A Nation or Nobody

Bordeaux Mountain Video

2012-01-25T13:27:00.000-08:00

Here's a really short and rough experiment (no fade-ins or fade-outs) that I put together to see if I could develop my visual style in video form. I guess this fits into my continuing exploration of Bordeaux Mountain. The music is a royalty-free piece by Kevin Macleod.

More on Caryl Phillips - A New World Order

2012-01-25T12:56:00.000-08:00

Last July, I wrote a blog entry in which I stated that I planned to read more of Caryl Phillips’s work. Over the holidays I made good on that plan, and I’m glad I did. Absorbing Phillip’s 2001 collection of essays A New World Order has been a highly rewarding experience over the last month or so.

When I think about my relationship with Phillips’s essays I can’t help but be reminded of what Patrick Chamoiseau has said about writing, reading, and community:

“We must understand that the great communities of writers and artists will be determined, not by traditional signs of identity - skin color, language, gods, and place of birth - but by the structure of our imaginary. If someone is a writer from Martinique, it doesn’t necessarily follow that he will be my brother in letters. My brother in literature may be born in Japan, Puerto Rico, France, or Germany. Now it is a particular rapport with the world’s diversity which ultimately determines our loyalties and our sense of belonging to a human community. The rest of it, all those ancient signs - race, language, history, territory - all that is going to break into pieces.”

I say this because after reading A New World Order, I am of the mind that Caryl Phillips is one of my closest brothers in literature. Born in St. Kitts and raised in England, Phillips has developed a sense of identity that locates the entire “Atlantic World” as his home. But his experiences growing up the son of immigrants in a reactionary political climate in Britain have given him a deep understanding of the value and the pain of being an outsider. As a result, many of the essays in A New World Order are driven by a desire to navigate the unpredictable terrain of "home" and "belonging". For Phillips, like many of us, identity has never been a simple matter.

I have to imagine that for many readers, Caryl Phillip’s search for identity may be puzzling. He has no illusions about this. In his conclusion to the book entitled “The High Anxiety of Belonging” Phillips writes:

“…Mercifully not everybody suffers the same degree of anxiety over this question of belonging. Most people live secure lives in a place that they recognize as their own. I understand that to such people my ambivalence will probably appear to be at best slightly cranky, at worst paranoid.”

Phillips is speaking of a specifically British context - one in which that nation’s difficulties with coming to terms with its post-imperial diversity has at times lead to a hostile national atmosphere. Even if things have improved on that front since the 1970s, and Phillips is adamant that they have, there is still always the deep feeling of rejection that those of us who don’t exactly fit the national narratives of our homes will always carry inside of us. Phillips tells a story of a simple interaction he had at an embassy for instance:

“One’s right to participate is always under scrutiny in ways as crude and as simple as the sentence a British diplomat in Portugal once shared with me when, having lost my passport in Lisbon, I was trying to obtain emergency papers to return home to Britain. ‘Mr. Phillips, he said, ‘you don’t even look British.’”

As a writer, however, Phillips has certain insights into the ways in which the policing of the British national narrative works, and how it has encouraged outsider voices to protest loudly within literature and the arts (This is not just a British dynamic, clearly). Phillips writes:

“The richness of the British literary tradition may be an ironic by-product of this failure of national imagination. I would rather have a less vigorous literature, and a healthier nation in which the process of moving along the road from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ was not burdened with so many psychological obstacles. Writers are generally able to negotiate these obstacles and even flourish while hurdling them. But in case we forget, most of us are not writers.”

The way forward for Phillips has been both a faith in the breakdown of old forms of identity (clearly underway), and the possibilities inherent in his conception of an “Atlantic home.” Phillips’s sees that all of us whose ancestors have voyaged across the Atlantic over the last few centuries - settlers, slaves, refugees, and merchants - are bound up in a common history. He writes:

“Across the centuries, countless millions have traversed these waters, and unlike myself, they have not always had the luxury of choice. They have felt alienated from, or abandoned by, the societies that have hitherto known as ‘home’.”

And those migrations continue at an accelerated pace - back and forth across the Atlantic and around it. What makes this oceanic world so special is that it has always been highly diverse and interconnected by trade and movement. Those of us who might call ourselves Atlantic people understand the sea and how it works. We understand narratives of travel and displacement. We understand cultural rupture and distance. We are a tribe of many tribes. For Phillips this model of identity is more appealing than being British, or Caribbean, or American, or African.

To be clear, this is not all just idealism. Phillips’s essays in A New World Order demonstrate that he is able to move around the physical and intellectual world of the Atlantic with relative comfort. He is just as at home writing about the troubled life of American soul singer Marvin Gaye as he is writing about racial ambiguity in the novels of South African writer J.M. Coatzee. He discusses Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka’s essays with as much ease as he explores V.S. Naipaul’s early letters with his father in Trinidad. Throughout the collection, Phillips is clear and insightful, in no small part because he truly understands the “Atlantic” narratives that link these subjects together. These are not the writings of someone who is British, exactly. But of course, Phillips is that too.

Most of the essays in A New World Order come from the decade of the 1990s, but they are more relevant today than ever. Phillips can increasingly sit back confidently and watch as an army of people amass under the banner of cultural ambiguity. It’s a peaceful army. But it does have some changes to make to the old order of things. Phillips writes:

“In this new world order of the twenty-first century, we are all being dealt an ambiguous hand, one which may eventually help us to accept the dignity which informs the limited participation of the migrant, the asylum-seeker, or the refugee. As the laborious certainties of the old order fade, and the volume of the global conversation increases, ambiguity embraces us.”

The old order may crack down in response, but I think we can say that the capacity for authoritarian narratives to take hold is now diminished. This is something that we can celebrate alongside Caryl Phillips, a man who saw this new dynamic coming and did his part to help usher it in.

Photo Post #27 - Family Archives

2011-12-14T14:41:00.001-08:00

Tortola, 1940s
Photo by George Knight

A few thoughts on ARC Issue 4

2011-12-14T14:05:00.000-08:00

When I first started this blog, my aim was simply to organize some of my thoughts. The island that I come from is often extremely isolated within the Caribbean region - not only as part of a non-sovereign island group, but also as the site of an ongoing contest (with significant overlap) between North American and West Indian cultural narratives. Over the years, I have felt this struggle happening within me also as I have attempted to navigate my own experiences of migration - from St. John to Boston, from Boston to St. Thomas, from St. Thomas to Panama, from Panama to Maine.

What I didn’t realize was the extent to which we are in a moment in which (some) voices from the Caribbean are being privileged in international discussions of globalization and globalism. The impression I have is that there is a huge amount of energy surrounding and emanating from the region right now. I think this calls for both excitement and caution. Excitement because the Caribbean really does have a lot to offer the world. Caution because these discussions always run the risk of becoming another form of exploitation if they get too far away from actual conditions on the ground. That’s my opinion at least - and I know that I am particularly wary about this because of the often troubled state of my own home island.

Here’s what I love about ARC magazine - it allows us to see the threads, as they exist in the art world, that are connecting various experiences of Caribbean identity. If we are all, in fact, engaged in some sort of global process, what exactly does that mean? How do we make a space for integration without erasing the different identities that we all value? Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins frame the issue gracefully in their introduction to issue 4 of ARC:

"This collection explores a range of experiential moments constructed within very determined scenarios. Personal, political and gendered issues are examined and reveal patterns that attempt to define the expanding boundaries of the Caribbean from a critical and intimate perspective. In this issue we are trying to visually embody a region and its circulating diaspora by bringing together its complexities to become conscious of its embodied whole, bringing our islands, minds and beings together and truly binding us at the core."

As always, I feel the need to express how valuable all of the artists and writers included in ARC are to my own learning process. There wasn’t one feature in the new issue that didn’t teach me something new.

One highlight for me was reading Wendell McShine’s philosophy on creating mural art. He says:

“…My mission is to bring art to everyone. I never understood the institutionalization of something that is meant to be shared and experienced openly, only belonging to a selected few - seems a bit old school and very selfish. I make it my business to bring my art to the up roots and the grass roots all at the same time. In making a better world, inclusion is paramount…”

This rings true to me - inclusion is always something to aim for. Not to mention the fact that the discussion between McShine, a Trinidadian artist working in Mexico, and Oneika Russel, a Jamaican artist working in Japan, seems to occupy the sort of global space that we’re supposed to be striving for these days.

Speaking of which, this issue also includes an article by British scholar Leon Wainwright in which he expresses some of the same hesitations I have over issues of globalism in Caribbean art:

“Perhaps we should debate the issue of where such global change has happened, and for whom, on whose terms, and with what outcomes? For artists in the transnational Caribbean, I wonder whether globalizing processes are always experienced as an ideal and welcome future.”

I appreciate the inclusion of this statement amidst this issue’s celebration of an increasingly border-less space. Those of us who have benefited from it in various ways need to remember that not everyone has.

I also really loved what Damali Abrams had to say about her performance as healing process, and her feeling that oftentimes we are all just acting out the various roles that our societies have cast us in:

“I don’t think the performance ever ends for any of us. From the time we are told ‘act like a lady’ or ‘Black people don’t do that,’ we are learning to perform ‘appropriately’ based on our race, gender, class, and nationality. In my work I’m just calling attention to the fact that it’s all a performance.”

Melanie Edmunds’s writing on the sculptures of Jamaican/American artist Arthur Simms struck a chord with me also. She finds in his work the poignancy of migration, nostalgia, and loss. It is really amazing how similar many of us are in our sense of “being stuck in the middle - not really this, not really that,” in Simm's words. I think it’s important to question the inadequate labels and categories that are making so many people feel this way. One of the conclusions that I’ve come to personally is that people really have an intense desire for communication with other humans. When that communication gets blocked for whatever reason, it inevitably leads to frustrations.

James Cooper of Bermuda also has some interesting things to say about his temporary sculptures:

“The fact that they live sometimes only for a few seconds is somehow related to this feeling I have that all the big things in our societies are proving to be unstable - religion, government, corporations…So what is real right now? This moment!”

This sort of anxiety over the present state of the world - the apparent instability of the systems that we are living in - is something that I think is going to generate a lot of energy over the next decade or so. Look to the arts - always a leading indicator.

I’ve only mentioned a few of the excellent artists whose work is featured in ARC issue 4! Be sure to buy your copy here.

Listen

2011-12-13T14:41:00.000-08:00

I think this song's a couple years old now, but I just saw that "Everything and Anything Virgin Islands" featured it yesterday. Listen up.

Wally Kyat - From the V.I. (Hold Yuh Riddim)

video courtesy of azizlight657.

Photo Post #26

2011-12-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Awaking to the New

2011-11-30T11:27:00.000-08:00

I spent some time this weekend revisiting Derek Walcott's 1974 essay "The Muse of History". I find it incredibly useful to read Walcott whenever I feel my thoughts sliding too heavily into the political realm. I do think that politics is important, but I also have a great deal of respect for Walcott's utter faith in the power of language. He has often expressed little patience for the way that political rhetoric obscures deeper truths.

No matter how many times I read Walcott's thoughts on the "open possibility" of the Caribbean experience, I can feel the power of his words. He writes of:

"...the possibility of the individual Caribbean man, African, European, or Asian in ancestry, the enormous, gently opening morning of his possibility, his body touched with dew, his nerves as subtilized to sensation as the mimosa, his memory, whether of grandeur or of pain, gradually erasing itself as recurrent drizzles cleanse the ancestral or tribal markings from the coral skull, the possibility of a man and his language waking to wonder here."

The history of our hemisphere is a painful one, but for Walcott the pain of history is banal. Conquest, settlement, and enslavement - the three forces that have shaped the Americas - have created a new literature of remorse and revenge, privilege and poverty. But for Walcott, the deepest truth of the Western hemisphere is that we all find ourselves in a strange land - even indigenous people, who find their realities dramatically altered. We come from societies born of violence and migration. We have all broken with the past - some by choice, some by force or necessity - and we have become something new.

It is newness that Walcott embraces. Insecurities over identity, which Walcott knows well, are self-inflicted wounds for the writer. In his view, history can not tell us who we are. Neither can politics. The truth is in the power of language. Walcott presents two of his favorite Francophone Caribbean poets to demonstrate an important truth at the heart of the archipelago:

* I've shortened the samples that Walcott provides to the words that resonate most with me personally.

Saint-John Perse
of Guadeloupe:

"...Wandering , what did we know of our ancestral bed, all
blazoned
though it were in that speckled wood of the islands?...
There
was no name for us in the ancient bronze gong of the old
family house..."

Aimé Césaire of Martinique:

"... I want the conquistador with unsealed armour
lying down in death of perfumed flowers,
the foam censing a sword gone rusty
in the pure blue light of slow wild cactuses."

Walcott calls the poets' shared sensibility, "the sensibility of waking up to the New World." He writes of these two poets:

"If we think of one as poor and the other as privileged when we read their addresses to the New World, if we must see one as black and one as white, we are not only dividing this sensibility by the process of a sociologist, we are denying the range of either poet, the power of compassion and the power of fury. One is not making the case for assimilation and for the common simplicity of all men; we are interested in their differences, openly, but what astonishes us in both poets is their elation, their staggering elation in possibility."

Creolization is chaos. Creolization is creation. Creolization is destruction. Some attempt to kill the "Old World" that exists within, some embrace it and glorify it. But our true identity lies in what we do when we awake to the new.

Photo Post #25

2011-11-24T18:38:00.001-08:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

A Postcolonial Critique of St. John?

