Locating the Destitute

Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction

Stanka Radovic

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813936307
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While postcolonial discourse in the Caribbean has drawn attention to colonialism's impact on space and spatial hierarchy, Stanka Radovi? asks both how ordinary people as "users" of space have been excluded from active and autonomous participation in shaping their daily spatial reality and how they challenge this exclusion. In a comparative interdisciplinary reading of anglophone and francophone Caribbean literature and contemporary spatial theory, she focuses on the house as a literary figure and the ways that fiction and acts of storytelling resist the oppressive hierarchies of colonial and neocolonial domination. The author engages with the theories of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and contemporary critical geographers, in addition to selected fiction by V. S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Beryl Gilroy, and Rafaël Confiant, to examine the novelists' construction of narrative "houses" to reclaim not only actual or imaginary places but also the very conditions of self-representation.

Radovi? ultimately argues for the power of literary imagination to contest the limitations of geopolitical boundaries by emphasizing space and place as fundamental to our understanding of social and political identity. The physical places described in these texts crystallize the protagonists' ambiguous and complex relationship to the New World. Space is, then, as the author shows, both a political fact and a powerful metaphor whose imaginary potential continually challenges its material limitations.

1. Caribbean Spatial Metaphors

I myself consider literary documents as realities of the imagination, pure products of the imagination. And why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

Caribbean discourse and literature open a unique possibility for an innovative rereading of spatial and postcolonial theories in conjunction. The Caribbean has always been contested space, historically fought over and swapped among various colonial powers while conceptually cast as either the abyss of the slave plantation or the garden of worldly paradise. Engaging with various discursive representations of this ambiguity of Caribbean space, I address in this chapter the polarized visions of Caribbean postcoloniality between brutal colonial facts and powerful images of their contestation. These gestures of creative resistance, often formulated through spatial metaphors, offer deliberately provisional “third” solutions against perceived historical binaries. In the novels I analyze, space in general and Caribbean space in particular are always “both/and” rather than “either/or.” For many Caribbean authors, space is at all times a material fact and a representative image; specifically defined and generally relevant; culturally bound and open to a kind of “worlding” or “relation” beyond its immediate context; a site of culture and the problem of the individual; an opening to otherness, to the outside, and a closure into the imagined autonomy of an inside. Here we confront space as a representative image and as a specific material fact and are therefore better equipped to examine the ambiguous and persistently liminal nature of spatial analysis itself. In this sense Caribbean discourse, with its persistent focus on its own contested spatiality, opens a unique possibility for reconsidering and broadening the scope of spatial theory, whose important but often underappreciated concern has to do with the way imaginary representations of space reflect and subsequently shape the real places we inhabit. As they reflect on their region and its history, Caribbean authors and theorists address the inherent complexity of space itself—as image, concept, and experience; projection, utopia, and fact.

This constitutive ambiguity is, in my view, precisely the reason why space is such an attractive, rich, and repeatedly invoked concept: its potential meanings can never be exhausted because they are always dynamically implicated in questions of cultural identity. The complex nature of insular topography itself seems to suggest paradoxes and dualities, which fuel our generic perception of islands; they fascinate us as “surrounded yet open on all sides, disconnected yet whole,” so that “in our imaginations, island ecology includes homes for dragons and elves and enchanting spirits; islands are wild and dangerous, or homey and safe, depending on our definitions. They are usually the imagined home of extraordinary and noble indigenous people. But we also keep dangerous and important prisoners on islands” (Anderson, 1). In the spirit of Robert S. Anderson’s uneasy and consciously ironic passage from “enchanting spirits” to “dangerous prisoners,” we should remember that the Caribbean islands are likewise torn between fact and fiction. The region is continually fictionalized as the terrestrial incarnation of the Edenic myth while remaining a factual site of brutal colonial history, conveniently obscured by tourists’ quest for tropical bliss.¹ The metaphoricity and materiality of island topography in general and the Caribbean archipelago in particular draw our attention to the uneasy yet mutually constitutive relationship between how we imagine things and how they really are. We produce places as we imagine them, while the facts of that place-production become in turn crucial for our representation of their reality. Nowhere is this imagination of the world, which becomes world-reality, clearer than in Christopher Columbus’s factual arrival at an “imaginary” location in the New World, where in the actual place we now know as the Caribbean he mistakenly “discovered” the continent sought after by European imperial powers. The Caribbean thus became “the West Indies” and to this day bears the name of an imaginary geography. V. S. Naipaul’s sardonic recounting of this event draws into focus the complication that such materialized geographical fiction will later have for East Indian indentured laborers: “When in 1492 Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought therefore to have called the people Chinese. But East was East. He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through the Indian corn” (“East Indian,” 39). Antonio Benítez-Rojo sees this same geographic fantasy as generative of a particularly lopsided view that the West will end up having of the Caribbean: “The West’s idea of the Caribbean is a product of these and other mistakes and inventions” (The Repeating Island, 220). In this narrative of colonial “bungling,”² the moments of fiction cannot be extricated from real events, showing us that spatial reality is always produced by the complex processes of imagination and exploration, discovery and misrecognition, fascination and brutality, encounter and conquest, memory and misremembering. As Robert Harbison argues in the case of architecture and its function, “The solidest architectural facts are fictional to a degree” (7). The same can be said for the solid materiality of geographical and spatial claims: they inevitably depend upon fictions that first motivate and subsequently sustain them. My selection of spatial discourses reveals an interest in those spatial theories that foreground the imaginary and utopian dimensions of spatial practice alongside its material and embodied realities in order to show them as mutually constitutive and, at the same time, always uneasily poised against one another.

