Creolizing the Metropole

Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film

H. Adlai Murdoch

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253001320
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

A study of how Caribbean immigrants to France and the UK from 1948–1998 and their descendants portray their metropolitan identities in literature and film. Creolizing the Metropole is a comparative study of postwar West Indian migration to the former colonial capitals of Paris and London. It studies the effects of this population shift on national and cultural identity and traces the postcolonial Caribbean experience through analyses of the concepts of identity and diaspora. Through close readings of selected literary works and film, H. Adlai Murdoch explores the ways in which these immigrants and their descendants represented their metropolitan identities. Though British immigrants were colonial subjects and, later, residents of British Commonwealth nations, and the French arrivals from the overseas departments were citizens of France by law, both groups became subject to otherness and exclusion stemming from their ethnicities. Murdoch examines this phenomenon and the questions it raises about borders and boundaries, nationality and belonging. "An outstanding contribution to scholarship. Theoretically grounded and meticulously researched, it examines the complexities inherent in constructing new diaspora identities that are at once ethnic, national, and fluid." —Renée Larrier, Rutgers University "In these expansive, fresh, adroit interpretations of Maryse Condé, Gisèle Pineau, Zadie Smith-White, and Andrea Levy, the author exposes the stark reality that race, and the prejudices attached to it, is a barrier to unequivocal assimilation. This study affirms that a diasporic duality persists as creolization slowly alters the metropole. Overall, an interesting read." — Choice "[This] book provides an extremely valuable contribution to the fields of postcolonial studies and European literary and film studies in at least three ways: it theoretically refines the concept of creolization, it contributes to much-needed redefinitions of France and the United Kingdom as multicultural, and it foregrounds the aesthetic qualities of the works under study." — Research in African Literatures

In time the slave surrendered to amnesia. That amnesia is the true history of the New World. That is our inheritance. . . . The slave converted himself. . . . as he adapted his master’s religion, he also adapted his language, and it is here that what we can look at as our poetic tradition begins. Now began the new naming of things.

DEREK WALCOTT, The Muse of History

ONE

Caribbean Diasporic Identity

Between Home and Away

DETERMINING THE DIASPORA

Any attempt to come to grips with the limits, implications, and resonances that the term “diaspora” embodies in the Caribbean context must begin by confronting the imbrication of this term with the varied inscriptions of identity that frame the concept of Caribbeanness. Ineluctably bound up with the complex patterns of regional history, identity here functions, in Paul Gilroy’s words, as “a junction or hinge concept that can help to maintain the connective tissue that articulates political and cultural concerns” (British Cultural Studies 225). This conjunction forces us to confront the doubleness – or perhaps the dilemma – that the term “diaspora” signifies in the political history and culture of the region, problematizing the many paradoxes inherent in the term itself. In a certain sense, following the arrival of Columbus and the profit-seekers who quickly followed in his wake, the Caribbean region as a whole had been made an ethnic and cultural tabula rasa by about 1600, due to the disappearance of the indigenous population through the pernicious combination of overwork and disease once exposed to the Spanish conquest. As a result, almost the entire present-day population of the Caribbean arrived there from elsewhere; they arrived for reasons as varied as voluntary migration, contract or indentured labor, and slavery, but the primary derivation of the Caribbean’s principal population groups is ultimately extra-regional. As Stuart Hall puts it in “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” “None of the people who now occupy the islands – black, brown, white, African, European, American, Spanish, French, East Indian, Chinese, Portuguese, Jew, Dutch – originally ‘belonged’ there. It is the space where the creolisations and assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated. The New World is the third term – the primal scene – where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West” (234). Yet it is also indisputable that the cultural processes that Hall describes resulted in the creation of a home and an identity for the Caribbean people, one which they have made and made their own by affirming and living out the complexities of encounter, invention, and transformation. As Hall continues, “Cultural identity . . . is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. . . . Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation” (225). There is a plethora of evidence, much of it historical and cultural as well as anecdotal, to suggest that Caribbean people view themselves as originating in and belonging to culturally distinct national entities. At issue, then, is the extent to which the resonances of cultural identity converge with “diaspora” to map the boundaries of contemporary Caribbean identity.

