Lawson Welsh, Sarah

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		4		Editor's Comment.It is a great pleasure to open this Special Issue on Caribbean literature with an interview with the Barbadian-born writer, Kamau Brathwaite.  Brathwaite's long career and prolific output as a poet, historian, critic of literature and language, cultural commentator, activist and encourager of Caribbean arts spans almost 50 years. He is undoubtedly one of the towering figures of twentieth-century Caribbean literature and yet his latest creative writings have been considerably neglected outside of the Caribbean, his profile much less high than might have been expected of such an important voice.  Marcia Burrowes' interview with Brathwaite, conducted at his home in “cowpastuh” Barbados in August 2002, is thus a welcome corrective to this trend and will hopefully encourage other readers to re-approach and reappraise Brathwaite  in terms of his latest reflections and writings on Caribbean literature and culture. In the interview Brathwaite reflects on 'what constitutes the Caribbean' and  'Caribbeaness' and its relation to a wider black diaspora. He also 'revisit[s] the term “creolization”, for which he is widely known and [seeks] to invest a greater sense of the act of maroonage within its meaning'.  Like Oonya Kempadoo in her interview with Harald Leusmann in this issue, Brathwaite reflects on tourism and the tourist industry in Barbados and the Caribbean and its effects on 'the environment and on the psyche of the Barbadian and Caribbean people' in terms of a 'changing landscape and the loss of creative space for the artist'. The interview ends with a discussion of the  notion of the crossroads, as a key concept in African and Caribbean culture as well as in Brathwaite's own life. Although Brathwaite is popularly known as a proponent of an African-centred cultural politics, significantly in Burrowes' interview, he stresses  that his real interest is to reach for a Caribbean aesthetic, 'to discover and to articulate and to recognize what is our space, which is a Caribbean space, and that’s made up of all the elements' of which the African is only one part. 	In line with Brathwaite's recognition of a multifaceted Caribbean, writers of Indo-Caribbean origin are also well represented in this special issue. Included are interviews with Guyanese writers David Dabydeen and Oonya Kempadoo and a focus on recent fiction by younger Guyanese women writers, Rooplall Monar and Naramal Shewcharan in Miriam Pirbhai's 'The Question of Cultural Conviction for 'This time generation'': The Indo-Guyanese Response to Contemporary Caribbean Experience'. Pirbhai argues that despite differences in 'setting, tone and style' of Monar's Janjhat (1989) and Shewcharan's Tomorrow is Another Day (1994); these two novels share a common thematic concern with the differences between a 'rural and a progressively urnbanized diasporic community...the growing gulf between older and younger generations' and the shifting patterns of gender roles and gender relations to be found in a rapidly changing [Guyanese] society. Pirbhai foregrounds the 'doubly symbolic' role of subaltern female characters in these fictions and examines the writers' often radically 'feminist investigations of gender within ethnically and racially deployed identity politics' within the novels. Such investigations involve a disruption of essentialized constructions of the 'postcolonial woman', in Sara Suleri's terms, 'as metaphor for good', and of the subaltern women as 'harmonious symbol […] of historical continuity' (Rajan) as well as a dismantling of the more insidious stereotypical depictions of the South Asian diasporic woman as passive victim in much androcentric discourse, not all of it confined to the Caribbean. For Pirbhai, these interventions are characteristic of a growing number of texts by women writers of Indo-Guyanese origin, which demonstrate not only a more sophisticated articulation of gender issues but which also point to a wider 'development in the Indo-Guyanese novel from an earlier generation's focus on the secluded estate community to a younger generation's more politicized interest in urban Guyanese society' and the 'shaping of a post-Independence Guyanese consciousness', a shift which mirrors a larger movement in Guyanese society as a whole. Another Indo-Guyanese writer, of this younger generation, is Oonya Kempadoo, author of Buxton Spice (1998) and Tide Running (2001). Kempadoo's first novel, Buxton Spice was notable for its frank and important exploration of adolescent sexuality, including lesbian sexuality, a subject still under-represented in the literature and culture of the Anglophone Caribbean. As such, it can be productively read alongside texts by a growing number of Caribbean prose writers who have chosen to foreground the exploration of issues of sexuality in their work. These include Robert Antoni's 1998 novel Blessed is the Fruit, Lawrence Scott’s prize-winning novel Aelred’s Sin (1998), Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms At Night (1996), Nigel Thomas’s Spirits in the Dark (1993), Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1985) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and the novels and short stories of Patricia Powell, notably her 1994 novel, A Small Gathering of Bones.​[1]​ Leusmann discuses with Kempadoo her beginnings as a writer, her role as a practicing artist and its links with her work, her experience of growing up during the Burnham years in Guyana and the treatment of language and sexuality in her writing. Poet, novelist and critic David Dabydeen is the subject of Lars Eckstein's interview. Eckstein opens by discussing Dabydeen's longstanding interest in the relationship between literature and the visual arts, an interest also shared, in a more practical way, by fellow Indo-Guyanese writer and artist Oonya Kempadoo, also interviewed in this issue. Dabydeen's fascination with the visual arts, especially those of the 18th century, is evidenced most strikingly in his 19  poem 'Turner' and his latest novel, A Harlot's Progress (1999). These two texts 'creatively engage' with J.M. Turner's painting “Slave Ship” and William Hogarth 1732 series of engravings, A Harlot’s Progress. 