THE formation of a Caribbean Identity, Part 3
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By Kimberly Stewart
To sum up the two previous articles, scrutiny into the natural history, unavoidably points to queries about it beginnings, a topic that has left both the European and Caribbean writers alike in awe.
The idea of Caribbean beginnings is attached to a long history of mythologizing nature in a region that Peter Hulme has succinctly described as a unique “discursive entity” (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 10). Reports about mermaids, Amazons, giants and anthropophagites “creatures from the ancient myths invaded the newly discovered lands and seas” (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 11) led to the reformulation of the region via Christian and classical toponyms such as the Antilles, Virgin Islands and Brazil.
According to Glissant all cultural zones previously assembled by plantation organizations have in common, an engagement with cultural amnesia and the loss of origins (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 15). Walcott also demonstrates by adding “nostalgia for the older culture and a melancholy at the new can go as deep as a rejection of the untamed landscape, a yearning for ruins” (Muse of History 42), ultimately leading the West Indian writer to deprecate and lament the immediate and current environment. Derek Walcott urges on celebrating the Edenic Caribbean as well as recognizing the harms of indulging such nakedness for consumption and appropriation. He says,
Direct experience with nature can teach shape and hopefully amend the human story and this is perhaps the reason why to invoke Walcott’s interview, “The argument of the outboard motor”, is fallacious or as Shona Jackson ultimately insists, El Dorado myth does not completely erode the lands’ own natural dynamism (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 15).
Understanding that indeed History can be our muse Walcott reminds his readers that they cannot remain in the ruins. The past is, and can be used, as a tool to help build oneself. Walcott himself being a mullato (half black and white) is the embodiment of this bittersweet history. The Europeans gave the West Indians something to build on; its literature. Walcott uses classical literature to overthrow expansionism.
He also mentions that in Greek mythology whoever looks at Medusa is turned to stone forever. Likewise whoever looks at history and ponders at it for an exorbitant amount of time is likely to end up in a state of stagnation (stasis), from which there is no advancement or escape.
There is the evident semi-conflict where the writers agree to the landscape being the perpendicular reference in identity formation which diverts to the major questions this three part series article seeks to explicate listed previously; What is the significance of the landscape and why should one look back at it? What can be learnt in looking back? How are the materials handled after being engaged? During the Renaissance of the Caribbean which took place around the great depression in the United States in 1929 along with the upscale in political and social consciousness of the Caribbean, people felt the necessity to examine a deeper and more invigorating exploration not just of one’s history but also the feeling of being at home and what this sense of home implied.
The simultaneous extirpating of peoples and plants is what the colonial process involved, prompting one that the etymological root of the word “diaspora” is “seed”. If diaspora lends to much of the human encounter of plants and animals, a literal scattering of seeds and the resultant adjustment that became important for survival. Hybridity and Creolization have been focal terms to the many concoctions of Caribbean cultural theory but have not yet shaped notably in the environment philosophies of recent decades. Edward Said insinuates about the representation of postcolonial “the land is recoverable at first only through imagination” (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 15).
Caribbean writers recognize the mandate of thorough investigation of historical knowledge but observe/ realize the exploration often diverts to a discontinuity of historical archive, a barrier that biogeography or archaeology may never surmount. The sentiment of belonging is conditioned by a forever lack of information of natural and human histories and hence demands reproduce a sense of identity in the present. Glissant interprets the Caribbean subject, encounters the paradoxal mandate of self-remodelling on the basis of a series of forgettings (DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 20), since in creating a new identity means leaving behind fragments of the imagined whole.
Derek Walcott also makes a similar reference in The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory “the process of the making or remaking of poetry are the fragments that were left behind; that buried language and there individual vocabulary calls for excavation of self-discovery and this is the process of poetry” (70). Again this process diverts one to look at the landscape for such definition of identity despite the amnesia of history.
Walcott says basically “there is no forgiveness or pardon for the past” (74). He means here that looking back at the past where there is the expectancy of forgiveness is to be living in an illusion and also stagnation (stasis). Therefore when looking at the landscape it is not to just remain in those ruins but now to begin to build a new culture from there.
Edward Baugh in The West Indian writer and his Quarrel with History follows or supports the notion when he states that the “earliest link between a view of history and the urge to write can be traced back to myth” (71). Myth uses the mechanism of disguise while deliberating meaning, “obscures yet brings to light”, “mystifies as well as clarifies”, “intensifies that which emerges, fixed in time and space between men and their world” (71). It elucidates the known-unknown. Baugh goes on to clarify when he says, “the revelations of myth are obscure. Which is what I meant when I say it both obscures and clarifies” (71).
From this one can derive that from the primary point of contact which in the ensuing manner can be described as: The evolution of Western thought, over time, history and literature first come together in the sphere of myth but first as foreshadowing the past and second as a vision for the future. “Both obscure yet practical” (Baugh 72). However according to Identity and Caribbean Literature any analysis of Caribbean literature should produce a new reading of one’s condition. It should therefore tell, how those varied groups negotiated their Caribbeanness, how it prepared them to occupy their contemporary space and how the Caribbean crucible of experience modified their experiences (Cudjoe).
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