Critically bound up with the doubleness of diasporic culture for the Caribbean are the related issues of migration and return. While certainly not peculiar to the Caribbean experience, both play a role in determining the extent to which, and the ways in which, the Caribbean may be defined as a diasporic community. On the one hand, the right – or, for that matter, the dream – of return grounds most concepts of the diasporic experience and is itself intimately bound up both with structures of meaning that are derived from and attached to problems of place or location and with those patterns of ethnic and geocultural dispersal, immigration, or exile that are read as having given rise to the concept of diaspora in the first place. Furthermore, such patterns are traditionally grounded in an act or event of recognizable trauma somewhere in the past, and they presuppose a somewhat uniform sense of co-ethnicity and exile among the dispersed as well as what Braziel and Mannur term “clearly demarcated parameters of geography, national identity, and belonging” (1). Along these lines, Robin Cohen also identifies a number of critical criteria grounding the mass displacements that traditionally compel diasporas into migration or flight. These include dispersal from an original homeland; the framing and idealization of this homeland in collective memory or myth; a hope or expectation of return; a strong, ethnically grounded group identity; a problematic inscription in the host country or community; and a sense of transnational solidarity with co-ethnic groups in other countries.¹ However, as a result of the many and varied movements of peoples that have characterized the twentieth century, the shape and tenor of diaspora itself have undergone numerous metamorphoses, leading Braziel and Mannur to “caution . . . against the uncritical, unreflexive application of the term ‘diaspora’ to any and all contexts of global displacement and movement” (3). But at least two key questions from the preceding structural schemas apply to the Caribbean case: first, how many of these criteria can be seen to apply directly to the Caribbean condition? And second, if the category of diaspora is itself linked to concepts of nation and national identity, how important are the national and geographic fragmentation and dispersal of the Caribbean peoples in the characterization of its various communities as a diaspora?

It is clear, then, that any inscription of the Caribbean as a diasporic community involves the implicit recognition of an imperial, external presence within the region, which in its turn mediates the very “Caribbeanness” of the term “Caribbean” itself. The processes of displacement and disjuncture implicit in the term “diaspora” are perhaps brought more clearly into focus through Gilroy’s gloss on its several resonances, where he points out that it “disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness” (Against Race 123). At the very least, then, any reconsiderations of the complex construct that is the diasporic Caribbean will compel us to revise long-held notions of the role and place of “center” and “periphery” in a post/colonial context and to bring into play important concepts of location, cultural fusion, and creolization as a means of interrogating and displacing rigid assumptions of identity drawn on an ever-evolving modernity and an incessant cycle of migrant movement. As Simon Gikandi puts it in his introduction to a special issue of Research in African Literatures on the black Atlantic, “what is important to keep in mind, however, is the ambiguous ways in which margins and centers are conflated or blurred, the process of fusion and fission that brings them together and also separates them. Our challenge . . . is perhaps to recenter such contrapuntal relations in any diasporic or postcolonial studies agenda.” Given the rapidly increasing challenges associated with locating the center or the periphery of Caribbean culture within a global context of migratory modernity, where increasingly peripatetic subjects live out the lack of grounding and perpetual motion that characterize the period, or with defining the Caribbean as an African diaspora (with its implicit resonances of exile and return), what are we to make of the plural cultural traces that are the hallmark of the region, of its assimilation and transformation of the global and the local, the imported and the indigenous into regional patterns of ethnocultural affirmation, or of the challenge posed by what Gikandi succinctly terms “some concrete intellectual encounter with Africa itself” (5)? The boundaries and corollaries are indeed legion here, and to make irrefutable claims concerning patterns of permanent identification risks enmeshing any emerging conceptualization of diasporic identity for the region within competing categories of race, representation, and discourse.

But perhaps the most far-reaching implication of this discussion for the Caribbean diasporic presence on the metropolitan mainland is this: if, as Lacan postulates, self-identity is constituted within the gaze of another, then ultimately both populations are mutually interpellated, interrogated, displaced, transformed, and redefined by this constitutive recognition of difference. Such an ongoing, interactive encounter thus relocates many critical categories, including diaspora, ethnicity, and culture, such that they are no longer defined simply by traditional boundaries of race and place, Britishness, Frenchness, or Caribbeanness.

What is at stake here goes beyond such relatively straightforward issues as an identifiable Africanness or Indianness of Caribbean culture, the formative role of colonial metropolitan influence, or the extent to which any of these axes have been harnessed to, or infiltrated by, the various other ethnic, linguistic, religious, political, or musical forces that were also displaced by, into, and across the region. While all of these factors certainly played a role in the development of recognizably Caribbean identity patterns, it would probably be foolhardy even to attempt to establish some sort of hierarchical sliding scale that would measure and account for the place of each element in some sort of geocultural, transnational Caribbean Chain of Cultural Being. Such measurements are almost impossible to fix with any reasonable degree of certainty, particularly given the variability and specificity of colonialism’s social and political exigencies as they were carried out across the individual islands. Indeed, given the congruence of routes, pathways, and histories that creatively collided in the region and the seemingly infinite interweaving of a variety of ethnic and cultural influences, what emerges from this maelstrom of post/colonial place(s) is the creative openness undergirding any framework of Caribbean identity whether within the region or outside it.

