Hidden Forces: Counter-Epistemologies in the Writing of Amitav Ghosh

John Thieme

John Thieme

 

Abstract

In his book The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh discusses The Hidden Force, a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, referring to it as ‘the most insightful of all European colonial novels’. Its insightfulness, for Ghosh, lies in its representation of the disintegration of a solid and unimaginative Dutch colonial official in Java, who has to ‘confront the epistemic violence of colonialism’, when he is challenged by a series of weird and paranormal events, which he feels embody a ‘hidden force’. This essay argues that hidden forces, which undermine both the hegemony of the colonial project and values ascendant in the global world order of today, recur throughout Ghosh’s writing, whether fiction or non-fiction. It particularly focuses on the role they play in In An Antique Land, The Calcutta Chromosome, Gun Island and The Nutmeg’s Curse.

In the final chapter of his book The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), Amitav Ghosh discusses The Hidden Force, a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, saying that in his view it ‘the most insightful of all European colonial novels’ (NC 249).[1] What makes it so insightful for Ghosh is its representation of the disintegration of a solid and unimaginative Dutch colonial official in Java, who has to confront what Ghosh refers to as ‘the epistemic violence of colonialism’ (250; italics in original) when he is challenged by a series of weird and paranormal events, which he feels embody a hidden force. From its outset, Ghosh’s own work has been similarly concerned with showing how hidden forces undermine the hegemony of the colonial project and, in his more recent work, he extends this by suggesting that such forces, particularly ‘climatic events of unprecedented and uncanny violence’ (NC 257), are threatening the global world order of today.

From his earliest work to his most recent, Ghosh has been concerned with representing the lives of those who have been unrepresented or underrepresented in mainstream historical narratives. His first novel, The Circle of Reason (1986), follows the fortunes a young Bengali weaver, Alu, whose loom becomes a trope for a circular vision of Reason that stands in opposition to Western linear historiography. His recent work, Smoke and Ashes (2023), which offers a coda to his exploration of the nineteenth-century Opium Trade in his expansive Ibis trilogy (2008-2015), is sub-titled A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories. In both cases, and the same is true of virtually all of Ghosh’s writing, the focus is on the lives of those whom history has for the most part overlooked, and in both his fiction and non-fiction, Ghosh repeatedly attempts to give voice to disempowered subalterns who at best have found a place in the margins of history. And, although his more recent work moves beyond colonial issues to a concern with the contemporary planetary crisis, engendered by anthropogenic climate change and related phenomena, it continues to challenge pre-Enlightenment and non-Western epistemologies.    

To demonstrate this contention, this essay focuses on two of Ghosh’s earlier works, In An Antique Land (1992) and The Calcutta Chromosome (1996), and two of his recent ones, Gun Island (2019) and, more briefly, The Nutmeg’s Curse. In each of these pairings, one of the texts is ostensibly fiction, the other ostensibly non-fiction, but there is slippage between the two modes of writing. Ghosh’s discursive praxis erodes the boundaries between history and fiction to make subaltern alternatives to the dominant imaginaries of the post-Enlightenment West possible. The fiction is set against a background of factual information: the novel The Calcutta Chromosome incorporates specialist information about late nineteenth-century malaria research and religious movements deemed to be heretical in the West. The apparent non-fiction In An Antique Land is informed by speculative fictive invention: sub-titled History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale[2] in one of its editions, it contains an imaginatively reconstructed account of the lives of figures whose life-stories have been occluded in colonial records.

In An Antique Land juxtaposes two apparently factual narratives. In the longer of these, a Ghosh persona, engaged in anthropological research in Egypt,[3] describes his experiences living in a fellaheen village. In the shorter narrative, the persona attempts to uncover a hidden history, by pursuing the fugitive traces of the ‘slave’ of a twelfth-century Jewish merchant – in Egypt, the Malabar coast of India, the U.K. and finally the U.S. – and in so doing he pieces together a narrative of the life, not only of the subaltern slave, ‘Bomma’, but also of his master, Abraham Ben Yiju. The account of the quest for the slave draws readers into an anthropological detective-story, which serves as a metonym for the difficulty of the task of excavating hidden subaltern identities. At the same time, in providing a skeletal biography of Ben Yiju, the text engages with the equally fascinating historiographical project of narrativizing the life of a liminal merchant, who is the personification of Indian Ocean trade-routes that confound the East-West bifurcations of Orientalist cartographies. Ghosh represents Ben Yiju as a cultural broker who moves unself-consciously between supposedly discrete worlds. And in the contemporary Egyptian narrative, there is a similar erosion of the boundaries between different worlds, when the writer, in dialogues with the Egyptian villagers among who he is living, finds striking parallels between experiences and events in India and Egypt.

          So Ghosh’s technique blends archival research and fiction. Speculating on Ben Yiju’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman, he says, ‘If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof’ (IAAL [1992] 230; my italics). Commenting on how Bomma became Ben Yiju’s ‘slave’, he writes, ‘From certain references in Ben Yiju’s papers it seems likely that he took Bomma into his service as a business agent and helper soon after he had established himself as a trader in Mangalore’ (259; my italics). Starting with the comment that Bomma’s first appearance on ‘the stage of modern history’ was only ‘a prompter’s whisper’ (13), Ghosh opens up ‘a trapdoor into a vast network of foxholes where real life continues uninterrupted’ by ‘grand designs and historical destinies’ (15-16). Similarly, his account of contemporary fellaheen village life focuses on micro-histories, ‘tiny threads, woven into the borders of a gigantic tapestry’ (95). Ghosh’s Egyptian characters, figures that would generally be relegated to the periphery of travel-narratives, come alive as individuals in their own right. At the same time they become representatives of the subalterns emancipated by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Revolution, whose lives are now undergoing rapid change as a result of ‘their engagement with modernism’, their desire to escape from what they see as their ‘anachronistic’ (200) situation, by ascending a ladder of technological development. The central tension of the dialogues in the contemporary narrative arises from accounts of the villagers’ eagerness to learn about Indian customs, in order to make comparisons between the two cultures’ success in engaging with modernity.

