basement was a tunnel that led to the Ashes Building where he could
reach the Zapatas.
The Black Building, like all the businesses in the
pandemic, would normally be empty and locked up during any crisis, but it was
commandeered by the city in the health crisis because of the spread of the
virus among the troops. A warning sign asked all but the infected or health
workers to stay clear.
A nurse wearing protective clothing, a mask, and a
face shield, greeted him when he walked up the steps to the entrance.
“Assessment?” the woman asked.
Titus nodded.
“Straight ahead, the third door to the right. Here.”
She handed him eyewear and sprayed his hands.
“Thank you,” he said.
Once inside the building, Fischer stood without a mask
or eye shield.
Titus ignored and moved around him and began to take
the stairs down two flights to the basement. Fischer stood in front of him at
the bottom.
“You can’t rewrite this situation,” Fischer said.
“Of course he can,” a man said who walked into the
room from the darkness. It was Wang. “This is the individual spirit.”
Fischer stepped back a few feet from Titus when he saw
Wang, as if he feared Wang.
“It’s not an individual spirit,” Fischer said. “You
know that.”
“This is his choice,” Wang said, “let him continue.”
Fischer and Wang for a minute stared at each other
without moving.
Titus continued his journey.
There was a dark room that smelled like old documents
and the sweat of heated meetings. He used the light on his cell phone to find
the tunnel on the left. Thick cobwebs covered most of the entrance and a layer
of dust was on the floor and stairs.
In a few minutes he crossed over to the basement of
the Ashes Building. It too was pitch black. As Titus crept up the stairs to the
basement door, voices on the other side of the door suddenly became quiet. The
door flung open and several men and women with guns faced him.
“Who are you?” one of them asked. “What are you doing
here?”
“My name is Titus Ketkar. I can help.”
They took him to a small room where there were four
others.
Titus quickly outlined the strategy. Take the Path up
to Queens Park. Again, knowledge of this possibility came from the carpenter,
who had been hired by the government to barricade certain entrances to the Path
and to the subway from the basements of several buildings, one of which was the
Ashes Building. The government told the carpenter to seal off these entrances
not permanently but superficially in case the government wanted to reopen them
in the future. Titus knew how easily the blockades could be removed. Since the
Path itself and all its stores were abandoned and empty, the Zapatas should
have little problems reaching Queens Park.
After offering the plan, Titus made little effort to
convince them. He returned to his bike and began his journey up Yonge.
An artist was sitting on the sidewalk near the corner
of Elm Street and Yonge surrounded by paintings. Titus stopped and gave him a
mask and other protective items he was given at the Black Building. The man put
on the mask and handed Titus one of his small paintings. The work reminded
Titus of Kandinsky and Malevich.
“I paint the future,” the artist said. “You’re from
the future. I know you. You’re Professor Ketkar.”
“We’re all from the future,” Titus said.
“I sat here twenty years ago, right here. And I met
you. My little girl was sitting next to me. And you bought one of my new works.
Do you remember? It had three straight purple lines of varying thickness on a
yellow background. In the corner was an exploding sun-like object. I called it
Blessed Anarchy.”
“I still have the painting,” Titus said. “Well, I used
to have it. It was on my wall in my office. It was ransacked.”
“My daughter saved it. She was one of your students.”
“What’s her name?”
“Charlotte.”
Hearing her name made him gulp and remember that young
woman on the platform. But he was also happy. Somehow Charlotte was here and
had not shot herself. This poor father had not lost a daughter from Lazan’s harassment.
It did not occur to Titus that this shift may have been Lazan’s work to satisfy
Gretchen.
“Because of the pandemic,” the painter continued, “she
now lives with me. She likes to talk about how you helped her finish school and
become interested in philosophy. She also credits you for her interest in
Whitehead.”
Titus could not recall lecturing on Whitehead. Long
ago his studies veered toward Peirce rather than Whitehead. He did read Process
and Reality and a few other books of Whitehead, but he never taught them.
“She was thinking about doing her thesis on
Whitehead,” the old man continued, “but you encouraged her to choose a woman
philosopher. She chose Susanne Langer, Whitehead’s student, because of me, I
think, because Langer wrote a lot about art. Well, you would know that.”
He mentioned Langer in his survey courses, but he had
no special expertise in her work.
“Where can she return the painting?” the artist asked.
“Let her keep it until classes resume,” Titus said.
“Here. You keep this one. I have no way to carry it on my bike.”
Titus climbed back on the bike.
“Professor? Back then, you asked me a question. You
said: Do I know about the art of pamoghenan? I said no. I still don’t know
anything about it. What is it?”
Titus did not respond but shrugged.
“I guess I was hoping you could tell me,” Titus said.
He had no recollection of talking about pamoghenan
with him.
“That’s OK,” the artist said, “you needn’t explain.
I’ll keep thinking about it. But tell me: Is it immortality or like the blowing
out of a candle?”
Titus shrugged again and climbed on his bicycle.
“By the way, a woman came by and told me there are
artists waiting for you at the Church of the Holy Trinity.”
The identity of the woman required no thought.
Titus cycled to just south of the corner of Bay Street
and Dundas Street West. There, on the east side, snuggled off Bay Street, was
the little Church of the Holy Trinity. ‘Little’ compared to Metropolitan United
or St. James, but nonetheless remarkable. It was unique in service and in architecture,
though swallowed up by surrounding modern secular buildings.
The Holy Trinity was built in the Gothic late medieval
Tudor style with a cruciform design with two high turrets at the entrance.
Inside there were tall narrow translucent stain glass windows on each side
telling stories, which, like Chartres, brought light into the interior in
unusual ways and a sense of awe at the height of the ceiling. Throughout there
was the pointed arch.
Titus had often gone to Holy Trinity during Christian
holidays to hear the traditional telling of Jesus’s birth story. On other
occasions he would sit in the back pew and listen to the concerts of new music,
or meditate to the wonderful organ music, hear recitations of poetry, or peruse
the new art on display outside at the entrance. No other church had a better
feast for the mind of sound, image, and literary power all at once. But, more
importantly, no church did more to help the homeless and those in need. Often,
when Titus would walk in to seek quiet, he would see boxes of canned food and
bottles of water and homeless people stretched out in or under the pews.
