Caribbean Literature in English

Louis James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138163140
• eBook ISBN: 9781317871217
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Caribbean Literature in English places its subject in its precise regional context. The `Caribbean', generally considered as one area, is highly discrete in its topography, race and languages, including mainland Guyana, the Atlantic island of Barbados, the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, and Jamaica, whose size and history gave it an early sense of separate nationhood. Beginning with Raleigh's Discoverie of...Guiana (1596), this innovative study traces the sometimes surprising evolution of cultures which shared a common experience of slavery, but were intimately related to individual local areas. The approach is interdisciplinary, examining the heritage of the plantation era, and the issues of language and racial identity it created.

From this base, Louis James reassesses the phenomenal expansion of writing in the contemporary period. He traces the influence of pan-Caribbean movements and the creation of an expatriate Caribbean identity in Britain and America: `Brit'n' is considered as a West Indian island, created by `colonization in reverse'. Further sections treat the development of a Caribbean aesthetic, and the repossession of cultural roots from Africa and Asia. Balancing an awareness of the regional identity of Caribbean literature with an exploration of its place in world and postcolonial literatures, this study offers a panoramic view that has become one of the most vital of the `new literatures in English'.

This accessible overview of Caribbean writing will appeal to the general reader and student alike, and particularly to all who are interested in or studying Caribbean literatures and culture, postcolonial studies, Commonwealth 'new literatures' and contemporary literature and drama.

PART I

Distorting Mirrors: The Slave Era

For I am a direct descendant of slaves [the Calibans], too near to the actual enterprise to believe its echoes are over with the reign of emancipation. Moreover, I am a direct descendant of Prospero worshipping in the same temple of endeavour, using his legacy of language …

George Lamming¹

The Caribbean in the plantation era acted as a distorting mirror, in which Europeans imaged desires, prejudices and terrors; and where enslaved Africans dreamt of ancestral homelands. Yet at times the reflections met and melded. This section examines in turn two communities, implacably divided by race, culture and interests, yet bonded by a shared and violent history.

Chapter 1

Reflections of Europe in the New World

Kamau Brathwaite has observed that in the Caribbean during the slave era ‘in the field of literature itself, a great deal of energy was given over to treatises … and descriptive and historical works. Some of these … may be classed as literary works in their own right, since they reveal the creative eye recording.’² Modern concepts of the West Indies first grew out of letters and travelogues, often written by Europeans as acts of Utopian desire. ‘In these islands’, Columbus wrote on his return to Spain, ‘I have so far found no monstrosities, as many expected, but on the contrary all the people are of fine appearance; nor are they negroes as in Guinea, but with flowing hair …’³ Although his letter also mentioned the man-eating Caribs,⁴ he portrayed the West Indies as inhabited by child-like, friendly peoples. On his last voyage in 1502, he navigated the South American coast, collecting substantial amounts of gold, and was told by Indians of a wealthy nation ten days’ journey into the interior. Subsequent expeditions sought the city of el hombro dorado, a ruler who annually covered himself in gold dust and ritually bathed in the centre of Lake Guatavitá in the Andean highlands.⁵ One of the last searches for El Dorado was made up the Orinoco in 1595 by Sir Walter Raleigh. His account in The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guyana (1596) can still enthral today.

On both sides of this riuer, we passed the most beautifull countrie that euer mine eies beheld: and whereas all that we had seen before was nothing but woods, prickles, bushes, and thornes, heere we beheld plaines of twenty miles in length, the grasse short and greene, and in diuers part groves and trees by themselues, as if they had been by all the art and labour in the world so made of purpose: and stil as we rowed, the Deere came downe feeding by the waters side, as if they had been vsed to a keepers call.⁶

The people

never eat of anie thing that is set or sowen, and as at home they use neither planting or any other manurance, so when they com abroad they refuse to eat of ought, but of that which nature without labor bringing forth.⁷

Politically, and even as exploration, Raleigh’s voyage was a disaster. His subsequent 1616 expedition was abortive, and he was summarily beheaded. But the myth lived on. Raleigh’s account of his travels encouraged the British settlement of Guyana and Caribbean islands, and even that of Virginia and the Eastern seaboard. Raleigh’s account of the Indian as Noble Savage influenced Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Cannibals’, which, in Florio’s translation of 1603, helped shape Shakespeare’s conception of ‘Caliban’ (an anagram of Canibal) in The Tempest (c. 1611). In turn Caribbean writers such as Césaire and George Lamming were to take Caliban as the European image of the West Indian.⁸ The first full account of European settlement in the Caribbean was by the French Dominican priest, Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, The General History of the French Antilles (1667–1671). Du Tertre vividly describes a complex society where, in Elsa Goveia’s words, ‘colonists, free Indians, indentured servants, slaves, buccaneers, Catholics, “heretics”, and Jews mingled in a fascinating exoticism under tropical skies’.⁹ He had a humane attitude to both Indians and slaves, seeing them not as inferiors but as ill-treated human beings, and his account of Carib life became a main source for Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754). Another important document was by Père Jean Baptist Labat, who vividly described his encounter with Caribs on Dominica in his New Voyage to the Islands of America (1722).¹⁰

