Introduction
Anne Malena and Pascale De Souza
Although contemporary discourse typically assumes the possibility of a homogeneous Caribbean identity, both comparative studies and language-specific studies are starting to point to the existence of rifts and disjunctions within and among the Caribbean islands and regions of the continent. These rifts emerge in some theoretical and literary texts where differing, and sometimes conflicting, problematics of history, gender, race, and culture prevail. The geographical, historical, linguistic, and political diversity of the region has indeed produced numerous writers and critics whose views resist both nationalistic and academic constructs of Caribbean literatures and cultures. This special issue of The Journal of Caribbean Literatures focusses on some of the issues emerging out of this new discourse and aims at initiating a much needed debate on the role and responsibility of intellectuals vis à vis Caribbean realities.
The idea for The Caribbean That Isn't? took hold on a late summer Albertan afternoon, that is very far from the Caribbean, as the seed for a proposed 1996 MLA special session in Toronto. In bringing together scholars working in different languages and combining different perspectives, this session was a great success and a first attempt to question the common discourse apparently unifying the Caribbean region. Three of these original contributions (DeLoughrey, Fox, Martínez-San Miguel) have been included here in a revised and expanded form and Catherine DenTandt, who acted as a respondent at the MLA session, is providing a lead essay . A fourth contribution (Charles) will be included in a forthcoming issue which will counterbalance this one and be entitled The Caribbean That Is. Interestingly enough, Charles's MLA talk dealt with Haiti and, somewhat typically, resisted the theme given. The revised article, in putting a strong emphasis on the possible Caribbean links suggested by Haitian literature suggests that Haiti may be an important exception to the view we are presenting here. The other three articles become here part of a whole that may appear paradoxical since it is an attempt to bring together, under the guise of a common theme, papers that skillfully refute the very idea of commonality. This collection of essays however does not constitute a unified breach into the academic construct of the Caribbean but rather represents the state of tension and unrest that is felt by many Caribbean scholars both within and outside the Caribbean.
As we near the end of the century and of the millenium, a certain sense of urgency is making itself felt: what has happened to the revolutionary struggles of this era, to the promises of a better world, to the spreading of human rights? While some progress has been made--the end of Apartheid in South Africa, for example--many regions of the world remain economically and politically marginalized and oppressed. Puerto Rico has recently voted (December 1998) to maintain the ambiguous status of its relationship with the United States, Cuba is facing uncertainty after too long and too powerful a regime, Haiti continues to suffer as a pawn of globalization, independent islands are still struggling with abject poverty, and French islands find themselves ludicrously annexed to Europe. What have the intellectuals and the writers been able to do to alleviate these conditions? To what extent has Caribbean literature been co-opted by the North American and European Academes and stopped having any effect on Caribbean reality? In other words, is Caribbean poetics changing Caribbean politics? These questions are not addressed directly in the following pages but they inform the reading practice of the critics contributing to this issue. Their questioning of well-known texts and examination of new ones speak to the need to cast a critical look, given the political stasis of the Caribbean region, on accepted notions of fluidity, opacity, and contingency of Caribbean identity.
The articles selected for this issue argue for rethinking the Caribbean and Caribbean literature. By referring to and questioning the metaphoric formulations of Caribbean identity found in the seminal texts of C.L.R. James, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo, they propose that the notion of Caribbean unity be problematized along with cultural criticism and literary studies. For example, while Paul Gilroy appealed to the unifying force of the Atlantic as a locus of common history and pain, some contributions to this issue show (Szeman, DeLoughrey) that this theoretical construct breaks down in the literary text as the ocean becomes a vehicle for exile or a motive for displacement in the name of tourism. Gilroy's formulation and those of James, Glissant, and Benítez-Rojo, all stem from the need to participate in a collective healing process and to reassemble in loose and fluid images the fragments strewn about by colonial history. It is precisely these repeated appeals to a common colonial history that are being questioned again and again in the following pages, not only because there are major differences in the national histories of colonization but, more importantly, because the common bonds created through these appeals are formed within the inherited colonial structures and end up reinforcing divisions defined by race (Den Tandt, Szeman, DeLoughrey, Fox, Martínez-San Miguel, N'Zengou-Tayo), gender (Szeman, DeLoughrey, Bragard, Mehta, Chancy, Duffey), and class (Den Tandt, Szeman, DeLoughrey, Martínez-San Miguel).
The point is not to deny the liberating power that these metaphors have had on Caribbean consciousness but to problematize their wide and often uncritical acceptance and application. It is suggested, rather, that writers, in particular Ana Lydia Vega whose work is examined in several papers (Den Tandt, Martínez, Chancy, N-Zengou-Tayo), are concerned with something else: characters are not able to live up to the ideals proposed by these images and remain divided by language, race, class, and gender. In order to bridge the gap that seems to have widened between literary discourse and reality, a new kind of critical practice is called for. History needs to be re-examined, demographics taken into consideration, and socio-political contexts as well as other cultural practices analyzed. This means the adoption of a truly interdisciplinary approach, as DenTandt suggests, to literary and cultural studies.