As expected, when he entered, the church was mostly
empty due to the quarantine. A group was sitting in the front pew and an
organist was playing a work he knew, “Wachet auf, rufs uns die Stimme”[1],
by J. S. Bach. He could easily identify all but one of this group of phantoms:
He knew Marcel Duchamp, Ravi Shankar, Wassily Kandinsky, Fela Kuti, and
Leonardo da Vinci, and, he soon learned, J. S. Bach himself was at the organ.
Only the appearance of Fan Kuan, the Song landscape painter, was unknown to
him, though his work was familiar.
“The sky is falling, dear little god,” Wassily said.
“Think creatively,” Leonardo said. “The future is
now.”
“They are blind to possibilities because they know
only the tradition,” Marcel agreed. “They’re afraid to step out of the box of
rules lest they lose their jobs or livelihood. An artist of society must take
risks, come what may.”
“Remember,” Ravi added, “begin, don’t end, with the
unknown. It’s the obvious that has the unknown.”
“Your being must have purpose,” Fela said.
The organ music stopped. The master of Leipzig came up
to the pulpit and spoke:
“Let’s not eliminate tradition,” Bach said, “let’s
improve it, bring out its substance, not its surface. Society is now so
unmusical, with no depth, no touching of the soul. Would you not agree, Fan
Kuan? Is it not time to awake from the long sleep?”
Fan Kuan nodded slowly. Then he stood beside Bach.
“Yes,” Fan Kuan said, “awake from a sleep of
selfishness, material illusion, and useless preoccupations. What is near in
this painting of society is empty and shallow. The middle of the painting has
no future and lacks contrast, and the far, the far is the weakest. What do we
see that offers eternal seeds? As Johann has said, no depth in any dimension.
If I was to paint it, it would be so boring I would be embarrassed.”
Titus had no opportunity to discuss or question them
because they rose together, went up to the choir area, and left. He sat in the
second pew and studied the large stained-glass windows at the end of the nave.
The blue ceiling with its designs was so contemplative that he fell into a
meditative slumber.
16
By
the time he was back on College Street, the environment had changed. The street
was crowded with people, and busy with streetcars and vehicles. No one wore a
mask. Everything seemed normal, or at least a type of normal compared to what
came before or after.
When he reached the campus, the quad had grass, and
there were no tents or squatters. The only difference was that a large stone
statue of a figure with no discernable features, had replaced the glass
sculpture. Several bees were encircling it. The man was faceless in a mask, but
he wore a suit. At its base were the words,
TO PROFESSOR TITUS KETKAR,
FOR HIS HELP IN OVERTHROWING THE PAST
AND STARTING THE REVOLUTION.
Titus stared at the statue.
“I knew him,” an old man said, coming up to stand
beside Titus. “Well, I knew someone whose son knew him and took one of Ketkar’s
classes. His office is open to the public. Have you been?”
Titus shook his head.
“Oh, you should go,” the old man said. “It has so many
interesting things.”
“Thanks. I’ll think about it.”
Titus walked back to College Street and took the
streetcar home. Karna caught up with him just as he was climbing the stairs of
his apartment building.
Once inside his apartment, he sat on his couch and
tried to wipe what had occurred from his mind.
“Are we ready?” Karna asked. “Is it time for old
gods?”
“Yes,” Titus replied.
[1] Awake,
the Voice is Calling us. This hymn, written by a pastor 400 years ago, was
written in the midst of an epidemic.
 |
| John Thieme |
Space
is mobile. Space is plastic. Cultural geographers such as Doreen Massey stress
the mobility of space, not simply because apparently settled places change with
the passage of time, but also because the spatial configurations that we know
as place[1] are
epistemological constructs. Consequently space is dialectical, shifting and
unstable and, in Massey’s words, “social relations are never still; they are
inherently dynamic”, so it is necessary to “move beyond a view of place as
bounded, as in various ways a site of authenticity, as singular, fixed and
unproblematic in its identity” (Massey 1994: 2). This
said, the chronotopes, to borrow the term that Bakhtin uses to describe “the
intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships” (Bakhtin 1981:
84) that were shaped by European imperialism,
and which have continued in new iterations in neo-colonial situations, demonstrate
an ambivalent response to the plasticity of space. Ambivalent because European
explorers and settlers, after effectively acknowledging the malleability of
space by assuming the right to shape supposedly blank territory – in Australia the
land was deemed to be terra nullius (empty
terrain and therefore exempt from the normal laws of ownership) – into their particular
versions of place, both through actual possession and through naming
strategies, habitually naturalized the illusion that the Eurocentric
geographies they had imposed represented “site[s] of authenticity”.
The
ruptures that occurred in the wake of colonization reshaped pre-existing
Indigenous places in particularly devastating ways and nowhere moreso than in
the Caribbean and Guyanas, where the Amerindian population suffered genocide
and the majority Afro-Caribbean population, brought to the region in the slave
ships of the Middle Passage, are descendants of the survivors of a brutal
crossing that had been tantamount to genocide for many of their fellow
transportees. Consequently Caribbean space exists in a tension between an
attempt to impose stasis, which found its most oppressive form in the
plantation system, and an opposing impulse in which ceaseless journeying, particularly
prominent in Anglophone Caribbean writing of the long twentieth century,
becomes a dominant trope in representations of the region’s peoples’ ongoing
quest for autonomous selfhood. As Stuart Hall puts it, “identity […] has many
different ways of ‘being at home’ – since it conceives of individuals as
capable of drawing on different maps of meaning and locating them in different
geographies at one and the same time – but it is not tied to one, particular
place” (Hall 1995: 207), and journeys, actual or figurative, offer a portal
into such multiple forms of cognitive homecoming.