          In the historical narrative, Ghosh’s emphasis on the mobility of the pre-Enlightenment trading networks of the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean might suggest movements similar to contemporary routes of migration, but the analysis is culturally specific: he makes a sharp distinction between such movements and those of first the post-colonization period and then the contemporary globalized world. The demise of what he views as a centuries’ old ‘culture of accommodation and compromise’ of the Indian Ocean trade comes with the advent of Portuguese colonization, which take control of the trade ‘by aggression, pure and distilled’ (288), refusing any attempts at co-operation. ‘[T]he peaceful traditions of the oceanic trade’ (287) have been the products of a travelling culture that is a world away from those of colonial mercantilism and contemporary global capitalism’s ‘technology of modern violence’ (236). So, while the main emphasis of In An Antique Land is on the collapse of a peaceful, boundary-free culture of accommodation under the impact of colonialism, Ghosh is already suggesting the analogies with neo-colonial practices in the world order of today. Again, there is continuity between the two.

 

The Calcutta Chromosome is ostensibly more fictive than In An Antique Land, but it also interweaves a network of traces – from the history of malaria research and theological movements generally deemed to be heretical in the West, and also slightly futuristic computer technology – to provide the possibility of a hidden subaltern history, which exists in parallel with colonial history as an equally, or possibly more) potent epistemological force, albeit one which has traditionally operated through silence. The predominant mood is established early on in the novel, when a revered Bengali poet is overheard giving a lecture on silence. ‘Every city’, he says, ‘has its secrets […] but Calcutta whose vocation is excess, has so many that it is more secret than any other. Elsewhere […] secrets live in the telling […] But here in our city […] that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life […] it mutates to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to be most starkly withheld – in this case, in silence’ (CC 24-5). This may seem very cryptic, but it sets the tone for a novel that posits the existence of a silenced, hidden network that is more powerful than the colonial epistemologies that have failed to recognize it.

 The main narrative involves a re-examination of the history of late nineteenth-century malaria research by a possibly deranged Calcutta-born man named Murugan, who is convinced that Ronald Ross, the British scientist who was awarded the 1902 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on the life-cycle of the malaria parasite was not a ‘lone genius’ (57), a brilliant British dilettante who outstripped all of his contemporaries. Murugan believes there is a secret history that has been erased from the scribal records of the colonial society and from medical historiography more generally, and he sets out to uncover the hidden truth, a project which can be seen as a metonym for the attempt to recuperate subaltern agency more generally. Murugan’s research has led him to the conclusion that Ross and other Western scientists working in the field of malaria research in India have been manipulated by their Indian helpers, led by a woman named Mangala, who appears to be both the high priestess of a secret medical cult, offering a cure for syphilis, and the brain behind the discoveries that eventually led to Ross's winning the Nobel Prize. So, Ghosh's narrative discredits the Western scientist and instates an Indian female subaltern in his place.

          The cult’s discoveries are, however, concerned with far more than a malaria cure. They involve a counter-epistemology, which promises a form of immortality through the erosion of Western conceptions of discrete subjectivity. Mangala's discovery of the means by which malaria is transmitted has come about as a by-product of her real research interest. Working outside the straitjacket of Western empirical methodologies, she has been attempting to evolve ‘a technology for interpersonal transference’ (106), a means of transmitting knowledge ‘chromosomally, from body to body’ (107). In Murugan's view the relationship between Mangala's counter-science and that of conventional scientists such as Ross is analogous to the relationship between ‘matter and antimatter, [. . .] rooms and ante-rooms and Christ and Antichrist and so on’ (103). If one accepts Murugan's thesis, there is, then, the possibility of a subaltern Manichean force which, though it operates through silence and secrecy, is at least as powerful as Western logocentrism.

In short, The Calcutta Chromosome invites its readers to engage with the possibility of an alternative historiography, in which traditionally disempowered subjects prove to be the real puppet-masters. The counter-science cult led by Mangala can only operate through silence, but the fictive reconstruction that Murugan initiates subverts the hegemonic dominance of Western logocentrism all the same. The Calcutta chromosome and the possibility of effecting the interpersonal transference of knowledge occupies a central role in this investigation, since such transference would erode the barriers between elite and subaltern classes, between the purveyors and the recipients of knowledge, and everything in the novel seems to be working towards this end. Structurally it moves between multiple stories and characters; and the near repetition of variant forms of the same situation also works to dismantle the notion of discrete essentialist versions. The novel has several investigators of possible meanings, and it gradually becomes clear that they are all implicated in the material they are investigating. Numerous binary divisions are eroded. Ultimately, as I have argued elsewhere,[4] The Calcutta Chromosome leaves its readers to consider the part they have played in the construction of meaning. The view that readers are passive consumers of texts, epistemological subalterns, is upended, leaving them free to become agents in the process of decoding the hidden histories that have been explored. I began by referring to Ghosh’s comments on The Hidden Force, where the main protagonist is unable to come to terms with mysterious undercurrents in colonial Javanese society. In The Calcutta Chromosome, the pendulum swings away from the colonial psyche and moves towards an engagement with the specifics of a subaltern epistemology. The novel has been widely praised for its ingenuity and readability,[5] but the subtleties of its engagement with different knowledge-systems, which make it one of Ghosh’s finest achievements, remain under-appreciated.

