Literature of the English-Speaking Caribbean

"Two sterling works are the most a young country like this can be expected to produce in a limited number of years, and—to tell the whole truth—they are all the public, in its present state, can put up with." This sentiment, from a June 1871 Trinidad Chronicle editorial, notes that only infrequently did the "tender stem of Creole Literature, languishing in an as yet wild and barren soil," produce "something ripe and substantial" rather than "watery, sour, or husky fruit"—not an atypical sentiment for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone Caribbean. The lament of the absence of anything but a small, insufficiently literate or "cultured" reading public, and the lack of writers able to or interested in rendering a "Creole" reality, usefully flags issues of inadequacy, authenticity, and taste that have continued to resonate in discussions of the region's writers.

A relatively small percentage of competent and interested readers must be put, first, in the context of a relatively small population across the region, and then also in the context of an interest in books for the purpose of commerce or of gaining accreditation—the surest way to stifle pleasurable reading—as well as a deep suspicion of "political" or "ideological" sentiments. But the notion that "literariness" and pleasurable, leisured reading ought somehow to be cleanly separated from the taint of politics, examinations, or the market has haunted literary aesthetes in the region and across the globe, and it is precisely around definitions of "culture" that commentators within and outside the region have deemed the Caribbean a "wild and barren soil."

The extraordinarily rich cultural production of the mass of Caribbean people has been disparaged as "noise" in letters to the editor from the nineteenth century until today. It has also been disparaged in punitive legal codes, not least of all because the language of this "noise" has mainly been in the Creole languages of the region. A restrictive definition of literacy cannot accommodate the Caribbean's keen interpretation of signs, dreams, graffiti, West African masquerade, the King James Bible, the Rastafarian Promise Key, political and religious utopias, imperial edicts and wars, seditious broadsides, L. W. de Laurence's books of magic, Marcus Garvey's newspaper Negro World, Haile Selassie's speeches, missionary hymns, the Ramayana, Congolese Nsibidi script, "high canonical" and "trash" literary publications, current news from across the globe, and the absorption of all of this and more into the rhythms of daily life in societies that have never had the luxury of pretending that they are closed. To the consternation of those who condemn this "noise," the achievement of producing two Nobel laureates of literature—Derek Walcott from Saint Lucia in 1992 and V. S. Naipaul from Trinidad in 2004—has to be qualified by the fact that the region's popular musicians are much better known and more often cited around the world.

Yet, if it is true that narrow definitions of culture, literature, and society have ensured that the creativity of the lower echelons of Caribbean society has been scorned (Cooper, 1993), it has also meant that a lettered elite, anxious about its distance from this stratum of society and recognizing in its "noise" the key to challenging metropolitan definitions of the region's people as debased and inhuman, has focused on it intensely in its fiction and poetry—some have even called the focus voyeuristic (Hodge, 1972). Thus, for some critics, poetic personae and fictional characters and narrators who use Creole speech, for instance, are genuinely "Creole," Caribbean, or politically engaged, and those who do not are inauthentic. Is Jamaican-born poet Claude McKay's Constab Ballads (1912) more authentic for being written in Jamaican Creole than his sonnets, or, for that matter, than the poetry of his compatriots: Philip Sherlock celebrating blackness and nationalism in the 1950s in iambic pentameter ("Across the sand I saw a black man stride / To fetch his fishing gear and broken things"), or the coolly ironic poetry of Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, Velma Pollard, and Dennis Scott in the 1970s and 1980s?

Jamaican author Louise "Miss Lou" Bennett was honored in 2003 in national ceremonies in Jamaica that were attended by a middle class that had criticized her for using Creole in the public domain decades earlier. This only means that the boundaries of acceptability have shifted to include her and not others. But it is also surely just as wrong to assume that anything uttered in Creole is inherently oppositional or progressive. Countries and territories such as Saint Lucia and Curaçao (Netherlands Antilles) have long led the way in using Creole languages for a range of purposes. Perhaps it is less useful to make unequivocal judgments about authenticity than to recognize the enormous diversity of voices and perspectives in the literature of the region, and to note the particular stakes for each critic in the assessment of this diversity.