2011-11-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

In "Reading Sugar Mill Ruins: 'The Island Nobody Spoiled' and Other Fantasies of Colonial Desire" Eve W. Stoddard and Grant H. Cornwell begin by quoting from the literary works of Derek Walcott and Jamaica Kincaid. They cite both Edward Said and Frantz Fanon as sources. They describe their work as an "essay in the politics and poetics of space." For a while now, I've been eager to find any postcolonial critiques of my home island of St. John that might have been published over the last decade or so. It appears that I have found one, first published in 2001 in South Atlantic Review, Vol. 66, No.2.

I have an increasingly conflicted relationship with postcolonial studies, if I am to be honest. I became interested in the field for its global engagement and its belief in fiction and poetry as vehicles for social change. It has allowed those of us whose personal histories are intertwined with colonialism, neo-colonialism, and trans-nationalism (almost everyone in the world at this point) to better understand our societies and our selves. Here in the United States it allows for a critique of the broader academic system that it is both a part of and an opposition too - a tricky balancing act. But so often, the expanding diversity within the field reveals its underlying contradictions. Sometimes it even starts to lose local relevance and seem out of date. Even so, postcoloniality's core concepts remain the point of departure for many of my personal explorations.

Globalization has put a lot of people of my generation in awkward positions. Many of us are skeptical of the concept of national citizenship and are looking for new strategies of belonging. Frequently this search leads us beyond our local communities. Our educations now stress the importance of global citizenship.

But I have to confess that, despite our interconnectedness, global citizenship is not a status I am completely comfortable with. We are not all entitled to be citizens of wherever we please, even as we must make all efforts at inter-cultural communication. When involved in any sort of global discourse, we inevitably have to break out of our local contexts. But I often fear that a lot of nuance and complexity can be lost in the process. Human experience is too boundless to be packed up neatly in any sort of "theory."

I say this because "Reading Sugar Mill Ruins: 'The Island Nobody Spoiled' and Other Fantasies of Colonial Desire" is an essay about the space from which my personal perspective and identity arise. It is about the island of St. John. It is about the conditions that shape us in various ways on that island. And importantly, it is an interpretation written by visiting North American academics. As might be predicted, their essay contains both valuable insights and also moments in which the flaws of "global citizenship" are revealed.

As the title of their paper suggests, Stoddard and Cornwell are primarily interested in colonial era sugar mills in the Caribbean - specifically, how they are interpreted, restored, and consumed within contemporary tourist economies. They write:

"We will argue that the hundreds of remnants of sugar estates found today throughout the Caribbean are highly contested spaces, sites of struggle over issues of race, nation, and neocolonialism."

How true. In the case of St. John, these issues can not be separated from the Virgin Islands National Park, a federal entity that owns many of the island's plantation ruins. The presence of one man, Laurance Rockefeller, looms large in any discussion about the current image of St. John. It is his vision of the island as a nature park in service of his exclusive resort, Caneel Bay, that has largely resulted in the struggles of the present day. Stoddard and Cornwell write:

"It is that vision we wish to scrutinize in this essay, a vision pursued in earnest and privileged arrogance by Rockefeller, but shared by many then and now."

Here are the specifics, according to Stoddard and Cornwell:

"Rockefeller's vision for St. John in general, and the Caneel Bay resort in particular, anticipated the current trends in eco- and heritage tourism. In this discursive strategy, culture and nature are sanitized and packaged for the consumption of Northern tourists. While it is important that the experience being sold retain some elements of Rockefeller's island with it's 'ruggedness,' 'adventure,' 'discovery,' and 'unspoiled beauty,' the history of the space that tourists are allowed access to is profoundly fictionalized."

In many places throughout the Caribbean, this "fictionalization" of both history and present is the new form that empire has taken. These fictions are ingrained both within the Caribbean and outside the region. My personal experience of Caribbean-ness is as intertwined with Rockefeller's colonial vision (and tourism, in general) as they would have been with the plantation system had I been born in the 18th or 19th centuries. They are not equal but they are equally influential.

Caneel Bay, 1936 - that is my grandfather second from the left.

In the words of Stoddard and Cornwell:

"The cultural and ecological context of the remnants [of the plantation era] is also creole. However, while creoleness is the condition of Caribbean ecology and culture, each island nation instantiates a different version of creoleness depending on its layers of past creolization, its recent history of independence or dependence, and its contemporary political economy. This pervasive creoleness means that there are always differentially situated readings of history, cultural practices, and institutions, and that hegemonic interpretations push alternative or resistant readings underground."

This is one of the most interesting things that I've read about my home in a long time. The fact that many people living on St. John do not attempt to locate themselves in a historically Caribbean context is, in my view, a problem.

As Stoddard and Cornwell point out:

"...Rockefeller embarked on the grand project of building around the ruins of sugar mills, not just a luxury resort, but a U.S. national park. In an interview, Rockefeller said, 'It's time Americans heard more about these islands of theirs,' a proclamation of possession still repeated in Virgin Islands tourist media. For example, a recent magazine advertisement from the U.S. Virgin Islands Department of Tourism shows a beautiful unlabeled aerial shot of Caneel Bay. The caption, addressed to the mainland U.S. audience, states 'St. Croix * St. John * St. Thomas: They're your islands.'"

Stoddard and Cornwell point out many examples of a peculiar sort of historical disconnect that exists in contemporary representations of St. John - the sight of a freedom struggle that predates the Haitian revolution. A review of Caneel Bay's "colonial charm" makes reference to a "kinder, gentler time." Advertisements for the Virgin Islands National Park still offer St. John up for "discovery." Rockefeller's plans are revealed in a 1956 National Geographic article in which he states, "We hope to get the land above Caneel Bay back into production so that guests can see sugar cane and tropical fruits actually growing. Eventually we'd like to restore the entire plantation area."

Stoddard and Cornwell locate the heart of the matter in, "the nostalgia of a certain class of consumers who have fantasy desires to be situated in a history that never was." In other words, tourism on St. John - specifically, who controls it - perpetuates some of the ugly elements of a plantation past. It's true that the connections can be made if one cares to look for them. I believe this is a similar reality on many different islands in the Caribbean.

Stoddard and Cornwell display a sort of guilt and moral outrage that is very traceable to the U.S. academic establishment - not surprising since that is the place that their critique stems from. Although their arguments have their roots in a sort of "academic tourism", this does not mean we shouldn't be aware of their perspective. What flaws their essay carries as a result are open to interpretation.

Here's the conclusion the authors come to:

"The case studies we are doing suggest that the stories of slavery and contemporary nationhood can be told in many ways. One of the most important variables in avoiding the reproduction of plantation relations is the narrative point of view used to present the ruins. The story needs to be told from the point of view of Afro-Caribbean people; it needs to be their remembrance, however painful both to them and the white Americans who visit both Caneel Bay Resort and the Virgin Islands National Park by right of their neocolonial relationship to the island."

Although the main thrust of this argument - that the narratives constructed around the plantation era for the benefit of tourists is at times both destructive and disrespectful to the memory of the enslaved - is something I agree with, there are two other responses that I have to this conclusion.

First, if Stoddard and Cornwell believe that there is just one Afro-Caribbean "narrative point of view" on tourism and plantation ruins, they are in fact engaging in their own simplification of Caribbean history. This is the other side of the coin to the fictions offered up by the tourist industry. As well intentioned as academics outside the region may be, they often do not see contemporary Caribbean societies as containing their own internal class divisions with deeply embedded racial, ethnic, and religious complexities.

Secondly, if indeed the writers' aim is to contribute to a reversal of plantation relations in the Caribbean, the solution that they offer may be insufficient. Narrative perspective remains incredibly important, but it is not the only consideration. The economy of an island like St. John is highly dependent on tourism, and that tourism in turn depends on offering visitors a pleasant experience that confirms their own fantasies. Inviting visitors to resorts and attractions where they would be forced to engage with their complicity in "plantation relations" does not seem to be a good plan for attracting tourists and developing the Virgin Islands economy.

Stoddard and Cornwell may rightly say that the narratives of the local population should be more important than any colonial desires on the part of visitors, but the fact is that entire economic systems have been established on the opposite reality. This is the unpleasant paradox at the heart of the matter, a fact that the people of St. John have been struggling to come to terms with ever since Laurance Rockefeller established his Caneel Bay resort for "the self-renewal of wealthy, urban-oriented guests." St. John's population is well aware of the need to place Afro-Caribbean voices front and center within the chosen narrative of the island, as is evidenced by the statue that now greets visitors as they step off the ferry dock - an iconic image of a slave rising in revolt against bondage and oppression. How we come to term with our island's history in the face of what many people consider to be gradual erasure will no doubt dictate who we all become.

Hubert Harrison on Identity, Migration, and Americanization

2011-11-19T11:42:00.001-08:00

Hubert Harrison, the "father of Harlem radicalism", is to me one of the most interesting figures in 20th century Caribbean history. I've enjoyed reading some of his writings over the last few months. The many layers of Harrison’s experience - he was a Crucian who arrived in the United States in 1900, 17 years before his home island was purchased by the U.S. - contain a number of complexities. I think that there is an increasing level of understanding that diasporic Caribbean communities have a lot to say about modern globalism.

Here’s what Harrison himself has to say on the issue of his own identity (from an article addressing comments made by the Jamaican writer A. M. Wendell Malliet on the impossibility of Black West Indian integration into American society in the '20s):

“ …And in the first place, please give me leave to wonder whether I am West Indian at all. Both Mr. Malliet and most Americans assume that a West Indian is a “Britisher,” owing allegiance to a British King, and chock-full of British culture; whereas there are Spanish, French, Dutch, Danish (and now American) West Indians. Personally I have never been British. I was born Danish and am now twice an American; first by my own free choice and next by Uncle Sam’s purchase of the Danish islands. I left those islands, finally, at the age of 17 and have lived in New York for 27 years. Here I printed into manhood, became in course of time, the kind of American I am at present.”

Harrison continues:

“So I became Americanized (whatever that may mean) - I became an American because I was eager to be counted in the fight wherever I happened to be, to bear the burden and heat of the day in helping to make conditions better in this great land for the children who will come after me. And although I am not SATISFIED with American conditions as they are now, I realize that in these days of change and unrest I would not have been satisfied anywhere else. In China I would be fighting against foreign domination, in Egypt, India, South Africa, or West Africa I would be fighting against the British oligarchs, in Jamaica against the sinister repression of black people practiced by both whites and mulattoes, and in the Dutch, French, or American West Indies against crackerism [white supremacy], stupidity or cowardice.”

And this may be the most interesting part:

“BESIDES: when America gets ready to buy the West Indian islands of any European Power the inhabitants, as people who are OWNED, are not going to have any final voice in determining their destiny - any more than the Puerto Ricans or Virgin Islanders had. And that is something that they may face in the next thirty years - as I see it. So that I suspect that other West Indians will ultimately be forced to do what I did without being forced.”

These are all provocative comments.

In the most recent article in the Caribbean Review of Books, Nicollette Bethel makes reference to:

“the archetypal Caribbean writer, the one who must leave his home to find it again, who must choose, at least in the beginning, between career-in-exile and invisibility-at-home, and who is perennially troubled by the decision.”

Her words ring true. Many have noted that this “exile” experience often produces individuals who have not lived in their home countries for decades and yet only write about the places they have left behind. This is perfectly fine - any writer is free to address any topic he or she wishes. And it’s obvious that this nostalgic tendency comes from a place of pain and inner-turmoil. It is what makes exile literature poignant to so many - as humans, we all carry this potential loss within us.

But what strikes me about the words of Hubert Harrison is how firmly he resists the temptation to essentialize himself ONLY as West Indian. This is even more amazing given the racial discrimination Harrison would have naturally faced in the U.S. in the 1920s. The fact that Harrison came to his internationalist conclusion in 1927 is actually a little bit startling. Given Harrison’s emigration experience, his thoughts on identity suggest a great deal of confidence and fortitude.

There is, of course, a certain trade-off. In the 500 page collection of Harrison’s writing, A Hubert Harrison Reader, only two articles can be found on the condition of the U.S. Virgin Islands (under a Naval autocracy in the 1920s). In these articles, Harrison's voice may seem slightly distant to some Virgin Islanders. In one anonymous letter to the editor, Harrison gives himself the pseudonym “A St. Croix Creole”, and yet in his lengthy discussion of the USVI’s recent history he speaks in the first-person when referring to the people of the United States rather than the people of the Virgin Islands. Harrison, thoroughly trans-national but with an identity grounded in the Black diaspora experience, seems to have come to some conclusion early on in his career about who he was and what audience he was trying to reach. While many U.S. Virgin Islanders in Harlem spent their careers championing the causes of their islands, Harrison’s interests and ambitions were global.

The thing about visionaries is that not all of their visions come true. The Danish West Indies was the last Caribbean nation to be purchased by the United States in the 20th century. But Harrison’s words on the future are still prescient. North America and the Caribbean continue to be as entangled as they always have been. Harrison believed in the inevitability of increased contact between a fragmented and economically depressed Caribbean and a powerful, expansive United States in the mid-20th century. He chose, therefore, to attempt to steer the United States in a direction that would be less oppressive and more answerable to the concerns of the people who might otherwise be trampled on. This seems to me to be a heroic response to the position he found himself in.

Photo Post #24

2011-11-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Raphael Dalleo on Postcoloniality in the 1970s

2011-11-08T19:20:00.000-08:00

In my effort to learn more about the recent history of Caribbean art and literature, I’m often confronted with the transitional decade of the 1970s. How did the shifting political realities of those years change the artistic output of the region? How was this experienced differently in different nations?

