Writing states of independence: Erna Brodber and Kei Miller

Caribbean literature records the disillusionment with the reality of political independence that followed the failure of the West Indies Federation, and indicts the confederacy of dunces largely responsible. Peter Abraham’s This Island Now, V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Oonya Kempadoo’s Buxton Spice and Caryl Philips’s A State of Independence, among others, have excoriated both colonial and national political machinations that divide states and the region on the grounds of race, class and ideological differences. I want to attend, however, to a more positive vision which cautiously raises hopes for the prospects of Caribbean citizens to actually achieve a state of independence, or as Erna Brodber puts it in The Rainmaker’s Mistake, entry into ‘the Free’ (2007 150). This process, however, takes place far outside the realm of organised politics: specifically, the realm of Spirit. The writing of Erna Brodber and Kei Miller envisions Caribbean people accessing epistemological resources of their own cultural fashioning, resources which properly harnessed admit the possibility of growth, transcendence and fulfilment beyond the strictly material realm. In both, the liberation of the individual is linked with that of the community and imagines achievement of a real confederation

Settling into ‘unhomeliness’: Displacement in selected Caribbean and Caribbean Canadian women’s writing

Faced with horrific daily evidence of the consequences of polarisation on the ‘grounds’ of difference (racial, ethnic, religious), I find myself increasingly emphasising culture contact and transculturation in my teaching practice. This is a reasonable enough focus in the Caribbean context, and it certainly is appropriate to my history as a product of such processes: my parents were born in two different countries, I was born in a third, brought up in a fourth and live and work in yet another; my children were born in one country, of parents born in two other countries, and they too will very likely end up living and working somewhere else; and so the cycle continues