Beyond Windrush

Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature

J. Dillon Brown, Leah Reade Rosenberg

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628464764
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This edited collection challenges a long sacrosanct paradigm. Since the establishment of Caribbean literary studies, scholars have exalted an elite cohort of émigré novelists based in postwar London, a group often referred to as "the Windrush writers" in tribute to the SS Empire Windrush, whose 1948 voyage from Jamaica inaugurated large-scale Caribbean migration to London. In critical accounts this group is typically reduced to the canonical troika of V. S. Naipaul, George Lamming, and Sam Selvon, effectively treating these three authors as the tradition's founding fathers. These "founders" have been properly celebrated for producing a complex, anticolonial, nationalist literature. However, their canonization has obscured the great diversity of postwar Caribbean writers, producing an enduring but narrow definition of West Indian literature. Beyond Windrush stands out as the first book to reexamine and redefine the writing of this crucial era. Its fourteen original essays make clear that in the 1950s there was already a wide spectrum of West Indian men and women—Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and white-creole—who were writing, publishing, and even painting. Many lived in the Caribbean and North America, rather than London. Moreover, these writers addressed subjects overlooked in the more conventionally conceived canon, including topics such as queer sexuality and the environment. This collection offers new readings of canonical authors (Lamming, Roger Mais, and Andrew Salkey); hitherto marginalized authors (Ismith Khan, Elma Napier, and John Hearne); and commonly ignored genres (memoir, short stories, and journalism).

Part One

Negotiating National Belonging

Indianness and Nationalism in the Windrush Era

LISA OUTAR

In looking back at the Windrush era and considering its significance for the trajectories that Caribbean discourses of nationalism and cultural identity have taken, we are tossed back into the excitement and complexity of the anticolonial movement, the trenchant and poignant idea of the empire coming home to roost, optimism about the possibilities of nationalism, and a sense of the tricky road to new forms of political and cultural identity shaped via vexed concepts of home/away, insider/outsider, citizen/migrant. To assess the Windrush era through the lens of little-known Caribbean Indian voices who were addressing questions of belonging and the limits of prevailing narratives of political and social identity at the time is both to foreground a gap in our thinking about that era and to uncover some of the anxieties of the period that were often projected onto this group of relatively recent migrants. Indians—who were in the process of defining their place both within Caribbean societies and within larger frameworks of British and Indian colonial identity—as well as the region’s non-Indians, were trying to figure out what role Indianness should play in the new national formations being imagined. The pre– and post–World War II period was a particularly intriguing time for Caribbean Indians, coinciding as it did with the hundredth anniversary of the Indian presence in the region and the movement of Indian nationalism on the subcontinent, which was nearing its key goal of independence, achieved in 1947. It was thus a moment of reflection about what had been achieved in the time since the arrival of Indians, what desires were for the time ahead, and what sorts of relationships with the political and cultural influences of the subcontinent should be pursued.

As we know, it is not that Caribbean Indian voices are absent in our thinking about this period. In fact, V. S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon are celebrated as part of that breakthrough generation who brought Caribbean literature into a fertile new international era. However, they are rarely examined in terms of their relationships to other forms of Caribbean Indian writing at the time, and the representation of Indianness in the work of the rest of the Windrush writers is almost never examined. While novels like George Lamming’s 1958 Of Age and Innocence express deep fears of what Indian instinctive behavior might mean for the future of nationalism in the region, a review of Indian journals and literary publications of the era suggests that the presumption of unified action or thinking on the part of this community was erroneous indeed. In Finding a Place: Indo-Trinidadian Literature, Kris Rampersad tracks what was going on with Indian writing from the 1850s to the 1950s in Trinidad and suggests that there was an active debate within the Indian community that was being ignored by dominant discourses of nationalism at the time. She argues that “while to others they appeared to be united, internal divisions were strong and festering, and widened as the stakes in the society became higher, to climax into a clear rift on the eve of independence.”¹ In this chapter, I select George Lamming and Edgar Mittelholzer as representatives of two particular strands of Windrush-era thinking about nationalism and examine them as writers who were in fact actively trying to imagine spaces for Indians within new national collectives. However, I contend that despite these authors’ aspirational rhetoric of common creole identity, they ended up portraying Indo-Caribbeans as a potential threat to Caribbean nationalism.