In the opening paragraph of his essay, “Performing Postcoloniality in the Jamaican Seventies: The Harder They Come and Smile Orange”, Raphael Dalleo puts it succinctly:

“The 1970s mark a crucial moment in Caribbean cultural history, as the region made the uneven passage from colonialism to postcoloniality.”

He explains further:

“…Anticolonialism, as a critique of modern colonialism and a discourse able to establish links between intellectuals and social movements, led to successes such as the Cuban revolution in 1959 and inspired the decolonization era’s faith in revolutionary change throughout the 1960s. But the 1970s witnessed the rise of postcoloniality as a new system of exploitive and unequal international relations, and anticolonialism suddenly appeared unable to address these neoliberal forms of domination…”

Dalleo is specifically interested in the way that both the film The Harder They Come and the play Smile Orange are characteristic of the Jamaican transition into postcoloniality. In his view, the 1970s might be described as an in-between phase in Caribbean academic discourse in general. While anticolonialism seemed newly inadequate in a world that was increasingly controlled by global capital that moved freely across borders, no new ideology of resistance had yet been born. And this is not simply a side effect of post-independence malaise, either. Dalleo argues that even in places where anticolonial movements did not culminate in independence, one can still detect this shift.

“Even places like Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Puerto Rico, while not becoming independent, nonetheless experienced this transitional moment, moving from modern colonial status to something different during the 1940s and 1950s. Juan Flores has called this status the “postcolonial colony”, but what I want to emphasize is not the uniqueness of departmentalization or the associated free state. These islands are only the most overt examples of how throughout the region, the future of autonomy and sovereignty that anticolonialists had hoped to establish was never fully realized as postcolonial modes of domination have been consolidated.”

This seems to be where we stand now. I can’t say for certain what the case is in independent Caribbean nations, but in the “postcolonial colonies” I happen to know that angst and alienation are in some ways problematic. How different individuals experience and react to these social issues is of course variable

Raffeo’s examination of The Harder They Come and Smile Orange is fascinating and definitely worth a read. His interest seems to primarily lie in the gender implications of the anticolonial/postcolonial shift, something that I often hear discussed but don’t have the academic language to address. If I understand correctly, his argument is largely about the emasculation of the anticolonial rebel of the 1960s in the face of the neocolonial domination of the 1970s. Dalleo writes (on the The Harder They Come):

“The film’s hero, Ivan, appears as the ideal representation of masculine resistance…

...The film traces Ivan’s coming to consciousness, as he goes from a naïve country boy who believes that he can achieve success through the limited legitimate avenues available to him to a critic and eventually opponent of an unjust system that forces him to battle for its scraps. He chooses Fanonian violence as he attempts to overturn this inequality, and his newly conscious self is associated in the second half of the film with Cuba (the site to which Ivan attempts to escape in the film's final scene) and Rastafari, two of the most significant critiques of colonial capitalism to emerge in the Caribbean.”

The fact that the protagonist in the film The Harder They Come is largely undone by his anticolonial ideology suggests a reassessment. Dalleo argues that this is a reflection of an emerging cynicism among the intellectual class in Jamaica in the 1970s. He writes:

“…The futility of [Ivan’s] resistance becomes increasingly apparent; the film thus depicts the anticolonial stance as delusional in the postcolonial context.”

Dalleo points out that the flaw that leads to Ivan’s downfall in The Harder They Come may be a failure of imagination. This is the same failure that has often been explored in Caribbean art and literature in the decades since. It is the downfall of the rebel.

“Ivan, who has been shown throughout the movie to be a connoisseur of the Hollywood Western, is unable to imagine his resistance through anything other than that script…"

"...Ivan’s attempt to directly confront the postcolonial system fails miserably, due to his failure to imagine a role for himself other than that created by the US culture industry. ”

“…In rooting for him, though, we are also made to see the inadequacies of our anticolonial imaginary: the film’s ending suggests that for postcolonial political movements to succeed, they need to recognize their distinctiveness from the anticolonial struggles of the past, and to imagine, new, locally devised ways of organizing themselves against the empires of the present and future.”

Continental, Colonial, or Creole? - A Submission for "In the Castle of Our Skins"

2011-10-30T15:44:00.000-07:00

My thanks go out to Soyluv, the very thoughtful Trinidadian blogger, who was kind enough to invite me to participate in her Blog Carnival on race and national identity in the Caribbean, entitled "In The Castle of Our Skins." Check out her writing here.

There are over 300 million people in the world today who share my United States citizenship. Sometimes I wonder how many of us, for whatever reason, feel removed and alienated from the nation listed on our passport.

It took me a long time to realize that, as a US Virgin Islander, my experience of American-ness is fundamentally distorted from the norm - if indeed there is one. I have found that this feeling of a skewed identity extends to my Caribbean-ness as well, and sometimes to my whiteness. Why this came as a surprise to me I’m not sure. I attribute it to youthful naiveté. Many of us, when we are young, don’t really question just how specific our experiences are to our environment. Those of us who come from places where migration is so often a part of our cultural experience, however, probably can’t help but start to question our own sense of belonging. We have to occupy multiple spaces at once, and when we start to contradict ourselves, we notice.

Bordeaux Mountain: home

The national and racial norms that we often measure ourselves against don’t exist anyway. Any quest for identity may just lead us around in circles. When I think of all the labels that I might self-apply in order to define myself, I begin to realize that I can’t really make any of them fit without important disclaimers - probably the case for a lot of people around the world these days. The way that I am most comfortable self-identifying - simply as a US Virgin Islander - can be a problem given my family roots in the USA (and Europe), and the somewhat atypical way that I experience that heritage. Nearly a century after the purchase of the Danish West Indies by the United States, our already complex islands have added many more layers of hybridization - leaving all sorts of people in the position of having to redraw their cultural maps. It's an ongoing process that affects us all.

If this sounds like a recipe for all sorts of anxieties and conflicts, that’s because it sometimes is. In an unincorporated territory, one person's claims of native status can be another person's colonial occupation. A lot of Caribbean people know this instinctively. Like many US Virgin Islanders, I have experienced identity uncertainties in my own way, and they are inseparable from who I am. And I don’t experience identity in a static way either. Sometimes I feel like a native son rooted in the soil of my island, and other times I feel like a non-belonger.

Any Virgin Islanders reading this may have already guessed that I am from St. John - the smallest of the three main US Virgin Islands, and in my opinion, the one with the most controversial recent history. My own politics - searching, and sometimes even bitter - are a result of the unique tensions of the modern St. John experience. I am an authentic part of the island's history and, as I often say, I don’t disassociate myself from it.

Some St. John youth circa 1990 (I'm in the front row second from the right)

I have found that there is often an element of nostalgia in discussions about St. John. People on-island will often say “What happened to the ‘love’ in ‘love city’ (our island’s nickname)?” or they may pine for the loss of a small community environment. Sometimes these grievances are legitimate, and sometimes they come from wealthy people trying to preserve their own slice of “paradise” at the expense of others. I try my best not to get caught up in any of these conversations. I’m not anti-development, but what is clear to me is that the way St. John has developed has often been counter to the interests of local people. Those with the most at stake in the future of the island are sometimes marginalized in favor of gated villas and tourist businesses run by expatriates. Our home is a small place, with most of the land controlled by a federally-run National Park - there really isn’t much room left to grow in a way that benefits future generations. I think that our island should do a little more to privilege Caribbean-ness in its many forms.

The 20th and 21st-century history of St. John involves questionable philanthropists, speculative land-grabs (both private and federal), haphazard development, a lack of robust political representation, and even promotion by an American pop-country singer. Anyone who wants to discuss these issues with me can feel free to drop me an e-mail. I can speak at length on these issues. But they are somewhat beyond the scope of this piece, in which Soyluv of Creative Commess has so graciously asked me to address the topics of race and national identity, to which the things I have just mentioned are merely background.

The mid-century development boom in the US Virgin Islands brought an influx of people from the mainland United States and also from other Caribbean islands. As in any community that experiences sudden mass-immigration, issues of belonging became central to not only day-to-day life but also local politics. As William W. Boyer wrote in his 1983 history book:

"No other locale in the Caribbean, however - or elsewhere in the world for that matter -had undergone such radical and rapid ethnic and economic change in the 1960s as that experienced by America's Virgin Islands."

How this relates to race, if at all, depends on who you ask. Clearly, not all Stateside Americans identify as white and not all Virgin Islanders identify as black, and yet sometimes those categories get fused together with no regard for the complex reality of the situation - especially here in the States where Caribbean identity is often filtered through stereotypes. There are, of course, black-identifying Virgin Islanders whose roots in the territory are entirely post-transfer (the sale of the islands from Denmark to the U.S.) and white-identifying Virgin Islanders whose roots go back many generations. And that's before we account for all the Virgin Islanders who identify as neither white nor black. We have nearly every ethnic/racial group imaginable represented in the territory. As would be expected, Caribbean people tend to have a more nuanced view of racial identity in their homes than visitors, who have been known to lump people together based on skin tone. As Derek Walcott said on the US Virgin Islands in 1994:

"When I was here, I felt the Virgin Islander was treated usually like a waiter; that was my crass reaction. That black or white, American tourists coming down here thought of people down here as people who should serve them. This is not relegated only to white people."

It seems to me that a lot of the way that we experience race in the US Virgin Islands (or anywhere for that matter) has more to do with the expectations of others than anything else. That doesn't mean that contemporary issues of race and oppression don't exist. My own racial identity is often informed by the historical fact of white privilege, and with tourists’ notions of black authenticity. Neither of these are issues that I can ignore as a white US Virgin Islander whose family history does not include the hardships of the plantation era and its legacy. There are a lot of legitimate questions that other Caribbean people might have about my own identity, and I welcome them.

My grandfather in Cruz Bay, St. John 1940

What I will say, without hesitation, is that the way I experience my race is more Caribbean than American. In the literature and art of our region, which my formal education in the USVI rarely exposed me to, I see the closest parallels to my own life experience. Many of the white expressions of Caribbean identity in particular speak to me very directly. The struggle to belong in a space that has a conflicted relationship with whiteness, the insecurities over history and privilege, the ambivalence towards nationalism, alienation from the metropolitan space - these are all things I have experienced. I find these not to be things I share with a large percentage of white Americans, most of whom have never had to consider a marginalized racial or national identity. It is about how you perceive yourself and your space within the community you grow up in.

In many places in the Caribbean, I have a feeling that some of this identity insecurity is a middle-class affliction more than a racial one. I have a very personal relationship with what the Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand once described as the feeling of being “raised for export like sugar cane.” It does seem to me that my particular community on St. John, which holds more than a few expatriate attitudes, sometimes actively encouraged me to value those aspects of my identity that are North American more than those that are Caribbean. I think that there are times when this is something worth resisting - even for those of us with heritage in the States. To what extent this is possible, I'm not sure.

Those of us who have left our homes and are uncertain how to reenter them in a meaningful way should question the forces that encouraged our migration. In my “small island experience” it is often simply expected that many of us will leave. In the meantime, immigration and emigration continue, and it’s easy to get marked as an outsider - even by your peers who have stayed at home. I used to find it amusing and harmless when taxi drivers on St. Thomas would ask me if I wanted a ride “back to the cruise ship”, or when tourists would continually ask me where I was originally from. Now that I am more uprooted by my years spent in the States, these comments can sting. As long as so many of us are made to feel out-of-place in various ways, I think that we can expect questions of identity to remain dominant in our national and regional dialogues.

Geraldo Guirty on the US Virgin Islands' Flag and Anthem

2011-10-20T16:19:00.000-07:00

I’m really enjoying the writing of the late St. Thomian journalist Geraldo Guirty right now. Two of his books, Sixtonian: Vignettes about Amalia (1991) and Harlem’s Danish American West Indians (1989), were given to me last month to help further my understanding of US Virgin Islands history (1917- present). This period of 20th-century West Indian history is one that I belong to - sometimes uncomfortably - and sure enough, Guirty has a lot to say about many of the issues I care deeply about. I would have loved to have been able to sit down and talk to him in person. He saw an incredible amount of change during his lifetime - from the last days of Danish rule right up through the post-hurricane-Marilyn years.

In Harlem’s Danish American West Indians, Guirty chronicles Virgin Islanders’ struggles for self-determination in both New York City and at home. I was particularly interested in Guirty's words on the particular brand of nationalism that was promoted by the political elite of the 1960s and 70s - complicated as it was by many of its pro-U.S.-incorporation positions. The tensions within this ideology are self-evident, but they are also what make the US Virgin Islands what they are today, with wide-ranging consequences that are both positive and negative. Guirty sees that the road to self-determination is a long one, and though he is critical of many of the steps taken during the heady days of the 1960s, he is generous in his praise for those individuals involved in each step of the journey.

As we all know, nationalism can be a sensitive subject. Are there more important "national symbols" than the flag and the anthem? In the US Virgin Islands, both of these bear the marks of a complicated relationship with the decolonization era. Some people may find this awkward. In his book Guirty is in no way belittling the efforts of all Virgin Islanders who have fought difficult battles to give the people of the territory a measure of self-governance, and neither am I. The practical matters of self-determination are always more important than any idealistic notions of sovereignty. But the USVI’s anti-colonial nationalism in the early 20th century (at least how it was expressed by the political elite) was often slightly ambiguous. Guirty sees the USVI’s flag and anthem, and the debates surrounding them, as displaying this uncertainty. Any Virgin Islanders can decide for themselves how they feel about this issue, or whether it is even important at all. Naturally, not everyone is going to be on the same page.