 

As I have said, Ghosh’s more recent work has expanded the parameters of his engagement with the epistemic violence of colonialism and its aftermath by focusing on the contemporary planetary crisis, engendered by anthropogenic climate change and related phenomena, and there is a clear continuity of concerns. For example, in his influential study The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), he is at pains to point out that cities such as Mumbai, Chennai, New York, Charleston, Singapore, and Hong Kong, founded directly on the ocean by European colonists as an assertion of ‘power and security, mastery and conquest’ are ‘among those that are most directly threatened by climate change’ (GD 37). Meanwhile, he says, today waterside locations continue to be status symbols and favoured tourist spots.

          Ghosh’s main argument in The Great Derangement is that that beliefs about climate that depend on the view that meteorological changes occur gradually have become unsustainable, since the recent proliferation of extreme weather-related events has made the hitherto improbable the new norm. At the same time, The Great Derangement does something else: it engages with what Ghosh sees as fiction’s limitations when it comes to depicting the meteorological shifts that threaten the planet’s future. He claims that the realist novel is unsuited to the representation of dramatic climatological events, because ‘the calculus of probability that is deployed within the imaginary world of a novel is not the same as that which obtains outside it’ (23). The argument here verges on the specious, but to his credit in the years following the publication of The Great Derangement, Ghosh seems to have had a change of heart, largely, it would seem, as a result of his admiration for Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory (2018),[6] a novel which challenges anthropocentric speciesism by making trees central.

Whatever the precise reasons for Ghosh’s change of heart, Gun Island, which appeared three years after The Great Derangement, is a work in which he offers his own sustained attempt at a novel that encompasses the supposed improbable of extreme weather events, along with a range of other hitherto abnormal phenomena that have become norms in the age of the Anthropocene. The novel’s narrator, Deen Datta, who prides himself on being ‘a rational, secular, scientifically minded person’ (GI 36), finds himself challenged by various happenings that appear to be paranormal. Deen travels between West Bengal, Brooklyn, California and Venice, and in each of these locations, he experiences evidence of climate change. This ranges from disturbances caused by the migration of creatures who have suffered habitat loss to seemingly apocalyptic storms. Dolphins, fish, yellow-bellied sea snakes, bark beetles and brown recluse spiders have all been displaced from their traditional habitats, to the point where the migration of species is a new norm, and several passages in the novel draw explicit analogies between human and non-human migration. The numerous instances of extreme weather in the novel reach a climax in the closing pages, when a tornado threatens the central characters as they drive along a road in the Italian region of the Veneto, and subsequently, when they are on board a ship in the Venetian lagoon, they see a plethora of tornadoes on and above the water. For the rational Deen, what he is witnessing seems to belong to an alternative world that lies outside the bounds of realism and he likens this to a pre-Enlightenment text he has seen in Venice’s Querini Stampalia library, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’ (276), which translates as The Strife of Love in a Dream. This is a romance told by a man who is transported into a forest, where he finds himself ‘surrounded by savage animals’. He loses himself in a dream-within-a-dream, where he finds himself assaulted by voices emanating ‘from beings of all sorts – animals, trees, flowers, spirits …’ (227; ellipsis in original). What is most uncanny in this instance, though, is Deen’s feeling that he himself is lost in the dream and being dreamed by ‘creatures whose very existence’ he finds ‘fantastical’ […] – spiders, cobras, sea snakes – and yet’, he says’, they and [he] had somehow become a part of each other’s dreams’ (227). So dream supersedes reality in an animist vision, in which non-human species have equal agency with humans, and more generally pre-Enlightenment, non-Western fables challenge the primacy of the Anthropocene, in a manner similar to the animist vision developed by Richard Powers in The Overstory. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili parallels the Bengali legend that has provided the main impetus for the plot: the legend of the Merchant, Chand Sadagar, and his struggles with Manasa Devi a Sundarbans goddess of snakes and other venomous creatures, such as spiders. So, taking the reader into a discursive space that moves beyond realism, Ghosh proposes the necessity for fabulation, as a riposte to the contemporary planetary crisis. In an Afterword to his verse-narrative Jungle nama (2021) he is explicit about the need for alternative narrative modes. He writes:

The planetary crisis has upturned a vast range of accustomed beliefs and expectations, among them many that pertain to literature and literary forms. In the Before Times, stories like this one would have been considered child-like, and thus fare for children. But today, it is increasingly clear that such stories are founded on a better understanding of the human predicament than many narratives that are considered serious and adult. (Jn 77)

I have written about this aspect of Gun Island more fully in my book Anthropocene Realism (2021). Here perhaps I can just stress that the novel finds affinities between non-Western and pre-Enlightenment Western fabulation in which animism is taken for granted, and sees them as necessary modes to combat the anthropocentrism that has brought about the planetary crisis.

Finally, The Nutmeg’s Curse, a non-fiction work which is sub-titled Parables for a Planet in Crisis. It begins in medias res with a historical tale, which is recounted in a manner suggestive of fiction: ‘nobody knows exactly what transpired in Selamon [a village in the Banda Islands in the Indonesian province of Maluku] on that April night, in the year 1621, except that a lamp fell to the floor (NC 5). The exact nature of what happened on the night in question may be unclear, but Ghosh relates how a fire caused by the falling lamp led to a wholesale massacre of the local inhabitants by the occupying Dutch colonizers, who assumed that the fire indicated that the villagers were revolting. The broader context is that until the eighteenth century, Maluku was the world’s sole source of nutmeg and mace, commodities highly valued around the globe at a time when spices were at the heart of international trading networks. Ghosh’s elaboration of the tale makes it a parable about the violence of colonial mercantilism but again, he emphasizes that there are continuities with ‘our present predicament’ (19), in which dependence on natural resources, in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas, which are ‘fossilized forms of botanical matter’ (18) dominates the global economy.