Further, I argue that their depictions seriously misrepresented the commitment to Caribbean nationalism that we see in the work of Indo-Caribbean writers and intellectuals of the period. The work of two journals in particular, the Observer and the Spectator, while evidencing key disagreements about choices for Indians in the region, was united in its complex understanding of nationalism’s relationship to ethnic memory and cultural exploration: both journals rejected the notion that the retention of Indian cultural identity meant a betrayal of nationalist ideals. I argue that the Observer and the Spectator end up invoking what Arjun Appadurai has called “trojan nationalisms.” Containing as they did “transnational, subnational links and, more generally, nonnational identities and aspirations,” the conceptions of citizenship that Indo-Caribbeans demarcated for themselves offered key challenges to emerging norms of nationalist rhetoric that emphasized affective loyalty to only the Caribbean as homeland.² Shaped within a context of Indian cultural identity and an awareness of the subcontinent’s own anticolonial struggle and emergence into independence, these unique expressions of Caribbean nationalism imagined new possibilities of alliances that encompassed the subcontinent, the Caribbean, and Britain.

While the plural society model has long been discarded in our considerations of how Caribbean cultural and political formations have taken shape, it is useful to revisit it for what it has to say about Indians in this era, especially since it coincided with popular thinking of the time. In 1965 M. G. Smith tried to theorize why, in the British Caribbean, “nationalism has been slow to develop, and separatism is as pronounced within the colonies as between them.”³ Smith chalked the situation up to the fact that most of these societies were multiracial, laying particular blame at the feet of Indo-Caribbeans: “Little research has yet been done on these substantial East Indian populations, but it is known that Hindustani is spoken among them, and that the majority of these East Indians remain loyal to Indian culture and Indian nationalism. These loyalties are related to the slow growth of a Caribbean national sentiment.”⁴ For Smith, the retention of Indian languages and a continued sense of themselves as Indian citizens are characteristics that serve to place this group outside any sense of Caribbean affiliation. Though Smith’s rhetoric thus sounds initially contradictory to George Lamming’s in The Pleasures of Exile, in which Lamming praises Selvon’s peasant sensibility (presumably derived from his Indianness) as key for the formation of an anticolonial nationalism, their common ground, as revealed in Of Age and Innocence, is the sense of Indo-Caribbean people as somehow being too authentically Indian to be loyal Caribbean subjects.

Lamming’s novel, while committed to the vision of a multiethnic Caribbean, reveals a profound, stereotypical fear of Indian clannishness, or, to use Édouard Glissant’s term, the group’s propensity for “filiation.”⁵ In large part, the figure of the Indian emerges in Of Age and Innocence as the foil against which the celebrated nationalist body is defined. The novel reveals the author’s own conflicted and fearful views of Caribbean shortcomings more so than it does a confident vision of the possibilities of a postcolonial Caribbean. In his consideration of how a multiracial society, in its struggle toward independence, negotiates difference, Lamming depicts the spectacular failure of a promising political alliance due to the action of an Indian character, Baboo, who assassinates the popular black leader, Shephard, thinking he is clearing the way for someone more like himself to gain power. As he plaintively relates to Singh, the Indo-Trinidadian politician to whom his murderous act was devoted, it “was only for you I do it . . . from infancy I dream to see someone like myself, some Indian with your achievement rule San Cristobal.”⁶ Through one of its climactic moments, the novel thus signals a fear that the Indo-Caribbean is incapable of the selflessness necessary to sustain the sort of coalition effort it would take to lead the Caribbean to freedom from colonial rule. In this fictional world, the authenticity of one’s claim of belonging to the nation is ranked according to pain and sacrifice, and the Indian is shown to be incapable of sacrifice in service of the nation. Of Age and Innocence thus plays into the persistent idea that those descended from slavery suffered most in the Caribbean’s history and so were most deserving of inheriting the reins of power from colonial authorities.

In the depiction of Baboo as narcissistic (seeking to have a version of himself in power), untrustworthy, and primarily motivated by greed, we see that Lamming’s disappointment in the shortcomings of Caribbean nationalist movements ends up fitting easily into available stereotypes of the Indo-Caribbean as clannish and continually seduced by the lure of money at the expense of other human and moral connections. Baboo and the other silently hovering Indians he presumably speaks for are set up as immature citizens who need to be taught how to be a part of a multiethnic collective; they are rendered in Lamming’s novel as people for whom the abstract ideals of nationalism—loyalty outside the bonds of blood kinship—did not come naturally. In his later comments on the writing of the novel, we find Lamming supporting this idea of citizenship that has to be cultivated and taught. Framing Of Age and Innocence as his reflections on the possibilities for cooperation across ethnic lines in Guyana in the 1950s, Lamming argues that human solidarity “requires a kind of educational work, a kind of indoctrination, a reciprocal sharing of cultural histories, which has never been at the center of our political agendas in the Caribbean.”⁷ However, because the character who betrays the solidarity movement is an Indian who desires an Indian leader, the novel suggests that it is Indians especially who must be taught these reciprocal values. Without these values—those found lacking most of all in the Indian characters—Lamming implies that San Cristobal may not be competent for self-rule.⁸

Like Lamming, Mittelholzer was committed to the depiction of a multiethnic Caribbean that included Indians, yet his 1950 A Morning at the Office also projects onto Indians deep anxieties about Caribbean claims of measuring up to its colonizers and, consequently, about the region’s readiness for self-rule. This novel is particularly important for assessing Mittelholzer’s vision of ethnicity and national belonging because it presents the multiethnic staff in a corporate office as a microcosm of Trinidadian society and thus illustrates Trinidad’s figurative cohesiveness as a nation and its readiness to rule. In a letter to the Guyanese poet A. J. Seymour, Mittelholzer writes: “There is much need in England and America of a true representation of the coloured middle-class element in British Guiana and the West Indies. We’ve been looked upon too long as ‘natives’ and for once and all I want to have the truth out. I want the English and the Americans to realize that there are coloured natives out here who can be just as educated and refined as they can be.”⁹ What I note in Mittelholzer’s comments here and in A Morning at the Office in general are the intertwined racial and class connotations of this creative undertaking. If it is the Caribbean middle class who can hold their own against the English and Americans, then there ensues a particular kind of disavowal of the non-middle-class member of Caribbean society that falls more heavily on some racialized bodies than others. My argument here is that in A Morning at the Office, the figure of the Indian comes to represent the peasant body: that which needs to be rejected by the modern state and citizen. Importantly, Mittelholzer thus disagreed with one popular nationalist trend in efforts to counter charges of cultural inferiority—the celebration of the idea of the authentic peasant. In fact, Mittelholzer’s 1950 novel, while accepting of Indians as an incontrovertible part of a multiethnic landscape, shows them most prominently as a shameful reminder of a peasant past.

Scrambling at the bottom of the racial and class hierarchy that Mittelholzer sets up in the novel is the Indian Jagabir. He is a profoundly disturbing presence to the other characters, who are shown as more capable of social mobility, albeit with limitations based on skin color and class origin. While Jagabir’s mocking of the office boy’s crush, combined with his endless snooping, seems cause enough for him to be an object of dislike, the intensity of feeling expressed toward him in the text demands our closer attention to this character. At various points people in the office describe ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Looking Beyond Windrush
• Part One: Negotiating National Belonging
• Part Two: Genre and Gender
• Part Three: The Politics of Literary Production and Reception
• Part Four: Alternate Geographies
• Contributors
• Index