The problem with our flag seems obvious enough to Guirty:

There are no bald eagles in the Virgin Islands. But as problematic as the design may be from some local perspectives, the man behind it is the real issue to Guirty. Sumner Ely Wetmore Kittelle, the third naval governor of the USVI (1921-1922), is the man to whom we owe our current flag - or at least the concept of it. Guirty writes:

“The valid objection to Kitelle’s flag is the excess patriotism for the parent country, the United States of America…”

And moreover, Guirty reminds us, Kitelle is a man who once said this:

[Kitelle to President Warren Harding:] “I cannot too strongly urge that there be no change made in the organic law until a full generation has elapsed…and above all the white element remain in the lead and in supreme control.”

Guirty is not attempting to stir up racial animosity with this statement at all. But it does give insight into the times, and the naval government from which the flag arose.

In his book, Guirty recounts the design of a new flag proposed by the first USVI legislature in 1956 that aimed to signify the islands’ natural beauty, unity, and complex creole history. But this design finally died with the fourth unsuccessful attempt to draft a constitution in 1981. Activists moved on to other symbolic battles, like changing our official license plate, which when I was growing up was still emblazoned with the highly questionable phrase “America’s Paradise.” But the flag issue, in Guirty’s opinion should remain on the public’s mind. He writes:

“If Virgin Islanders are to revive the struggle for a flag that will reflect the history, culture, heritage, and progress of the islands, fully focusing on the descendants of African slaves, they will have to become more realistic and practical to dismiss the lingering symptoms of colonialism.”

Not to be too polemical (that passage was written 20 years ago, after all), but I see Guirty's point. Unfortunately, we have all seen reasonable positions like these get pushed to the fringes of politics where they can turn destructive.

And what about our national anthem? Like a lot of Virgin Islanders, I grew up singing “The Virgin Islands March” in school - usually immediately following the US pledge of allegiance. I am quite attached to it, as I know a lot of people are. Geraldo Guirty, aside from his praise for the anthem’s distinguished composer Mr. Alton Adams, isn’t sure that the song adequately expresses the struggles for self-determination and freedom that are such an important part of US Virgin Islands history. He contrasts “The Virgin Islands March” with “Hold High the Torch”, a hymn by Rufus Vanderpool that he feels better addresses these issues. Guirty writes that “in ‘Hold High the Torch,’ the people as a priority stand foremost.” He is doubtful that this same populism and hope for the future exists in the lyrics of our current anthem, which in his view have “the lure for the sophisticated visitor seeking paradise without the motley crowd.” (Guirty says he is mostly referring to the last 3 verses, not the one most people sing)

Guirty makes the case for the importance of national symbols that have real meaning for the majority of the people. Whether they do or not in the USVI in 2011 is sometimes hard to tell. In Guirty's view, the problems inherent in the flag and anthem of the U.S. Virgin Islands are merely symptoms of a larger problem - one which has the potential to create mass alienation. Whether nationalism ever provides a solution to this issue I have my doubts - in fact, it may be part of the problem in some ways. But I don’t think it’s controversial to note the destructive nature of widespread alienation in any society. Geraldo Guirty was aware of this danger, and he wanted more Virgin Islanders to have a stake in the future and development their islands - which we can all agree is something to keep working towards.

Photo Post #23

2011-10-09T16:45:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

The Camus Question in Postcolonial Literature

2011-10-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

The other day, as I was doing some research on French postcoloniality, I came across this article. It's a very interesting perspective on Albert Camus from a European culture magazine.

One of the common criticisms of postcolonial literature as a category is that it doesn't really account for huge differences within the so-called "postcolonial world." This is sometimes true, in my opinion - it's too easy to get carried away with master narratives in general. I don't think it's really wise to bring the exact same interpretive tools to societies that exist half way across the world from each other and expect to make any informed observations.

Anyone with an interest in postcolonial literature has to be vigilante about this. Are there really common impulses and instincts among writers who are produced by colonial or postcolonial societies? On many occasions, it has appeared to me that there are at least a few.

It might say something about contemporary literary studies that my first real contact with Albert Camus of Algeria was through Edward Said's groundbreaking book Culture and Imperialism. Said, although generous as usual, is pretty adamant about what sort of space he thinks Camus should occupy within postcolonial discourse. A good deal of his discussion of French imperialism is devoted to revealing Camus's "extraordinarily belated, in some ways incapacitated colonial sensibility..."

I was so fascinated by Said's take on Camus's most well-known work, The Stranger, that I had to find a copy to add to my library. In Said's view, the common readings of The Stranger as a reflection of 20th century "Western consciousness" doesn't really account for the complexities of the colonial Algerian society from which it arose.

I'd imagine that postcolonial theory has completely shifted the context in which Camus is read. A little online research reveals that as an author and a public intellectual, he is more contested today than he ever was during his lifetime.

Here's what Edward J Hughes has to say in his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Camus:

"...Camus’s Europeanness and more particularly his Frenchness was in an important sense atypical, skewed by the fact that he was born into the working-class poor of colonial Algeria, thereby joining the ranks of the so-called petits colons or small-time colonisers. This marginal position - adrift not only from metropolitan France but also from the French colonial bourgeoisie who ruled Algeria and an under-class of native Algerians whose plight he nevertheless highlighted – was to remain central to his sense of identity..."

"...As a contested social site, Algeria was to provide the setting for the unfolding of complex cultural tensions that manifest themselves in Camus’s own life, in his public pronouncements and positions and in his ﬁctional creations. Signiﬁcantly it was speciﬁcally as a French Algerian that he chose to designate himself when thanking the Nobel Committee for their recognition of his work."

My point in highlighting that passage is not to clear Camus of the charges made by Edward Said. Camus's self-identification as an Algerian does not answer all the questions we might have about his context within the French colonial tradition. It's worth remembering that it is the contested status of Camus's native space that gives his writing its energy, and that his own position within that space is absolutely important to understanding him, and his politics.

Politics is indeed where Camus seems to fail as an Algerian writer (or a writer from Algeria, if you prefer). This doesn't seem that surprising to me. Settler culture has its own literary voices within the Caribbean, with similar political failings, but the North African case strikes me as different in fundamental ways. While Camus dedicated much of his early career to criticizing the policies of metropolitan France in Algeria, he could not conceive of any anti-colonial position. When French Algerian society began to crack under the pressure of its colonial flaws, Camus clung to the idea of reform. Edward J Hughes writes:

"Faced with these events [escalating colonial violence and emerging nationalism], Camus appeared unable to appreciate that colonial structures themselves were fundamental to the problem. Wedded to a policy of benign colonial assimilation, he believed that the solution lay in the implementation of democratic French republican structures..."

"...In the longer term and particularly in the mid to late 1950s with the Algerian War of Independence in full spate, Camus remained fundamentally ill equipped to adapt to the nascent postcolonialism in the country of his birth. Indeed, he failed to give any credence to the logic of anti-colonialism."

Now, I want to be clear that Camus's political failings were probably the only likely outcome of his particular historical moment. In 1950s Algeria or France, a French-Algerian anti-colonial perspective would probably have been a marginal one. But while the leading Francophone intellectuals (especially Sartre and Fanon) were comfortable with supporting Algerian nationalism, it's notable that Camus was not. This colonial anxiety surfaces in much of his fiction, including The Stranger with its famously detached protagonist Mersault. It's useful, once again, to quote Edward J Hughes:

"...notwithstanding Meursault’s stay-at-home, petit colon ways, for decades many readers saw in Meursault not, to put it crudely, a speciﬁc by-product of European colonial rule in North Africa but rather a largely innocent, indeed martyr-like ﬁgure falling foul of an unjust, Absurd world."

Camus himself died young, so it's unclear whether his political positions would have ever developed into something resembling anti-colonialism. It seems more likely that the events through which he lived would have caused him to become increasingly reactionary on the subject of Algeria. The work he produced during his lifetime, however, should probably be approached with an understanding of the inequalities and conflicts that colonial societies naturally generate. Would an Arab Algerian say the same? I'm not sure, but this passage from The Cambridge Companion to Camus may demonstrate that Camus, while sometimes on the wrong-side of his era's politics, was certainly not unaffected by colonial power systems:

"It is an irony that in 1957 as Camus was achieving worldwide recognition as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, he was becoming increasingly isolated from his fellow writers in France. Neither his anti-communism nor his refusal to back the cause of Algerian nationalism had made him popular with those who set the tone in Parisian intellectual circles at that time. His famous but awkward remark made to an Algerian interlocutor in Stockholm ... (‘I believe in justice, but will defend my mother before justice’) – dealt a ﬁnal blow to his already damaged reputation as a progressive intellectual."

A New Discussion of American National Myth in the Caribbean Review of Books

2011-10-02T17:23:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like I am being lazy when it comes to my interaction with The Caribbean Review of Books. I often find myself essentially reviewing other peoples’ reviews rather than offering my own original commentary. This may seem like a strange way to go about things, and I hope I’m not stepping on anybody’s toes. I learn more from the CRB than almost any other publication, and at the very least I hope my engagement assures the editors that a broad spectrum of people in the region are paying attention.

The article that caught my attention this month is Brendan de Caires’s review of Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom by the Jamaican political scientist and Brown University professor Anthony Bogues. De Caires describes the book as a collection of lectures that Bogues has given on American national myths, and he indicates that the collection is particularly concerned with the the rhetoric of exceptionalism:

“Anyone who recalls the theological tone of the Bush Neocons - eager to democratise the Arab mind with judicious doses of “shock and awe” and the timely suspension of habeas corpus, due process, and torture conventions - will immediately grasp the point of Anthony Bogues’s skeptical analysis of the myth of American exceptionalism.”

I suspect that I won't ever forget these things. I happened to move to the states during the George W. Bush years, right around the time that discussions of imperialism were starting to surface in mainstream American commentary. It was an altogether strange experience for me since I had come from a place where the historical ambiguities of American expansion were simply a fact of life. Did it take the Iraq war to reawaken the American psyche to some of the darker imperialist tendencies embedded in its national myths?

I’m naturally going to be an unreliable source on some of these matters. Widespread ambivalence towards our political condition is one of the things that complicates any criticism of the United States in both Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. I've come to the conclusion that there can be no binary thinking on these issues. The colonizer-colonized oppositional model has become unfashionable for a reason. The gray areas within these power systems are where a whole lot of people live the entirety of their lives. Which is not the same as saying that new forms of oppression don't exist.

With that said, I’m always excited to see Caribbean discussions of American hegemony because I feel it might be one subject where my voice may be useful, or at least interesting to other people in the region. When it comes to the US Virgin Islands perspective, I think that St. Thomian writer Tiphanie Yanique has been doing a great job of expressing some of the territory’s contradictions. Here’s what she said in a recent issue of Caribbean Beat:

“Most Virgin Islanders, myself included, have a very complicated relationship to our Americanness. When we talk about “Americans”, we are never talking about ourselves. Still we benefit from an American passport and from many of the other privileges of American citizenship. Barack Obama is our president.

Ultimately, however, we think about ourselves as Caribbean people, and our history, location, and culture clearly situate us in the Caribbean. At the same time, we don’t know much about the rest of the Caribbean. At least, not my generation. We didn’t learn much about our region in schools. We had to find other ways to access the rest of the Caribbean.”

I haven’t really gotten a chance to have an in depth discussion about this issue with Ms. Yanique - just a really brief e-mail exchange once - and so I don’t know how she would feel about hearing that I experience these tensions in a similar way. Clearly we occupy different spaces within our community - but this American/Caribbean uncertainty is definitely something we share. And to be clear, I am not naïve about the fact that I carry within me the flaws and blind spots of my particular space in the USVI either.

The national narrative of the United States has often left people from the US Virgin Islands out, and so it’s easy for us to see some of the contradictions within our experience. How can anyone from the US Virgin Islands take American exceptionalism completely seriously when the territory’s history includes the struggle against an autocratic and imperial naval government from 1917 to 1931? How can non-voting U.S. citizens view the office of the president as completely democratic? When the new American congress took office in 2011, they unceremoniously stripped our non-voting delegate of her recently-given right to vote within congressional committee (see here). I don’t want to give the impression that I am on an anti-American screed - The US federal government has paid for much of my education and provided disaster relief food at key times in my life. And I am certainly not denigrating any specific individuals. I am simply saying that U.S. Virgin Islands perspectives are not always in line with any myth of American democratic exceptionalism.

I remember a moment in 2009, shortly after President Obama had signed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, that I saw a news story on CNN that seemed to embody much of the miscommunication between the US and the US Virgin Islands. It was a story about stimulus funds being given to the Virgin Islands in order to help improve our infrastructure. CNN had predictably titled the story “Stimulus in Paradise.” My jaw dropped as the reporter proceeded to interrogate Governor deJongh about whether Virgin Islanders were really Americans and thus deserving of federal funds. The governor handled the situation diplomatically by saying that Virgin Islanders have been part of the American Republic for longer than some states. He didn't mention that this relationship has at times been uncomfortable for segments of the Virgin Islands community. The reporter proceeded to ask how it was possible that "paradise" could possibly need any federal aid. And this exchange actually aired on the supposedly non-ideologically-aligned American news network...

So, I think I was talking about a book review somewhere in here, right? Now that my own point of view has been more clearly expressed, I feel I can discuss de Caires’s recent review of Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom. Tellingly, de Caires emphasizes author Anthony Bogues’s desire to position his writings outside the standard discourse of cultural critics on the American Left. De Caires notes:

“[Bogues] stresses, however that he is ‘not concerned with the cut and thrust of the Bush bio-political settlement and its unraveling.’ but intends to reflect on ‘the character of American hegemony and to ask: what does it say about power?’”

