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Writing in Limbo
Modernism and Caribbean Literature
Simon Gikandi
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Writing in Limbo
Modernism and Caribbean Literature
Simon Gikandi
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About This Book
In Simon Gikandi's view, Caribbean literature and postcolonial literature more generally negotiate an uneasy relationship with the concepts of modernism and modernityâa relationship in which the Caribbean writer, unable to escape a history encoded by Europe, accepts the challenge of rewriting it. Drawing on contemporary deconstructionist theory, Gikandi looks at how such Caribbean writers as George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, Alejo Carpentier, C. L. R. James, Paule Marshall, Merle Hodge, Zee Edgell, and Michelle Cliff have attempted to confront European modernism.
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1
Caribbean Modernist Discourse: Writing, Exile, and Tradition
But if true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching, motif of modern culture?
âEdward Said, âReflections on Exileâ
Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie
I feel like me heart gwine burs
Jamaica people colonizing
Englan in reverse
âLouise Bennett, âColonization in Reverseâ
The most important literary and cultural documents in the Caribbean traditionâAimĂ© CĂ©saireâs Cahier, Frantz Fanonâs Black Skin, White Masks, C. L. R. Jamesâs The Black Jacobins, V. S. Naipaulâs A House for Mr. Biswas, and George Lammingâs In the Castle of My Skinâwere produced in exile. Because of this simple fact, any attempt to map the directions in which contemporary Caribbean writing has developed, or to account for the emergence of a distinctly Caribbean literary tradition, must investigate the phenomenon of exile as a historical and existential condition. In other words, exile and the displacement it engenders constitute the ground zero of West Indian literature, its radical point of departure; exile generates nationalism and with it the desire for decolonized Caribbean spaces. It is not insignificant, Edouard Glissant wrote in 1981, that âthe first cry of Caribbean Negritude was for Return.â As he says, âThe truth is that exile is within us from the outset, and is even more corrosive because we have not managed to drive it into the open with our precarious assurances nor have we succeeded all together in dislodging it. All Caribbean poetry is a witness to this.â1 Although it is doubtful that the writers of the texts mentioned above wrote simply to dislodge or dispel the condition of exile, many of them used exile (in intense cases of ironic reversal and dispersal) as an instrument for transcending the prison-house of colonialism. In both a psychological and an ideological sense, exile would be adopted as an imaginary zone distanced from the values and structures of colonialism; it would hence be posited as the point of departure for the anticolonial discourse that was to generate most of the novels I discuss in this book.
Now, I do not intend to claim any special status for the condition of exile in Caribbean writing or even to suggest that exile was the only route toward a literary tradition in the islands. Indeed, exile has become such a dominant term in the theorization of twentieth-century literature that, leaving the specific historical experiences of Caribbean writers aside, there is a sense in which most contemporary literature is a product of the sense of cultural orphanage which defines the modern condition.2 Because exile was one of the most dominant tropes in the ideologies of high modernismâwhich tended to evoke cultural displacement as a form of artistic privilegeâit was inevitable that those Caribbean writers who aligned themselves with the European avant-garde would adopt exile and its rhetoric as the gesture that, by individuating and universalizing artistic production, would also liberate the writer from his or her âcompromisedâ literary traditions. Thus, for V. S. Naipaul, exile and and displacementâwhich he defines as âoneâs lack of representation in the world; oneâs lack of statusââsecure the colonized writerâs position as an individual who, uncorrupted by national interests, becomes a reasonable and objective commentator on colonial and postcolonial societies.3 As Rob Nixon has observed, for Naipaul being an exile âis a term privileged by high modernism and associated with the emergence of the metropolis as a crucible for a more international, though still European or American-based, culture.â4
This more recent, and possibly retrospective, view of exile and its connection to literary reputation has been examined in many excellent commentaries on Naipaul and is not my concern here.5 Instead, my focus is on the rather paradoxical question posed by Said in the epigraph, a question that informs most Caribbean literature published before independence: how can exile and displacement be transformed into a powerful discourse of decolonization and the sources of a literature of national identity? In The Pleasures of Exile, which I discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, Lamming makes the important proposition that although the condition of exile is universal, it is configured differently in the West Indies because of its overdetermination by colonialism. According to Lamming, âWhen the exile is a man of colonial orientation, and his chosen residence is the country which colonised his own history, then there are certain complications.â6
According to Lamming, among the many complications raised by the writerâs state of exile and his or her affiliation with the metropolitan culture, two are particularly pertinent to the relationship between writing and displacement in Caribbean writing. First, the colonized imagination suffers from a certain anxiety in relation to the colonial language and its culture; the exiled writers might find themselves in much-improved circumstances once they have become established in the metropolitan centers, but their âwhole sense of cultural expectationsâ has not greatly changed; exiled West Indian writers arrive and travel âwith the memory, the habitual weight of a colonial relationâ (p. 25). Second, and as a consequence of the first complication, colonized writers can only break away from the colonial mentality by returning imaginatively to the native land to âgrapple with that colonial structure of awareness which has determined West Indian valuesâ; they use the novel âas a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian communityâ (pp. 36, 37). As I argue in my Introduction, the dialectic of loss and return which Lamming attributes to the exiled imagination is the structuring principle in CĂ©saireâs Cahier. But this dialectic acquires an even greater resonance in Lammingâs The Pleasures of Exile and C. L. R. Jamesâs Beyond a Boundary, the two texts around which I anchor my discussion in this chapter: here exile explicitly generates nationalism and its corollary discursive and narrative strategies.
