Burnett, Paula (ed.) The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005) [ISBN 9780140424607]. Texts collected on a historical basis, with a useful introduction which distinguishes between ‘oral’ and ‘literary’ traditions. This introduction also shows how the language of Caribbean literature has been shaped by a politics of culture.
Lovelace, Earl The Dragon Can’t Dance. (Harlow: Longman, 1981) [ISBN 9780582642317]. A contemporary ‘yard’ novel.
Dabydeen, David and N. Wilson-Tague, A Reader’s Guide to West Indian Literature and Black British Literature. (London: Hansib, 1988) [ISBN 870518357]. A useful introduction.
*Williams, Eric From Columbus to Castro; The History of the Caribbean from 1492–1969. (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969) [ISBN 0233961631]. Selective reading is recommended.
Ramchand, Keith The West Indian Novel and its Background. (London: Heinemann, 1983) [ISBN 0435986651].
Saba Sakana, Amon The Colonial Legacy in Caribbean Literature. (London: Karnak House, 1987) [ISBN 09007015344]. A lively polemic.
*James, Louis Caribbean Literature in English. (London: Longman, 1999) [ISBN 0582493544]. A new and interesting survey.
Darbell, Alison and Sara Lawson Welsh, (eds) The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. (London: Routledge, 1996) [ISBN 0415120497].
* Especially recommended
The historical contexts which produce a novel like Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, and the modern poetry in Burnett’s collection, go back a long way. It is for this reason that we are going to begin our study of modern Caribbean literature by looking at an extract from an anonymous poem written in the early eighteenth century, a poem which happens to be the earliest published Jamaican poem in existence.
From ‘A Pindarique Ode on the Arrival of His Excellency Sir Nicholas Lawes, Governor of Jamaica’ (1718):
Sing first the Heroe in his Goodly Ship
With waving Pendants and her gilded Beak
Breasting the Surgy Deep,
Proud of th’ important weight she bears,
Her Head aloft she stately rears,
And her Old Foe beneath Disdains, not Fears:
About Her ornamented Side
The painted Dolphins sport and glide,
And court his gracious Hand in all their Pride;
The fierce devouring Tyrants of the Main
Forget their Nature, for a while are tame;
The Shark himself neglects his easy Prey,
Swims to the Vessel and doth Homage pay,
Th’ exulting harmless little Fry
Wanton before their Enemy
Secure in Innocence whilst LAWES is by.
Our Prayers are heard, Our Fears dispers’d and fled,
No longer now the false destructive Seas,
Their Rocks, their Monsters, or their Rage we dread,
The labour’d Bark fast anchoring rides at ease,
Our Guardian safely Lands; (All Praise to Heaven,
For its best Gift to us in him is now giv’n)
The wide-mouth’d Cannons Roar,
Bears the News from Shore to Shore;
Farther th’acclaiming Peoples mightier Voice,
And Bless Great Brittain’s Monarch in his Choice.
Behold upon the winding Sštrand
Crowds like its Pebbles numerous stand.
And press upon the ruler of the Land
With too obsequious Love
Cluster’d in Throngs they move:
Herself neglecting see the pregnant Wife
Too fondly curious risques a double Life,
Old Age on Crutches limps to bless it’s Eyes
As loath to lose so wish’d a sight before it dyes,
All Work and Labour’s at a stand, as though
Of more Importance were the graceful Show
Than Gold, to all things else prefer’d but You;
The branded shackled Slave makes Holy-Day,
And is allowed to Play,
This once he expatiates free,
And tastes the unknown sweets of Liberty,
Life’s Choicest Blessing all shall flow Great Chief from Thee.
This poem is about Jamaica. It was published in Jamaica, and written by a Jamaican, a white Jamaican. The poem is also given Caribbean status by the fact that it is included in Burnett’s anthology of Caribbean verse. For all these reasons it could be argued that this poem is a Caribbean poem. But there is nothing distinctively Caribbean in the fabric of the poem. It is obviously a product of English education. Every word and phrase announces itself as belonging to English high culture. In terms of artifice and elegance, this poem would seem to owe quite a lot to something like Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’. It owes nothing to the language forms which were being spoken by black Caribbeans who, at this time, would have constituted some 90 per cent of the Jamaican population.