I suspect that one of the reasons for this distancing is that Bogues sees American liberalism as complicit in the overall system of US power, even as it formed the opposition to the more rhetorically-imperialist Neocons of the Bush era. This may also demonstrate how fine a line he must walk. How does a Caribbean academic, writing about US power from Brown University, distinguish himself from the many critics of American exceptionalism that work within US universities? What insights does he have as a Caribbean person that might benefit the discussion?

De Caires's focus in his review seems to be on those criticisms of American national myth that are shared by African-Americans, indigenous people, and other minority groups in the United States. He sums up an important part of Bogues's argument as follows:

“Seen from the other side of the plantation fence, neither the Founding Fathers nor the democracy they so eloquently constructed seem as benevolent or philosophically coherent as tradition would have us believe.”

I don’t think this is meant to be a polemic against those particular men and the historical position they occupied - which would be rather useless to most Caribbean people today (Alexander Hamilton's West Indian ambiguities notwithstanding). I see Bogues's point as more of a criticism of the tendency to mythologize national history, which I guess is more of an inherent flaw within nationalism than any uniquely American phenomenon. It only becomes important in the case of the United States due to that nation’s incredible global reach and the way it sometimes denies its imperial pedigree. De Caires writes:

“Bogues suggests that this original sin - racism - haunts subsequent manifestations of the Republic and informs a recurrent pattern of ignoring other people, especially the powerless, when making grand statements about the destiny of liberty’s empire. Bogues glosses Tocqueville’s reference to an “empire of democracy” as a good description of a political system that believes it possesses the “single universal truth under which human beings should live.”

Caribbean writing on the United States is always interesting in my view. As a region, the Caribbean is uniquely positioned historically and geographically to illuminate issues of imperial myth. The question of American exceptionalism still seems to inform much of the political discourse in the United States on both the right and the left, so I think it's fair game to address. It’s worth keeping in mind that every expansive power in history was convinced that it was expanding for exceptional reasons.

I like this line from the poem "Caribbean Quatrains" by Guy Stiles:

Since any empire is out of the question the best
thing for us is to slowly expand within ourselves.

ARC Magazine - Issue 3

2011-09-14T11:43:00.000-07:00

A very busy September has thus far kept me from reviewing the latest issue of ARC magazine, which I was happy to receive in the mail a few weeks ago. Now that I have a moment, I'd like to share my thoughts.

I've been thinking lately about what draws me towards integrationist, pan-Caribbean projects like ARC. The choices I have made in my life so far have brought me (hesitantly) to the United States, where my "difference" often goes unrecognized. Although I am certain I will never feel American in the mainland sense of the word, I also feel that my voice has definite limits within a Caribbean discourse. This is, of course, a Caribbean anxiety.

So why does ARC matter - at least to me? I have a strong conviction that we - as people of the Caribbean - must make all possible efforts at standing together. What is it that unites our experiences? What issues are we facing together as a region?

I think that Jane Bryce puts it well in her essay from Globalization, Diaspora, and Caribbean Popular Culture when she writes that the 21st century Caribbean has largely become:

"...an arena for the playing out of other people's fantasies. In the process, the region itself is emptied of meaning, becoming, instead, another luxury commodity, an 'incarnated sign' promising fulfillment of a void encountered elsewhere."

Many of us have experienced this uncomfortable situation in some way. It is not being anti-tourism or isolationist to question where these perceptions of our home as "a luxury commodity" have come from. The need to define ourselves in ways of our own choosing seems as urgent as ever. And we have more tools and understanding to do so than ever before!

Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins, the founders of ARC, know this. They open the third issue of ARC with this understanding:

"This isn't about breaking, this is about valuing the space we inhabit, the work we do, this is about understanding our flaws and deficiencies and working towards greater integration , excellence and healing..."

"...And we now realize all of this has little to do with art and a lot to do with faith, permission, and patience."

I agree. Art remains the means by which ARC is choosing to further our healing process.

My immediate perception of Issue 3 is that it is taking the magazine further down a path of assertive cosmopolitanism. I don't mean that in a negative sense. Cosmopolitanism is real Caribbean tradition, and some might argue it is one of the region's best. But we also must remain vigilante that our transnational ideas do not lose the local particularities that make them most relevant at home. It's an old problem and I sense that ARC and its contributors are searching for new solutions.

References to this cosmopolitanism can be found throughout issue 3 of ARC. This theme seems more ubiquitous than it was in the first two issues. In the lead article, Charles Campbell, critiquing a piece by Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan, notes that:

“The project’s subtitle, “it might not be such a bad idea if I never went home”, alludes to the stress of re-entry and difficulty of returning home after one experiences a foreign space.”

It’s a comment that speaks to the fears and diasporic melancholy of many people from our region - where so many have personal relationships with various states of migration. The suggestion seems to be that Caribbean worldliness does not come without a sense of nostalgia for what is lost. We cannot go "home" because "home" is the sum of our experiences. It only takes a few pages until the artist’s statement of photographer Mark King of Barbados proves Campbell right:

“The United States, the Caribbean, and Europe have all been places I called home. This varied international experience informs my approach. In addition to the interpersonal relationships that have formed during my travels, various elements from each experience have greatly influenced my photography, creating pairings that appear to be quite far removed from each other, but also play on the concept of nostalgia.”

In another article, Andil Gosine interviews the similarly transnational Richard Fung, who’s new documentary project has lead him to see roti as a sort of metaphor for the whole Caribbean experience. Fung says:

“…Here in Toronto, the Indians from the subcontinent are copying the Caribbean-style rotis because they know it’s popular; there’s a Caribbean roti shop copying the Indians copying the Caribbeans. So all of these hybrids in all of these places are really fascinating; they make you lose attachment to any sense of ‘an original’ or any sense of authenticity, any sense of ultimate truth that one can arbitrate against.”

It is not just culinary practice that Fung is referring to here. It is a stand against any cultural essentialism or master narratives that may be applied to our region.

There are many amazing artists featured in Issue 3, but a highlight for me is the feature on Lavar Munroe of the Bahamas. Of particular interest to me is critic Dr. Ja Jahannes’s observation that Munroe’s recent work seems to be influenced by magical realism. It made me remember something I read recently about the political uses of magical realism in the Caribbean. Can it free the imagination? If the reality of the region has often been one of imposed definitions of the Caribbean subject, does standard realism carry this inherent problem? I get the sense that Munroe’s use of magical imagery is part of what is giving his work its liberating energies. His art seems to “destabilize” in the best sense of the word.

Darryl Boodan’s conversation with Trinidadian performance artist Michelle Isava is another thought-provoking addition to ARC Issue 3. The way Isava speaks is striking to me - it seems to be the language of someone who has been hurt by her island. Her voice is the uprooted voice of the Caribbean outsider. Isava, a first-generation Trinidadian from a Venezuelan family, speaks of her experience in a way that is somehow familiar to me:

“…I want to be seen as both because that is what I am, but even more valid is that I am neither. I will never be fully.”

What ARC continues to do is gather together a collection of Caribbean artists in one place whose voices both contradict and harmonize with each other. This will help us to see that the fragmentations that have frustrated us in the past may be responsive to calls for unity.

I’ll leave you with a statement by Jean Francois Manicom of Guadeloupe which can be found in Issue 3 of Arc:

“The West Indies is a privileged place for the observation of dragons, with or because of its history - special, troubled, and violent. It’s brutal weather, it’s present search for identity, it’s people so special, from all walks of life, combining all the blood, carrying all legacies, all religions, and condemned to build a history and a future on tiny landscapes in the middle of the sea. The Caribbean is a good place to observe the migration and great movements of the main families of dragons.”

Buy your copy of issue 3 here.

A UVI Discussion on Caribbean Arts (1996)

2011-09-03T15:35:00.000-07:00

I was extremely happy to learn that the University of the Virgin Islands has opened up a satellite program on St. John this year. It should be a step in the right direction. In my view, St. John needs more on-island institutions that will produce our future leaders and encourage activism.

My perception is that over the last few decades, St. John has been generally defenseless against the incredibly powerful forces that have sought to reshape the narrative and image of the place. In my opinion, more local ownership of the economy must be encouraged.

Growing up on St. John, I had many questions about issues that were not much discussed there. What does it mean to be from an unincorporated territory? What are the complications of our history? Are we a colony? How does our case differ from other colonial situations? What are the options available to us in looking towards the future? What are the divisions in our community that will have to be addressed? The list goes on. Recently, I had a conversation with an old schoolmate of mine who is seeking to become a community leader. He expressed that it might be too late for our generation to change things because we have already been through our socialization process (family, school, ect.). I agree with him to the extent that change is difficult when so many of us have been shaped by a broken system, but I think that we all have the responsibility to make our voices heard.

The University of the Virgin Islands may have a lot to contribute to St. John in all sorts of ways. I know that certain helpful discussions have been facilitated by UVI in the past on St. Thomas and St. Croix, but St. John has often been left out despite the fact that it may be the island that most needs advocacy and attention (I am biased, I know).

I'd like to share one of those discussions on this blog. It's a dialogue on the politics and production of Caribbean arts - an interest of mine lately - that was published in UVI's "The Caribbean Writer" in 1996. The artists involved were David Edgecombe (director of Reichhold Center for the arts and playwright), Marvin Williams (writer and professor), Maria Henle (artist), Curliss Solomon (choreographer and dancer), and Erika Waters (writer, professor, and moderator).

The topics discussed include the exilic energies of Caribbean art:

[Marvin Williams] "It sounds paradoxical, but distance for me clarifies and intensifies what I think I feel or what I think I see. When I'm here [in the Virgin Islands] I write less. If I go away for a weekend, I can write about home with more intensity and clarity."

Colonial dynamics:

[David Edgecombe] "...It's really and truly a colonial reality; I just read a book about the problems in Australia, and they were identical to the problems I had growing up in a Caribbean island as a colony of Britain [Montserrat]. But because it's pervasive, is it right?"

"I went to a concert at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas two or three years ago. The concert was called the "Kingdom of Ice." When you walked in the theater, there was snow on the ground and there were icicles—and the highlight of the concert was snow falling from the roof! The only song remotely Caribbean was "Guava Berry" and that was played at the end of the concert while the people were walking out! Isn't there something wrong with this?"

Nostalgia:

[Marvin Williams] "...the change in topography, in landscape, always gets me thinking—how does that affect people? And maybe because memory is such a big part of what I do or what I rely on, when the actual landscape changes, it forces a kind of transformation of memory, or forces to the surface a kind of nostalgia and a critique of apparently ravished landscape. But whether or not landscape has changed, that is where I go to write "home."

Representation:

[Maria Henle] "I find that the majority of artists "quaint-ify" the Caribbean experience, which I once did myself. When I was in my teens, I did these primitive paintings and populated them with small black figures, and if I still painted that way, I would be doing well financially, but I have a lot of personal objection to that as an artist now, I've talked to West Indians and Continentals about it, about their feelings of depicting the Caribbean that way. Some people really have an objection to it, and other people seem oblivious to it. They don't see what I see and how offensive it is to take any group of people and basically make them objects."

And even some optimism for the future:

[David Edgecombe] "If we can get a cross-fertilization going on in the Virgin Islands, given the variety of races and people we have, I think, then we would end up with a truly vibrant and dynamic, unique art form. Whether it's the visual or the performing arts, I would like to see us try to make that possible. Get the juices flowing, get the dynamics flowing!"

If discussions of this nature were happening at the University of Virgin Islands 15 years ago, it seems to me that the time should be ripe for us to reap the benefits. At the very least, we should keep the dialogue going and expand it for new generations - and maybe even for the youth of St. John. All of them; Imagine that.

Nagesh Rao on Nationalism in The Redundancy of Courage

2011-08-29T19:11:00.000-07:00

An essay from Volume 1, Issue 1 of "Postcolonial Text" caught my eye recently, and I think it may be worth sharing here. In “Resistance and Representation: Postcolonial Fictions of Nations in Crisis”, Professor Ngesh Rao examines how two novels, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry and The Redundancy of Courage by Timothy Mo have addressed issues of anti-colonial resistance within a fairly recent context (both books were published in the 1990s).

My commentary on this essay will not be an attempt to summarize Rao’s entire argument. I’d encourage anyone who is interested in this topic to read the full text here. The main point of interest for me in Rao’s analysis is his particular reading of The Redundancy of Courage - a novel that he says has been largely ignored by postcolonial critics due to its seemingly outdated, and one might say optimistic, views on nationalism. He writes:

“[The Redundancy of Courage] seems, at one level, to be the ideal postcolonial text. Its representation of a fragmented, multiply-determined subject; its valorization of the standpoint of a diasporic consciousness; its destabilizing of narrative truth through the use of irony; all these would seem to confirm ideas and themes that have come to be taken as axiomatic by postcolonial theory.”

And:

“I argue that the novel resists incorporation into a postcolonial problematic because of its affirmative vision of national liberation.”

Since Rao’s essay appears in an academic journal, his language here may seem complicated in the same sense that makes postcolonial theory somewhat inaccessible at times. To put things a little simpler, it might be said that while The Redundancy of Courage seems typical of postcolonial literature in its subject matter, the novel nevertheless does not fall neatly into the political boundaries that have been agreed upon by contemporary postcolonial theorists. The problem lies with what some might interpret as the novel’s endorsement of nationalist liberation, which postcolonialists tend to be wary of for several reasons.