It should by now be clear that attempting to account for the Caribbean experience in diasporic terms is a tricky proposition at best; the history of the Caribbean and its people does not conform to traditional diasporic patterns and exigencies of exile, dispersal, and return. Nor, for that matter, do we discern a single national entity of overwhelming political and psychological importance looming large on the diasporic horizon, a place that mediates both origin and return. Ultimately, these protean practices exploit the implicit slippage between voluntary and forced migration, a dichotomy exacerbated in the Caribbean context by a diachronic perspective that ranges from the inception of slavery, through the arrivants on contractual indentureship that followed emancipation, to the arrival of Portuguese and Syro-Lebanese groups around the end of the nineteenth century, to the labor-driven mass exodus to various metropoles of the late twentieth century. In these terms, it is beyond question that transnationalism and diaspora are key tenets in the region’s historical and symbolic framework. As Mimi Sheller asserts, “It has become a prime location for the emergence of transnationalism, both in terms of its uprooted people and its hybrid texts, spoken languages, diasporas, and music traveling across world markets. Not only does each Caribbean society embody and encompass a rich mixture of genealogies, linguistic innovations, syncretistic religions, complex cuisine, and musical cultures, but [they] have also exported their dynamic multicultures abroad, where they have recombined and generated new diasporic forms” (174). Diaspora’s central principle of an identifiable, if chimeric. national entity cedes, then, in the Caribbean case, to a transnational and transcultural inscription of identity, grounded in communities and locations eventuated in history and expanding and protean in the present. Such a vision of the fluid imbrication of nation and identity works to further Paul Gilroy’s somewhat ironic observation that “nations are presented as entirely homogeneous cultural units staffed by people whose hypersimilarity renders them interchangeable” (“British Cultural Studies” 225). In this Caribbean context, then, the importance that can be ascribed to an intrinsic ethnocultural difference militates against the urge to inscribe a singular imagined natal territory as diaspora’s ineluctable defining characteristic; rather, as Brent Hayes Edwards suggests, we should conceive of diaspora here “as a frame of cultural identity determined not through ‘return’ but through difference” (12). The persistence of perceptible differences and similarities within a larger, overarching framework of slippage and reciprocity propels and consolidates the idea of nonassimilation that Robin Cohen cites as critical to certain components of the diasporic condition: “it is still necessary to the notion of diaspora that they ‘creolize’ or indigenize not at all or only in a very limited way and continue to retain their link, sometimes their dependence, on the ‘motherland’” (Global Diasporas 24). Certainly, while the geographically and politically fragmented Caribbean is not in this sense a “motherland,” it is nevertheless incontrovertible that the region as a whole figures as “home” for those who are “away.”

But such abstract notions of implicit marginalization cannot and do not account for the totality of the Caribbean migrant experience. These expatriate communities, particularly those that came into being in the wake of the migration movements to the European metropoles begun in the postwar period, while often homogeneous and endogamous, are also hybridized in their turn through their cultural exchanges with the larger British and French communities, such that their implicit homogeneity is then placed in question. In other words, those areas of metropolitan culture – music, fashion, cuisine, and speech, to name just a few – that have been subject to evolving change in the wake of Caribbean migrancy subvert our long-held assumptions of universalism and integration. As Harry Goulbourne suggests, “In other words, it was generally assumed that British society was homogeneous. . . . It was also assumed that this supposedly homogeneous culture had the capacity to integrate and absorb whatever differences might appear” (32). The results of these demographic developments, where Britishness or Frenchness does not remain static, but in fact responds and is made subject to the perceived alien presence on the metropolitan body, speak directly to the protean, transformative character of the Caribbean diaspora and draw on it to creatively redefine broader, long-held notions of nation, identity, and belonging. As Gilroy explains, “The idea of diaspora offers a ready alternative to . . . rooted belonging. It rejects the popular image of natural nations spontaneously endowed with self-consciousness. . . . diaspora is a concept that problematizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. It disrupts the fundamental power of territory to determine identity by breaking the simple sequence of explanatory links between place, location, and consciousness. It destroys the naïve invocation of common memory as the basis of particularity in a similar fashion by drawing attention to the contingent political dynamics of commemoration” (Against Race 123). From this identitarian perspective, one that valorizes dislocation, disjuncture, and diffusion, the migrant Caribbean communities in the metropoles would have to reconceive the tacit links between place, belonging, and memory; here, the concatenation of population, visibility, generational turnover and transformation, and artistic and cultural appropriation and performance would result in the emergence of new forms of diasporic identity, shifting vocabularies and categories of connectedness for these burgeoning postmigratory communities.