The
Middle Passage is the Ur-journey of
Caribbean memory, but Caribbean identities have always been in transit. Introducing
a television programme that formed part of a BBC Caribbean night in 1986, the
Jamaican-born poet Linton Kwesi Johnson put the matter succinctly and
incisively by saying simply, “We’re travellers” (Johnson 1986), and Anglophone
Caribbean constructions of spatial identity alternate between a sense of
nervous, uneasy movement through multiple maps of meaning and a desire to
arrive at fixity, often in the form of some kind of homecoming, whether it be a
return to Africa[2]
(or India), a usually disappointing voyage to the Mother Country,[3] or
more productively a location of self within the Caribbean, within what Makak,
the protagonist of Derek Walcott’s play Dream
on Monkey Mountain refers to as “going
back home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of this world” (Walcott 1970: 326). Travel,
both voluntary and involuntary, has, then, been a crucial material determinant
of the lives of many Caribbean peoples, but beyond this it is a trope for what
it is to be Caribbean. In “The Journeys”, a poem in Rights of Passage, the first part of his significantly titled Arrivants trilogy, Kamau Brathwaite
conflates the many journeys of diasporic Africans, blending them together into
a single, seemingly endless odyssey. The poem makes reference to
pre-enslavement journeys in Africa – from Mero├л to the West Coast – to
travelling northwards to urban spaces in the United States, to visiting Cape
Town and Rio and to taking “Paris by storm” (Brathwaite 1973: 36) during the
period when Negritude and the vogue for African American music and writing were
at their height in the French capital. However, the seminal journey is the
Middle Passage crossing of the Atlantic slave ships:
salt of the wave-gullied
Ferdinand’s sea
Soft winds
To San Salvador,
Christoph-
er, Christ, and no Noah
or dove to promise us, grim
though it was, the simple
sal-
vation of love. […]. (35-36)
“Journeys”
offers a microcosm of The Arrivants
trilogy, which throughout its compass captures the sense of restive travelling that
lies at the heart of the Anglophone Caribbean experience and informs many of
the region’s writers’ representations of the shifting dynamics of space. The
movements engendered by conquest, enslavement,
independence, tourism, migration and a number of other experiences have
subjected the topography of the region to a series of reinventions that have
radically changed both its actual landscapes and its epistemological contours.
This essay endeavours to demonstrate the mutating nature of Caribbean spatial
trajectories, making reference to sites that have occupied a central role in
the Anglophone Caribbean literary imaginary. In several instances linear
movement from past to future is blurred or collapsed in the texts discussed, a
practice that embodies the intensity of the Caribbean challenge to the static
closure inherent in colonial constructions of place, often reflecting a break
with what Catherine A. John, discussing the importance of the trope of the
circle in pre-colonial Africa, refers to as “the Western imperative to think in
linear, ‘progressive’ fashion” (John 2003: 12); elsewhere spaces are reclaimed
in accounts of their literal and figurative transformation. To illustrate the
ways in which space can be re-envisaged in new formations, this essay focuses
on Caribbean literary responses to the Interior, the plantation and the plot,
and the sea and the beach. In each case the locations considered emerge as
mobile polyvalent sites that offer the possibility of transforming the
traumatic legacy of the colonial past, which exploited environments, enslaved
or subjected peoples and imposed a discursive onomastics that was a corollary
of such practices. In its most extreme form, such onomastics, as I have argued
elsewhere in talking about European botanists’ assumption of the right to name
plant species from around the world (Thieme 2016: 43-44), were predicated on
the assumption that colonized territory had no prior existence. In the
Caribbean, as Jamaica Kincaid points out, the incorporation of plants into the
Linnaean system of naming did for botany what the plantation system did to the
African-descended peoples of the Caribbean: European botanists took the view
that “these new plants from far away, like the people far away, had no history,
no names, and so they could be given names” (Kincaid 2000: 91). Plants, places
and people were subject to an imposed nomenclature, which masqueraded as primal
Adamic naming, supposedly legitimized by the fact that the entities being
christened had no previous names.
Into the Interior
(Indigenous Space)
In
the beginning … there were no words. Or to be more precise, Anglophone
Caribbean writing is a latecomer in the long, largely unwritten history of
Caribbean space and attempts to envisage the optics through which Amerindian
peoples such as the Caribs, Arawaks and Wapisiana saw their environments in the
centuries before European conquest are inevitably acts of imaginative invention
by the descendants of more recent arrivants, hampered by having to grapple with
cosmologies foreign to the supposedly rational post-Enlightenment mind.
Foreign, too, to the philosophies inherent in Afro-Caribbean thought, though
these have more affinities with the representational modes of the region’s
pre-Columbian peoples. As Wilson Harris, commenting in an interview on the role
of metaphor in his work, has put it:
In
savage [sic] cultures the beginning does not lie in the Word, as in St John’s
Gospel. The beginning lies in the image, in the gesture, in the hieroglyphic
painting, in the sculpture, in the mask and, when one comes to metaphor, one
has the sense that language may have its roots in the way images broke their
moorings to come into one psychical consciousness and metaphor is at the heart
of this mutation. (Harris 1980: 18)
In
Harris’s oeuvre, metaphor is the mode through which he attempts to realize
language’s potential for a transformative, non-referential identity politics
that challenges conceptions of self and place as fixed and unitary. In the same
interview he goes on to say:
If
one lived in a symmetrical cosmos, it is possible to conceive of a model which
indeed would be final and then one could say, well, one has achieved all that
could be achieved, but since one lives in an asymmetrical cosmos, there is no
possibility of escaping from the consequences of change, whether those
consequences erupt in a disastrous form or whether we are able to enter into
them creatively and make them into visionary issues that take us through into
other areas of comprehension that allow us to deal with the crises and
difficulties of the age in which we live, because we still live very close to
the scene of conquest. (Harris 1980: 18)
In
short, the legacy of conquest has established a monistic view of the Caribbean as
a “site of authenticity” and Harris’s fiction contests this through an
alternative poetics of space, realized through the transformative agency of
metaphor. Throughout his work he engages in a sustained pursuit of asymmetrical
epistemologies that harmonise with the pre-Columbian landscape and its peoples,
a quest that verges on the heroic, even if its completion is consigned to be
eternally frustrated.
The
trope of a dream journey towards a visionary moment of epiphany plays a central
role in Harris’s project and the journeys in his fiction frequently collapse
time, so that they appear to be undertaken simultaneously in both the
contemporary era and in an earlier period that predates European settlement and
gestures towards an Indigenous pre-Columbian wholeness, while foregrounding the
problematics inherent in any notion of a return to a pristine originary moment.