The first reason for this wariness is the same one expressed by most reasonable opponents of nationalism everywhere - that is a disgust with the ethnic chauvinism and potential violence that are often bundled in with the national project. The second reason is nationalism’s association with a particular strain of European culture and history, and its frequent failures to change things in the postcolony. And the third, and maybe the most important, source of this wariness found everywhere among postcolonial intellectuals is the fact that many of them have been personally excluded from localized nationalisms for various reasons (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, diaspora), so they have had to conceptualize an anti-colonial stance that is also anti-nationalist.

In my view, the only problem with this stance lies in the fact that although nationalism does indeed seem reactionary and out of date in the 21st century, many places in the world today still do not have a full measure of self-determination. How is this to be achieved without the motivating force of a national movement? A recent blog entry I wrote on Patrick Chamoiseau of Martinique addresses this issue, but provides no concrete answers. Chamoiseau expresses that regional sovereignty is a necessity, but that he doesn't necessarily think that it depends on building a nation-state. So, how might we envision this future? This is a very relevant problem in 2011. I’m not saying that some alternative to nationalism isn’t in the process of emerging, or won’t emerge, but I just don’t see that it is available to many people yet. This is the main reason I am interested in Ngesh Rao’s analysis of The Redundancy of Courage.

As Rao points out:

“In The Redundancy of Courage, the crisis is that of a nation under neocolonial oppression: the crisis of a nation without its own state.”

But how can this be addressed? Many postcolonial theorists, disillusioned with nationalisms in their own countries (independent or otherwise), are typically ambivalent. Rao writes:

“Against the certainties of a now-discredited nationalism, postcolonialism privileges the radical uncertainties and ambivalences of the margin. As Homi Bhabha puts it in The Location of Culture, I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement that confounds any profound or authentic sense of a national culture or organic intellectual”

Postcolonial theorists are always quick to point out that the cultural authenticity on which nationalism depends does not exist in actuality. Or as Rao puts it:

“…The (postcolonial) nation is neither unitary nor homogenous, but is actually the stage on which the social contradictions of class, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and language are played out. Analogously, the world of the postcolonial novel is itself a radically fractured space, where different social groups contend for power and control, both of their world and of the narrative itself. Postcolonial novels thus often highlight the contradictions inherent in the national imaginary”

But could there ever be a national imaginary that includes a genuine acceptance of cultural difference within itself? This is the sort of nationalism that Ngesh Rao argues is being formulated by Timothy Mos in The Redundancy of Courage.

“…the novel considers the national dimension of liberation as a consequence of the contingencies of anti-colonial struggle, and not of a prior commitment to the nation-form. In this arena the national becomes a name not for an ethnic chauvinism, but for its opposite: a solidarity with others involved in the same struggle.”

As I stated earlier, an in-depth discussion of Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy of Courage is beyond what I am attempting here. Ngesh Rao provides a summary of the plot in the essay I linked to above. But I find it enormously interesting that Rao locates within that novel an impulse towards an anti-colonial nationalism driven by common sentiment rather than cultural essentialism. Rao argues that these nationalist leanings caused the book to be overlooked for its “outdated” politics. But to those who still live their day-to-day lives within a neo-colonial dynamic, maybe these politics are more relevant than the book’s relative obscurity would suggest.

Photo Post #22 - Family Archives

2011-08-28T15:03:00.000-07:00

At the St. John Inauguration, 1954.
Photo from The Daily News

More U.S. Virgin Islands Literature: Marvin E. Williams

2011-08-28T13:41:00.000-07:00

I’ve written on this blog a few times that I'd like to expand my knowledge of U.S. Virgin Islands writers. My relationship with the territory’s authors remains more distant than it should be, but I don’t think this is atypical for someone from St. John. When I was in my late teens I started reading more Caribbean literature, which was not taught at my high school, and it helped me to have a clearer understanding of what was going on around me, not to mention what was going on in my own head. Even so, writing by Virgin Islanders remained difficult for me to find. Unfortunately, when I was growing up my knowledge of the fiction associated with the territory basically consisted of Night of the Silent Drums and Don’t Stop the Carnival (both written by authors from the states - and with important problems). While I don’t take the view that those two books need to be banished from any readings of U.S. Virgin Islands literature (in fact, they can probably tell us a lot about how the USVI is perceived in the states), I have been trying to educate myself more on the territory’s homegrown writers, who should receive more attention in my opinion. I know they are out there.

Tiphanie Yanique’s recent successes have been encouraging to me, and my accidental discovery of Gus Edwards was a nice surprise. I am still trying to track down more on the older generation of writers like Adolph Sixto and Hubert Harrison. But what about other works of contemporary fiction and poetry? I am eager to find more.

One of the writers who has been highly recommended to me is Marvin E. Williams, who was a professor at UVI and a prolific author and poet until his untimely death in 2010. I was surprised to learn that I had actually read one of his short stories, “Ah Liberated Man”, years ago in the 1994 collection New Writings from the Caribbean. I remember his story being one of the ones that I enjoyed the most in that collection. I also recently learned that Williams edited Yellow Cedars Blooming: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Virgin Islands Poetry in 1998. I need to find a copy of this book.

One of Williams’s own poems that I was able to locate online is entitled “Geoffrey Wondered.” I think it’s a great poem - an interrogation of St. Croix’s past, a grappling with colonial and plantation legacies, and it considers the reversal of historical voiceless-ness that has transpired on UVI's grounds. As Geoffrey and the narrator walk around the university campus on St. Croix they come across the grave of Peter Rist, the Danish planter who once owned the land the campus was built on, but who is now all but forgotten. The narrator attempts to question Rist from the present, in which his plantation has become a university. Williams writes:

"so I decided to speak to Peter across the years,
braced for the laughter or the tears, for
an accounting that would satisfy our questions."

Who was this man on whose property the university now stands? An evil man? A gentle man? A man caught up in an ugly colonial dynamic, or an irredeemable agent of oppression? Is there any way to know him? Is there any way to reconcile the present with the past? Williams continues:

"A university of ex-slaves has confiscated your plantation; your
great house has been renamed Student Affairs, your
cane fields have expanded into a dorm, your

slave quarters have been gentrified into classrooms, your
kitchen heats and feeds The Caribbean Writer, your
slaves' progeny, avoiding books, are now students; your

embalmers call me bitter, insulting, cruel;
you are more honest than your ancestors who to exonerate
themselves exonerate you; so, I wonder, how do you feel?"

Williams’s narrator wants to hear a human voice from this faceless planter buried on the UVI campus. He has an intense desire for answers. Yet at the same time he realizes that Rist is no longer in control of the narrative.

While reading “Geoffrey Wondered” I was reminded of the closing lines of Derek Walcott’s early poem “Ruins of a Great House” in which the narrator’s anger towards the past is tempered by his capacity for human generosity:

“All in compassion ends
So differently from what the heart arranged:
'as well as if a manor of thy friend’s…'"

I think that Marvin Williams might have understood this feeling well. I’ll be sure to search for more of his work in the near future.

Photo courtesy of the St. Croix Source.

Who was Pissarro?

2011-08-22T17:10:00.000-07:00

My thanks go out to the bloggers at Repeatingislands.com, who posted an entry on August 4th that has given me a reason to once again think about the St. Thomas painter Camille Pissarro. The entry provides a link to a recent New York Times article by Holland Cotter entitled "Populating the Landscape with Idealism", a preview of the new Pissarro exhibit that will be opening this October in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

I'm aware that my description of Pissarro as a "St. Thomas painter" may be jarring to some - he is, after all, best known for his association with the French artists who came to be known as the Impressionists, and to whom he acted as a mentor. But I mean this very sincerely. I am convinced that Pissarro should be thought of as a Caribbean painter, and - with Thomas Hylland Eriksen's words on creolization and creativity in mind - I'd like to make the argument that he should perhaps be considered an artist associated with creolization.

Is this Caribbean reading often applied to Pissarro's work? I'm not an art historian so I really can't say. But the few times I have had the privilege of seeing his paintings in person, little information has been available on his background. Even some galleries and stores that I have seen feature his paintings on St. Thomas only deal with his early Caribbean-themed work as if it were simply the subject matter - and not also the man - who belongs to the region. In fact, most writing I've seen on Pissarro places him in the general context of "outsider art." That phrase may sound familiar - in this case I think it's a problem of not being able to make sense of the his experience. Obviously, not all "outsiders" are the same. The Caribbean outsider, born with uncomfortable relationships to foreign colonial power, local nationalist forces, or both, deserves to be taken on his or her own terms.

What's encouraging about Holland Cotter's New York Times article is that it seems to offer the reader an opening, however small, to bring a Caribbean interpretation to the table. Although Cotter never refers to Pissarro as belonging to a Caribbean tradition in so many words, he does try to locate the source of Pissarro's artistic and personal philosophies, and the results are suggestive - at least to me. Cotter writes:

"Pissarro was, by temperament and belief, a welcomer — of people, ideas..."

"...More than many of his colleagues, Pissarro understood what it felt like to come from outside, uncertain of the rules. He was born thousands of miles away from Europe in 1830, on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, then a Danish colony. His father was a dry-goods merchant from Bordeaux, his mother a Caribbean-born daughter of French parents. Both sides of the family were Sephardic Jews. Pissarro himself chose to remain a Danish citizen all his life."

The implications of this seem pretty clear, and probably not very surprising. But I am especially interested in that final sentence, which may seem insignificant to some. It begs the question, why would Pissarro, a man of French descent, choose to remain a Danish citizen after he had migrated to France to participate in the Parisian art scene? Speaking as a Virgin Islander who has lived in various places, I think I recognize the impulse. Was Pissarro's retention of Danish citizenship a political act? In the absence of sovereignty for the Danish West Indies was it the best thing he could do to say, "I'm from St. Thomas, and I am proud"? Over the last few years I've been witness to many different Virgin Islanders' experiences of migration to the United States, and what I've noticed is that their VI flags tend not to come down.

Pissarro grew up in the cosmopolitan port city of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas. As a child he spoke three different languages. He developed his artistic style everywhere from Venezuela to Haiti. His early experiences of a multicultural Caribbean gave him a generosity towards people, a trait that became central to his artistic vision. Cotter writes:

"The result, in painting after painting, was a vision of the world as a kind of extended family, or kinship network, with larger circles of relationships rippling out from Pisarro's own domestic unit...."

"Pissarro’s idealism was insistent. Because he wanted his projection of a better future to be realized, he tried to work it out in the present, through his own practice of ethical generosity, firm in the face of political censorship (he was closely watched by the French police because of his anarchist ties), anti-Semitism (he forgave this in Degas) and professional isolation as an artist who was neither born French nor had French citizenship (a status he shared with his friend Mary Cassatt)."

"Yet the stranger in him, the foreigner looking in, led him to acknowledge the underside of that vision. In late 1880s he made a series of 30 ink drawings illustrating the brutalities of urban capitalist society. The album, titled “Turpitudes Sociales” (“Social Disgraces”), have the bold, crude look of newspaper cartoons and were made for two of his nieces by way of political instruction. Nothing else by him is like them, and they haven’t been exhibited in a museum until now."

In Cotter's descriptions of Pissarro we may be able to recognize the openness of the creole - with echoes of Glissant's words on "Relation". We may be able catch a glimpse of the suffering creole in exile, protesting the dominant systems of power. And from Pisarro's early work, we may learn that his first loves were the people and landscapes of the Caribbean. It is my opinion that a reading of Pissarro's work that doesn't take these things into account is incomplete. Maybe some day the international museums where Camille Pissarro's greatest paintings hang will refer to him not as French, but as a Caribbean painter.

2 Women Chatting by the Sea, St. Thomas
by Camille Pissarro (1856)

Young Pissarro with his teacher, Fritz Melbye in St. Thomas, DWI.

Photo Post #21

2011-08-19T19:34:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Film and Neo-Colonialism

2011-08-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

Confession: I am a media studies major, so naturally I've found myself in a few film classes over the years. Is there any artistic medium that raises more ugly questions of representation and power than film (...and video)? Making a movie, even an amateur short, is often a hugely expensive and time-consuming process. The sort of background that you have to come from in order to even be interested in this sort of self-expression, or to find yourself in a university film class, puts you in a hugely privileged category globally-speaking. Sure, I'll acknowledge that writers also need to occupy a special position in order to get published and find an audience, but a pen and some paper strike me as relatively democratic tools by comparison.

My point in bringing this up is not to delve too deeply into a subject that would require years of research to adequately address. But I do want to write about the neo-colonial problems of the film-industry briefly because it's been on my mind lately thanks to some blog entries I've seen over the last few days.

My own perspective is as follows: I come from a place that has an uneasy relationship with mass media, and I often find myself uncomfortable with the values I find expressed by movies and television - especially when it comes to representations of "the tropics." Just turn on the TV in the United States - how many advertisements alone use tropical or Caribbean imagery to portray a sort of unpopulated area of "nothingness" that only exists to offer "relaxation" or "escape"? This sort of thing is old news, and maybe I shouldn't take it too seriously, but I have to admit it still doesn't sit well with me. Predictably, the first result produced from a google search of "Caribbean film" relates to Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" - a fun movie, but oh well....

Superficial representations of the Caribbean in metropolitan media can be destructive - that much is obvious. But what about cases where the intentions are good? What happens when metropolitan film-makers, for instance, want to go beyond the tropes of the tropical vacation picture or pirate epic? Are they disqualified? Are the issues of power and representation that arise too great to ignore? The always informative website Repeatingislands.com recently featured a blog entry by Jermain Ostiana of Curaçao that takes on this issue.