In the ensuing sections of the book, Ghosh ranges widely, across various aspects of the planetary crisis, developing an argument that shapes itself into a powerful polemic against Anthropocentric exclusivism. As in Gun Island, the crux of his argument is that there are hidden forces that resist what he calls ‘the vision of world-as-resource’, in which ‘the physical subjugation of people and territory’ is accompanied by ‘a specific idea of conquest, as a process of extraction’ (76). He locates the origins of the contemporary ecological omnicide that has generated the climate crisis, and along with it the loss of biodiversity and all the other injurious consequences of global warming, in the epistemology that legitimized a ‘new economy based on extracting resources from a desacralized inanimate Earth’ and ‘the subjugation of human ‘brutes and savages’, along with ‘an entire range of nonhuman beings – trees, animals, and landscapes’ (38). In a chapter on ‘terraforming’, in which he particularly focuses on Native Americans, he discusses how interventions by settlers constituted a form of biological and ecological warfare that dispossessed and exterminated Indigenous peoples. By such means, the nations of the Great Plains of America were destroyed by settlers spreading diseases like smallpox and sanctioning the slaughter of the buffalo that were essential to their way of life. In opposition to the view of Earth as a site of resource extraction, again as in Gun Island, he puts forward a hylozoist view of existence in which agency is no longer the sole prerogative of human animals. Humankind, in its colonial and global capitalist incarnations is displaced from its centrality in favour of a vitalist politics and poetics akin to the Gaia hypothesis of the British chemist James Lovelock, who has promoted the belief that the Earth is a self-sustaining organism that regulates and replenishes itself.[7]

Let me end by coming full circle back to Ghosh’s comments on Louis Couperus’s The Hidden Force in The Nutmeg’s Curse. Ghosh concludes his remarks on The Hidden Force by saying that the predicament it represents is ‘emblematic of the plight of all humanity, as it faces the planetary crisis’, because ‘most of humanity today lives as colonialists once did, viewing the earth as though it were an inert entity that exists primarily to be exploited and profited from’ (257). So again he finds a seamless continuity between the epistemic violence of the colonial era and the Anthropocene exclusivism of today. His final words are, ‘It is essential now, as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer, that […] nonhuman voices be restored to our stories. The fate of humans, and all our relatives, depends on it’ (257).

 

---

[1] References to Ghosh’s works are by the initials of the main words in their titles.

[2] The 1994 Vintage First Departures edition.

[3] Ghosh’s own doctoral thesis was on Kinship in Relation to the Economic and Social Organization of an Egyptian Village Community, Oxford 1982.

[4] See Thieme 2003.

[5] See Khair 2003:145-6.

[6] See Ghosh ‘Reading and Conversation on Gun Island’, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pixQalTh0xQ (Accessed 28 September 2024).

[7] Gaia is the subject of Chapter 7 of The Nutmeg’s Curse (NC 85-98).

 

 

WORKS CITED

Couperus, Louis ([1900] 2012) , The Hidden Force: A Story of Modern Java, Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace/Amazon.

Ghosh, Amitav (1986) The Circle of Reason, New Delhi: Roli Books.

--- (1992) In An Antique Land, London: Granta.

--- (1994) In An Antique Land, New York: Vintage New Departures.

--- (1996) The Calcutta Chromosome, London: Picador.

--- (2008-15) The Ibis Trilogy: Sea of Poppies, John Murray, 2008; River of Smoke, John Murray, 2011; Flood of Fire, John Murray, 2015.

--- (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--- (2019) Gun Island, London: John Murray.

--- (2021) The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Gurugram: Penguin/Allen Lane.

--- (2021) Jungle nama: A Story of the Sundarban, London: John Murray.

--- (2023) Smoke and Ashes: A Writer’s Journey through Opium’s Hidden Histories, New Delhi: Fourth Estate.

Khair, Tabish (2003) ‘The Question of Subaltern Agency: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ in Khair, T. (ed.) Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003: 142-61.

Powers, Richard (2018) The Overstory, London: Heinemann.

Thieme, John (2003) ‘The Discoverer Discovered: Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome’ in Khair, T. (ed.) Amitav Ghosh: A Critical Companion, New Delhi Permanent Black, 2003: 128-41.

--- (2023) Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

***

Bio: John Thieme is Professor Emeritus at London South Bank University. He has held professorial positions at the University of Hull and the University of East Anglia, and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London. His critical books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (2001), Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change (2023) and studies of V.S. Naipaul (1987), Derek Walcott (1999) and R.K. Narayan (2007). His creative writing includes Paco's Atlas and Other Poems (2018), Digitalis and Other Poems (2023) and the novels The Book of Francis Barber (2018) and Cabinets of Curiosities (2023). He edited The Arnold Anthology of Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1996) and was the general editor of both The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and the Manchester University Press Contemporary World Writers Series for two decades.