'Creative engagement' with others kinds of texts -- slave narratives, abolitionist tracts, planter's journals -- in A Harlot's Progress is also considered as the two discuss the function and nature of intertextuality in relation to the novel. This discussion is usefully extended in Eckstein's examination of the use of similar material in relation to Caryl Phillips's Cambridge, in his article 'Dialogism in Caryl Phillips's Cambridge, or the Democratisation of Cultural Memory', also in this issue. Similarly, the discussion of the problematic issue of an aesthetics and the aestheticizing of suffering, in relation to slavery and the Holocaust, in Eckstein's interview with Dabydeen can also be productively read alongside Benedicte Ledent's article 'The "Aesthetics of Personalism" in Caryl Phillips's Writing: Complexity as a new Brand of Humanism' which argues that the 'focus on marginalized individuals' in Phillips' Cambridge (1991) and The Nature of Blood (1997) 'counterbalances the potentially dehumanizing agendas of Renaissance Humanism and the Enlightenment, two streaks of humanism which, Phillips shows, underlie colonization, imperialism and discrimination in general, while, paradoxically, promoting principles of justice and emancipation as well'. Ledent argues that 'All Phillip's characters are both insiders and outsiders who try, more or less successfully, to negotiate a compromise between their different selves. This matches Phillips' definition [in his 2001 collection of essays, A New World Order] of a truly multicultural society which, for him, is "composed of multicultural individuals; people who are able to synthesize different worlds in one body and to live comfortably with these different worlds"'.' Accordingly, Ledent ends with an illuminating consideration of Phillips' own focus on culture in his non-fictional writing and in his anthology of historical and contemporary writing by 'outsiders' in Britain, the 1997 Extravagant Strangers, in order to show how Phillips works towards a more inclusive notion of humanism and new possibilities for Britishness in his work. The focus on Caryl Phillip's writing in both Eckstein's and Ledent's contributions in this issue, is part of a burgeoning critical discourse on one of the most important Anglophone Caribbean writers to have emerged in the last twenty or so years. Eckstein's 'Dialogism in Caryl Phillips' Cambridge, or the Democratisation of Cultural Memory' is a scholarly re-evaluation of Phillips' 1991 novel Cambridge in the light of its often misunderstood 'intertextual dimension', that is, its close use of textual fragments from 18th and 19th century travelogues, histories and early black British writings. Eckstein opens with correspondence between Phillips and the late Paul Edwards, leading authority on slave narratives and modern editor of the (slave) narrative of Equiano Olaudah, itself one of Phillips's sources for his novel, in order to introduce the polarised critical debate on the function and effect of the novel's intertextuality. Eckstein stresses Phillips' own expressed intentions for the novel, his attempt 'to make something "new" out of something "old"' and his hope that in creating "two characters (and a supply cast) the memory of whom might linger in the minds of those who read this "fiction" it might even send them back to the original sources to find out more'. However, as Eckstein notes, to date the critical response to the novel has not done this. In a painstakingly researched and invaluable appendix to the article Eckstein therefore redresses this neglect by reproducing a large number of excerpts from the novel alongside their various sources. Using insights from narratogical and Bakhtinian theory, Eckstein argues that, rather than seeing Cambridge as a simplistic pastiche of its sources, we should read the novel as a more complex work which 'carefully and deliberately' mobilizes its fragmented source materials in order to 'set[…] two fictional characters, but also two entire discourses on slavery into dialogic relation. It is in this dialogue that the silences and ideological delusions on both sides begin to surface, and to eventually resonate in the re-negotiation of our cultural memories today.'Line Henriksson's 'Who is F***ing Helen: The Representation of Bodies and Voices in Derek Walcott's Omeros and Tony Harrison's V' uses British poet, Harrison's controversially received poetic meditation on 'the versuses in life': political, class, educational, generational and gender divisions in 1980s's Britain of Thatcher and the Miner's strike, as a foil for a reading of Walcott's epic poem. Henriksson focuses on the 'politics of representation in the two poems, namely the poet-narrators’ representation of the voice (Harrison) and bodies (Walcott) of the Other: a Leeds skinhead and the beautiful Helen of St. Lucia respectively'. Looking closely at the language politics and stylistic features of both poems, Henriksson shows how 'both poems eventually distance themselves from their own representation; in Harrison this self-critique includes an awareness of inevitable complicity, whereas the critique built into Omeros as an indictment of metaphor remains only apparent and does not involve the poem’s (problematic) description of Helen and her body'.In 'Shifting Identities and Locations in Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden (book): and A Small Place' Melanie Murray turns her critical gaze to Kincaid's non-fictional writing, writing which has generally received far less critical commentary than her novels and short stories with