In his novel Palace of the Peacock,
Harris narrates the progress of a contemporary crew’s journey upriver into the
Guyanese heartland, a voyage in which the geographical interior is a
correlative for a journey into the psyche, an obvious iteration of the
epistemological dimensions of space. The journey retraces the route taken by an
earlier drowned crew and seems inextricably enmeshed with the rupture visited
on the landscape by colonialism. Yet, as is always the case in Harris’s work,
opposites merge and the conquistador protagonist Donne, who has violated the
environment and its people, is twinned with an alter ego, the “I” narrator of
the novel, a Dreamer who offers an alternative vision of past, present and
future, in which the binaries that characterize colonial culture and
post-Enlightenment discourse more generally are eroded. Throughout the novel
polarities such as dream and reality, conqueror and conquered, even life and
death are blurred, as the text eschews the conventions of Western rationalism in
favour of a poetics in which psychic dualities are fused. This culminates in a
conclusion that offers a transcendent vision of experience. Dead characters
return to life and the interior landscape becomes animate:
Across the crowded
creation of the invisible savannahs the newborn wind of spirit blew the sun
making light of everything, curious hands and feet, neck, shoulder, forehead,
material twin shutter and eye. They drifted, half-finished sketches in the air,
until they were filled suddenly from within to become living and alive. I saw
the tree in the distance wave its arms and walk when I looked at it through the
spiritual eye of the soul. (Harris 1968: 146)
The
crew of Palace of the Peacock brings
the various races that make up the contemporary population of Guyana together
in a voyage towards a post-Columbian reconciliation with Indigenous Caribbean
space. Arawak characters such as a woman named Mariella, whom Donne has
violated in the past, appear, but their identities are shadowy –Mariella herself
also links the animate and the inanimate, since she is both a person and a
mission – and they mainly function as the backdrop against which the
post-settlement crew’s journey towards psychic wholeness is undertaken.
Moreover, as the title, which alludes to the final stage of the alchemical
process, the cauda pavonis (peacock’s
tail), indicates, Harris uses a Jungian paradigm for the progress and
conclusion of this journey.[4] So
in one sense he follows a Western model, albeit one that is at odds with
Enlightenment norms, for his resolution.
Elsewhere
in his work Harris goes further and attempts to enter into an Indigenous imaginary.
In “Couvade”, one of the triptych of tales inspired by Amerindian mythology
that make up The Sleepers of Roraima,
the angle of focalization moves inside a Carib consciousness to rework a
traditional myth about ancestral continuity. Like Palace of the Peacock, the tale’s action involves a movement
towards the reconciliation of psychic opposites. In this case a boy protagonist
undertakes a journey in which the identities of hunters and hunted continually
mutate. Ultimately the boy, whose spirit-guide on his journey, his grandfather,
is an uncertain repository of time-honoured tribal wisdom, assumes his role as
Couvade, the sleeper of the tribe, and his awakening ensures communal
continuity, but there is no idealization of the Carib world. Couvade’s
community is represented as locked in a cycle of violent struggle. So while “Couvade”
is set in a timeless world and, unlike Palace
of the Peacock, European colonial intervention is not an issue, the tale depicts
an environment divided by warring factions. Harris declines to idealize the
pre-Columbian space of the Guyanas, and the Americas more generally, as an
unspoiled primeval milieu. In an essay entitled “Tradition and the West Indian
Novel”, he likens the impact of the “European discovery of the New World and
conquest of the ancient American civilizations” to “an enormous escarpment down
which [the West Indies] falls”, but is quick to interject that pre-Columbian
civilizations “were themselves related by earlier and obscure levels of
conquest” (Harris 1967: 30-31). Nevertheless the notion of the Interior as an
extra-Eurocentric space, attainable through an ongoing process of psychic
transformation that subverts the rationalist orthodoxies of post-Cartesian
thought remains as an aspirational ideal towards which the characters of both Palace of the Peacock and “Couvade”
travel and as such it releases a radically different perception of the
possibilities latent in the Guyanese landscape.
Plantation and Plot
For
many years accounts of slavery and plantation life were a significant absence
in Anglophone Caribbean writing, an omission which reflects the exclusions of
the Eurocentric educational curriculum and the cultural norms that prevailed in
late colonial Caribbean societies. A passage in George Lamming’s first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, in which a
group of colonial schoolboys find it hard to believe that Barbadian space was
ever given over to slavery, offers a particularly telling example of its omission
from the accounts of Caribbean history that they have been taught. For the boys
the land of their birth is ‘Little England’, a country shaped by a benevolent
maternal colonialism, personified by Queen Victoria, and they have been
brainwashed by a narrative in which the moment of Emancipation has been
privileged at the expense of any reference of the earlier enslavement of the
Afro-Caribbean population:
[Queen Victoria] was a
great and good queen, the head teacher had said, and the old people had said
something similar. […] They said she made us free, you and me and him and you.
[…] It was disturbing. The thought of not being free. […] An old woman said
that once they were slaves, but now they were free. And she said that’s what
the good and great queen had done. She had made them free. […] [A small boy]
asked the teacher what was the meaning of slave, and the teacher explained. But
it didn’t make sense. He didn’t understand how anyone could be bought by
another. He knew horses and dogs could be bought and worked. But he couldn’t
understand how one man could buy another man. […] People talked of slaves a
long time ago. It had nothing to do with the old lady. She wouldn’t be old
enough. And moreover it had nothing to do with people in Barbados. No one there
was ever a slave, the teacher said. It was in another part of the world that
those things happened. Not in Little England. (Lamming 1953: 56-57)
‘Little
England’ may have been an extreme case and clearly Lamming’s response in the
novel is all too aware of both the erasure of slavery in the colonial school
curriculum and the indoctrination that
has led to the emphasis on Emancipation, with slavery only memorialized in the
folk consciousness personified by the old woman. Nevertheless the major
concerns of In the Castle of My Skin have
more to do with mid twentieth-century decolonization than the historical legacy
of slavery and in this respect Lamming is only too typical of the independence
generation of Caribbean writers, who were both shaped by, albeit in most cases
coming to write against, the late colonial cultural climate in which they grew
up.