---

Setu, April 2025

Atwood, Animals and the Anthropocene: Re-Reading Surfacing in the 2020s

John Thieme

John Thieme

When Margaret Atwood published her second novel Surfacing in 1972, environmental fiction was already an established genre, but awareness of the extent to which anthropogenic activity was damaging the planet was in its infancy. For pioneering nineteenth-century North American environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold and John Muir, who strove to combat attitudes that saw wilderness as a site for exploitation, the natural world had been a tangible constant, and for the most part the traditions of ecological writing that followed them concerned themselves with addressing local eco-systems. Thus, in the twentieth century, while seminal fictional and non-fictional works such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) demonstrated the injurious consequences of particular farming practices, they stopped short of suggesting that human activity was fundamentally changing the composition of the planet. Arguably Surfacing goes further, because it offers a radical critique of human exclusivity and as such invites being read as a brilliantly conceived harbinger of twenty-first century novels such as Wu Ming Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011; trans. 2013) and Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) that offer a thorough-going interrogation of the Anthropocene.[1]

Margaret Atwood

            As I write, scientists continue to debate when the Age of the Anthropocene, the age in which human actions have become the most important single determinant of the condition of the earth’s eco-systems and atmosphere, began. The term has been bandied about for some four decades, and various moments have been put forward as candidates for its inception. These have ranged from the beginnings of the Agrarian Revolution more than ten millennia ago to the peak in nuclear fallout in the 1950s or 1960s, after the detonation of the first atom bombs in 1945. Between these extremes come the suggestions that the Industrial Revolution’s adoption of fossil fuels makes the eighteenth century a more obvious terminus ad quem for the Age of the Anthropocene, and the proliferation of the carbon economy after World War II signals a moment when the descent to the bottom accelerated at a hitherto unparalleled rate. So, while there is a fairly general consensus that the Age of the Anthropocene is more than just a sub-division of the Age of the Holocene, as yet the jury has remained out on the question of when it began and whether it constitutes a new geological era.

            Just at the moment, though, as I write – in July 2023 –  the Anthropocene Working Group has proposed Crawford Lake in Ontario as a site that represents the beginning of the proposed new era and has dated it as having begun in the 1950s, since that was when the lake showed an increase in levels of plutonium from hydrogen bomb tests, along with an upsurge in carbon particles and nitrates, from fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers respectively. The Group’s proposal awaits ratification, but, if it is accepted, the Anthropocene era will officially be approved next year.

            What, one may ask, does this have to do with Surfacing? When Atwood wrote the novel just over half a century ago, she could hardly have foreseen that the current debates about the case for the instatement of the Anthropocene as a distinct geological epoch would be argued on the basis of evidence drawn from a Canadian lake. Yet, the setting for the novel is just such a lake, a lake located in a wilderness environment that is showing signs of the damage caused by anthropogenic encroachments and so, coincidentally, this location is very appropriate, since Surfacing stands at the headwaters of novels that critique human exclusivity.

            At first glance Surfacing is a highly personal story. The introspective unnamed narrator/protagonist, who is a commercial artist, journeys from the city into the Quebec woods, an environment where she has lived as a girl. She goes back with three companions – her lover Joe and another couple, David and Anna – to search for her father, a retired arborist who has gone missing from the remote island cabin where he has been living alone. Interspersed with her account of this present-day journey, the narrator revisits episodes from her past, recalling them in an associative stream-of-consciousness manner that particularly focuses on her childhood and her relationship with her supposed ‘husband,’ who turns out to have been a married man with whom she was having an affair. The dénouement of the present-day action begins when she discovers her father’s drowned body, though initially she displaces this onto her brother, whom readers have earlier been told drowned as a child, only to have this subsequently corrected; the dénouement of the past action begins when she reveals that she has had an abortion and readers realize that she has displaced details from the day when this took place onto references to her imagined wedding day, which never took place.

            So, while initially the plot seems to revolve around the disappearance of the narrator’s father, it quickly becomes clear that she is engaged on a parallel quest to find herself – a quest to unravel suppressed aspects of her past, on which she has superimposed a fictionalized version. Her companion Anna occupies herself with reading detective stories and Surfacing itself emerges as a kind of detective story: a detective story of consciousness, in which the unreliable narrator is both the object of investigation and the detective who unravels the mystery of her dissociated consciousness, as she gradually discloses the truth about her past. Her unreliability functions on various levels with readers being treated to more of her back story than she reveals to the various people in her life, her present companions included. Ultimately, though, she is a victim who has estranged herself from the reality of her past and in the latter stages of the novel she undergoes an extended epiphany, in which she strips away the layers of her false self and resolves ‘to refuse to be a victim’ (Atwood [1972] 1979: 185), a condition which she has associated with her being a woman and a Canadian.[2]

Surfacing is, then, ostensibly a very personal story, in that it is an account of one woman’s struggle for authenticity. However, at the same time, the narrator’s surfacing from the false version of her past that she has constructed has broader significance, since she comments extensively on language, landscape, gender, nation, and society in a manner that makes her consciousness a crucible for many of the most debated issues of the period in which the novel is set, the early 1970s. She sees life in terms of a series of oppositional binaries, which include Canadian/American, female/male, wilderness/city, organic/mechanic, conception/abortion, sanity/madness, and Native/settler. Above all, she mistrusts the ‘human’ and affiliates herself with the non-human animal So what may initially seem to be a tightly written account of an aberrant psychology has much broader resonance. While it may be reductive to read the narrator as a Canadian Everywoman, the text lends certainly itself to being read as a study of a Canadian Anywoman’s psyche – her being left unnamed lends credence to such a reading – and beyond this as a probing investigation of fundamental existential issues that have ever increasing relevance, as, half a century later, geologists move toward ratifying the era in which we are living as the Age of the Anthropocene. Germane though the issues foregrounded in Surfacing were to the North American counter-culture of the 1970s, the novel anticipates the contemporary growth of awareness that anthropogenic activity is threatening the future of the planet.

