Abstract
In his 1963 essay, “Roots,” Edward Kamau Brathwaite makes the case that the appearance of V. S. Naipaul’s novels The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Miguel Street, and A House for Mr Biswas marked a significant shift in the body of Caribbean literature. The books’ “lightness of touch,” “feeling for proportion,” “ear,” and “power of characterization,” as well as their representations of a kind of Indo-Caribbean life long absent from Caribbean letters, are all presented by Brathwaite as marked advancements on the writing of Naipaul’s peers and forebears—A House for Mr Biswas, in particular, praised for pooling all of these stylistic strengths in a work “whose basic theme is not rootlessness and the search for social identity,” and whose main character “is clearly defined and who is really trying to get in rather than get out,” all things Brathwaite marks as singular achievements.1 For many contemporary readers of both authors, this assessment might strike an ironic note, not least when supplemented with Brathwaite’s depiction of V. S. Naipaul as the bearer of “an entirely different kind of sensibility.”2 What is perhaps more intriguing is the fact that, alongside his positioning of Naipaul as a central and preeminent figure within the community of Caribbean writers of the early 1960s, Brathwaite’s praise queries the fixation on escape in works that predate Mr Biswas. “Roots” not only begs for recognition of Naipaul’s writing, it also bends back to inspect the content of the works that heralded their arrival.
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Notes
Edward Brathwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 39, 42.
Gordon Rohlehr, “Literature and the Folk,” in My Strangled City and Other Essays (Port-of-Spain: Longman Trinidad, 1992), pp. 52–85 (pp. 53–54).
The shift to a new politically active mode of Caribbean criticism is commonly traced to the conflicts of the 1971 Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) conference. For excellent overviews of the ramifications of that event, see the first chapter of Alison Donnell’s Twentieth Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History (London: Routledge, 2006);
Christian Campbell’s “‘Folking up the Criticism’: The Politics of ‘the Folk’ in Caribbean Discourse,” in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 383–92; and Norval Edwards’s “The Foundational Generation: From The Beacon to Savacou” and “Sylvia Wynter: Insurgent Criticism and a Poetics of Disenchantment” in the same collection, pp. 111–23 and pp. 99–107, respectively.
Raphael Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. vii–viii and 21.
Curdella Forbes, From Nation to Diaspora: Samuel Selvon, George Lamming and the Cultural Performance of Gender (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2005), p. 31.
Belinda Edmondson, Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative (London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 153.
Sidney Mintz, “The Caribbean as a Socio-Cultural Area,” in Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Michael M. Horowitz (New York: The Natural History Press for the American Museum of Natural History, 1971), pp. 17–46 (p. 36).
See Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 170, where she speaks of those “outsider-insiders” who fill a similar role in the contemporary Caribbean. The entirety of Sheller’s text deals with the ways in which the Caribbean has been represented by European “outsiders” throughout its history.
Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), p. 13.
Sandra Pouchet Paquet, “The Fifties,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 51–62 (p. 52).
Bill Schwarz, “Locating Lamming,” in The Locations of George Lamming, ed. Bill Schwarz (Oxford: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 1–25 (p. 10).
See Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 70; and Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History,” in Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, ed. Orde Coombs (Garden City: Anchor Press, 1974), pp. 1–27 (p. 4).
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, eds. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), p. 5.
Bridget Brereton, “The Development of an Identity: The Black Middle Class of Trinidad in the Later Nineteenth Century,” in Caribbean Freedom: Society and Economy from Emancipation to the Present, ed. Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (London: James Currey Publishers, 1993), p. 274.
J. Michael Dash, “Introduction,” in A History of literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, ed. A. James Arnold and others, 3 vols (Philadelphia: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company, 1994–2001), I (1994), pp. 309–14 (p. 311).
See Alistair Hennessy, “Intellectuals: The General and the Particular,” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century Caribbean, Volume I, Spectre of a New Class: The Commonwealth Caribbean, ed. Alistair Hennessy (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 1–20 (p. 7), where the author argues that high illiteracy rates in the developing world create situations where anyone with qualifications is a potential member of the elite;
and Bruce King, “Introduction,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 1–8 (p. 2). Both scholars’ claims are corroborated by much comment on the region, including Robert Aldrich and John Connell’s statement that francisation (“Frenchification”) through schooling was the central means of social promotion in the French Caribbean after emancipation. See their France’s Overseas Frontier: Départements et Territoires D’outre-Mer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 171.
Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (London: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), p. 12.
See Philip Kaisary’s The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014) for an overview of literary responses to the revolution.
Ulrich Fleischmann, “The Formation and Evolution of a Literary Discourse: One, Two, or Three Literatures?,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, ed. A. James Arnold and others, I (1994), pp. 317–38 (pp. 323–24).
The Haitian literacy rate was and remains notoriously low as is the percentage of the population who are fluent in French. See Léon-François Hoffman, “Haitian Sensibility,” in A History of Literature in the Caribbean: Hispanic and Francophone Regions, ed. A. James Arnold and others, I (1994), pp. 365–78 (p. 374).
David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti, 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1996), p. 43.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe, Resistance and Caribbean Literature (London: Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 67. Cudjoe differentiates between “intellectuals” who are impotently stuck between the colonizers and the masses and authors who, although from the intellectual class, are able to know their people and represent their desires. Why authors are “in touch with the aspiration of the masses” in a way others are not is, to me, insufficiently explained in this account.
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 15.
Celia Britton, “Eating their Words: The Consumption of French Caribbean Literature,” ASCALF Yearbook: The Annual Publication of the Association for the Study of Caribbean and African literature in French, 1 (1996), pp. 15–23 (p. 19).
This stance is particularly apparent in Brown’s reflections on George Lamming in Migrant Modernism: Postwar London and the West Indian Novel (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2013), which tend to present the author through a screen of “resistance” and thus make the goal of his works “to transform uncritical, passively receptive readers into skeptical, suspicious ones, alert to the cultural, ideological, and political frames within which all narrative is produced and received” (74) and to reawaken “critical consciousness in his readers […] to enunciate his own sociocultural position in a particularly combative way” (76–77). This reading may be supported by the author’s later works but, as shown in chapter 3, looks away from certain aspects of his first novel In the Castle of My Skin.
Pierre Bourdieu, The logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 53, 60.
See, respectively, Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology [n. trans.] (London: Verso, 1984), p. 33;
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), p. 48;
Lucien Goldmann, Cultural Creation in Modern Society, trans. Bart Grahl (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp. 76–77.
Goldmann and Althusser’s theories in particular have been subject to many critiques, not least those of Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 38, 44, where he notes Althusser’s privileging of philosophy in his model and criticises Goldmann’s “simplistic and mechanical” theory.
Sudha Rai, Homeless by Choice: Naipaul, Jhabvala, Rushdie, and India (Jaipur: Printwell, 1992), p. 4.
Abdelmalek Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 3.
Timothy Weiss, “Translational Identities and the Émigré Experience,” in Diasporic Subjectivity and Cultural Brokering in Contemporary Post-Colonial Literatures, ed. Igor Maver (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009), pp. 39–57 (p. 46).
Benita Parry, “Reconciliation and Remembrance,” in Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 179–93 (p. 180).
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 80.
See George DeVos, “Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation,” in Ethnic Identity: Creation, Conflict, Accommodation, ed. Lola Romanucci-Ross and George DeVos, 3rd edn (London: AltaMira Press, 1995), pp. 15–47 (p. 23);
Donald Winford, “Sociolinguistic Approaches to Language Use in the Anglophone Caribbean,” in Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations, ed. Marcyliena Morgan (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California, 1994), pp. 43–62 (p. 44);
Gertrud Aub-Buscher, “Linguistic Paradoxes: French and Creole in the West Indian DOM at the Turn of the Century,” in The Francophone Caribbean Today: Literature, Language, Culture, ed. Gertrud Aub-Buscher and Beverley Ormerod Noakes (Kingston: The University of the West Indies Press, 2003), pp. 1–15;
Richard D. E. Burton, “Between the Particular and the Universal: Dilemmas of the Martinican Intellectual,” in Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century Caribbean, Volume II, Unity in Variety: The Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean, ed. Alistair Hennessy (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 186–210 (p. 195).
V. S. Naipaul, The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street (London: Picador, 2002), p. i.
Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 119. Chow goes further than this in Writing Diaspora, buttressing her consideration of diasporic intellectuals in ways that are compatible with this study by speaking of the “masked hegemony” of migrant voices over those they represent at home (p. 118).
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© 2015 Malachi McIntosh
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McIntosh, M. (2015). Introduction. In: Emigration and Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137543219_1
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