What counted as "substantial Creole Literature" for the 1871 editor quoted above—"two sterling works" published shortly before by Antoine Léotaud on the birds of Trinidad and John Jacob Thomas on Trinidad's Creole language—suggests some characteristics of the region's literary history. Both Léotaud, who was white, and Thomas, who was black, were delineating a "Creole" Trinidadian landscape. This is a reminder that white, functionally-white, Indo-Caribbean, and other writers not usually classified as black have contributed powerful interpretations of Caribbean life and the impact of the Afro-Caribbean presence in particular: such writers include H. G. De Lisser, Samuel Selvon, Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Robert Antoni, Sharlow, Lawrence Scott, Ian Macdonald, and Anthony Winkler, to name a few.

Léotaud's and Thomas's texts posed a Francophone challenge to the Anglophone hegemony of British rule, but Thomas also sought to insert dark-skinned, working-class Trinidadians who spoke little else beside Creole into Trinidad's cultural matrix as legitimate culture-bearers rather than uncivilized tabulae rasae fit only for labor. This vindication of people of African descent in Trinidad led Thomas to publish Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude (1889), which refuted the racism of Victorian historian James Anthony Froude's English in the West Indies, or, The Bow of Ulysses (1888). Thomas's book was similar to Haitian writer Joseph-Anténor Firmin's De l'égalité des races humaines (Equality of the human races; 1885), which challenged Count Arthur Gobineau's theories of racial inequality. It also resembled the two-volume Glimpses of the Ages or the "Superior" and "Inferior" Races, So-Called, Discussed in the Light of Science and History (1905/1908) by Jamaican-born Theophilus Scholes. Their desire to challenge metropolitan perspectives—"writing back to empire"—has been a key trope in much of the region's fiction and poetry.

Firmin, who wanted the French language to have the same nationalistic and cultural significance as the Spanish language did for Latin Americans, would not have agreed with Thomas's championing of Creole. On the other hand, dictionaries and grammars are written by scholarly elites for consumption by other elites, and Thomas was as committed to speaking on behalf of working-class Trinidadians as any of his counterparts. As "one of Her Majesty's Ethiopic subjects," he affirmed the validity of the Caribbean in the context of British colonialism. If those who traveled to England in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were more ambivalent, London was still viewed as the inevitable place to be consecrated as a serious writer. As critics have pointed out, authenticating the novel or poem as truly "West Indian" as opposed to "British," and ensuring that Caribbean male writers would be equal to or better than the English writers against whom they were often measured, frequently involved the use of male characters and poetic personae who would keep metropolitan and local women in line, and also respect but ultimately contain the energies of the unlettered working class, and so usher the nascent nation into being (Edmondson, 1999).

A critical factor in the experience and delineation of a regional "West Indian" sensibility was the Caribbean Voices radio program broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation from 1945 to 1958. Founded by Jamaican poet Una Marson, prospective writers were inspired to produce their own work after hearing on the radio the poetry of Eric Roach from Trinidad and Tobago; or the Saint Vincentians Danny Williams, Owen Campbell, and Shake Keane; or the performance of Walcott's play Henri Christophe (1950) on Sunday afternoons. The output of literature by Caribbean writers during this period and into the 1960s is phenomenal, and includes the work of, among many others, C. L. R. James, George Lamming, Edgar Mittelholzer, Garth St. Omer, Vic Reid, Neville Dawes, Namba Roy, Sylvia Wynter, and Orlando Patterson. They published their work abroad, or in journals across the region (such as Kyk-Over-al in Guyana, Bim in Barbados, Beacon in Trinidad, Focus in Jamaica), or in newspapers such as Trinidad's Guardian. They also joined members of various literary and debating societies, poetry leagues, and artists' collectives, were galvanized by the labor strikes of the 1930s and calls for federation and independence, and became inspired to explore the region's history of enslavement and revolution.

At the same time, writers such as Rosa Guy, who helped found the Harlem Writers Guild, Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff migrated to the United States rather than to Europe. In one sense, the presence of so many Caribbean writers today in that location has diminished the impact of London, but in another sense it signals the shift in the center of gravity from one English-speaking empire to another. In addition, immigrants to England or their children—including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Fred D'Aguiar, and Zadie Smith—are winning accolades for rewriting an England that is fully theirs, just as Olive Senior, Austin Clarke, M. Nourbese Philip, and Ramabai Espinet are rewriting both the Canada to which they have relocated and the Caribbean.

