Book Review: Caribbean Writers on Teaching Literature, edited by Lorna Down and Thelma Baker

Book review

Caribbean Eyes

Travel writing in English has historically been seen as a genre in which British travellers visit and write about colonized places. This chapter, by contrast, reads a number of works in which Caribbean travellers describe their experiences in Africa. It examines Lamming’s Pleasures of Exile, V.S. Naipaul’s writings on Zaire and the Ivory Coast, Shiva Naipaul’s North of South, and Maryse Condé’s La Vie sans fards in detail. In these works, the writers revisit and revise the British tradition. Travel writing was a genre through which Caribbean writers thought through and articulated the position of the Caribbean within the new postcolonial world.

The Loss of El Dorado and ‘Colonial’ Historiography

This chapter is about historical writing in the West Indies, from the 1960s onwards. Historical writing about the colonial past was a key place in which Caribbean writers in this era analysed the social and cultural impact of that history and looked forward to a decolonized future. Naipaul’s Loss of El Dorado is a fascinating but neglected text in this conversation, and is a key text in the development of his historical and social thought. This chapter positions Naipaul’s work within a history of West Indian historical writing, and historiographical debate, looking in detail at the work of C.L.R. James, Elsa Goveia, Eric Williams, Derek Walcott, and David Scott.

Subjection and Resistance: Landscapes, Gardens, Myths and Vestigial Presences in Olive Senior's Gardening in the Tropics

This paper argues that a selection of Caribbean writers has engaged an aesthetic that spotlights the idea of a living or divine landscape through a deployment of folkloric, mythological, magical or spiritual epistemological frames. This aesthetic foregrounds the expansive possibilities of nature and other life forms in the wake of empire and global modernity. By an engagement with these tools, the creative writer deconstructs the limits of colonial ecological damage and modern-day agricultural devastation, while simultaneously affirming the Caribbean landscape as an active and creative agent within articulations of community and belonging. Through a blend of eco-criticism as examined by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Wilson Harris's formulations of the "living landscapes" and Caribbean mythologies, this essay seeks to interrogate the manner in which Caribbean poet, Olive Senior, consciously deploys the literary imagination as a platform to plant seeds of reform and activism in the trail of environmental destruction. Senior accomplishes this through notions of mythic time and space that are unfettered by monolithic ideologies and linearity. This signposts an effort to posit a reliance on a spirit-infused universe—a deeply felt ideology which is pivotal to acts of environmental healing and societal recuperation.

“Strange Elation” and a Strange Relation

While Gerard Manley Hopkins—a supporter of British imperialism who did not engage with issues surrounding colonialism, slavery, or race—might seem a surprising model for post-colonial writers, he has in fact generated powerful responses in Caribbean poets through his playful rhythmic sensibility, attunement to individuality, religious faith, and environmental consciousness. For John Figueroa, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Pamela Mordecai, John Robert Lee, Jane King, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Kwame Dawes, and Vladimir Lucien, Hopkins has been an important example of linguistic resistance. His authenticity of voice, even when it comes from a distant land and culture, has inspired writers whose voices have often been marginalized; his attention to linguistic variation has stimulated experiments with patterns and intonations of Caribbean Anglophone dialects; and his idiosyncratic descriptions of the material world have given Caribbean writers an example of how to capture the uniqueness of their own vibrant landscapes.

Atlantic Continuities in Tomás Rivera and Rudolfo Anaya

This chapter draws from Tomás Rivera’s poetry and Rudolfo Anaya’s short story “The Man Who Could Fly” (2006) to read continuities of an Atlantic world formation within the Southwest. Specifically, this essay compares paradigms of a remembered “Congo” informed by dialectics of empire concerning both Central African exploration—in the case of Rivera—and plantational Latin American and American slavery—in the case of Anaya. While this article argues that in the case of Rivera, Henry Stanley’s exploration haunts the spatialization of Rivera’s poetry, in Anaya, by contrast, Atlantic continuities are chiefly embedded in a transnational comparison with Latin American Caribbean writers such as Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier. Applying Caribbean thinker Edouard Glissant’s theorization of “Relation” to these Chicano narratives, this chapter decodes the racial geographies of the Southwest to theorize how landscape and fiction work together to memorialize subaltern Atlantic memory.