Representations
of Caribbean landscapes as sites plundered for economic profit and reliant on
slave labour in the pre-Emancipation period remained largely unvoiced in the
region’s writing until the 1980s. Prior to this only a small group of texts engaged
with slavery and its legacy. The early parts of Edgar Mittelholzer’s sprawling Kaywana Trilogy deal with the brutality
of plantation life, but Mittelholzer’s account of three hundred years of
Guyanese history is frequently tainted by its ministering to the demands of the
pulp fiction market. Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants
trilogy, especially Rights of Passage, is altogether more convincing
and committed in its response to slavery, though Brathwaite is concerned with
the New World African diaspora more generally and several of the poems in this
opening section are concerned with plantation society in the American South and
the evolution of African American
consciousness. And arguably it was African American writers, notably Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker, who provided the inspiration for Caribbean and
Caribbean-British writers, such as Fred D’Aguiar and Caryl Phillips, to write
about plantation life in the 1980s, and perhaps it is no coincidence that
African American experience receives significant attention in texts from this
period.[5]
That said, the impetus to write about Caribbean slave societies increased and
works such as Nichols’s i is a long
memoried woman, Phillips’s Cambridge and more recently Laura Fish’s
Strange Music, which address the
inhumanity of plantation life, have redressed the earlier avoidance of this
crucial era in Caribbean history.
Prior
to the 1980s, one novel, the sociologist Orlando Patterson’s Die the Long Day stands out for its
uncompromising depiction of the dehumanizing geography of estate life.
Employing a range of focalizers and seeing newly arrived Europeans as complementary,
if less brutally exploited, victims of the sexual trafficking that was rife in
eighteenth-century Jamaican society, the novel depicts the human degradation
visited on enslaved Afro-Caribbeans by the plantation economy, with an emphasis
on the spatial constraints it involved. The harsh realities of confinement are vividly
realized in the following passage, where a runaway slave awaits trial in
Jamaica’s slave court:
The hot-house was a long,
narrow structure, made of stone walls and a shingled roof, divided into five
rooms. The room at the end, which Africanus approached first, was sealed off
from the rest and was used as a cell. He looked through the barred peep-hole on
the thick lignum-vitae door and called to the barely discernible figure lying
chained to the wall of the dark cell. Sam, an incorrigible runaway, had been
caught in the woods a few days earlier by a gang of Maroons. (Patterson 1973: 34)
This
account is, however, only a heightened instance of the spatial confinement central
to the novel’s representation of a pre-Emancipation plantation economy, which
in its appropriation of land for the sole purpose of commercial profit offers
an extreme form of the view that place is bounded, and journeying
is clearly at best a dim aspiration for the enslaved field-workers. Nevertheless
an alternative to the annexation of Jamaican land inherent in the plantation
system emerges in passages that represent what Sylvia Wynter has termed “plot” as
opposed to “plantation” (Wynter 1971). Wynter discusses V.S. Reid’s
ground-breaking 1949 novel New Day,
which pioneered the way for subsequent Caribbean fiction written in forms of
the region’s Creoles, and in her account of the novel, “plot” refers to the smallholdings
cultivated by recently freed slaves and their descendants in the
post-Emancipation era, but in Die the
Long Day it is present as a subaltern economy that co-exists with the
plantation system prior to Emancipation, providing a degree of autonomous
selfhood for those denied human dignity as field slaves:
Cicero […] walked through
the back door to his little kitchen garden. Apart from the sty and the path
running through it, almost every square inch of the little plot […] was planted
out with nearly every variety of tropical vegetables and fruit trees – okras,
callallu, plantains and bananas, shaddochs, peppers as well as two young
coconuts, an orange, a calabash, and an abba tree.
Along
with his provision ground in the backlands, this was his pride and joy. A
moist, green little island of dignity – all his own, his complete creation – to
which he could retreat and seek comfort. In tending his plants he also soothed
and healed a little the wounds and gashes inflicted on his soul out in the
fields each day. […] (Patterson 1973: 93)
“Plot”
can only provide temporary mental escape from the dehumanization of estate life,
but it nevertheless embodies a spatial aesthetics that challenges the hegemonic
view instituted and maintained by the plantocracy and points towards a view of
land usage that would gain momentum in the future.
Across the Sea, On the
Beach
“The
sea is slavery” (D’Aguiar 1998: 3). With these words Fred D’Aguiar begins his
novel Feeding the Ghosts, a fictional
memorialization of the infamous Zong
massacre, when more than 130 enslaved Africans [6]
were thrown into the sea by the crew of the slave ship Zong to drown. D’Aguiar’s novel is a powerful attempt to convey the
horror of a Holocaust experience that seems to defy language and other literary
texts about the Zong tragedy have employed
a diverse range of strategies to grapple with the problem of speaking the
unspeakable. M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetic sequence Zong! foregoes any attempt at mimetic representation in favour of a
fragmented protest that moves between song, lament and shout. David Dabydeen’s Turner, a rejoinder to J.M.W. Turner’s
response to the massacre, “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon
Coming” is a verse attempt to give voice to what one critic has called “those
who have been lost twice, first to death in the Middle Passage and then to an
imperial archive of exotic and sublime objects and representations” (Schenstead-Harris
2013: 2). The massacre, which led to a legal tussle over the ship’s owners
insurance claim for the loss of their cargo was a pivotal moment in the growth
of late eighteenth-century abolitionist sentiment, but in terms of the more
contemporary literary responses mentioned here, it has played an important part
in raising awareness of the horror and dehumanization of the slave trade – the
insurance claim for the murdered Africans was founded on the widely held belief
that they were simply property. Like Dabydeen’s Turner, D’Aguiar’s Feeding
the Ghosts counters this, particularly through the self-reflexive strategy
of having its protagonist Mintah escape from the sea to write an account of the
voyage. Written aboard the ship, her narrative subsequently provides evidence
in the court case that ensues because the ship’s insurers have refused to pay
for the jettisoned cargo.[7] At
the same time it is analogous to the fictive strategy of D’Aguiar’s text, which
is also built around a form of testimony.