But to understand how a condition of loss is reversed into a discourse on nationalismâwhich is defined by Said as âan assertion of belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritageâ7âwe must first return to the historical conditions that prompted an earlier generation of Caribbean writers to define colonialism as essentially a state of perpetual exile. Indeed, to understand why many Caribbean writers sought to invent a literary tradition to compensate for their state of unbelonging, we must begin with an examination of these writersâ existential condition. We must begin by understanding why long before they sought their African roots, or even tried to adopt the African-derived popular cultures of the Caribbean into their poetics, West Indian writers had to settle scores with the colonial tradition that produced them.
Exile and the Generation of Caribbean Discourse
The existential situation of the black writer in the colonial Caribbean is best captured by James in an 1969 essay discussing the Beacon literary circle which, in the Trinidad of the 1930s, sought to establish cultural and literary autonomy in the West Indies. In reflecting on the colonial culture that had produced him, James draws attention to two rather contradictory propositions that are, nevertheless, crucial to an understanding of the decolonizing enterprise and its discourse. James begins by restating a point that is easily lost in the ideological rhetoric surrounding his life and work: âI want to make it clear that the origins of my work and my thoughts are to be found in Western European history and West European thought. ⊠It is in the history and philosophy and literature of Western Europe that I have gained my understanding not only of Western Europeâs civilisation, but of the importance of the underdeveloped countries.â8 James was to restate this point a few years before his death when he asserted that âwe of the Caribbean have not got an African past. We are black in skin, but the African civilisation is not ours. The basis of our civilisation in the Caribbean is an adaptation of Western civilisation.â9 The authorâs insistence that his categories and conceptual system have been determined by Western culture is not simply an ideological aberration; he takes it a step further when he appropriates the colonial library as his literary point of departure:
The atmosphere in which I came to maturity, and which has developed me along the lines that I have gone, is the atmosphere of the literature of Western Europe. In my youth we lived according to the tenets of Matthew Arnold; we spread sweetness and light, and we studied the best that there was in literature in order to transmit it to the peopleâas we thought, the poor, backward West Indian people.10
There is, however, an important contrary strain to this ostensible identification with the colonial tradition and its culture; while literacy and education shift the black elite away from the âbackward West Indian peopleâ toward the colonial master, they also expose the inherent state of cultural, social, and even racial dispossession which the two social classes share. The white members of the Beacon circle had opportunities to realize their talents in the colony, James notes in reference to Albert Gomes, but âwe were black and the only way we could do anything along the lines we were interested in was by going abroad; thatâs how I grew up.â11 Indeed, Jamesâs growthâmanifested in Beyond a Boundary as the transition from the English public school mentality to an embracement of nationalismâarises from a cognizance of the gap that defines his desires; he is educated to become a full-fledged member of the colonial club, but he is excluded from the same club because of his race and color. Thus, on one hand, a colonial education was promoted as the point of entry into the dominant political economy and culture; on the other hand, the colonial situation was inherently and immutably what Fanon would call a Manichaean world with compartmentalized social spaces unbridgeable by wealth, culture, or education.12
The colonial context would not allow for the kind of transcendental desires James sought through the âpublic schoolâ code because the compartmentalized colonial context is, in Fanonâs famous spatial metaphor, one that forecloses self-realization:
This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. The originality of the colonial context is that economic reality, inequality, and the immense difference of ways of life never come to mask the human realities. When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.13
Among the members of the Beacon circle, Albert Gomes might try to explain his difference from other Caribbean writers in terms of geographical location and individual choiceâthe others went away but he stayed at homeâbut James, who had come to examine the colonial situation differently and to know it better than he did in his youth, realized that sites of cultural production had nothing to do with education, social position, or even individual choice. For him, Gomes could stay because he was not born in the native side of the town and this gave him a kind of power which had nothing to do with talent or desire: âYou stayed not only because your parents had money but because your skin was white; there was a chance for you, but for us there wasnâtâexcept to be a civil servant and hand papers, take them from the men downstairs and hand them to the man upstairs.â14 Desires imprisoned by a fixed colonial relationship could only be released through displacement. Dispossessed in their own land, exiled Caribbean writers would reterritorialize themselves and hence reassert their identity through discourse and narration.
Moreover, because the colonized subject has also been entrapped in a colonial hermeneuticsâpreviously, knowledge was only possible âunder Western eyesââself-understanding in the projected decolonized culture demands the appropriation of exile as a form of metacommentary on the colonial condition itself. Indeed, Fredric Jamesonâs critical discussion of the function of metacommentary in hermeneutics can help us understand the conceptual, but quite paradoxical, privilege accorded exile by colonized writers trying to take their place in a world from which they have hitherto been excluded. More specifically, Jameson isolates three functions of metacommentary which I find pertinent to my discussion: interpretation as a commentary on âthe very conditions of the problem itselfâ; interpretation as an act of showing the interpreterâs credentials and self-justification; and interpretation as an attempt by a society âto assimilate monuments of other times and places, whose original impulses were quite foreign to them and which required a kind of rewriting.â15 The first two functions are elaborated in Jan Carewâs famous essay on exile and the Caribbean writer, while the final function is the key to understanding Lammingâs theoretical reflections on exile.16
The importance of Carewâs essay does not lie simply in his examination of the historical condition that makes the colonized subject an exile at home, but in the ways he reverses exile from a negativ...