Ostiana is very critical of a new film being produced by Dutch and American film-makers about Tula, a national hero in Curaçao and the leader of a 1795 freedom struggle. In Ostiana's view this amounts to depriving Afro-Curaçaoan people of their right to tell Tula's story. This wouldn't be an issue if the conditions existed for a more balanced dialogue. But Ostiana feels a Dutch narrative about Tula would silence Curaçaoan narratives that cannot (yet) be expressed in a big-budget film project. He addresses the film-makers:

"You have to wait your turn until the descendants themselves have created a solid infrastructure where they can empower their communities, develop their talents via art, sport, music, theater and film. You can't commercialize our ancestor's history bypassing the descendants rights and think you are doing us a favor."

"[In] 2011 there is no film school here, if you want to learn cinematography you will have to go study abroad. Only the middle and upperclass or connection to them without any regular working class pressure has the privilege to choose and see the importance of a film study. Most underprivileged or working class folks will not end up in a cinematography class."

Just ten years ago, people who were unhappy with projects like the proposed Tula movie would have had less of a chance to protest and reach a large audience. I think it's encouraging that blogging and digital-media have given more people a voice than ever before. Ostiana is sharing his opinions on something he is passionate about - neo-colonialism in the film industry - and a lot of people (including me) are listening.

Around the same time that I encountered Ostiana's blog post, I read an update to Caribbean Blog International by Rebecca Theodore of Dominica entitled "What is 'The Help': A Caribbean Perspective." I think she is looking at the film industry from a similar perspective as Ostiana, although her subject matter is different.

I haven't seen the new film "The Help", but I know that there's been some controversy surrounding it in the U.S. - it's a story about black housekeepers in Mississippi during the civil rights era, but it was written and directed by white women. Again, it isn't that white narratives about the U.S. civil rights movement are invalid, it's just that there are few black narratives about civil rights released by Hollywood. I obviously can't have any opinion on something I haven't seen, and I'd imagine the situation is complex. But anyone who's interested in reading Ms. Theodore's thoughts on the film, which have more to to with racial narrative than regional narrative, can read them here.

What can be done about the fact that so many people feel that the international film-industry functions as a sort of reverse ventriloquy act - stealing and distorting their voices? The financial interests behind the movie business - a multi-billion dollar industry - certainly have something to do with its ability to create and control narratives. The best thing we can do for now, it seems, is create forums for voices of dissent.

I'll leave you with a trailer from the 2011 movie called "Even the Rain." As a movie-star driven flick about colonialism written by a North American and directed by a Spaniard, it is not at all disassociated from the issues of power I've just discussed, but it does address those issues in a very self-aware way. It's definitely worth watching:

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o on the Politics of Language

2011-08-14T18:17:00.000-07:00

When discussing a subject like colonial power dynamics, it can be intimidating to venture beyond the specificities of one's own experience. In a world where so many people are struggling to gain control of their own narratives, it's important to speak only for one's self. The abundance of academic theory that has been developed over the last few decades to explain the so-called "colonial experience" has shown us its inner-workings and given us the language to critique it, but it can not be used as an excuse to disregard real cultural and historical difference. I try to always keep that in mind.

This past week, a friend of mine lent me the book Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (photo courtesy of UCI). I had read a good portion of it about a year ago, but it was worthwhile to refresh my memory. The Kenyan experience of colonialism is very distinct and can't be easily compared to any colonial experience in the Americas, despite some of the similarities that we might expect. One of the chief issues facing many nations in Africa, according to Ngũgĩ, is the problem of language. As is often the case, the ways in which people express themselves in both verbal and written form becomes a political issue in the postcolonial society.

Language and dialect remain politically charged issues in the Caribbean as well, albeit in ways that can't be separated from the complexity of the Americas. The conflict generally arises in the Caribbean between European languages and their Creole counterparts. In a 2007 presentation to the St. John Historical Society, Mr. Elroy Sprauve spoke of a typically Caribbean linguistic anxiety. Robin Swank recounted the presentation in the book St. John: Life in Five Quarters:

"Mr. Sprauve recalled the linguistic insecurity imposed on the islands' children at not speaking Standard English was common during his youth, a tactic damaging to a child's psyche. This has eased in recent times. Adults, however, may still feel insecure about speaking out at a public hearing in Creole. 'Although', he smiled, 'you can certainly hear their opinions afterwards.'"

To this day, in the US Virgin Islands (as in most places) there are all sorts of messages about class and power encoded in the way an individual speaks. Beyond the traditional English/Creole divide, among young people today there is also the phenomenon referred to as "Yankin'", by which a Virgin Islander speaks not just Standard English but also with a North American accent, usually the result of living in the States for an extended period of time or attending private school. One of the places this has been most noticeable to me lately is in the music industry. Check out the 2008 radio hit, "Losin' it" by St. Thomas musical group Rock City for an example of this type of accent-shifting. The success of the guys in Rock City have made my generation of Virgin Islanders proud, but it's true that the songs they release for a VI audience tend to sound different than the ones they release for North American radio. Whatever the politics of the situation, it seems they have been able to turn their ability to sound alternatively Caribbean and North American into an asset.

There's something to be said for linguistic and dialectical fluidity, and I think it's fair to say that many Caribbean writers and musicians have embraced these aspects of their lives and used them to their advantage, choosing to write or sing in a mixture of European and Creole languages. In Ngũgĩ's Kenya, however, the literary debate surrounding language has always been different given the survival of a multitude of indigenous African languages. His book Decolonizing the Mind is adapted from a series of lectures that he gave on that subject, as well as his eventual decision to break with the Kenyan intellectual establishment and write in Gikuyu, his native tongue.

Ngũgĩ's account of a conference of African writers held in Kampala, Uganda in 1962 is very illuminating. The gathering was meant to be a sort of meeting of the minds for those emerging writers who would be the creators of a new African postcolonial literature. They were the new cultural elite. Looking back in hindsight in 1986, Ngugi sees many of the contradictions and absurdities that weren't apparent to him at the time. As he puts it:

"Even at [the writers'] most radical and pro-African position in their sentiments and articulation of problems they still took it as axiomatic that the renaissance of African cultures lay in the languages of Europe. I should know!"

What's fascinating to Ngugi is that the attendees of the conference sat down to define what exactly qualified as African literature, but never really addressed the issues that were at the root of the problem. Ngugi writes:

"The debate which followed was animated: Was [African literature] about Africa or about the African experience? Was it literature written by Africans? What about a non-African who wrote about Africa: did his work qualify as African literature? What if an African set his work in Greenland: did that qualify as African literature? Or were African languages the criteria? OK: what about Arabic, was it not foreign to Africa? What about French and English which had become African languages? What if a European wrote about Europe in an African language?..."

"...The question was never seriously asked: did what we wrote qualify as African literature? The whole area of literature and audience, and hence language as a determinant of both the national and class audience, did not really figure: the debate was more about the subject matter and racial origins and geographical habitation of the writer."

I don't think that Ngũgĩ would ever say that what he and his peers were writing was inauthentic or bad in any aesthetic sense. He simply came to the conclusion much later that there were some very real probems with the new elite writing in European languages, which basically amounted to them writing only to each other and the metroplitan gatekeepers of culture. They had produced "another hybrid tradition", which Ngũgĩ calls Afro-European literature or Euro-African literature.

Isn't this always the predicament of the postcolonial privileged class? The fascination with identity and the nationalist tendencies that are so common in the art and literature of this class are found everywhere in the postcolonial world. Ngũgĩ's (self-critical) take on it is this:

"This very lack of identity in its social and psychological make-up as a class, was reflected in the very literature it produced: the crisis of identity was assumed in that very preoccupation with definition at the Makerere [Uganda] conference. In literature as in politics it spoke as if its identity or the crisis of its own identity was that of society as a whole. The literature it produced in European languages was given the identity of African literature as if there has never been any literature in African languages."

A damning indictment, but not one that seeks to invalidate African literature written in European languages. Ngũgĩ only wants to make a critique of the continuing colonization of culture in his native Kenya. The vast size of the African continent has made it possible for him to write in an indigenous African language and therefore ally himself with the rural people whose cultures and languages remain largely untouched by colonial hybridization. Although this is not a path that is typically available to Caribbean writers, especially those from smaller islands, Ngũgĩ's decision is one that many people from the formerly colonized world face in one form or another.

Photo Post #20 - Family Archives

2011-08-12T17:19:00.001-07:00

Cruz Bay dock, 1936
Photo by George Knight

Thomas Hylland Eriksen on Creolization and Creativity

2011-08-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Third essay from 2010's The Creolization Reader that I want to look at is entitled "Creolization and Creativity." It was written by Thomas Hylland Eriksen (photo courtesy of UiO), a professor at the University of Oslo who is interested in the creative energies that seem to be unleashed by cultural instability and mixing.

The first thing to be said about Eriksen's essay is that he is using creolization terminology in exactly the way that Stephan Palmie (see here) warns of. Eriksen's perspective is a European one, and many of the examples he uses are not directly related to the traditional forms of creolization that exist in Latin America and the Caribbean. His use of the term is more metropolitan/postmodern and is primarily a reaction to the mass immigration that Europe has experienced over the last half-century, which has reshaped the continent and is not unrelated to colonialism and imperialism of course. Eriksen's audience is not exclusively a Caribbean or American one. But whether or not you agree with the basic assumptions that he is starting out with (that creolization theory can be used in Europe in a way that is apolitical and unobjectionable), he makes some interesting points regarding what many have observed about various "creolized" experiences: that they may lead to heightened creativity.

Eriksen points out that the prevailing Western European view on the subject of creative energies from the renaissance right up through the romantic era was that the most beautiful human creations resulted from experiences of purity and authenticity. This may explain why 18th and 19th century Europeans who wrote about culture in the hybrid colonies, especially the Caribbean, could only conceive of it as "nothing”, or to quote a more recent view, “mimicry.” This Western Enlightenment view of creative energy was probably always flawed, but at the very least it doesn’t account for the last few centuries of artistic practice, particularly as it relates to forms that might fall under the increasingly unstable category of “Western culture” - think jazz, cubist paintings, and the postcolonial novel in the 20th century.

I'm interested in the two writers who Eriksen chooses to examine in order to lay out the first part of his argument. Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul both seem to be risky examples for a European to use when talking about literature of creolization - both have been criticized at times for reflecting English colonialist attitudes towards India, Africa, and the Caribbean. But seeing as it is colonialism that has put these writers in their uncomfortable positions in the first place, I think we need to approach Eriksen’s argument with an open mind. It seems fair to say that the experiences that might fall under a very broad definition of traditional creolization - displacement, hybridity, uncertainty - may be what prompted both Naipaul and Rushdie to write with such passion in the first place. If we forget for only a moment the politics of creolization, I think we can all see that this is a valid point.

Of these two writers, it should be clear from other entries on this blog that Naipaul is more interesting to me personally. As a reader, it’s sometimes hard to reconcile the moments of compassion and generosity in his best novels with his often reactionary attitudes and curmudgeonly public persona. The question that’s often asked is, why does a man who is so clearly a critic of English colonialism present himself as an unrepentant Anglophile, and at times, reinforce colonialist perspectives? The answer may be that Naipaul simply has no choice. Eriksen writes:

“Naipaul’s skepticism towards contemporary celebrations of mixing and hybridity is obviously influenced by his own class experience as a boy from the periphery, whose highest aim in life consisted of being recognized by the metropolitans…

…Although he is frequently seen as not only a writer living in exile but also one writing about exile, Naipaul has never celebrated the state of exile. Indeed, he rarely uses the word itself, as it seems to impose an idea of freedom of choice upon a condition, that is displacement, which is rarely chosen, which can be tragic or at least deadly serious to millions of people.”

Here, Eriksen is using Naipaul as a foil for Salman Rushdie, who often takes a more positive view of the culturally-mixed experience, exiled or otherwise. He writes:

“Shocked by India, alienated by England, and aloof from the Caribbean, Naipaul became a writer about torn identities. Several of his mature, largely tragic novels…are about men (and a few women) who try to be something they are not, usually because they can see no other alternative. It is the dark unprivileged side of Rushdie’s brave new world…

…However, it can also be said that the tragic grandeur of Naipaul’s best books confirm an assumption, which he himself might reject, that exile and cultural hybridity are creative forces. His tragic world-view may be caused by his reading a new territory with an old map, while simultaneously realizing that the alternative to his lifelong ambivalence is not a traditional, secure identity, but a fundamentalist identity of the kind that appears precisely when one tries to enforce an old map on a new territory.”

Eriksen’s use of the word ambivalence is important. It is precisely this phenomenon that has always painted the privileged colonial and the trans-national into a corner. Multiple identities within one person are not always harmonious, and are at times opposed to each other. But as Eriksen points out, the alternative is the sort of self-simplification that is always dishonest and at times dangerous. For one of the most eloquent illuminations of this phenomenon see Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih.

Eriksen is the first to point out that he is speaking the language of exile here, and not simply creolization (although exile is a common experience of creolization as he is using the term). Is it simply migration that gives rise to these creative impulses, or is it something more complicated? Eriksen writes:

“First it has often been said that it is only by going abroad that one can hope to know…one’s own country…"

"…It may be that this explains why nationalism often has been developed among migrants or people who are otherwise marginal to their own culture…"

"…Nostalgia and longing stimulate a creative activity which can nonetheless be marked by despair and alienation.”

With this passage, Eriksen seems to have moved fully into talking about displacement in its purest form - which is not necessarily a colonial or creole phenomenon. By the time he gets into his examination of identity politics, it’s clear to me that he is talking about modern Scandinavian society - and its conflicted relationship with immigration (see recent tragic events in Norway). He wants to offer a theory grounded in the language of creolization. While this doesn’t line up with my perspective exactly, I still find it to be an interesting point of view - especially given my home's (the former Danish West Indies) historical connection with Scandinavia.