Activity
Examine ‘Quaco Sam’ on page 8 of the Burnett collection. Try to characterise the differences between white creole and black cultural traditions.
Ironically it is precisely the self-conscious Englishness of the Lawes poem that underwrites its status as a Caribbean poem and for this obvious reason: throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and at least the early part of the twentieth centuries, so-called ‘real’ culture was by definition white European culture. Thus the first characteristic of the literature of the British West Indies in this long period is its self-conscious Englishness. The second characteristic is its distortion of reality. In the above poem, for instance, power, the power of the English state represented by Governor Lawes, is civilised and sanitised. This power is imaged not by the brutalities of whipping, branding, rape or tongue-slitting which characterised the plantation system in historical reality. Power becomes something like a moral force which civilises the wild and savage in nature so that the seas, the rocks, even the sharks, become tamed and bow in deference to the ‘gracious’ hand of Sir Nicholas Lawes: Lawes the hero, the guardian, the ruler and, in a wonderfully telling phrase, Lawes ‘the Great Chief’. The poem lies most dangerously perhaps in the last verse where the crowds gather together to press upon Lawes with ‘too obsequious love’. The slaves have been given a ‘holy-day’ and they frolic at Lawes’ feet in thanks. You might want to ask what has happened to the traditions of black resistance which characterise the history of the Caribbean and which so challenge the white poet’s image of the knee-bending black. This history included actions ranging from black women practising abortion, or what one historian has called ‘gynaecological resistance’, to full-blown rebellion and revolution. In fact, this poem happens to have been written in the middle of a full-blown rebellion, the Maroon Wars, wars which produced a white exodus from Jamaica and which were not concluded until 1739, with a treaty which forced the British Government to recognise the free status of the slave rebels and their right to trade. This history of resistance, like the language of the black Caribbean, has been erased in this poem, and along with it an essential part of the black experience in the Caribbean.
The black experience continued to be distorted or erased for the next two centuries following the publication of the Lawes poem, which means that this eighteenth-century poem is not just a poem. It is part of a very long tradition of white creole culture.
Activity
At this point you need to familiarise yourself with this white tradition and its distortions. Burnett’s collection is illustrative. You should also consult Kenneth Ramchand, who gives extracts from texts like H.G. de Lisser’s The White Witch of Rosehall (1929). In the following extract from this novel two white men are watching something which purports to be a black religious ritual.
A shudder passed through Robert; to his surprise he found that he too was slightly moving his body to the rhythm of the sound. Rider had himself better in-hand, but the hypnotic influence of the scene did not leave him entirely unaffected. It had the appeal to the more primitive emotions. It stirred up something in the depths of one’s being. He could understand how devotees in pagan lands were moved at times almost to madness by the call and compulsion of their strange and horrible religions.
When you are in a position to characterise these white creole traditions, you should then consider the question of why these distortions had such currency. This will involve you in finding out about the plantation system. Images of black people in white literature had their origins in slavery. How are the two, exploitation and ‘culture’, connected? You should consider the broad contradictions between slavery and the high moral and cultural ground which Britain took in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. David Dabydeen and N.M. Wilson’s book, A Reader’s Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature, will help you to explore these contradictions.
Activity
Read the Prologue of Lovelace’s novel. It will be immediately obvious that this black voice is very different from the white creole traditions you have been looking at. You should begin to make some provisional notes which help you to characterise and explain these differences.
How did a powerful black perspective, such as Lovelace’s, emerge in societies where political, cultural and social institutions had been predominantly under white ownership? This is a complex question, but a key decade to consider is the 1930s. This period is usually seen as a turning point in the development of Caribbean political life. Throughout the 1930s strikes and demonstrations occurred throughout the region, producing a radical trade union movement and the formation of nationalist labour parties. These political organisations were to articulate demands for social reform and political independence in the years that followed. It is important to realise that the arrival of the modern black Caribbean novel, in terms of quality and quantity, is exactly synchronous with the rise of these popular movements and possibly uniquely connected to the whole anti-colonial enterprise. The progenitors of the modern Caribbean novel, people like C.L.R. James who wrote the first yard novel, Minty Alley, in 1936 and Alfred Mendes, who published Pitch Lake and Black Fauns in the 1930s, were writers who were also political activists. The purpose of their fictional writing was partly, perhaps primarily, to raise political and social consciousness. This purpose has remained of fundamental importance to Caribbean writers ever since. The Caribbean novel has remained very much concerned with exploring social and political life through realism and this is one of the features which distinguishes the Caribbean novel from some central traditions of its modern European counterpart.