Both Mintah’s actual resurrection
from the sea and the compilation of her narrative suggest the possibility of an
alternative woman-centred heritage salvaged from the Middle Passage. So too
does Nichols’s i is a long memoried woman,
a collection which is both an elegy for the undead dead “souls / caught in the
Middle Passage / limbo” (Nichols 1983: 16) of the crossing that brought millions
of Africans into New World slavery and a “Black Beginning / though everything
said it was / the end” (7). In this account apocalypse is transformed into an
originary moment, a moment which, despite the appalling conditions of
confinement on the slave ship and the subsequent brutality of plantation life, in
a grim but not entirely parodic equivalent of the promise associated with the
New World in the European imagination, anticipates the possibility of a
completely fresh start in the Americas. Nichols’s poem does not flinch from condemning
both the trade and plantation life, but it constantly returns to the fortitude
of a female protagonist, who, sustained by memories of Africa, seeks “the power
to be what I am/a woman / charting my own futures/ a woman / holding my beads
in my hand (79). There is a similar sense of women’s resilience offering a
means of transcending the legacy of the slave trade and remaking Caribbean
space in D’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts
and much earlier in George Lamming’s Natives
of My Person, an allegory that collapses the time between the first voyages
of the slave trade and the twentieth- century Caribbean of the independence era.
Lamming’s novel documents horrific violence aboard a slave ship, which does not
reach its island destination in the Caribbean, but the island is reached by
three women previously mistreated by members of its male crew, who have
travelled aboard a “sister-ship” (Lamming
1974: 15; italics in original). Liberated from the corrosive economies of the slave
trade, they embody "a future [the male crew-members] must learn” (Lamming 1974: 351), the words with which
the novel closes. As is often the case in Lamming’s fiction, women are both passive
victims and active agents for the
transformation of personal and political power relations. Waiting for their male abusers, they hold
out the promise of a regenerative fresh start in a Caribbean setting beyond the
horrors they have experienced in the Old World.
D’Aguiar’s assertion that “The sea
is slavery” is prefaced by an epigraph from a poem whose title it appears to be
reworking: Derek Walcott’s “The Sea is History”. In Walcott’s poem a Caribbean
speaker provides an account of the genesis and development of the region, redolent
with Biblical analogies and references to its marine flora and fauna. The poem
does not avoid the horrors of the slave trade, but subsumes them in a longer
vision of a Caribbean historiography in which the natural world takes
precedence and the sea is a polyvalent signifier. The words quoted by D’Aguiar:
Where are your monuments,
your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History. (Walcott 1980: 25; qtd. D’Aguiar1998:
n.
pag.)
are
ambiguous in that while they suggest the erasure of African culture, they also
view the sea as an environment that negates the approach to history on which
colonial accounts are predicated. The discursive construction of Caribbean
space is once again a central issue.
In
numerous other Walcott poems, the sea is also a source for a poetics that is
grounded in a maritime imaginary. In “The Schooner Flight”, the
protagonist Shabine’s seafaring is a trope for
writing as well as Caribbean life more generally. Articulating a central aspect of his creator’s poetic project, Shabine
expresses his commitment to a vernacular verse that is a direct outcrop of his nautical
existence:
[…]
when I write
this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt;
I go draw and knot every line as
tight
as ropes in this rigging; in simple
speech
my common language go be the wind,
my pages the sails of the schooner Flight. (Walcott 1980: 5)
Later the poem
makes reference to the Middle Passage, but this is a view in which the sea
seems to wash away all the ills of the past and the poem ends in a mood of
benediction, celebrating the sea, as Shabine immerses himself in it as the site
of his continual journeying:
The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart –
the flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know […].
My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. (Walcott 1980: 19-20)
At
the edge of the sea, the beach, like all littoral environments is a liminal
location, a site that encapsulates both the beginnings and the subsequent
limits of the island experience. For the narrator/protagonist of V.S. Naipaul’s
The Mimic Men, Ralph Singh (n├й
Kripalsingh), a descendant of one of the Indian indentured labourers brought to
the Caribbean in the post-Emancipation era, the island where he has been born, is
a pristine “place still awaiting Columbus and discovery”, but this brings him
little solace, since he sees his own predicament as that of a castaway,
shipwrecked far away from his Indo-Aryan origins. He identifies with the trunks
of great trees from another continent that have been washed up on the shore and
now lie marooned in the sand, seeing himself as a “shipwrecked chieftain on an
unknown shore, awaiting rescue” (Naipaul 1967: 133-134). Subsequently the trope
of the tree, an image of a transported extra-Caribbean identity, recurs in an
almost identical form as Singh looks at “the bleached trunk of a tree that had
collapsed on some other island or continent and had been washed ashore here and
anchored in sand” (193). Here he sees himself and two companions who are with
him as “shipwrecked and lost, alien and degenerate, the last of our race on
this island, among collapsed trees and sand, so smooth where no one had walked
on it” (195). For Singh the otherwise undisturbed evenness of the sand offers
no possibilities of positive transformation. Caribbean space is a desert island,
unendowed with meaning, and the notion of renewal through a positive response
to the New World landscape never occurs to him as a possibility. In an earlier
passage in which he writes about his experience as a property developer, it is
telling that he has found it necessary to dynamite out the stump and root of a
“giant tree, old perhaps when Columbus came” (72) on his significantly named
housing estate Crippleville, a corruption of his surname, Kripalsingh. It is an act of ecological violation which confirms his
personal deracination and his sense of alienation from any kind of
extra-colonial, in this case pre-colonial, vision of Caribbean space.
