The Formation of Caribbean identity in Literature: Where the landscape is the only surviving witness. Part II

By: Kimberly Albert

As the article continues to engage the theoretical framework of post-colonial theory; it ascertains means in which the historicity of immigration and re-settlement has supplied unique trials and prospects for forming a sense of belonging and an environmental ethos in the Caribbean. The landscape now takes the role of telling a story which those who were there before have died and is now apart of the landscape itself. As Guillén suggests, “literature must not do the impossible: it must remember a human history that has been buried by the tremendous tropical indifference of the Caribbean environment” (DeLoughrey, Gosson, Handley 3).

The Caribbean’s environment has been drastically changed and grafted by colonialism which brought to the attention of how natural histories are profoundly submerged in the world’s historical process. Edward Baugh on the reverse says the sustained circumstances of the day-to-day reality do not shape part of a continuum meaning that its commonality with its surrounding (what would be referred to as nature) is sporadic  in relation to the culmination of experiences (what would be referred to as culture). History although a discipline endeavours to illuminate the reality lived, by this people “will suffer from a serious epistemological deficiency: it will not know how to make the link” (Caribbean Discourse 61). He says “this dislocation of the continuum and the inability of the collective consciousness to absorb it all, characterize what I call a non-history” (Caribbean Discourse 62). The dilemma in appropriating the natural aesthetics of a landscape that has been so tragically changed with the vehemence of colonial history has showed a persistent paradox for Caribbean writers. In the attempt to strip away colonialism from the Caribbean, replenishment of folk culture, comprising of religious practices has supplied a revitalizing context for both natural and human antiquities in the Caribbean. For example Aimé Cesaire has widely drawn from botanical history to inscribe African and Arawakan “roots” on his “calabash of an island” while Eric Roach’s poetry explores the “glorious landscapes of the soul” (DeLoughrey, Gosson, Handley 71).

Braithwaite the historian says, “What the West Indian writer must help to recover is the true self which the colonized African exercised in the task of survival. That the function of the writer is to express and articulate the people’s culture in its historical depth and give it back to them” (Breiner 2). So in other words the writer ultimately is a conduit that not only functions for himself but also for his society in all aspects. Naipaul emerging out of a post-colonial setting however, creates the image of himself as the East Indian, West Indian turned Englishman in the text West Indian poetry and its audience. He opposes Braithwaite’s argument earlier by stating that the writer’s primary function is “self-cultivation” rather than writing just to give back to society. Naipaul states that he sees society as a sterile void and the only way he can cultivate himself above his ‘destitute’ society is by migrating to a place where he can find an adequate response to his work (Breiner 2). He also argues that “history is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (Middle Passage 29). It is evident to see that Caribbean writers had no other choice but to migrate to better oneself. Marlene Nourbese points out that “growing up in the Caribbean, you grow up knowing that you are going to leave home. For one thing the societies are too small to absorb all their trained people, so you have to leave” (Condé, Lonsdale 2). This is why it is said nostalgia is a powerful element in most Caribbean writer’s fiction; that sentiment and longing for the past, which they inevitably had to evade because of circumstances beyond their control. Carol Boyce adds by remarking, “Migration creates the desire for home which in turn produces the rewriting of home” (Condé, Lonsdale 2). Subsequently this situation creates a bitter-sweet notion. The advantage is it created a collective Caribbean identity and a ‘new place’ in literature but unfortunately it has weakened the sense of personal identity who have ranged themselves along colour lines.

It does not matter how hard any Caribbean writer tries to be the ‘English writer’ he/she will always be West Indian because of the impracticality to dissect one from the natural mundane or every-day experiences (good or bad) of life; the conscious or unconscious interaction with a class, ideologies, their findings in the social hemisphere or from the fact that each and every one belongs to a society. The landscape is the mirror.

When endeavouring to tell a voiceless story the side-effects are usually fatal. It frequently diverts to the inquisition of who or what is culpable. The victim, in a number of instances is the land itself, when the past is elusive or, on the contrary, the land is the culprit because “isolation and a diminutive geography have condemned one to live in perpetual submission having in one’s defence not aggression but patience” (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 2). Glissant explains “that the landscape in literature stops merely being a decorative or supportive and emerges as a full character. Describing the landscape is not enough. The individual, the community, the land are inextricable in the process of creating history. Landscape is a character in this process. Its deepest meanings need to be understood” (Caribbean Discourse 105-106). According to Richard L.W. Clarke, “There has been a growing consciousness within historiographical circles in recent times that the relationship between the historical text and the reality it purports to re-present is one fraught with difficulties” (2). The trouble with unification of the natural aesthetics of a landscape that has been so extremely changed with the vehemence of European history, has demonstrated a remaining enigma for West Indian writers. Derek Walcott offers the alternative, that mimicry is creation. He states that “we owe Europe either revenge or nothing and it is better to have nothing than revenge because revenge is uncreative” (The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry 12). This is what would be called Caribbean “imagination as necessity and as invention” (The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry 12).  Caribbean mimicry was central as Walcott observes that mimicry is an act of imagination and just like a tiger’s ‘grass-blade stripes’ acts as camouflage; it is designed as both defence and lure” (The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry 12). Indeed if the landscape and to an extent its literature mirrors or is symbolic for identity consciousness of a people, moreover the interrogation of literature purports the concerns of how one has depicted the landscape in the new world through the use of literature.