With this background in mind we can now return to the relationship between white creole literary traditions and black literary traditions.
Activity
How would you describe the main differences between these two traditions?
It should be clear that the two are not just different. There are senses in which the black traditions are in part defined against the earlier white traditions. Thus, if white creole literature is typically romantic and exotic, The Dragon Can’t Dance is determinedly realist and, typically of the modern Caribbean novel, it focuses on the social and cultural conditions of the urban and rural working classes. If in the older traditions a white consciousness becomes the focal point which reveals, evaluates and interprets, in The Dragon Can’t Dance, white consciousness is displaced. White society here is a shadowy force in the background, referred to, but not much more, when, for instance, Fisheye notes that, despite all the political efforts of the ‘People’s National Movement’:
…white people were still in the banks and businesses along Frederick Street. The radio still spoke with a British voice. He couldn’t understand. (p.66)
In the older traditions, black culture, African or otherwise, is the strange, the other, the primitive. In the modern novel this culture becomes a vital means of expression, which makes people ‘known’ or ‘seen’, as Lovelace puts it. Carnival, of course, is at the heart of this black culture in Lovelace’s novel. Participation in this annual ritual is much more than just a temporary release from the harsh realities of everyday life on the Hill. Participation becomes a vital assertion of selfhood.
Little by little Aldrick worked his way to the front of the band. Then he saw Sylvia, dancing still with all her dizzying aliveness, dancing wildly; frantically twisting her body, flinging it round her waist, jumping and moving, refusing to let go of that visibility, that self Carnival gave her; holding it balanced on her swaying hips going up and coming down in a tall, undulating rhythm, lifting up her arms and leaping as if she wanted to leap out of her self. A self in which she could stay forever, in which she could be forever. (p.127)
It should be becoming clear that the modern Caribbean novel involves a concerted frontal attack on the earlier white traditions. The Dragon Can’t Dance is vitally concerned with retaking the cultural territory which white creole and European traditions had usurped. Language is the place where this retaking of the territory takes place most obviously. In the earlier traditions Standard English and dialect were entirely separated and there was an obvious cultural point to this separation. Standard English was the code of ‘civilised’ white society. Dialect, or the language forms of the majority of the Caribbean, became the ‘low’, incorrect English of the ignorant masses. Modern Caribbean writers have, as it were, repossessed the language of the Caribbean. In Lovelace’s novel this is achieved partly by closing the gap between the language of narration and the language spoken by characters. In The Dragon Can’t Dance there are clear differences between the language of narration and the language which characters speak, but the differences are constantly being undermined, by diction, by grammatical forms, and by the distinctive rhythm of the narrative which is designed to echo Caribbean dialects and which uses Calypso rhythms. The point about this usage of dialect has something to do with realism, of course, but more than this it also gives a special kind of status and authority to dialect because it puts it to the service of an impressive range of aesthetic purposes.
Activity
Collect further examples of the antithetical relationship between modern black literature and the white creole traditions. Pay particular attention to the representation of the past. Because the earlier traditions distorted the past, or ignored it, modern black Caribbean literature frequently engages in a re-evaluation of the past. It is also frequently engaged in, as it were, writing out the silences, filling in the absences of the earlier tradition. You should consider the representation of the past in both Lovelace’s novel and in the modern poems in Burnett.
Thinking about the relationships between colonial and postcolonial literature raises the question of the authenticity of black literary culture as a national culture. It could be argued, for instance, that a Caribbean novel in English, for all its assertions of representing a ‘national’ literature, remains a colonial product, dependent on a language of empire to one extent or another, but also dependent on a literary form which is itself so closely associated with Europe. Some might even argue that authentic black culture in the Caribbean must be looked for in cultural forms other than the novel. Such views are extreme, but cannot be entirely dismissed. Even a novel like The Dragon Can’t Dance, which clearly places itself within a process of cultural decolonisation, is punctured by a deep sense of disillusion, and this sense derives in part from Lovelace’s handling of issues around cultural authenticity. The novel does assert a black identity, but it reads more like a postcolonial critique than an assertion of triumph. In other words, this is a novel which in some ways remains dispossessed in the present.