            So, although on one level, Surfacing can be read as an interesting early 1970s period-piece, it is also a forerunner of Atwood’s post-millennial ecologically committed fiction, particularly her MaddAddam trilogy, and in many ways it is her finest work in this genre. The three MaddAddam novels – Oryx and Crake ([2003] 2004), The Year of the Flood ([2009] 2010) and MaddAddam ([2013] 2014) – move between a chilling near-present and a dystopian future to show, over the course of some 1,700 pages, how Anthropocene activity is contributing to the destruction of life on Earth as we know it. Surfacing, which is only a tenth of the length of the trilogy, may seem slight in comparison, but it is a tightly written masterpiece that has few rivals among the growing group of novels that are addressing the impact of human behaviour on the planet’s climate, biodiversity, and resources. While its main action takes place within the mind of its narrator, its themes encompass most of the issues that have subsequently come to be associated with the Anthropocene. The relationship between human and non-human animals is central, but from the opening sentence, where the narrator says ‘I can’t believe I’m on this road again, twisting along past the lake where the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south, and I notice they now have sea-planes for hire’ (Atwood [1972] 1979: 1), onwards, it is clear that the environment more generally is under threat, as Canadian wilderness space is invaded by forces associated with Canada’s powerful southern neighbour.  And along with this physical invasion, the narrator takes the view that Canada is threatened by American psychological colonization:

They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference. Like the late show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space, body snatchers injecting themselves into you dispossessing your brain […]. (123)

The tension between American materialism and Canadian reverence for Nature runs throughout the novel. In its starkest form, it is articulated by David, who glibly sees their temporary stay in the Canadian bush as offering an escape from American-led capitalist culture, at one point saying, ‘We ought to start a colony, I mean a community up here, get it together with some other people, break away from the urban nuclear family. It wouldn’t be a bad country if only we could kick out the fucking pig Americans, eh?’ (83). Earlier, when the narrator suggests they should use their time away from urban civilization to read, he replies, ‘Naaa, why read when you can do that in the city?’ (33), but at the same time as he says this, he is twiddling the knob on his transistor radio to try to get the latest baseball scores. And the narrator, who distances herself from David’s rhetoric, nevertheless takes a similar view of Americans, when she sees two fishermen in a powerboat, who have wantonly slaughtered and strung up a heron, as the epitome of that kind of Anthropocentric exclusivism that arrogates to itself the right to brutalize and kill the non-human:

The innocents get slaughtered because they exist, I thought, there is nothing inside the happy killers to restrain them, no conscience or piety; for them, the only things worthy of life were human, their own kind of human, framed in the proper clothes and gimmicks, laminated. It would have been different in those countries where an animal is the soul of an ancestor or the child of a god, at least they would have felt guilt. (121-2)

The powerboat fishermen turn out to be Canadians not, as she has assumed, Americans, and it transpires that they have taken David and Joe to be Americans because of their long hair. So rigid national stereotyping is undermined, but the broad contours of two diametrically opposed views of existence continue to be signified by the terms ‘American’ and ‘Canadian’ and in tandem with this the narrator equates the American with the ‘human,’ which she distrusts, and the Canadian with the ‘animal’.

            This is a dichotomy that runs through much of her work. In the same year as Surfacing appeared, Atwood published her critical book, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972), a surprise best-seller (Atwood [1972] 2012: v-xii) whose popularity has outlasted that of many of the literary works it discusses. Survival includes a chapter on the way animals are represented in classic British, American and Canadian animal stories, which provides an interesting companion-piece to the representation of animals in Surfacing.[3] Atwood takes the view that British animal stories are not really about animals at all, but ‘like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, Englishmen in furry zippered suits, often with a layer of human clothing added on top,’ and goes on to say that the animals ‘speak fluent English and are assigned places in a hierarchical social order which is essentially British (or British-colonial; as in the Mowgli stories): Toad of Toad Hall is an upper-class twit, the stoats and ferrets which invade his mansion are working-class louts and scoundrels’. She notes that these stories ‘invariably’ have ‘happy endings’ ([1972] 2012: 73-4).

In contrast, according to Atwood, American examples of the genre are hunting stories, and she cites Moby-Dick, the bear in Faulkner’s story of the same name, the lion in Hemingway’s ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’, the grizzlies in Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? and the deer glimpsed in James Dickey’s Deliverance as evidence of animals that are the prey of human hunters. In each case, she says. the animals concerned are ‘endowed with magic symbolic qualities’:

They are Nature, mystery, challenge, otherness, what lies beyond the Frontier: the hunter wishes to match himself against them, conquer them by killing them and assimilate their magic qualities, including their energy, violence and wildness, thus ‘winning’ over Nature and enhancing his own stature. American animal stories are quest stories – with the Holy Grail being a death – usually successful from the hunter’s point of view, though not from the animal’s; as such they are a comment on the general imperialism of the American cast of mind. (Atwood [1972] 2012: 74)

Having identified what she sees as the dominant mythology of American animal stories, Atwood goes on to contrast this with Canadian examples of the genre. She sees the Canadian animal story, as pioneered by Ernest Thompson Seton and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a genre which offers insight into the Canadian psyche and says that ‘Those looking for something “distinctively Canadian” in literature might well start right here’ (73). She finds the Canadian stories very different from their British and American counterparts:

The animal stories of Seton and Roberts are far from being success stories. They are almost invariably failure stories, ending with the death of the animal; but this death, far from being the accomplishment of a quest, to be greeted with rejoicing, is seen as tragic or pathetic, because the stories are told from the point of view of the animal. That’s the key: English animal stories are about ‘social relations,’ American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers […]. (74-5; italics in original)

And this is followed by the remark: ‘Moby-Dick as told by the White Whale would be very different (“Why is that strange man chasing me around with a harpoon?”)’ (75).