Although the Caribbean was, after Columbus’s “discovery,” initially conquered by the Spanish, northern Europeans started their own permanent colonies in the seventeenth century, first on the still unoccupied islands of the Eastern Caribbean and later moving west into the Greater Antilles. The rise of northern European colonial interest meant that “the islands often changed hands during wars in Europe, as local forces or naval expeditions seized control” (Rogozinski, 59).³ Saint Lucia, for example, “probably holds the record for frequent changes of ownership” (144), passing fourteen times from the French to the British and, in that same spirit of spatial mythologization, earning the nickname “Helen of the West Indies.” This history of colonial competition over “available” and exploitable space reveals the extent of European interest in the Caribbean and the phenomenal profit that the Atlantic slave trade and plantation slavery brought to the European colonial powers. According to Eric Williams, “By 1750, there was hardly a trading or manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided one of the main streams of that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution”(Capitalism and Slavery, 52).

To this day, and despite official independence (gained mostly in the 1950s and 1960s), the Caribbean islands are still claimed from the outside and exploited for tourism: the region is “in danger of being reduced to sun, sand, sex, smiles and servility by multinational capitalism and with the eager cooperation of its own local political and economic elites” (Strachan, 2–3). Recast as a worldly paradise, the region is today commodified for the world consumer despite the fact that the Edenic myth sits quite uncomfortably with the history of the Caribbean as a series of plantation colonies marked by the violence of slavery. Contested because it is in various ways perpetually claimed by an outside, either for wealth extraction or for the myths of leisure and fun, the Caribbean is a region whose critical, literary, and artistic discourses aim at resisting the danger of either being reduced to the peripheral position of the ex-colony or being governed by an increasingly miasmic global elsewhere in providing de-historicized spaces for pure consumption of pleasure. Yet, as Nick Nesbitt argues in the context of the French Caribbean (though we can treat this observation as relevant for the entire region), “Amid growing dependency on and imbrication within national . . . and now global capitalism, Antilleans have consistently offered a multifaceted critique of their self-estrangement and lack of autonomy” (4). In other words, Caribbean authors strive almost unanimously to redefine the region as a locus of diversity, rich cultural and artistic production, and a complex regional and relational identity. In Ian Gregory Strachan’s words, “Caribbean discourse, then, is customarily shaped by an underlying economy: the imperialist-colonial economy of wealth extraction and exploitation and an often anti-imperialist counter-economy, one that concerns self-worth” (4).

In some of the most widely known critical assessments of Caribbean cultural history, the region appears emblematic of colonial alienation and its brutality. As Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin argue in their seminal study The Empire Writes Back, the almost complete extermination of the indigenous people in the West Indies and the displacement suffered by its entire contemporary population (originally from Africa, India, China, the Middle East, and Europe) means that “the West Indian situation combines all the most violent and destructive effects of the colonizing process” (25). Created by exploitative colonization (as opposed to settler colonialism), the West Indies cannot indulge in the dream of filiation to some precolonial world nor view the decolonizing process as a simple reversal or rejection of the colonial history. As a result of its complex relationship to colonialism, seen as a destructive force that nevertheless brings the contemporary Caribbean into being, the region is here defined as “the crucible of the most extensive and challenging post-colonial literary theory” (144) and as the clearest representation of the irreversible impact of colonialism, which begins with the ancestral exile of the African and continues with the present-day hegemonic pressures from Europe and the United States.