Activity
Carnival is presented in this novel as a celebration of self, a ritual which empowers its participants with ‘visibility’. At the same time, Lovelace offers a critique of this ritual, a ritual which never seems to move beyond a symbolic demonstration of black power. At this point you might compile a detailed list of the terms of Lovelace’s critique of Carnival.
The issue of ‘negritude’, a nineteenth-century word for pan-Africanism, is treated by Lovelace with a similar ambiguity. Consider the first four chapters of the novel. You will see that they revolve around the Queen (Cleothilda), the Princess (Sylvia), the priest (Aldrick) and the warrior (Fisheye). This initial structuring links the inhabitants of the Hill with the displaced culture and societal forms of Africa, but the linkage is both negative and positive at the same time. Fisheye does continue the traditions of warriorhood, but these become corrupted in acts of women-beating.
Activity
The treatment of black identity in the colonial context is a fundamental concern of Caribbean literature. Consider Lovelace’s treatment of this issue in detail. You will find that many poems in Burnett’s collection are also concerned with the same theme. Consider, for instance, Walcott’s poem ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ (pages 243–244), or ‘Mabrak’ by Bongo Jerry (pages 69–71), or Louise Bennett’s ‘Back to Africa’. While you are considering this broad issue of cultural identity, you might consider what parts Pariag and Dolly, the two Indian Hill dwellers, play in Lovelace’s novel.
Lovelace’s critique of Caribbean society is partly carried by Aldrick. His understanding of the futile action of the ‘People’s Liberation Army’ represents an understanding of the legacy of colonialism as a state of mind, even when the political institutions of colonialism have ostensibly been dismantled.
Even with guns in we hands, even with power, we was looking to somebody else to make a decision…Even when we have power, when we have guns. Is like we ain’t have no self. I mean, we have a self but the self we have is for somebody else…We put the responsibility on them to act, to do something. You don’t see that? The way children cry, so their parents will pick them up. You don’t see that? (pp.188–189)
This postcolonial novel, then, remains a colonial novel, at least to the extent that it is still forced to locate itself within the colonial legacy. The point to emphasise is that this disillusion has precise historical determinants and forms part of a political perspective which Lovelace shares with many Caribbean writers.
Activity
To understand something of these historical determinants you will need to consult something like Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro. In particular, you should find out about the hope raised by the Caribbean Federation of the 1950s, and the deflation of that hope when the federation collapsed in 1962. You should also consider the role of the United States in the Caribbean. If the Spanish, French, English and Dutch have formally left the Caribbean, the US retains a heavy involvement in the region. This involvement constitutes a kind of economic imperialism at the invitation of Caribbean leaders, who apparently cannot find ways of distancing themselves from the old colonial networks. The result has been the continuance of social and economic impoverishment in many Caribbean societies.
By the end of this chapter, having studied some of the essential reading and some of the recommended critical texts, you should be able to:
1. ‘There is no difference between a novel written in Africa, or India, or the Caribbean and a novel written in England except the experience of the society it is written about.’ How far is this the case? Illustrate your answer with reference to any two authors you have studied during the course.
2. ‘It is good that everything’s gone except their language, which is everything’ (Derek Walcott on the British in the Caribbean). Consider how the issue of language and identity has been treated by any two Caribbean authors.
3. Discuss how any two writers of the period have treated one of the following:
At this point there are a number of ways in which you might want to develop your study of Caribbean literature. You might want to read a wider range of writers. Dabydeen and Wilson will help you make choices in this respect. We would particularly recommend George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin and Roger Mais, The Hills Were Joyful Together. You might want to develop aspects of your study more thoroughly by, for instance, looking more carefully at the language issue and the use of dialects in Caribbean literature. You might now feel well placed to look at colonial and postcolonial literatures outside the Caribbean region.