            In Surfacing, the American attitude she identifies in Survival comes through particularly forcefully when the narrator describes her response to the dead heron:

Why had they strung it up like a lynch victim […]. To prove they could do it, they had the power to kill. Otherwise it was valueless: beautiful from a distance, but it couldn’t be tamed or cooked or trained to talk, the only relation they could have to a thing like that was to destroy it. Food, slave or corpse, limited choices; horned and fanged heads sawed off and mounted on the billiard room wall, stuffed fish, trophies. It must have been the Americans. (Atwood 1979 [1972]: 110-11) 

The heron represents ‘Nature, mystery, challenge, otherness’, the ‘magic symbolic qualities’, which, as Atwood sees it, have to be destroyed in American animal stories, and later in Surfacing, the narrator invests it with a particular spiritual meaning, when, she links it with Christ and the Christian doctrine of the vicarious atonement: ‘anything that suffers and dies instead of us is Christ […]. The animals die that we may live’ (134).

On one level, then, the representation of animals in Surfacing encourages reading the novel as national allegory, but such a reading is delimiting, both because the supposed Americans prove to be Canadians, but also, and more significantly, because the narrator’s equation of the American with the human moves this dichotomy onto a more fundamental ontological plane. Numerous details relate the specifics of her situation to concerns that interrogate the Enlightenment privileging of the Anthropocene. Thus the passage that opens the second of the novel’s three sections goes to the heart of the Cartesian separation of mind from body, and in so doing foregrounds and criticizes ways in which humans distinguish themselves from animals on the grounds that they have reasoning capacities:

The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn’t have different words for them. If the head extended directly into the shoulders like a worm’s or a frog’s without that constriction, that lie, they wouldn’t be able to look down at their bodies and move them around as if they were robots or puppets; they would have to realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die. (70)

And in this section of the novel, the narrator journeys back into the past – personal, national and prehistoric – and rediscovers a conception of self that existed before language created this duality. This journey is enacted on several levels. Initially it is signalled by a change in tense: hitherto she has been telling her story in the present; now the narrative moves into the past, and as she gradually uncovers buried aspects of her personal past, the novel engages in a similar process of excavation as it digs into the pre-Columbian past of Canada, a past which is particularly associated with animals and Native Canadian culture. One reading of her journey has seen it as a shamanistic rite (Pratt 1981) and certainly the narrator enters into a mindset which is remote from the norms of Western Anthropocene thinking.

            Pursuing her quest to locate her father, the narrator looks for clues in his papers and comes across some apparently insane drawings that he has made. They include a figure that seems to combine alligator-like animal features with human attributes, and this therianthropic amalgam leads her to conclude that her father has become totally deranged, with the figure he has drawn possibly representing ‘what he thought he was turning into’ (95). Her father has been the epitome of reason to her, even though she has discovered that the ‘eighteenth century [sic] rationalists’ (32), personifications of the Enlightenment Anthropocene, that he admired were afflicted with a plethora of mainly psychological problems. Consequently she is particularly shaken by what she views as his insane drawings. However, when she realizes that he has been pursuing an interest in Native rock-paintings, there is a sea change in her attitude. What appears mad as the product of a supposedly rational, modern mind takes on different connotations when it is associated with an animist Indigenous view of experience. So she goes in search of her father in places where his papers suggest the rock-paintings are located and gradually her identity as a woman from contemporary consumer society is stripped away, as she travels back into a world where the norms of the Anthropocene no longer obtain.      

She dives into the lake at a spot where her father has been looking for the Native paintings and surfaces having experienced the central epiphany of the novel. This is the discovery of her father’s drowned body, and after initially displacing this onto her brother, she conflates what she has seen with the central trauma in her past: the repressed knowledge of a child she has aborted:

I knew when it was, it was in a bottle curled up, staring out at me like a cat pickled; it had huge jelly eyes and fins instead of hands, fish gills, I couldn’t let it out, it was dead already, it had drowned in air. It was there when I woke up, suspended in the air above me like a chalice, an evil grail and I thought, Whatever it is, part of myself or a separate creature, I killed it. It wasn’t a child but it could have been one. I didn’t allow it. (137)[4]

So the shock of seeing her father dead brings her own aborted parenthood to mind and she likens the foetus to an animal that may or may not be part of herself. The feminist aspects of the text make it clear that patriarchal repression has been a major factor in her alienation and her father’s death releases her from one kind of male logic, even though he has been less rational than she has assumed. More significantly, she emerges as the victim of her married former lover, who has coerced her into an abortion she hasn’t really wanted, telling her the child ‘wasn’t a person, it was only an animal’ (138; my italics).

            She has come to regard herself as the murderer of this animal, and traumatic though the abortion has been for her, this takes on resonances that go far beyond her personal angst, since, along with wilderness space and Indigeneity, animals represent a prehistoric, extra-Anthropocene order of existence, which is being destroyed by contemporary ‘civilization’. There are several allusions to prehistoric species – mammoths (3), pterodactyls (57), and mastodons (138) among them – as well as numerous references to the contemporary fauna of the region. In the action that follows, as mentioned above, she discards the trappings of such ‘civilization’ and reverts to an animal-like state of being. Animals, in the narrator’s imagination, as she undergoes this return to Nature, have no need of language; they represent a pre-linguistic order, in which Anthropocene binaries such as the split between mind and body do not exist.

            After discovering her father’s drawings, she believes that her mother must have left her a similar legacy and she finds this in a scrapbook in the form of a picture she herself has drawn as a child. This depicts a pregnant woman, whose unborn baby, her pre-natal self, is ‘sitting up inside her gazing out,’ and opposite the woman is another therianthropic being: ‘a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail’ (152). This is glossed as a representation of God, in which the Manichean binary that separates God and the Devil has been broken down, but it can equally well be seen as a transgression of the human-animal binary. Just prior to this, she says, ‘it wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both’ (148) and she resolves to raise the baby she believes she may now be carrying as an animal-like being, whom she ‘will never teach […] any words’ (156).