This view of Caribbean exceptionality in its experience of and response to the colonial history is already present in George Lamming’s juxtaposition of African and West Indian colonial experiences: “What the West Indian shares with the African is a common political predicament: a predicament which we call colonial; but the word colonial has a deeper meaning for the West Indian than it has for the African. The African, in spite of his modernity, has never been wholly severed from the cradle of a continuous culture and tradition. . . . It is the brevity of West Indian’s history and the fragmentary nature of the different cultures which have fused to make something new; it is the absolute dependence on the values implicit in that language of his colonizer which has given him a special relation to the word, colonialism. . . . Colonialism is the very base and structure of the West Indian’s cultural awareness” (“The Occasion for Speaking,” 34–35). The relative brevity of modern Caribbean history, its linguistic dependence on the colonizer’s language and the fragmented diversity of its cultural components constitute the exceptional dimension of this region and, at the same time, give the Caribbean an exemplary status within the context of colonial history. The Caribbean is thus often propelled into an emblem of the new global diversity, itself marked by a kind of direct or indirect spatial, cultural, and linguistic displacement of all people, even those who once claimed the privilege of theorizing their “roots” and “purity.”⁴ According to this view, the Caribbean allows us to confront directly and without illusions the extent of displacement that colonialism and slavery, which lie at the core of contemporary capitalist development and its global reach, visited upon its victims.

Other readings of the Caribbean often give it an equally exemplary status and, while arguing Caribbean specificity, paradoxically establish something profoundly emblematic about the notion of “Caribbeanness.” Regardless of the exuberant richness of this theoretical figuration, the Caribbean runs the risk of becoming a metaphor for itself. Yet if this geocultural metaphor ends up substituting for the Caribbean as a specific place and dislocates its spatiopolitical reality, the potent and suggestive discursive construct threatens to erase the material irreducibility of the location and its needs. In The Repeating Island (1996), Benítez-Rojo’s seminal rereading of the Caribbean aesthetic and cultural history by means of chaos theory and the rhizome, the notion of Caribbeanness is extended to include people, artifacts, and performative cultural practices that are not, strictly speaking, Caribbean.⁵ In Benítez-Rojo’s interpretation of the Caribbean, which “comprises a rich and at times daring combination of literary criticism, theory, historicism, and creative writing” (de la Campa, 91), there is actually no such thing as “strictly speaking.” Instead there is a sense that the Caribbean exists and generates things in “a certain kind of way.” This suggestive formulation allows Benítez-Rojo to speak of jazz as “a kind of music that dwells within the Caribbean orbit” (RI, 19) or of Martin Luther King as someone who, although North American, was also able to be Caribbean: “His African ancestry, the texture of his humanism, the ancient wisdom embodied in his pronouncements and strategies, his improvisatory vocation, his ability to seduce and be seduced, and, above all, his vehement condition as a dreamer . . . and as an authentic performer make up the Caribbean side of a man unquestionably idiosyncratic in North America” (24). According to Román de la Campa, this radically open discourse emerges from a postmodern perspective that Benítez-Rojo constructs through “a string of metasignifiers such as chaos, free-play, supersyncretism, and polyrhythms, which lead ultimately to the category of performance” understood as “a Caribbean cultural disposition” (92). What it means to be Caribbean is stretched here to the point of bursting since anything and anyone sharing specific “Caribbean” features (such as, for example, a skill for performance, improvisation, dreaming) can be included in “a certain way” of being Caribbean. Although the deliberate looseness of this formulation signals a rejection of rigid discursive boundaries and definitions, especially those concerning narrow nationalism or ethnic rivalries, the stretching of the Caribbean “meta-archipelago,” as Benítez-Rojo calls it, from Bombay to Gambia and from a Cantonese tavern of circa 1850 to an old Bristol pub (RI, 4), runs the risk of leaving us with no sense of the Caribbean at all. In being everything (across time as a “repeating island” and across space as a “meta-archipelago”), the Caribbean could easily turn into nothing in particular, just like that overused notion of “space” Lefebvre once lamented. The metaphorically spatialized Caribbean archipelago labors, in my view, under the enormous weight of having to suggest an opening beyond material geography while nevertheless preserving the sense of Caribbean specificity in historical, geographic, and cultural terms. We are thus confronted with another version of the dual structure, here in the opposition between the emblematic and the singular. This structure seems to tear at the notion of Caribbean space and often strains spatial analysis itself. So how can we think of space in general and of Caribbean space in particular as something other than an overextended metaphor for itself, as something more than just a narrowly defined regional topography for which vague notions of cultural diversity often replace a serious engagement with the Caribbean aesthetic?