The records of later historians in the area, however, were shaped not by the Enlightenment but by the vested interests of the sugar planters. Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657) provides a detailed account of everything to do with sugar plantation except the effects of slavery. Nor is this discussed in Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), or Edward Long’s brilliant and polemical History of Jamaica (1774). Although not born in Jamaica, Long was a planter with family on the island, and identified with the island’s white Creoles. Up to a point he was a liberal, and his critique of British Imperialism has been compared with that of contemporary revolutionaries in North America.¹¹ But in his account of Jamaican society as a whole, Long vehemently asserted the ‘natural inferiority of Negroes’. His damaged scholarship stands as a monument, Elsa Goveia noted, to ‘the power of all societies to mould and often to warp, the minds and hearts of individuals that the social order may be preserved’.¹² Yet time had one ironic revenge. To demonstrate Africans’ lack of intelligence, Long transcribed a Latin poem by one Francis Williams, including his own contemptuous translation. Williams was a freed Jamaican slave, brought to England in 1711 by the Duke of Montague, and educated at Cambridge in order to discover whether, properly educated, ‘a Negro might not be found as capable of literature as a white man’. Distinguished in mathematics and classics, Williams was evidently also an accomplished poet. The only surviving example of his verse is one cited by Long, a Latin ode written in 1759 to George Haldane, the new Governor of Jamaica. If it inevitably flattered Haldane, Williams’s Latin was witty and elegant, and addressed his own racial situation, asserting that ‘virtue and prudence, established by a powerful hand, themselves know no colour (for creating God gave the same soul to every being, nothing forbidding)’.¹³ Williams’s application for Government office was blocked, and instead he became a teacher in Spanish Town. Nevertheless, Long had unwittingly established Williams as the first published black West Indian poet.

The brutalising effect of the slave system permeated West Indian society as a whole. Lady Nugent’s account of Jamaica in 1802 has often been quoted.

It is extraordinary to witness the immediate effect that climate and habit of living in this country have upon the minds and manners of Europeans, particularly of the lower orders. In the upper ranks, they become indolent and inactive, regardless of every thing but eating, drinking, and indulging themselves, and are almost entirely under the dominion of their mulatto favourites.¹⁴

Yet the society itself was complex. The lavishly entertaining major landowners in their Great Houses enjoyed a gracious lifestyle reminiscent of Faulkner’s South. Below them were a class of professionals and small plantation owners, and these were usually the most racist elements in the society, including petits blancs, overseers and book-keepers.¹⁵ Each had their own level of involvement in plantation life. The private diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a small landowner in Western Jamaica from 1750 to 1786,¹⁶ give a vivid account of the harshness of plantation discipline, its obscene punishments, and the routine sexual abuse of black women. Thistlewood continually faced non-cooperation and physical violence from his slaves. Yet he also evokes a shared intimacy in which fear and hate could mingle with dependency and even loyalty. Central to the diaries is Thistlewood’s chequered but enduring relationship with Phibbah, a slave cook on a neighbouring estate who was a woman of intelligence and moral stature. Through her, he had some access to the black community. Phibbah bore him a son, and the largest bequest in his will was to buy her her freedom.

Away from the squalor of the slave barracoons, white Creole communities created the amenities of an expatriate culture. Touring companies of actors, often en route from Europe to America, performed alongside amateur groups and some local professional actors in venues ranging from small playhouses to candle-lit barns. The first theatre was opened in Jamaica as early as 1682, in Barbados in 1792, and by 1820 Port-of-Spain in Trinidad had three.¹⁷ Most plays were European, with Shakespeare’s the favourite, although some were written locally.¹⁸ Theatre-going was largely the privilege of the white élite, but segregation was not absolute as has been sometimes claimed. Servants were often allowed in the gallery, and writing of Jamaica, Errol Hill noted ‘that it is fair to say that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the … theatre catered to a broad cross section of the public, if indeed it had been exclusive before that time’.¹⁹ Newspapers also fostered local culture. The Weekly Jamaican Courant, established in 1718, was the first of many journals that carried local news, comment and satirical squibs. Small presses, set up to print journals, published pamphlets and even books. The anonymous Whole Proceedings of Captain Dennis’s Expedition was printed in Jamaica in 1718; John Singleton’s more substantial verse travelogue, A General Description of the West Indian Islands (Barbados, 1767), followed. With local publication came the beginnings of a West Indian literary tradition. Better known than Nathaniel Weekes’s poem Barbados (1754), James Grainger’s The SugarCane (1764) was an ambitious four-part ‘West Indian Georgic’ that, in investigating agriculture, created new poetic images from the island’s topography. Grainger was a Scots medical doctor who settled and died in St Kitts, wrote a medical handbook on the care of slaves, and had a professional interest in plantation life that can ani...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series List
• Editors’ Preface
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• On the Arrangement of this Book
• Map of the Caribbean
• Introduction
• Part I Distorting Mirrors: The Slave Era
• Part II Anancy’s Web: The Caribbean Archipelago
• Part III Towards a Caribbean Aesthetic
• Part IV Groundation
• Part V On the Frontiers of Language
• Postscript
• Chronology
• Bibliographies
• Index