The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature

Michael A. Bucknor, Alison Donnell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136821738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature offers a comprehensive, critically engaging overview of this increasingly significant body of work.

The volume is divided into six sections that consider:

• 
  
  

• the foremost figures of the Anglophone Caribbean literary tradition and a history of literary critical debate

• 
  
  

• textual turning points, identifying key moments in both literary and critical history and bringing lesser known works into context

• 
  
  

• fresh perspectives on enduring and contentious critical issues including the canon, nation, race, gender, popular culture and migration

• 
  
  

• new directions for literary criticism and theory, such as eco-criticism, psychoanalysis and queer studies

• 
  
  

• the material dissemination of Anglophone Caribbean literature and generic interfaces with film and visual art

This volume is an essential text that brings together sixty-nine entries from scholars across three generations of Caribbean literary studies, ranging from foundational critical voices to emergent scholars in the field.

The volume's reach of subject and clarity of writing provide an excellent resource and springboard to further research for those working in literature and cultural studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies as well as Caribbean studies, history and geography.

Part I CARIBBEAN POETICS

DOI: 10.4324/9780203830352-1

1 DIONNE BRAND

A Poetics of Diasporic Domestic Radicalism

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

DOI: 10.4324/9780203830352-2

A diasporic Toronto-based Trinidadian writer, filmmaker and educator whose literary contributions span from revolutionary Grenada, to domestic work in Canada and the war on terror, Dionne Brand’s work is far from static. However, a poetics of stillness in Brand’s work offers a crucial intervention into the narrative of exile and mobility that characterizes much of twentieth-century Caribbean poetry. In ‘Ethno or Socio Poetics’, Sylvia Wynter defines the poetic as the practice through which artists recreate the world, breaking out of a capitalist relationship and producing a human relationship by describing a possible and as yet indescribable relationship (1976: 87). In this sense, all of Dionne Brand’s work, across genres, is poetic.

I call the poetic relation in Brand’s creative and documentary work diasporic domestic radicalism. Brand’s work is transnational. She is an Afro-Trinidadian in pursuit of ‘home’, writing about diverse immigrant communities in Toronto in her fiction, connecting to the Middle East in her analysis of the war on terror, and theorizing the transatlantic slave route. However, Brand’s accountability to domestic workers, her depictions of domestic violence and economically confined experiences of women, her elaborations of the details of domestic space and the interiority of relationships between women, makes her work intensely domestic.

The poetics of domestic diasporicity in Brand’s body of work critiques the oppositional relationship between the domestic and the diasporic in much of Caribbean poetry, narrative and theory (see Gumbs 2009). By linking these two seemingly disparate contexts and reminding us of the role of Caribbean women in the literal and ideological domestic work of households and nations in the global north and the Caribbean region, Brand practices poetry in Wynter’s sense. She reveals a silenced relationship and makes a transformed relationship possible. This gendered stillness is an ethical inhabitation of the economic and social violence mediated by space in the context of global capitalism.

Stillness, contradicting the modernist understanding of movement as progress, places the displacement of marginalized people from the Caribbean and elsewhere in the context of the gendered labour of reproducing a violent status quo. Not only does Brand’s subject matter offer a gendered critique of labour and violence, but her poetic strategies disrupt the relationship between discourse and progress, offering a much needed pause designed to transform the normalized economic violence of neo-colonialism. Caribbean poetics, influenced by colonial ideologies and narratives of migration, is a poetics of space. The spatial analysis of Brand’s work charts the generation and implications of ‘another place’ through her use of stillness as a poetic device.

Dionne Brand’s poetry answers Wynter’s poetic imperative, producing a language within which to describe the paradoxical situation of compelled mobility and the social reproduction of bondage across time. Even though transformation and transnational connections are the context for her work, stillness and confinement are consistent themes of Brand’s poetry. Brand’s poetry for adults and children has all been published since she moved to Toronto as a young woman, and therefore necessarily deals with the complexity of black diasporic and immigrant experience. ’Fore Day Morning inserts a Caribbean vision and language practice into a Canadian poetry scene, Earth Magic turns to fantasy to offer children a connection to land and place made difficult by alienation and migration, and Primitive Offensive directly engages the status of the other within the Western cultural landscape.