their more immediate concerns with identity politics and familial tensions in a gendered and postcolonial context. Murray's focal texts: the 1988 A Small Place, with its provocative take on the globalizing forces of the tourist industry and the realities of post-coloniality for 1980s Antigua and the 1999 My Garden (book): which recounts Kincaid's creation of a garden in Vermont, might appear at first glance to be quite dissimilar. However, Murray shows how 'both texts, in different ways, grapple with the problematic of a return to 'origins', whether personal or communal, in a postcolonial context whilst invoking and unravelling the myths of childhood and island life as paradisal'. She argues that if 'A Small Place disrupts the notion of an island isolated from a historical and cultural process, My Garden (book:) links the process of creating a garden to Kincaid's own historical perspective together with the history of the plants, seeds and histories of famous gardens'. A particular focus in Murray's article is the idea of the garden and gardens actual and symbolic, as well as the complex freight of meanings which the interrelated activities of gardening, botany and agriculture carry for Kincaid as an African-Caribbean writer. Murray shows how the notion of Paradise and a mythic return to origins, is expressed in Kincaid's writing terms of her childhood, the island space and, indeed the garden. Yet, as she shows, Kincaid's work simultaneously 'unravel [s] the[se] myths', acknowledging the impossibility of return. Neatly enough, Alison Struselis' 'Postcolonial Ghosts in the Caribbean: Lloyd Brown’s  (1996) deals with exactly the opposite: the ever-present possibility of return, but a return of a very different kind: the signs and permutations of haunting in a Caribbean context. She takes as her starting Avery Gordon's definition of a '"ghost"' as a ‘social figure’, one form by which something lost, or not visible, is made known' and one which prompts an affective response of  'transformative recognition'. In Struselis' focal text, Lloyd Brown's 1996 poetry collection Duppies, these 'social figures' represent 'a number of dispossessed, exiled and exploited peoples: slaves, Amerindians, the colonised, and the poor living in present day Jamaica under neo-colonial influences'. Struselis shows how the trope of haunting in Brown's work shape-shifts to include his childhood memories of supernatural entities specific to the Caribbean, the less embodied 'hauntings' of 'violent ancestral history' and of a 'colonial past continu[ing] to haunt present day, post-independence Jamaica', the ghost-like traces of a knowing allusiveness in certain poems, as well as a kind of spectral exile from the self in the poet's depiction of his revisiting and 're-membering' of the Jamaica of his past. Beyond this specific focus is the transformative use of hauntings and gothic motifs in Brown's collection, Struselis considers the wider 'question of cathartic return, the incorporation of the spectral and the role of Gothic' in a postcolonial context. Using insights on Gothic from David Punter and Glennis Byron, Struselis argues that 'Brown invokes these ghosts, his duppies, not to banish them, but as Byron and Punter suggest to write them back into history and make them visible in the present'. For Struselis, this constitutes a writing-back to the 'dominant discourse of British colonialism through what [Bill] Ashcroft describes as ‘interpolation’, using the “fractures and contradictions” of a text, or in this case, a style of poetry, working through the interstices of history, and language, rather than in direct opposition to it. Such writing back has a more profound effect than simply re-visioning history because it disrupts the dominant discourse by revealing the limitations of the discourse itself.'	Finally, in '"The Anansi Syndrome": A debate concerning Anansi's influence on Jamaican culture' Marshall discusses the role and future of Anansi, celebrated Jamaican folk hero of West African origin. She surveys recent educational and popular debates in Jamaica which suggest that the celebrated trickster, far from being regarded as symbolising positive aspects of Afro-Caribbean culture, epitomizes an anti-communal, amoral force, and a totally voided ethics which represent the darker side of the Jamaican national psyche. Marshall argues that the Anansi debate reflects 'the tensions between celebrating a cultural heritage and the demands for social conformity in a modern society'. One way of reading Anansi's possible demise is through the framework of globalisation and the marginalizing of the local in favour of imported global cultural capital. However, Marshall argues provocatively for Anansi as 'cultural survivor: 'Anansi has survived a cultural and historical metamorphosis and undergone his own form of globalisation. Why is there reason to suspect that Anansi cannot continue to adapt to the demands of a changing postcolonial society? Should we place Anansi in his historical context and celebrate him as a folk hero, a cultural survivor, or should he be purged from the pages of schoolbooks, the stage and the storyteller’s circle?'^1	   The list could be extended to include more writers of the Caribbean diaspora such as Audre Lorde, Jamaica Kincaid, Makeda Silvera and Dionne Brand. Indeed, Patricia Powell mentions all three figures as examples of this “outpouring of writings on homosexuality, especially [as] it pertains to the Caribbean” in the opening section of her review of Lawrence Scott’s Aelred’s Sin (Powell 1999: 82).

Editor's Comments to 'Special Issue of World Literature Written in English', edited by Sarah Lawson Welsh

https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/7508/1/editor%27s%20comments.doc

Editor's Comments to 'Special Issue of World Literature Written in English', edited by Sarah Lawson Welsh

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