Benítez-Rojo is invested in maintaining the possibility that the Caribbean can be thought about without being too narrowly defined since it is by its nature both decentered and unbound. What characterizes this unique region is then a series of spatial and other competing metaphors: it is aquatic, it is like the Milky Way, the lava, the wind, the clouds, it is chaos, fractal mathematics, the uncanny novel, and more. In exploding the metaphor, Benítez-Rojo suggests that the Caribbean “resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar” (RI, 11) associated with Europe and leads us instead to contemplate the continual paradoxes by which the Caribbean aesthetic, with its memories of colonial violence, seeks to find “territory of the absence of violence” (25). For Benítez-Rojo, the rejection of synthesis in favor of the perpetual flux between polarities also signals the rejection of exclusionary choices, which would indeed be violent if applied to the Caribbean. Insisting on unresolved bifurcations and paradoxes that, in resisting the synthetic impulse, reveal Caribbean literature to be “fugitive by nature” (25), he concludes that “a syncretic artifact is not a synthesis, but rather a signifier made of differences” (21). This position is shared by many Caribbean thinkers who strive to undo the harmonized but isolated identity constructs in favor of a more communal and diffracted sense of belonging. In Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s “In Praise of Creolness,” for example, the notion of Creole identity suggests something akin to Benítez-Rojo’s “heteroclitic, fractal, baroque” (RI, 25) forms of expression and offers a similar resistance to synthesized and totalizing discourses: “Because of its constituent mosaic, Creoleness is an open specificity. It escapes, therefore, perceptions which are not themselves open. Expressing it is not expressing a synthesis, not just expressing a crossing or any other unicity. It is expressing a kaleidoscopic totality, that is to say: the nontotalitarian consciousness of a preserved diversity” (“IPC,” 892, original emphasis). Far from being exhausted or explained by vague multicultural harmony, the question of the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the Caribbean contests rigid centers and boundaries, leading its prominent writers to theorize nonviolence and forms of cross-cultural cooperation. In the spatiocultural context of the Caribbean there can be, according to Lamming, no simple binary between “a traditional, indigenous culture and a colonizing power” (“Caribbean Literature,” 36). Instead the Caribbean is, from the very start, a region marked by “a triplicity of cultural strains—Africa, Europe, and Asia: local populations which can claim no ancestral roots in the soil that was to become their home” (36). This objective triplicity of Caribbean cultural space necessitates various imaginative theorizations of the relationship between people and their spatial context, and it finds, I argue, a very productive resonance in Lefebvre’s triplicity of space and the “trialectic” approaches to human geography of the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

In his famous presentation of “the black Atlantic,” another conceptual and geographic third space meant to restructure reductive colonial binaries such as Europe versus Africa or the Old versus the New World, Paul Gilroy expresses his concern with the “continuing lure of ethnic absolutisms” and “cultural insiderism” (3) shaped by the Manichaean dynamics of race and national belonging. He favors instead “the rhizomatic, fractal structure of the transcultural, international formation” of the black Atlantic (4). This complex cultural formation serves to remind us that, although “manifestly inadequate” (15), concepts like creolization and syncretism, so prevalent in the Caribbean discourse, indicate that cultures and cultural consciousness of all the participants of Atlantic colonialism, from the European settlers to the decimated indigenous populations, from the African slaves to the indentured Asians, all participated in an inevitable and continuous cross-cultural exchange and “were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other” (2). Revising Gilroy’s complex theorization of the black Atlantic, Michaeline A. Crichlow examines Caribbean creolization in the global context by introducing the notion of a “post-creole imagination” in order to decenter “the traditional focus of Creolization discourses on the Caribbean, plantation, and in part, even the ‘black Atlantic,’ while being critical of those deployments of the creolization motif in contexts where power is erased” (202). While discourses of creolization are here recognized as diversely and rhizomatically rooted in the Caribbean, they are also removed from their strict localization in order to reflect upon larger processes of global economic and cultural power structures, which shape them. Crichlow investigates how the dual nature of Caribbean geocultural location offers a view of specific local practice and of a broader set of global relations while remaining alert to the possibilities and limitations of these positions. This liminality, she argues, is “vital to an understanding of creolization as embedded in a politics of place that extends beyond the black Atlantic” (204). As these important theoretical interventions clearly show, the central ideas of Caribbean discourse remain productive for rethinking binary relations between local and global, specific and general, exceptional and exemplary, material and imaginative.

Yet as Benítez-Rojo insists, despite the mutual permeability and fluid circulation of communities and cultural practices, despite syncretism, creolization, and deliberately celebrated images of “impurity,” at the origin of the present Caribbean there lies an image of a transhistorical and transgeographic vio...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Caribbean Spatial Metaphors
• 2. A House of One’s Own: Individual and Communal Spaces in the Caribbean “Yard Novel”
• 3. “No Admittance”: V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas
• 4. Squatters in the Cathedral of the Written Word: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco
• 5. Heterotopia of Old Age in Beryl Gilroy’s Frangipani House
• 6. Upper and Lower Stories: Raphaël Confiant’s L’Hôtel du Bon Plaisir
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography