INTRODUCTION
Pascale De Souza and Anne Malena
Since we completed work on the Caribbean that isn't?, the sense of urgency we felt regarding the revolutionary struggles of this era, the promises of a better world, the spreading of human rights has become more acute. As former Soviet republics head for civil wars, Kosovo for independence, Montenegro for increased autonomy and Timor for a long-awaited release from the Indonesian grip, it seems that current trends point to increased divisions along rifts and disjunctions. In this respect, the Caribbean appears as a contradicting example, insofar as Puerto Rico voted in 1998 to maintain its relationship with the United States while the French Antilles have now become part of the European Union. The political diversity of the region, ranging from full nationhood to full integration within a colonizer's system is echoed by economic disparities, from the poorest nation of the Western hemisphere to the relative wealth offered by colonizer's subsidies. As contributors to The Caribbean that isn't? demonstrated, cultural (,racial,) and gender rifts further contribute to the complexities of the region. Is it indeed that Frank Moya Pons was right when he suggested that the Caribbean only existed as an entity for multinational corporations, Washington policy makers and intellectuals? This is one of the issues we hope to further explore here.
The idea for The Caribbean that is? took shape on a winter morning in Ontario. Attending an 8.30 a.m. MLA session entitled The Caribbean that isn't?, I (Pascale De Souza) was both impressed by some of the arguments put forth in the papers presented and concerned to see a region I had come to experience as a whole represented as torn apart. Having read about the possibility of a homogeneous Caribbean identity, learnt about federation ventures and visited relatives from St Lucia to Jamaica, Trinidad to Curacao, not to mention the outer diaspora, I had never doubted the existence of a Caribbean that is. And yet, arguments to the contrary seemed compelling in the papers presented. As Anne Malena and I discussed our views of the Caribbean after the session, we engaged in a debate we felt would be worth exploring more at length.
The debate initiated in the last issue of the Journal of Caribbean Literatures entitled The Caribbean that isn't? sought to explore in part the role and responsibility of intellectuals vis à vis Caribbean realities. Exchange between intellectuals would be a needed first step to any commitment to alleviating some of the political, economic, social or literary woes which affect the region. The authors explored in The Caribbean that is? point to the existence of such exchange, despite colonially induced barriers. The analysis offered also leads into two directions. On the one hand, authors writing in different languages explore themes -- naming, the sea, the maroon, the spiderweb -- along similar lines and deconstruct colonial texts. On the other, they borrow from each other's texts to celebrate the Caribbean that is.
Thus, the erasure of the name infuses both Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant's writings as they seek to explore a past buried in the sands of history (Loichot). Likewise, the sea emerges as a defining, if at times conflicting, principle in Walcott*s, St John Perse' s and Glissant's writings (Bonnet). The following papers focus on exploring Caribbean her story through the unearthing of memories in novels by Jamaica Kincaid, Edwige Danticat and Gisèle Pineau (Duff) and the rereading of Cesaire's maroon in Michelle Cliff (Krus). The arach(n)ean imagery which infuses both the novels by Paule Marshall and Simone Schwarz-Bart selected for study in the next contribution (Gyssels) reveals a rhyzomatic system which reaches back to Africa and underlines commonalities within the (black) diasporic experience. As Fumagalli shows, Jean Rhys and Maryse Conde embark on a similar journey for a shared spiritual and historical legacy, albeit via different means, as they seek to offer Caribbean readings of canonical English texts by the Brontes.
On the other hand, Caribbean authors read and quote one another. Martinus Aron thus takes his cue from Walcott's celebration of the region in The Ultimate Freedom (Hambuch) while Chamoiseau pays homage to Césaire in some of his work (Altes). Like characters in Crossing the Mangrove by Maryse Condé, authors cannot avoid interacting with one another as they gather around the absent but pervasive figure of Caribbean identity. Their dialogue is not a wake but rather heralds multi-faceted perspectives on a region where creolization processes are still at play, where economic disparities yet all pit these African-Caribbean-Pacific countries in a struggle to maintain trade privileges, where political issues cannot impair intellectual exchange nor linguistic barriers prevent authors from reading one another. Haiti emerged as a source of rift and disjunction in three of the papers included in The Caribbean that isn't?. Yet, its unique history and current predicament do not set it apart from the exploration of Caribbean continuities (Charles). As Maria Christina Fumagalli underlines in her contribution, the creation of the new Faber Series on the Caribbean bodes well for the future of intellectual exchange within the region as its aim is to "publish the finest work produced in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora in the four major languages of the region" (Condé, Windward Heights, back cover). In this respect, we were delighted to be able to include in this special issue articles dealing with Caribbean authors who have published in English, French, Spanish, Dutch but must deplore the absence of creole.