In an essay entitled “Columbus and
Crusoe”, Naipaul has spoken about the promise of Adamic innocence offered by
the Americas as an expression of the “enduring human fantasy” of “the untouched,
complete world, the thing for ourselves alone” (Naipaul 1972: 206), but,
referring to Crusoe in particular, he
sees the idealism of such a vision as contaminated from the outset:
Robinson
Crusoe, in its essential myth-making middle
part, is an aspect of the same fantasy. It is a monologue; it is all in the
mind. It is the dream of being the first man in the world, of watching the
first crop grow. Not a dream of innocence: it is the dream of being suddenly,
just as one is, in unquestionable control of the physical world, of possessing “the
first gun that had been fired there since the creation of the world”. It is the
dream of total power. (Naipaul 1972: 206)
Derek
Walcott also views Crusoe as a Caribbean archetype and in some respects his
comments resonate with Naipaul’s, since he sees Defoe’s Crusoe as a founding
figure for the region, but his own Crusoe is a shape-changer, incorporating a
multiplicity of identities. Talking about the figure in 1965, Walcott suggested he is simultaneously Adam, Columbus, God, Ben
Gunn, Prospero, a missionary who instructs Friday, a beachcomber from Conrad,
Stevenson or Marryat and Defoe himself (Walcott 1993: 35-36) and ultimately he
sees Crusoe as Proteus, constantly mutating to a point where he is as much
Caliban as Prospero, as much Friday as Defoe’s prototypical colonizer, as much
“the distorted, surrealist Crusoe of Bunuel” (Walcott 1993: 38) as that of
Defoe. In the talk, Walcott’s Crusoe emerges as both a Caribbean Everyman and a
type of the Caribbean writer who, like Shabine in “The Schooner Flight”, is constructing a discursive
universe from an apparent vacuum.
The shipwrecked protagonists of several of the poems
in Walcott’s collection The Castaway, particularly “Crusoe’s Journal”,
where Walcott writes “All shapes, all objects multiplied from his, / our ocean’s
Proteus” (Walcott 1965: 51), are
very similar in conception. In the title-poem of The
Castaway, the Crusoe figure is represented as a type of the solitary artist,
leading an isolated existence, nourished only by minimalist sensual stimuli:
The starved eye devours the seascape
for the morsel
Of
a sail […]
If
I listen I can hear the poly build,
The
silence thwanged by two waves of the sea.
Cracking
a sea-louse, I make thunder split. (Walcott 1965: 9)
In
“Crusoe’s Journal”, he is an Adamic first maker, as in Naipaul’s essay, a craftsman
fashioning a new kind of art, in this case creating poetry by “hewing a prose /
as odorous as raw wood to the adze” (Walcott 1965: 51). The mood varies, but in each instance there is an apparent
element of self-projection on Walcott’s part, as he draws an analogy between
Crusoe’s creating a discursive as well as a material universe and his own project
of developing a poetry, founded on metaphor, from what has hitherto been neglected
Caribbean space. So, while he shares Naipaul’s vision of the beach as a castaway
environment, Walcott also grasps its transformative potential, as a polyvalent
site that can bring new places into being.
Walcott’s most
direct response to Naipaul in The
Castaway comes in the poem “The Almond Trees”, where the image of the tree
is redeployed in a complex, transformative way, very different from Naipaul’s
use of the trope in The Mimic Men, to
provide commentary on the evolution of the region’s culture and society. The
poem opens with an allusion to Naipaul’s Middle Passage comment on
Caribbean history, “History is built around achievement and creation; and
nothing was created in the West Indies” (Naipaul 1969: 29), which makes it
clear that history is the subject of the poem:
There’s nothing here
this early;
cold sand
cold churning ocean, the Atlantic,
no visible history,
except this stand
of twisted,
coppery sea-almond trees [. . .]. (Walcott 1965: 36)
The trees, then, offer an alternative to the Eurocentric
historiography that Naipaul embraces in referring to the Caribbean as
uncreative. They are likened to “brown daphnes”, sunbathing on “this further
shore of Africa” (Walcott 1965:
36), a personification which draws on Greek myths of wood-nymphs and specifically
the legend that Daphne, pursued by Apollo, was metamorphosed into a tree. Initially
the women may seem to be tourists “toasting their flesh” in “fierce, acetylene
air”, which will “sear a pale skin copper” (Walcott 1965: 36-37), but as the poem progresses it becomes
clear that it is charting the movement of Caribbean society since colonization,
suggesting that a gradual darkening process has taken place. Trees and women
endure a furnace which seems to be the crucible of Caribbean history. The
suggestion is that through suffering, and pace Naipaul, the traumas of
the Middle Passage and slavery have been negated by endurance and cultural
pride. Walcott does not here, as in his oft-quoted rebuttal of historical
determinism in “The Muse of History” (Walcott 1976), wipe the cultural slate
clean. Instead he suggests a movingly compassionate encounter with Caribbean history,
which can transform what has gone before:
One sunburnt body now acknowledges
that past and its own metamorphosis
as, moving from the sun, she kneels to spread
her wrap within the bent arms of this grove
that grieves in silence, like parental love. (Walcott 1965: 37)
The
beach is omnipresent in Walcott’s Caribbean-set poetry and nowhere moreso than
in the sections that deal with the quarrelling fishermen in his most widely
discussed work, Omeros. However, I
should like to conclude by considering a passage from his poetic autobiography Another Life. In the passage in
question, autobiography shades into epic just as epic frequently moves towards
autobiography in Omeros. On the beach
at Rampanalgas in north-east Trinidad, “a child without history / without knowledge of its pre-world” holds
a shell to his ear and:
hears nothing, hears
everything
that the historian cannot hear, the howls
of all the races that crossed the water,
the howls of grandfathers drowned
in that intricately swivelled Babel,
hears the fellaheen, the Madrasi, the Mandingo, the Ashanti,
yes, and hears also the echoing green fissures of Canton,
and thousands without longing for this other shore
by the mud tablets of the
Indian provinces […]
the crossing of water has erased their memories.
And the sea, which is always the same,
accepts them.
And the shore which is always the same,
accepts them. (Walcott
1973: 143-4)
The child’s
direct communion with the natural world of sea and shore obliterates the
“howls” of such horrors as the Zong massacre,
along with the traumas of other communities voyaging to the Caribbean, in
favour of an inclusive vision; his nascent consciousness overrides the muse of
history, by using an angle of focalization, which is ignorant of the region’s past
and unknowingly erases its injustices. Sea and beach become pristine sites, seemingly
exempt from social intervention and capable of being invented anew by the
individual perception of the growing child. The passage is typical of Walcott’s
poetics, which demonstrate an acute sensitivity to the possibilities of
refashioning Caribbean space to reclaim it from the abuses of the past. Ultimately,
though, this is only a heightened New World form of the mobile spatial
aesthetic, which is common to most Anglophone Caribbean writers, whatever their
political persuasion, and which unsettles colonial constructions of places as
“site[s] of authenticity”.