            During this phase of the action, she removes herself from the norms of human behaviour by identifying herself as an animal – discarding clothes, making herself a lair, defecating like an animal – and subsequently imagining herself going beyond this into a state of being in which she envisages herself being absorbed into a complete hylozoist oneness with Nature:

The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word

I lean against a tree. I am a tree leaning […]

I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place. (175)

The thinking seems to anticipate James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is a self-sustaining holistic system ‘alive: not as the ancients saw her – a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight – but alive like a tree’ (Lovelock 1991: 12).

            Her visionary experience outside social norms promotes a view that undermines Anthropocene notions of normality predicated on reason: during this period she says at one point, ‘From any rational point of view I am absurd, but there are no longer any rational points of view’ (163). The novel concludes with her suspended between nature and culture, being called to return to society, but not having actually done so. So the ending leaves her in an interstitial situation. She knows that her extra-social experience has been an interlude, but she has learnt a counter-human wisdom from it, and as yet remains poised on the cusp between animal and human worlds. She has encountered therianthropic figures in both her father’s sketches of Native rock paintings and the scrapbook of her mother’s legacy, and just as she has thought that her father’s drawings may represent what he sees himself as turning into, she has entered into a non-human conception of self, when she has seen herself as first an animal, then a tree, and then simply a place.

The phase of the novel in which the narrator reverts to a non-human state may seem like a temporary episode, but the anti-Anthropocene mindset she assumes at this point is only an extension of her thinking throughout the novel and earlier it has manifested itself in her response to the requirements of the commission on which she is currently working as a commercial artist. She is illustrating a volume of Quebec Folk Tales and is struck by the extent to which the Disneyfied nature of its stories is at odds with the reality of the bush that she and her companions are experiencing. Bemoaning the fact that the animals are anthropomorphized (‘human inside and they take their fur skins off as easily as getting undressed’ (50) in a manner similar to the English animal stories she talks about in Survival and that there is no loup garou (werewolf) in the collection she has to illustrate, she sets about subverting the ethos of the tales by giving a princess she is depicting ‘fangs and a moustache [and] surrounding her with moons and fish and a wolf with bristling hackles and a snarl’ (51). Here, then, Gothic iconography replaces fairy tale sentimentality and this relates interestingly to what the novel as a whole is doing with the figure of the therianthrope. In Western incarnations such as the werewolf and the vampire, the therianthrope is separated off from the human by being demonized, but in the narrator’s childhood drawings that she finds in the scrapbook, they serve to dismantle human-animal binaries, in a manner that prefigures her assumption of a therianthropic identity when she removes herself from the norms of human society.  The ending of the novel moves beyond this, but irrespective of whether or not she is going to return to society, the trope of therianthropic identity, and beyond this the narrator’s coming to terms with her suppressed past by affiliating herself with a tree, a place, and by implication all the non-human organisms that make up life on earth, provide a powerful argument against human exclusivism. In short, this movement beyond the human into a hylozoist view of existence establishes Surfacing as a classic fictional attack on the Anthropocene avant la lettre.

---

[1] I discuss these two novels in Thieme 2023.  

[2] Cf. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, where Atwood identifies four basic victim positions ([1972] 2012: 31-35). The wording here in Surfacing seems to correlate with the fourth of these, the condition of being ‘a creative non-victim’ (Atwood [1972] 1979: 35).

[3] Earlier, in the title-poem of The Animals in That Country, Atwood had contrasted the animals ‘in that country’ who have ‘the faces of people,’ with the animals ‘[i]n this country’ who have ‘the faces of animals,’ die deaths that ‘are not elegant’ and then are said to ‘have the faces of no-one’ (Atwood 1968: 2-3). 

[4] This is anticipated by an earlier passage, in which, speaking of her own pre-natal experience, the narrator says, ‘I believe that an unborn baby has its eyes open and can look out through the walls of the mother’s stomach, like a frog in a jar’ ([1972] 1979: 26).

 

 

References

Atwood, Margaret (1968) The Animals in That Country, Toronto: Oxford University Press.

----------------------  ([1972] 1979) Surfacing London: Virago.

----------------------  ([1972] 2012) Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Toronto: Anansi.

----------------------  ([2003] 2004) Oryx and Crake, London: Virago.

----------------------  ([2009] 2010) The Year of the Flood, London: Virago.

----------------------  ( [2013] 2014) MaddAddam, London: Virago.

Lovelock, James (1991) Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine, London and Stroud: Gaia Books.

Powers, Richard ([2018] 2019) The Overstory, London: Vintage.

Pratt, Annis (1981) ‘Surfacing and the Rebirth Journey’, in The Art of Margaret Atwood: Essays in Criticism, ed. Arnold and Cathy Davidson, Toronto: Anansi: 139-157

Thieme, John (2023) Anthropocene Realism: Fiction in the Age of Climate Change, London and New York.

Wu Ming-yi ([2011] 2013) The Man with the Compound Eyes, trans. Darryl Sterk, London: Vintage.

---

Setu, July 2023

After the Crossing of Waters: Spatial Transformations in Anglophone Caribbean Writing

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 Meroë 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:

Hell

in the water

brown

boys of Bushongo

drowned in the

blue and the bitter

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 (né 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: André Deutsch.

Naipaul, V.S. 1969. The Middle Passage [1962]. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Naipaul, V.S. 1972. The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles. London: André 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.

---

Setu, June 2023