The structure of Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, divided into sections that connect language practice, to sieges and military occupations, seeks to document the unspeakable violence of neocolonialism, making Brand’s intervention into the narrative of transnational economic oppression even more visible on the level of form. In ‘Antiphone/Antipoetry’, Brand explains how difficult it is to ‘describe shit in pretty words’. In ‘October 19th, 1983’, which documents the day of execution of many of her fellow participants in the Grenadian revolution, she deals with the ethical problem of even recording the cruel reality. Brand uses the repeated phrase ‘is dead’ behind the names of her slain comrades and their mission, ‘dream is dead’, and then seeks to blot out her own account, claiming ‘i deny this poem’. Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal, in Defense of Claudia, a formal departure from most of Brand’s poetry, connects the North American military presence in the Caribbean to the economically compelled Caribbean presence in colder climates, using the discipline and brevity of the epigram to demonstrate the modern forms of confinement that characterize the incarceration of both the body and the imagination within a Western economic frame. At the same time, she critiques the sexual politics of Ernesto Cardenal’s epigrams to Claudia, a lover he disciplined through poetry after she betrayed him.

Brand gained more sustained recognition for her later collections – No Language Is Neutral and Land to Light On – which both engage the problem of language and freedom within the poetic dilemma of describing a Caribbean landscape, while resisting the gendered and nationalist tropes that have been used, by colonists and Caribbean writers in exile to do so. In an interview with Pauline Bustling, Brand explains:

I think after writing No Language I realized that home, that whole thing that makes us feel warm and possible or whatever, it’s really not something that any of us have experienced. That home is somewhere. If we want we could make it. But it’s not something that we’ve had … I was suggesting that we recognize the ways we can be seduced or tricked into hanging onto old patterns.

(Bustling 2007: 1030)

No Language is Neutral makes it clear from its title that the question of the role of language in politics is at stake. The second poem in the collection, ‘return’, invokes Aimé Césaire’s classic ‘Notebook of a Return to my Native Land’ to introduce us to the landscape in the view of a returning emigrant. Using the word ‘still’ 12 times in the 24 lines of the first movement of this poem, Brand makes ‘still’ an adverb, verb and adjective all at once, ending the first part of the poem_

watery, ancient, still the hard brittle, distinct smell of slavery

(7)

Slavery, something we wish could be stilled, stalled, stopped from over-running our present, is still here in the landscape of the Caribbean that is movingly stagnant in this poem. Later in the collection, ‘return II’ elaborates the warning. Relating a story about a piece of land that juts into the sea, and looks like it is Venezuela while really being just an oddly shaped point that is still part of Trinidad, this poem depicts the unfulfilled intergenerational desire for escape:

every woman must have whispered

in her child’s ear, away! far from here!

(12)

However, not only is it difficult for mothers to provide literal escape from the context of economic colonialism for their children, the historic impact and renewal of slavery through the lived neocolonialism of the people, proves the trick of the spatial seduction of the ocean, the myth that the tide brings something new. Again, Brand ends this part of the poem with slavery, haunting the present with a warning:

That is not footsteps, girl, is duenne!

is not shell, is shackle!

(12)

In contrast to the first part of ‘return’ and to most of the poems in the collection, which have minimal punctuation, this poem uses commas and exclamation points to frame the haunting voices of whispering mother, spirits, ghosts and a seductive narrative that undoes itself. The idea of an ‘elsewhere’ becomes a spatial myth just as she reproduces the temporality of slavery in the first part of the poem. And because the speakers, dreamers and audience of these queer and impossible desires for movement through time and space are women and girls, the gendered arrangement of global and local economics comes into play.

When Brand opens the complicated love song of her return to Trinidad ‘this is you girl’, we must think about what it means for land to be made feminine and intimate in the language of girl within the queer context of a woman’s desire for a girl, a lost girl’s desire for herself. Feminizing the Caribbean homescape has been a familiar trope within a colonial and patriarchal framework, depicting the Caribbean island as a woman’s body to be penetrated by a white colonial power, or reclaimed by male nationalists. Brand’s use of a similar trope, the island as the beloved, allows her to engage and queer the narrative by examining the actual plight of a feminine Caribbean relationship to land and leaving.