This ethnocultural interaction between migrant and host communities results in a specific and distinct doubling of identity and community, one that has been defined by Stuart Hall:

Such people retain strong links with their places of origin and their traditions, but . . . are obliged to come to terms with the new cultures they inhabit, without simply assimilating to them and losing their identities completely. They bear upon them the traces of the particular cultures, traditions, languages and histories by which they were shaped. . . . they are irrevocably the product of several interlocking histories and cultures, belong at one and the same time to several “homes” (and to no one particular “home”). . . . They are the products of the new diasporas created by the post-colonial migrations. They must learn to inhabit at least two identities, to speak two cultural languages, to translate and negotiate between them. (“Question” 310)

In other words, an ongoing pattern of identitarian doubleness and simultaneity of cultural affiliation comes increasingly to characterize the modern migrant condition; as these subjects are overdetermined by the plural forces of language, history, culture, and politics, a hybrid, transnational subjectivity, one that builds creatively on the paradoxical void and limitless promise of the neither/nor, ultimately comes into being. If we were to read this supra-national migrant experience solely within its nationalist frame, we would limit its truly transnational character. Hall’s summing up effectively identifies the complex, creative dualities intrinsic to such “identities in transition” or “translated” identities. Here, that critical sense of diasporic place is made subject to processes of fragmentation and doubling, such that the pluralized filaments of island identity become further divided in the newfound migrant community. The patterns of doubling and appropriation that are part and parcel of this process of “coming to terms” resist the imposed uniformity of assimilation even as they open up questions of origin and temporality critical to the negotiation of a Caribbean diasporic identity.

If our challenge lies in localizing, recognizing, and defining the patterns and parameters of Caribbean identity, we would do well to recall that identity itself is largely an unconscious process, forever incomplete and constantly in process. Such ambivalences lead us back to the particular geopolitical character and configuration of the region, historically marked as it is by fragmentation and pluralism rather than unity, a collection of nation-states – engaging often in feuding and competition as well as cooperation – rather than a single, overarching nationalism. But if such considerations lead us to privilege the concept of cultural identity over national identity in the Caribbean diasporic formation, such an approach must also come to terms with whether cultural identity itself is singular or plural, fragmented or holistic, as well as with whether the concept of diaspora applies to those staggered population flows that have variously entered and exited the region over time. The ineluctability of such pluralisms is beyond contestation, as the celebrated Caribbean author George Lamming cogently claims: “This cross-fertilization was the seed of our journey, and thus, people who are talking about roots are not really talking about our formation” (25–26). Indelibly marked by multiple traces, then, any notion of Caribbeanness can only recuperate and extend this fundamental inscription in cross-culturality. In these terms, the region has been diachronically framed by the diasporic condition. As Edwards continues, “diaspora points to difference not only internally (the ways transnational black groupings are fractured by nation, class, gender, sexuality, and language) but also externally. . . . we are forced to think not in terms of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal but explicitly in terms of a complex past of forced migration and racialization” (12–13). Indelibly marked by multiple temporal, ethnic, and demographic traces, a cross-cultural Caribbeanness implicitly suggests that very intersectional regional vision which the traces of colonial fragmentation appear to belie; in other words, these pluralized patterns of the Caribbean diasporic condition frame and enable identity even as the essence of the latter is displaced and dispersed in a variety of locations. It is out of this structurally symbolic framework that the nation ultimately acquires its capacity for ethnic, social, and cultural signification, for if, as Stuart Hall puts it, “a nation is not only a political entity but something which produces meanings – a system of representation” (“Question” 292), then it will be those transnational strands of identifiably Caribbean affiliation that together will undergird and delimit a certain commonality of Caribbeanness for the region’s peoples.

A useful way in might be the notion of the composite, that paradoxical, constitutive plurality which continually seeks to validate its own experience. It is to this experience that Gordon Rohlehr refers when, inscribing the calypso as a primary pillar of Caribbean discursive representation, he defines Caribbean identity as “multiethnic and multicultural . . . the product of influences and experimentation which speak of continuing transformation” (67). Drawing on Paul Gilroy’s inscription of the ship as a critical dislocating and suturing figure for the “Black Atlantic,” the identitarian conundrum posed by this critical proliferation of multiplicities has been articulated as a series of key questions and assertions posed by Eddy Souffrant: “The Caribbean condition . . . is one of relation. It consists in the relationship of a multitude of cultures and persons in transition. It is arguably the condition of dia...