Introduction (Continued)
In "Writing across the Caribbean: Musings on race and negritude", Patricia Fox explores racebased dynamics in Cumboto by the Venezuelan Ramón Díaz Sánchez, Biografía de un cimarrón by the Cuban Esteban Montejo, Canal Zone by the Panamean Demetrio AguileraMalta and Juyungo by the Ecuadorian Adlaberto Ortiz. She focuses on the Jamesian "uncoordinated periods of drift, punctuated by spurts, leaps and catastrophes"(296) quoted by Den Tandt and reveals how racial disjunctions emerge as powerful social dividers in these novels. Her analysis of the negritud movement however leads her to conclude that the degraded and fragmented African legacy holds together the present day practices and historical experiences of Caribbean peoples. Her argumentation and selection of novels paradoxically underline a unifying discourse on racial disjunctions which pertains not only to the Caribbean islandterritories but unites these to isthmus and Latin American countries.
In "A Caribbean confederation? Cultural representations of Cuban and Dominican Migrations to Puerto Rico and the US", Yolanda MartínezSan Miguel analyzes how immigrant populations become ethnic minorities and emerge as a source of difference that must be incorporated into what is supposedly defined as the national homogeneity. Her study of social commentary such as ethnic jokes and graffiti, of the Cuban Families' Yearbook, of short stories by Ana Lydia Vega and Magali García Ramis and José Luis Ramos Escobar's play Indocumentados: el otro merengue reveal how the immigrant subjectivity has become a crucial source of anxiety within Latin American society. MartínezSan Miguel also develops an interesting argumentation on the emergence of a Dominican musical discourse which, on the one hand, enables Dominicans to achieve open and public participation in PuertoRican culture, on the other hand, illustrates the racial, sexual, intellectual, and moral limits of contemporary Puerto Rican society through its portrayal of Dominicans as occupying the limits of civilization. She concludes her analysis on the role of globalization as it spurs these revalorizations of local discourse and on the problematics of redefining Caribbean (migrant) identities without essentializing a specific "national territory".
The essay by Sura Rath, "Two Spheres of Darkness: V.S. Naipaul and the West Indian Diaspora,"speaks to a different kind of disjunction, that of the Caribbean writer who writes in exile. V.S. Naipaul is well-known for his ambivalent relationship with Caribbean society in general and with the Trinidad of his childhood in particular. The early writer paints a harsh portrait of a stagnant society with no future while the more mature writer attempts to come to terms with the cultural anomie that he felt growing up in the Caribbean by reaching back even further to the remote culture of India. As a result, Rath points out, Naipaul recasts history and expresses a hybrid consciousness when writing about the two spheres of darkness that the Caribbean and India invoke for him.
West Indians of Indian origin are also the subject of Veronique Braggard's and Brinda Mehta's essays as they focus on what they perceive as the racialized marginalization of an already disenpowered social categorization. In "Coolie woman writing politics : Janice Shinebourne's creative historiography", Veronique Braggard argues that the very different circumstances and experiences of the Middle Passage by Africans and Indians account for many dissimilarities and tensions between the two communities in Trinidad and Guyana which have led to stereotyping, oppression, and agression. In her novels, Shinebourne records a multitude of voices : male and female, rural and urban, African and hindu, thereby offering an interesting perspective on the issue of coolitude. She reveals the absence from memory of the Second Middle Passage but also outlines the emergence of a deeply repressed, unsolved, and unwritten solidarity and ultimately uncovers a "Diwali" of creative encounters.
In "The Colonial Curriculum and the Construction of Coolie/ness in Lakshmi Persaud's Sastra and Butterfly in the Wind and Jan Shinebourne's The Last English Plantation", Mehta focuses on colonial education as a certain ambivalence of representation which provides both a potential alternative to traditionally circumscribed gender roles within the Hindu family while instigating feelings of cultural alienation. She analyzes the (dis)placement of Indian discourse and the effects of schooling on the emerging subjectivity of young Hindu girls. In Shinebourne's novel, West Indians of African and Indian ancestry remain united under the gaze of the overseer's daughter and as colonial teaching pawns. Yet, they ultimately keep their distrust of each other and of anyone perceived as without the ethnic group. Mehta argues that if Englishness and coolieness posit colonized subjects as passive victims of history, Butterfly in the Wind and The Last English Plantation offer plans for action against the alienating effects of a colonial education.
The three remaining essays explore the particular role played by Haiti in Caribbean history and literary tradition and the representation of Haitians in fiction and poetry by Cuban, Haitian, and Guadeloupean authors. In "Solidarity of dreams: searching for unity in the works of Edwige Danticat, Ana Lydia Vega, Julia Alvarez and Christina Garcia", Myriam Chancy argues that while the Haitian revolution is mythologized in Caribbean literary tradition, Haitians appear most often as depraved characters. She unearths racial disjunctions in Ana Lydia Vega's short story "Encancaranublado", analyzes the loss of memory in Cuba regarding racial identity in Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García and the paradox developed by Vega in an article as she argues that while the nobled exslave is being lauded, laborers are denied access to their African heritage in PuertoRico. In The Time of Butterflies by Julía Alvarez and "1937" by Edwige Danticat however, she finds a convergence between Haitian and Dominican destinies insofar as women writers provide opportunities for a new perspective as they unearth untold stories. Alvarez's novel, which focuses on the life and death of the four Mirabal sisters who opposed Trujillo's regime, reinscribes women in history but makes no mention of Haitian massacres perpetuated under Trujillo in 1937. Danticat's short story, on the other hand, memorializes this suppressed act. In so doing, both turn the ghosts of the past into the butterflies of imagined futures.
In "In flight from the borderlines: Roses, rivers and roving Haitian history in Marie Chauvet's Colère and Edwige Danticat's Krik Krak! and The Farming of Bones", Carolyn Duffey argues that Haitian writers are paradoxically both anchored in and in flight from their history. She underlines the absence of women such as Défilée, Dessaline's follower, in history books and argues that women remain implicated in Haiti's story but reveal hidden histories as their refigured narratives unfold. In The Farming of Bones, the 1937 massacres graphically underline the color and linguistic borders which divide the island. Her depiction of the same events in a Krik Krak! story however suggests that the bloodied river dividing the two parts
of the island may be bridged as a Haitian woman named Défilée flees the massacre to leave her daughter a story of redemption. In her conclusion, Duffey argues that paradoxically, the last place for these authors to find herstories might be in the ideologically framed myths of Haitian revolutionary history.
In "The Haitian popular migration in the writings of some Caribbean authors", MarieJosé N'ZengouTayo argues that Ana Lydia Vega, Kamau Brathwaite, Maryse Condé and Simone SchwarzBart fail to find anything exalting in the Haitian literary myth which inspired writers such as Derek Walcott, Aimé Césaire or Alejandro Carpentier. She contrasts Haitian poverty and political failure with Puerto Rican and Guadeloupean wealth and stability and concludes that the immigrant reveals the disfunctions of the host society and questions notions of identity in the works studied. In her view, this portrayal of Haitian migrants offers meditation on the present and the future of the region as an integrated whole. Her essay brings us back to the question raised in Den Tandt's article as it reveals the challenges that confront the production of a Caribbean cultural and political discourse. We are left to wonder if the new millenium will herald a new beginning or merely be a spurt in an endless waiting game.
We wish to thank Maurice Lee for his warm encouragements to put together this issue and for providing us with the possibility to do it. Warm thanks are also due to Hélène Garrett for her excellent and cheerful proofreading skills. Finally, please note that authors have supplied their own translations of quoted passages unless otherwise quoted and that we are grateful to all of them for allowing us to include their work in this issue.