Land to Light On continues this quest for lost women, a lost mother, lover, aunts, grandmothers in the landscape of gendered oppression. The title section of the collection makes this homelessness upon homecoming explicit:

… I don’t want no fucking country,

here or there and all the way back, I don’t like it, none of it,

easy as that. I’m giving up on land to light on, and why not,

I can’t perfect my own shadow, my violent sorrow, my individual wrists.

(48)

Here Brand brings the question of land and belonging back to the ‘individual wrists’, the body of a woman. Brand’s two most recent works of poetry have touched more explicitly on the issues of space and time in modernity through the police and military industrial complexes as experienced within feminized and racialized embodiment. thirsty centres around the experiences of three women in a household with an abusive Afro-Caribbean son/husband/father who is killed by the police at the corner of Yonge and Bloor during the middle of a ‘domestic dispute’. The police are absolved of any fault in his murder. thirsty makes the point that domestic violence and the violence of the police protecting the domestic scene from ‘impossible citizens/repositories of the city’s panic’ are systemically linked, and thus a patriarchal framework is not a viable ethical position (40). The refraction of the syllables (impossible/repositories and citizens/city’s panic) creates an intensity of reflection that causes pressure and tension, the meeting points between the words in this poem to break each other apart. Meanwhile the poet/narrator explains that she has to keep moving, ‘be on your toes or else you’ll drown … don’t dwell too long, don’t stand still here’ (22). The progressive shattering and falling apart in movements, stanza breaks, line structure content and diction in this poem destabilizes the ideas of home that make up domestic and national spaces like No Language and Land to Light On before it.

Inventory, the most recent of Brand’s poetry collections, takes on this issue through the mourning body of the hyper-alienated North American witness to the violence of the war on terror. As the narrator of thirsty speaks to us from inside an apartment where she reads newspaper coverage of police brutality and domestic violence, the narrator of Inventory speaks to us from in front of a television where she counts the death toll in the war on terror obsessively. Brand uses the intense impact of her words to demonstrate the connection between the ideological violence of the mass media and the actual deaths that the dehumanizing messages cause:

some words can make you weep

when they’re uttered, the light rap of their

destination, their thud as if on peace, as if on cloth

on air, they break all places intended and known

(99)

In each case, Brand employs language to destabilize the structure of normalized intersecting narratives of nation, patriarchy, neocolonialism and violence; by pushing words into a new relationship with each other, she implies a transformed ethical relationship in the subjectivity of her readers.

Brand’s fiction has an even wider readership than her poetry and her intervention into the narrative form of fiction with the poetic sensibility of intimate languagebreaks once again transforms the meanings of home and movement. In San Souci, Brand’s collection of short stories, a diverse set of women navigate Canadian and Caribbean settings, confronting the economic limitations of both spaces while also dealing with the gendered implications of abortion, sex work and romantic relationships. Brand’s diligence in transforming the structure and focus of her fiction to truly inhabit the contradictions of the situations she depicts requires her to shift the possibilities of understanding and communication available in narrative form. Her first novel In Another Place Not Here, graced by a character who refuses to remember the names for everyday items in the context of slavery and colonialism, shifting narrative voices with their own different relationships to colonizing English, dream sequences and a lyrical ambiguity that can only be described as poetic, creates a narrative that reveals and breaks out of the boundaries of national and domestic confinement. The characters navigate the confinement of manual labour and curfews under military rule. Like the movements of Brand’s later poetry collections, the main characters themselves finally break apart into a freedom that is unlivable and almost illegible, revealing the con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Biography
• Preface
• Introductions
• PART I Caribbean Poetics
• PART II Critical Generations
• PART III Textual Turning Points
• PART IV Literary Genres and Critical Approaches
• PART V Caribbean Literature and …
• PART VI Dissemination and Material Textuality
• Index