Press one foot on the soil of England and the phantoms spring. Poets, naturalists, novelists have harrowed and hallowed it for centuries with their furrowing pens as steadily as its yeomen once did with the plough.Derek Walcott “The Garden Path”
When I first got to England in 1951, I looked out and there were Wordsworth’s daffodils. Of course, what else would you expect to find? That’s what I knew about. That’s what trees and flowers meant. I didn’t know the names of the flowers I’d just left behind in Jamaica.Stuart Hall “The Local and The Global”
As a student at the University of the West Indies , Derek Walcott was walking in Jamaica ’s picturesque Bog Walk gorge with one of his professors, A.K. Croston. Croston, an Englishman, commenting on the gorge’s beauty, said that however beautiful the scenery was, it was still a kind of “meaner” Wye valley. For Croston, Bog Walk’s beauty acquired credibility and respect only by its comparison to England . Years later, recounting this incident, Walcott said he felt Jamaica could “break its arse” trying, but in the eyes of his professor it would never achieve the beauty of the English landscape . It would always be inferior. (King 87)
This book considers the ways in which such a comparison came to be made, and how comments like Croston’s are commonly held ones about the British countryside . I look at the ways in which the British (especially English) countryside is itself constructed and viewed, but also how Caribbean writing about the British countryside offers new ways of seeing, and how Caribbean writing means we should reconsider more broadly whose voices are heard. While the accounts in this book are of sustained, detailed, and close textual analysis, they speak more widely to an engagement with the nature and characteristics of British countryside, a space in which certain groups of people have been excluded, made to feel unwelcome, silenced, or ignored. I show how Caribbean literary accounts represent, portray, and understand the countryside via particular ideological frameworks that include colonial education, Romantic sensibility, and socio-economic perspectives including class and race . The authors’ childhoods have also shaped their adult views of a countryside they often will not have seen first-hand, but would have read about extensively at school and home; this refraction becomes another point of investigation. The authors I examine include Caribbean canonical figures such as Jean Rhys (Dominica ), V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), and Derek Walcott (St. Lucia ). Other writers I look at include the poet Grace Nichols (Guyana)—now resident in Britain —as well as British Caribbean second-generation writers Andrea Levy, Caryl Phillips, and Charlotte Williams . In their works, I examine the evolution of the relationship between the British countryside and Caribbean writing from the late 1920s (the date of Rhys’s first publications in Britain ) to the present day. While literary connections between the Caribbean and Britain began well before 1920, this date marks something of a beginning of a more sustained and larger-scale migration (especially post-World War II) of people from formerly colonized countries in the Caribbean to Britain and thus provides an appropriate point of departure for consideration. Via detailed and sustained textual analysis, I look at the extent to which generations of Caribbean authors found a different Britain to the one their predecessors encountered, how Britain’s countryside is represented differently in their writing before the writers have seen it first-hand, and how far there is a difference in how the authors construct the countryside after they have actually seen Britain .
The epigraphs that begin this chapter by renowned Caribbean writers and intellectuals—poet Derek Walcott and sociologist Stuart Hall —suggest that answers to such examinations are highly complex. These two responses to perceptions of Britain’s rural landscapes , where natural features are formulated and articulated via a literary and colonial context, reveal the authors’ own acute awareness of the constructedness of Britain’s countryside . They understand that the Anglo canonical literature they have studied in their Caribbean classroom shapes their views of England , and that the history and relationship between land and its literature are long, complex, and deeply rooted.
Several theoretical and ideological underpinnings illuminate these views and complicate the various ways in which the British countryside has thus been imagined and constructed. In other words, that what we now term the “countryside” in Britain is far from organic or natural. Rather, it is a physical, historical, and cultural construction. Accordingly, literary accounts of the countryside reflect several long traditions and genres that include pastoral and bucolic, wilderness, nature and, more somewhat more recently, environmental or ecocritical writing. In the examination here, relations between the British countryside and Caribbean writing about that countryside take place within a colonial and postcolonial context, which further complicates and extends the investigation, since the relationship of people to their environment and land also includes centuries-long histories of enforced displacement, migration , and appropriation of both culture and environment. I also examine ways in which Caribbean accounts of the countryside themselves challenge the degree to which the British—and especially English—countryside is exclusive.