It must also be acknowledged that this project contains a healthy dose of implicit self-criticism since it takes place on the North-American academic scene which is greatly responsible for producing a critical discourse about Caribbean culture too far removed from its political reality. This is of course complicated by the fact that Caribbean writers themselves are called upon to participate in this discourse and often do not have a choice if they are to maintain a readership. Rather than accentuating dividing lines between critics and writers or between geographical entities, it is our hope that this project will help in the wider recognition of the presence of the Caribbean in our midst and in a critical and well-informed appraisal of the consequences of that presence for our scholarly work.
The Caribbean that isn't opens with Den Tandt's essay which presents a provocative overview of the issues at hand with supporting evidence from Puerto Rico and Cuba. The articles that immediately follow can be taken collectively to begin illustrating the kind of approach proposed by Den Tandt: Szeman, by proposing a rereading of one of Lamming's novel, DeLoughrey by turning Gilroy's Black Atlantic on its head, Fox by addressing issues of race in Hispanic literature, and Martínez by including graffiti, music and family histories into her analysis of Dominican immigration to Puerto Rico. The next section (Rath, Bragard and Mehta) deals with the under represented reality of Indian culture in Trinidad and Guyana, while the closing essays discuss Haiti (Chancy, Duffey, N'Zengou-Tayo) from the perspective of history, gender, and representation. Although we have tried to be as comprehensive as possible, without giving in to the illusion of exhaustiveness, we do regret the absence of an article on the Dutch Caribbean in this issue--one will feature in The Caribbean that is. We hope that other scholars will be motivated to remedy this failing and produce more work from a similar perspective, thus furthering the debate and contributing to the knowledge and understanding of the rich and complex diversity of the Caribbean.
In "Caribbean 2000: Still here, still waiting", Cathy Den Tandt provides an insightful perspective on the challenges that confront the production of a Caribbean cultural and political discourse as we near a new century. She compares and contrasts the hopeful conclusions drawn by the Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James in "From ToussaintL'Ouverture to Fidel Castro" with the more sobering analysis given by the Cuban Abilio Esteves 46 years later. Though aware that the struggle for political and cultural identity in the Caribbean has consisted "of a series of uncoordinated periods of drift, punctuated by spurts, leaps and catastrophes"(296), James remains confident in his call to a collective forged from broken and battered histories. For Esteves, on the other hand, Cuban/Caribbean history is most accurately described as a process of waiting and hoping for things which never materialize, such as a revolution which will truly change his country's fate. Den Tandt argues that the Caribbean has no weapon, no discourse with which to address the blank space between James' and Esteves' essays. She underlines the current economical and political divisions in the Caribbean, from relative wealth to utter poverty, from attachment to a colonial power to independent nationhood and analyzes to what extent the Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons may have been right when he concluded that the Caribbean only existed as an entity for three groups: multinational corporations, Washington policy makers and intellectuals. In her essay, literature emerges as a primary agent in the project of cultural appropriation that effectively links Caribbean history, politics, and art. However, as stories such as "encancaranublado" by Ana Lydia Vega highlight, linguistic and historical incompatibilities remain and threaten to make impossible the emergence of a common discourse within the spheres of the literarycultural as well as the sociopolitical. Den Tandt concludes by advocating the formulation of a theoretical discourse by cultural critics that will take into account the practices of citizens, in the face of consumerism and globalization, and be informed by the work of social scientists.
In "Literature, federation, and the intellectual's nation: rereading The Emigrants", Imre Szeman argues that George Lamming's novel is the most explicit attempt to create an intellectual's nation. This panCaribbean space may however replicate the ontological violence of colonialism in unexpected ways. Szeman links the waiting period during the voyage to England in the novel to the phenomenological weight of the Caribbean. The shift in conversations aboard the ship, from extolling the virtues of each island to searching for commonality, spurs him to conclude that the notion of a Caribbean identity arises only when West Indians are away from home. Eventually, however, the nation created in The Emigrants remains an intellectual's nation, which elides important differences such as class, race, and gender.
The following essays in this special edition all explore these class, race, and gender rifts and disjunctions within the Caribbean region. Elizabeth DeLoughrey offers a gendered perspective on "The fragmented archipelago", showing that, contrary to Paul Gilroy's theory of cultural hybridity in the Black Atlantic, several women writers from the English, Spanish, and Frenchspeaking Caribbean islands depict the Atlantic Ocean as a consistent force of cultural separation and displacement. In their novels, there is no fluidity between the two sides, nor between Caribbean nations as a reversed Middle Passage now pulls Caribbean migrants away from home, as ties are sought out along linguistic lines rather than according to proximity, as tourism effectively cuts off local populations from the sea reserved to beachfront hotel guests. Only death provides a bridge between the communities of the Caribbean Sea as wouldbe immigrants find their watery grave in this new liquid commodity.