The Caribbean that is? : the inclusion of the question mark in the title of this special edition points in itself to some of the conclusions we did not reach at the end of this dual project. Indeed, as similarities emerged and Caribbean echoes could be found in the works studied, other issues arose which pointed to enduring rifts and disjunctions. Borrowing from another author could lead to praising or arguing against the images, theories, discourses emerging from other islands, or one's own. Thus, Arion chooses to reject Naipaul's view of the Caribbean in his novel (Hambuch) while Cliff refutes Césaire's vision of the maroon woman in No Telephone to Heaven (Krus). As to Altes's paper, it points both to the Césairian legacy in Chamoiseau and the enduring presence of metropolitan authors who paradoxically compose the sentimenthèque of the Martinican proponent of a unifying creolite. In this respect, the Caribbean appears in the articles selected as no more united than other regions of the world which have faced varied colonization patterns (The Pacific or the Indian Ocean come to mind) but less fragmented than a reading of the Caribbean that isn't? may suggest. As we enter a new millenium, the question remains as to what the future will bring for the Caribbean people in their diasporic diversity. The ability to transcend colonially induced disjunctions which surfaces in the essays included here may bode well as they embark on this crossing of a new mangrove of virtualities. On the other hand, readers may also be led here to reflect on their own perceptions of the region, as a fragmented archipelago rather than a CARICOM of voices.
The articles selected for this issue all explore a sense of unity within diversity from varying perspectives. The order in which they are organized alternatively shifts the focus from a broad angle to more narrowly defined questions, thus illustrating the many ways a common Caribbean identity can be construed and reinforcing the intertextuality that first motivated these contributions. First, in "Renaming the Name: Glissant and Walcott's Reconstruction of the Caribbean Self," Valérie Loichot undertakes to show how both Edouard Glissant and Derek Walcott, through the act of renaming, emphasize the commonalities in the diverging histories of their respective islands, Martinique and St. Lucia. Loichot first concentrates on the illegitimacy of names imposed on the Caribbean by the colonizers to then demonstrate how Glissant and Walcott rename without resorting to the same arbitrariness but by recovering, as Glissant does, names with lost European, African, Caribbean, or Asian origins stranded in the Caribbean and buried under the sands of time or, in Walcott's strategy, by exploiting the intertwining of languages. Through this process of reappropriation Glissant and Walcott mirror each other in their common deconstruction of imposed colonial names and reconstruction of Caribbean identity.
The following essay deals with another mirroring device in Caribbean literature, the poetics of the sea which constitutes a locus of exchange for diverse cultural identities. In "Maritime poetics: the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean seas in the work of Saint-John Perse, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott", Véronique Bonnet examines how these maritime spaces inform identity constructs in the works of these authors. For both Glissant and Walcott, for example, the Atlantic of the Middle Passage represents the "amnesia that poetic anamnesis is seeking to restore". The ocean is in turn contrasted with representations of the Caribbean Sea and the Mediterranean thr ough the creation of personal myths that reveal the poets' similar and diverging standpoints on identity.
The next four contributions shift the focus to female writers and deal with memory, the female voice, the weaving of identity, and rewriting. In "Looking Back to Move Forward: The Counterpoetics of Memory in Contemporary Caribbean Fiction", Christine Duff examines the importance of personal history in the formation of collective identity. By exploring the role of memory in the writings of Gisèle Pineau, Edwige Danticat and Jamaica Kincaid, she shows how trauma can be overcome through recollection and the creation of personal narratives. Memory thus becomes a liberating force in the counterpoetics of these writers and the source of a collective resistance against the destructive forces wrought upon the Caribbean such as slavery, exile, and estrangement.