Cultural Marxist Raymond Williams , in his seminal work The Country and the City (1973), was one of the first critics to thoroughly examine this binary relationship between country and city , and his work is fundamental to understanding how countryside or rural areas are seen as oppositional to city or urban areas, where modernity is seen as suspicious and the cause for a “kind of fall” (96). Critical perspectives since then have evolved accordingly, with a “questioning of the assumption there is one single way of understanding landscape ” and where country and city are “not two different stories, but … different harmonies on the same theme” (Johnson, M. 191, 192).
More specifically, in the postcolonial context, where landscape and geography often reflect ownership, appropriation, and empire-building, this relationship becomes especially charged. Rob Nixon , for example, finds that the relationship between environmentalism and postcolonialism is one of “reciprocal indifference or mistrust” (196), summed up as a “tension between a postcolonial preoccupation with displacement and an ecocritical preoccupation with an ethics of place…” (198). Indeed, the exclusionary nature of the English countryside , where there is often a privileging of the pure and organic, means hostility towards the displaced, outsider, or immigrant, often causing such tensions, as we will see in the accounts to follow. Nixon calls for a rethinking of the oppositions he outlines to “aspire to a more historically answerable and geographically expansive sense of what constitutes our environment and literary works we entrust to vice its parameters” (206). Following Nixon’s articulation of these tensions that underpin the two sometimes opposing critical fields, several critics have indeed sought more common and expansive ground. Specifically, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin identify that in every one of the “different strands of both postcolonialism and ecocriticism ” is the truism “no social justice without environmental justice; and without social justice – for all ecological beings – no justice at all” (10). And, in the last decade, a spatial turn in literary studies has allowed further lines of inquiry into questions of “space, place, and mapping” (Tally Geocritical Explorations). Indeed, while this spatial turn has rightly identified that some practices of geography and cartography have “served a repressive purpose in the subjugation of territory”, there is also acknowledgement that “a jointly ecocritical and geocritical approach offers a more sophisticated line of inquiry that examines the intersections between mapping and ecology” (Tally Ecocriticism, 7). In a similar vein, Ken Hiltner , editor of Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader (2016), notes the following:
Because of the environmental justice movement, ecocriticism greatly benefited from the work of literary critics exploring issues like gender , class , race , and colonialism . Ecocritics are now returning … the favor by showing how an environmental approach can enrich critical work in the fields, such as colonial studies, from which environmental justice borrowed. In this sense, ecocriticism will … both remain a discrete field of literary study and inform other approaches. Consequently, many critical studies may have a “green” tint to them without being primarily works of ecocriticism . (133)
This book is an examination in this latter spirit, insofar as the nature of the discussion contained herein is not primarily the work of ecocriticism , yet it is informed by such a critical approach. It concerns literary works about the countryside , rather than showing explicit attention to or containing distinct content about the environment. Additionally, the analyses in this book are distinct from most other ecocritical/postcolonial literary intersections in that the environments these authors engage with are not those of their (post)colonial home, but those of the countryside in the colonial motherland, and thus subject to additional ideological constructions of race and class therein. Thus, this project extends the boundaries of, or adds a dimension to, ecocritical approaches. Still, to the extent that “environmental critics explore how nature and the natural world are imagined through literary texts” in its broadest sense (Hiltner “General Introduction” Ecocriticism : The Essential Reader xiii), this book adds a nontrivial and novel facet to the ecocritical conversation: namely, that its examination is primarily about Caribbean (often immigrant) accounts of the countryside in Britain , as opposed to urban or city environments.
While I am primarily concerned with the ways these authors write about the British countryside , first-generation authors’ experiences of growing up in the Caribbean countryside is an integral and fundamental part of their cultural make-up. Physical attributes of the countryside are especially complex in these writers’ home islands—former British colonies—on which there was often already an imposition of a certain kind of enforced “British” landscape or topography, or where non-native plants and flowers such as roses are commonly grown.1 Caribbean writers reading their schoolbook English literature in the Caribbean would have had a strong sense of the importance of the British countryside , in which much of the understanding and perception of its nature comes from Romanticism and its attendant culturally embedded literary constructions. In the case of these Caribbean authors, who have grown up with a British colonial education, responses to that particularly pervasive Romantic symbol, the daffodil —a flower which would have been predominantly understood by reading Wordsworth at school—become especially significant, as in Hall’s comments in the epigraph above.
Each author in the accounts that follow represents the British countryside in various ways to negotiate belonging and attachment to Britain , including questions of heritage and marginalization. In particular, the writers use the idea of the countryside to negotiate their complex relationship with Britain itself, where they show dif...