Because writers across the French-, English-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean have had such an enormous impact on theorizations of anticolonial and postcolonial politics and poetics, and have been affirmed as "the best writers in English today," it is often the case that their specific Caribbean contexts are minimized or ignored. For some, this underlines the importance of analyzing writers in terms of their respective nations. And certainly it is hard to imagine the explorations of the interior by Jan Carew and Wilson Harris, or the critiques of political authoritarianism by Martin Carter in the 1960s and 1970s and Oonya Kempadoo more recently, as other than Guyanese, or the explorations of calypso and Carnival in the fiction of C. L. R. James, Earl Lovelace, and Marion Patrick Jones as other than Trinidadian. Studies like those by Selwyn Cudjoe (2003) and Barbara Lalla (1996) take up this national perspective, but even Lalla explores the significance of the outcast and homelessness in Jamaican literature as "a national fiction within the Caribbean aesthetic."

Any purely national focus is always in tension with other perspectives. New World Quarterly, Savacou, Trinidad and Tobago Review (formerly Tapia ), the Journal of West Indian Literature, Small Axe, and Anthurium and other journals have had a regional focus, as did the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement of the 1960s. In addition, the University of the West Indies in Jamaica and other institutions have fostered this regional consciousness. Not just Europe and the United States, but the migration of people in the English-speaking Caribbean to Panama and Cuba has affected the outlook of the region's writers, as has the continuing impact of the Cuban and Grenadian revolutions. If the annual Commonwealth Writers' Prize is one way for Caribbean writers to receive recognition, so is Cuba's Casa de las Américas award.

Africa and the African diaspora constitute another focus, and the novels of writers such as Paule Marshall and Erna Brodber use this prism to explore the impact of culture and nation on the Caribbean psyche. Vic Reid's 1958 novel The Leopard is set in Kenya, and both Neville Dawes and Kamau Brathwaite lived in West Africa. More than physical location, however, there is a continuing discussion about Africa's impact on Caribbean aesthetics, and as more and more empirical research emerges, the parameters of these debates will shift accordingly (Warner-Lewis, 2002).

Regardless of their linguistic origin and place of residence within or outside of the region, women writers across the Caribbean are being read and analyzed as a constituency. From that perspective, Kempadoo, for instance, critiques the nation in the specific register of the sexual violence done to women's and children's bodies (Francis, 2004). Other writers, such as Patricia Powell, question the ways in which the postcolonial nation polices the sexual identities of its citizens.

Today, debates about what constitutes "good" and "bad" literature continue with the publication of Caribbean urban and historical romance novels and thrillers, as well as the recovery and re-publication of forgotten nineteenth-century novels. As metropolitan literati applaud the region's writers, younger writers chafe at the old-fashioned preoccupations of their predecessors. It is possible to see older writers and younger writers, such as novelist Garfield Ellis and spoken-word artists Staceyann Chin and Roger Bonair-Agard, performing together at such events as the annual Calabash Literary Festival in Jamaica, organized by novelist Colin Channer and playwright, poet, and critic Kwame Dawes.

If some commentators still worry about "watery, sour, or husky fruit," they do so in a context in which the meanings of Caribbean, English-speaking, and literature are heatedly and eagerly debated.

See also Bennett, Louise; Brathwaite, Edward Kamau; Brodber, Erna; Canadian Writers in English; Carew, Jan; Caribbean/North American Writers (Contemporary); Caribbean Theater, Anglophone; Clarke, Austin; Creole Languages of the Americas; Dub Poetry; Harris, Wilson; Hearne, John (Caulwell, Edgar); James, C. L. R.; Kincaid, Jamaica; Lamming, George; Lovelace, Earl; Mais, Roger; Marson, Una; Prince, Mary; Seacole, Mary; Sherlock, Philip; Slave Narratives of the Caribbean and Latin America; Walcott, Derek Alton; Williams, Francis; Wynter, Sylvia

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