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail.
1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Brathwaite,
(Edward) Kamau. 1973. The Arrivants: A
New World Trilogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
D’Aguiar, Fred. 1994. The Longest Memory. London: Chatto & Windus.
D’Aguiar, Fred. 1998. Feeding the Ghosts [1997]. London: Vintage.
Dabydeen, David. 1994. Turner. London: Jonathan Cape.
Dathorne, O.R. 1964. The Scholar-Man. London: Cassell.
Fish, Laura. 2008. Strange
Music. London: Jonathan Cape.
Hall, Stuart.
1995. “New Cultures for Old”. In: D. Massey and P. Jess (eds.). A Place in the World? Places,
Cultures and Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
175-213.
Harris,
Wilson. 1967. Tradition the Writer and
Society. London and Port of Spain: New Beacon Books.
Harris, Wilson. 1968. Palace of the Peacock [1960]. London: Faber.
Harris, Wilson. 1970. The Sleepers of Roraima. London: Faber.
Harris,
Wilson. 1980. “The Legacy of Conquest”. Interviewed by John Thieme. Caribbean Contact, March: 17-18.
John,
Catherine A. 2003. Clear Word and Third
Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Johnson, Linton Kwesi. 1986. “Caribbean Journey”. 14
June. BBC 2.
Jung,
C.G. 2010. Collected Works of C.G. Jung.
Volume XII: Psychology and Alchemy. 2nd.
ed. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge.
Kincaid, Jamaica. 2000. My Garden (Book):. London: Vintage.
Lamming, George. 1953. In the Castle of My Skin. London: Michael Joseph.
Lamming, George. 1954. The Emigrants. London: Michael Joseph.
Lamming, George. 1974. Natives of My Person [1971.] London: Vintage.
Massey, Doreen.
1994. Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mittelholzer, Edgar. 1952. Children of Kaywana. London: Secker and Warburg.
Mittelholzer,
Edgar. 1954. The Harrowing of Hubertus
[Kaywana Stock]. London: Secker and
Warburg.
Mittelholzer, Edgar. 1958. Kaywana Blood. London:
Secker and Warburg.
Naipaul, V.S. 1967. The Mimic Men. London: Andr├й Deutsch.
Naipaul, V.S. 1969. The Middle Passage [1962]. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Naipaul,
V.S. 1972. The Overcrowded Barracoon and
Other Articles. London: Andr├й Deutsch.
Nichols, Grace. 1983. i is a long memoried woman. London: Karnak House.
Patterson, Orlando. 1973. Die the Long Day. St. Albans: Mayflower.
Philip, M. NourbeSe, 2008. Zong! Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Phillips, Caryl. 1991. Cambridge. London: Bloomsbury.
Phillips, Caryl. 1993. Crossing the River. London: Bloomsbury.
Reid, V.S. 1949. New
Day. New York: Knopf.
Reid, V.S. 1958. The
Leopard. London: Heinemann.
Schenstead-Harris,
Leif. 2013. “The Phantom’s Passage: David Dabydeen’s
Turner”.
Louisville Conference on Language and Literature. University of Western
Ontario. 23 February. <https://www.academia.edu/13248650/The_Phantom_s_Passage_David_Dabydeen_s_Turner>
[accessed 6 August 2016].
Selvon,
Sam. 1956. The Lonely Londoners.
London: Allan Wingate.
Thieme, John.
2011. “‘Not Equatorial black, not Mediterranean white’: Denis Williams’ Other Leopards”. In Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra and Tessa Roynon (eds.). African Athena: New
Agendas. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press: 311-325.
Thieme, John.
2016. Postcolonial Literary Geographies:
Out of Place. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tuan,
Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The
Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Walcott, Derek. 1965. The Castaway. London: Jonathan Cape.
Walcott, Derek. 1970.
Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other
Plays. New York: Farrar Straus
and Giroux.
Walcott, Derek. 1973. Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape.
Walcott,
Derek. 1976. “The Muse of History”. In Orde Coombs (ed.). Is Massa Day Dead? Garden
City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday: 1-28.
Walcott, Derek.
1980. The Star-Apple Kingdom. London:
Jonathan Cape.
Walcott, Derek.
1990. Omeros. London: Faber.
Walcott, Derek.
1993. “The Figure of Crusoe”. In Robert Hamner (ed.). Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Washington: Three Continents Press: 33-40.
Ward,
Abigail. 2011. Caryl Phillips, David
Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Williams, Denis.
1963. Other Leopards. London: New
Authors.
Wynter, Sylvia.
1971. “Novel and History: Plot and Plantation”. Savacou, 5: 95-102.
[1] This essay follows
Yi-Fu Tuan’s distinction between space and place: “undifferentiated space
becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value” (Tuan 1977:
6).
[2] Masks, the second part of Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy, remains the fullest poetic exploration of a
Caribbean encounter with Africa, while the third part of the trilogy, Islands, explores the creolization of
African retentions in the region. Caribbean novels set in Africa include O.R.
Dathorne’s The Scholar-Man and V.S.
Reid’s The Leopard. Denis Williams’s Other Leopards is the most complex
exploration of ‘mulatto’ Caribbean identity in Africa. See my essay on Williams’s
novel (Thieme 2011).
[3] See, e.g. George
Lamming’s The Emigrants and Sam
Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.
[4] See Psychology and Alchemy, Volume XII of
Jung’s Collected Works (Jung 2010).
[5] E.g. D’Aguiar’s first novel, The Longest Memory is set in Virginia and, while the various sections of Phillips’s Crossing the River move between continents, the majority of the protagonists are African American.
[6] Estimates as to the
exact number of slaves thrown overboard vary. D’Aguiar puts the number at “131
such bodies, no, 132” (D’Aguiar 1998: 3), revising the figure upwards by one to
include his protagonist Mintah, who manages to climb back on board.
[7] See Ward 2011: 151-164, for a discussion of the novel centred on D’Aguiar’s memorialization of slavery.