Eriksen mentions three different options that he sees as available to the modern-day immigrant: the pure identity, the hyphenated identity, and the creole identity. The pure identity is the fundamentalist path by which one essentializes oneself in the face of cultural complexity. The hyphenated identity is what Eriksen describes as an attempt to “bridge two discrete bounded categories.” And then there is the “creole” alternative, which Eriksen envisions as something else entirely:

“The third option, which I have called the creole identity, distinguishes itself from the former two in that it does not recognize the existence of pure, discrete, cultures…

…While pure identities try to keep creolization out and hyphenated identities are attempts to use two old maps to make sense of a new territory, the creole identity has discarded the old map and is in the process of drawing a new one. While fundamentalism and stagnation are dangers for the pure identities, continuous ambivalence and pressure to make new decisions are an aspect of the creole ones.”

So here we see how Eriksen connects the concepts of creolization and creativity. In his conception of the creolized identity, it is simply an unavoidable fact that creative energies will have to be unleashed to make sense of a “new territory.” There can be no other result.

While I don’t necessarily agree with all of Eriksen’s premise (which is really quite geographically specific), he nevertheless makes some intriguing and clearly-stated points about cultural mixture and creativity. If, as he puts it, the creole-identifying individual must constantly rebuild a ship already at sea, it may be a valid key to understanding the overlap in postcolonial, and even postmodern, experiences all over the globe. What may be most interesting is that Eriksen is another voice in a dialogue that seems to appeal to millions of people for perhaps as many reasons.

Lloyd Best on Decolonization

2011-07-30T14:48:00.000-07:00

I think that the late Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best is one of the most instructive people to read on the era of decolonization in the Caribbean - a time period that is fascinating to me. In 2001, a few years before his death, Best gave a speech at York University in Ontario, Canada entitled, "Race, Class, and Ethnicity: A Caribbean Interpretation." You can read it online here. The first half of that title doesn't do his presentation justice - Mr. Best also covers topics beyond race, class, and ethnicity - but the 2nd half of the title is the operative phrase. His aim is to create what is, first and foremost, "a Caribbean interpretation" - the sort that he has often argued must form the basis for new political and social movements.

It's interesting that even today many people associate Caribbean political radicalism with Marxism, which was meant to be a specific critique of industrial England. This is exactly the sort of thing that Best takes issue with. In his view, there can be no progress for the region in the absence of increased self-knowledge. In his lifetime, Mr. Best was always optimistic that this sense of understanding would create the policies capable of responding to the actual conditions of Caribbean societies. But he also knew that it just might require rethinking Neo-liberalism and Marxism, among other entrenched ideologies.

When I write about intellectuals of decolonization like Best, I am very aware of the dangers of appropriation. When he speaks about the conditions that created the Caribbean, his primary concerns are the specific historical characteristics of the plantation system, not the tensions of an an odd neocolonialism in which my own identity developed. But let me humbly offer my point of view as simply as I can: I agree with Best that new ways of thinking are sorely needed in many places, including the island that I am from. It is important that we interpret our homes from within instead of relying primarily on borrowed theories that won’t necessarily relate to what we find around us. I know this isn't exactly new info and that people have many different points of view on the matter. I also know this shift is an ongoing process that takes generations, not years.

The main problem in my particular corner of the Caribbean is much the same as it is elsewhere in the region, even though my experience of it is atypical. The education that many of us are receiving in our formative years is not always helping us to truly understand the social dynamics we see around us. Yes, this has been noted many times in many places. And yes, it applies equally to the US Virgin Islands. I don't think that this is particularly controversial - it seems to be something that a lot of people feel. When it comes to higher education, the problem is often magnified. As Lloyd Best puts it, “so many of us have been educated, or mis-educated, or half-educated in Europe.” You could easily replace Europe with the United States in that sentence and the meaning would be the same. This is not to say that an education in Europe or the U.S. is invalid or valueless, but the colonial dynamic that still exists in many Caribbean peoples’ schooling is problematic. Lloyd Best jokes with his audience in Ontario about his own experience studying in England, and I'd imagine that the crowd understands well: “I sat down there in Cambridge University to listen to Nicky Kaldor and all the finest professors in the world and I go ‘What the hell is going on? You’re not talking to me at all.’”

As the title of Lloyd Best’s 2001 speech indicates, he believes one of the things that has been fundamentally misunderstood in the Caribbean is the concept of ethnicity. He wants to put forth a theory by which we can understand its importance in the region. Best argues that the way that Caribbean societies were born encouraged their peoples to relate to the issue of belonging in multiple ways - both in the creole sense (as in, “I belong here.”) and in the ethnic sense (as in, “I belong to my race/religion/caste”). The small size of the nations involved, and the relatively short span of time that they have existed, have magnified issues of ethnicity while at the same time blurring them. Best says, “That is what creates this cleavage of persona and personality that is everywhere at large among Caribbean people. They need to fight different existences.” It is clear that this phenomenon exists in many different forms, but it is also an area where there seems to exist a lot of common ground. It is also obvious to Best that most metropolitan definitions of ethnicity do not conceive of this instability, which is the reason he is in favor of discarding them.

The speech that I linked to above is worth reading in its entirety. Best says a lot of things that are very provocative, and of course he means them to be. On the subject of the his island's most important early intellectuals (CLR James, Eric Williams, ect.), Best says it's possible to honor them while still recognizing the colonial predicament that they found themselves in. He is very clear that he does not mean to tear down his own heroes, but bluntly points out that they all represent only various stages in mental and social decolonization - not the end result. On the subject of class, Best willfully needles the Marxists by proclaiming that the Caribbean is a classless society. When he uses the term "class" he doesn't mean rank or hierarchy, but traditional responsibility for directing the society. “The thing about the Caribbean is that everybody has the same responsibility, which is no responsibility,” he says to laughter and applause. When questioned on the subject of Cuba, Best gives Fidel Castro some respect, but then criticizes him for making the mistake of following a Soviet model - thereby simply trading colonizers.

Lloyd Best’s most important message is his insistence that locally-based forms of knowledge are what all people should be striving to develop. I don’t think an unattainable purity is what he is after, and he doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I think he has a point when it comes to self-knowledge. Just because the majority of the Caribbean’s people trace their lineage to other places, doesn’t mean political and academic institutions shouldn't be homegrown and responsive to everyone's needs.

Hubert Harrison: "Father of Harlem Radicalism"

2011-07-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

I am currently on a journey to better understand the various writers who might embody a sort of U.S. Virgin Islands intellectual tradition. I think that there is a perception among the youth that Virgin Islanders have mostly been spectators to history. In reality, many native sons and daughters have been hugely influential globally and have even been driving forces behind the movements and ideas that have shaped the modern era.

In an attempt to really get a full picture of the USVI's history, all of us will have to engage with ideas that lie outside of our various cultural experiences. Due to the many peoples and nations that have been associated with the territory, the threads of our tradition may seem difficult to weave together into something coherent. Likewise, the migrations inherent in the colonial experience, which have scattered U.S. Virgin Islanders all over the world, make the project a difficult one. We should not claim, for example, that Edward-Wilmot Blyden's Pan-Africanism does not also have significant roots in Liberia. Likewise we would naturally encounter resistance if we tried to claim that Camille Pisarro's Impressionism did not belong to a French tradition, or that Hubert Harrison's Harlem Radicalism does not belong to the history of the United States. What I want to argue is that while we can't (and shouldn't want to) claim strict ownership of all of these worldly ideas, what they have in common is their association with U.S. Virgin Islanders, and this should be a source of pride. This mission may sound revisionist, but writing history in the Caribbean has often involved re-writing.

Hubert Harrison (born in St. Croix in 1883) is an important writer for me to learn about for a couple of different reasons. First - I really feel the need to start engaging with USVI and Caribbean voices that are very different from my own, and Harrison fits the bill. Called the "father of Harlem radicalism" and "the Black Socrates", Harrison is part of a time period and an intellectual movement that I really don't know much about other than the little I learned in high school. Second - I think it's notable that he immigrated to the States prior to the U.S. purchase of the Danish West Indies (USVI), and still managed to become a leading voice in one of the most important American movements of the 20th century. I think this goes a long way towards proving that the monolithic categories that we call "Virgin Islands culture" and "U.S. culture" have been entangled for longer than many people might assume.

Jeffrey Perry has an article on Harrison (whose writings seem to be experiencing a rediscovery in the U.S.) at Socialism and Democracy Online. He writes:

"Harrison’s class and race conscious political message merits special attention. More than any other political leader of his era he combined class consciousness and (anti-white supremacist) race consciousness in a coherent political radicalism. He opposed white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism; challenged the idea that racism was innate; developed a socio-historical as opposed to a religious or biological understanding of race; maintained that white supremacy was central to capitalist rule in the United States; argued that racism and racist practices were not in workers’ class interests; and urged “Negroes” not to wait on white Americans while struggling to shape their future."

"This message was combined with a consistent internationalism, a scientific approach to social problems, and an impressive grasp of history, science, politics, religion, freethought, literature, and the arts. His militant, mass-based approach broke from the patron-based leadership of Booker T. Washington and the “Talented Tenth”-based leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois and profoundly influenced a generation of activists that included Randolph and Garvey. Harrison was more race conscious than Randolph and more class conscious than Garvey; he is the key ideological link in the two great trends of 20th-century African American struggle-the labor and civil rights trend associated with Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Garvey and Malcolm X."

It strikes me that much of Harrison's worldview may have been shaped by his immigration experience. Many Black West Indians of the early 20th century recorded their awakening to a race-based consciousness after experiencing the elements of white-supremacist ideology that were prevalent in North American society. But let's not forget that Harrison's ideas sprang from the mind of a Virgin Islander. Perry says:

Harrison’s first seventeen years on St. Croix provided a firm foundation for his future work. In St. Croix he became familiar with important traditions “rooted in the African communal system” (including free public gardens and Saturday markets) which mitigated some of the oppressive pressures of the capitalist economy on laboring families. He learned of the Crucian people’s rich history of direct action mass struggle including the 1848 enslaved-led emancipation victory and the 1878, week-long, island-wide, labor protest known as “The Great Fireburn” (led by rebel leaders “Queen Mary” Thomas, “Queen Agnes” and “Queen Matilda”). He also came to know poverty, and that experience, he said, helped to keep his “heart open to the call of those who are down” and kept him from developing “such airs as might make a chasm between myself and my people.”

"Harrison was provided more encouragement to pursue his educational interests in St. Croix than was afforded the overwhelming majority of African American youth in the southern United States. He used the library at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Christiansted, studied under one of the island’s best teachers (Wilfurd Jackson, whose son, D. Hamilton Jackson, was Harrison’s friend and schoolmate, and became the island’s foremost labor leader), and excelled enough as a student that he was chosen as a teaching assistant. These differences also help to explain why Harrison would challenge the virulent white supremacy he encountered in the United States. When he left for the U. S., though virtually penniless, the fires of learning were burning and Harrison believed he was the equal of any other."

This all sounds like something for the Virgin Islands to be proud of. I encourage anyone who's interested to read Perry's entire essay on Hubert Harrison, which can be found here. There's a lot to learn, and that's a good place to start. Perry also has a few books out on Harrison. I was consistently amazed at how many of Harrison's ideas were way ahead of their time (not many people were making a historical critique of racism and imperialism in 1921, for example). Also, I know how many people in the USVI claim Marcus Garvey as an influence, but here is a man from St. Croix who was a primary influence on Garvey. And for those in the islands who don't agree with Harrison's politics, I hope they can be convinced that his brand of activism and unconventional (for his time) thinking is an important thing to claim as part of the Virgin Islands heritage.

Photo Post #19

2011-07-23T19:19:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Patrick Chamoiseau as a Warrior of the Imaginary

2011-07-23T18:33:00.000-07:00

In 2008, the University of Puerto Rico's literary magazine Sargasso published a conversation between Juan Carlos Canal and Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau entitled "Warrior of the Imaginary." I consider its content hugely illuminating and important, so I've tried to give it some time to sink in before writing about it. After a few weeks of thought, I think I'm ready to give it a try.

There are a few different angles from which I can approach this dialogue. First, I will say that I am very encouraged by the gestures towards Caribbean unity inherent in the simple fact of the article's existence - a Spanish-speaking person interviewing a French-speaking person for publication in an English-language magazine. We can argue all we want about the privileged (and guilty) status of English in cases like these, but what's more important in my view is that serious communication is taking place despite linguistic boundaries - often hard to overcome. What's more, there seems to be a lot of common ground in the discussion, which comes as more of a surprise to me than it probably should.

One of the personal interpretations that I bring to the Canals-Chamoiseau conversation is due to something that the three of us have in common. Chamoiseau's Martinique, Canals' Puerto Rico, and my home of the US Virgin Islands are all non-independent states, none of which are likely to achieve political independence any time in the near future. I think that the independent/non-independent divide in the Caribbean is one of the important ones (perhaps more important than language barriers in some ways), so I'd be curious to hear what readers from the more autonomous nation-states might say about this interview.

Canals begins the interview by asking Chamoiseau about a subject that those who have read this blog before will recognize as an interest of mine - creolization, and specifically the créolité movement. As he has done elsewhere, Chamoiseau insists on the fact that créolité will allow us to understand the Caribbean in the 21st century and help us move forward towards something that is posed in Canal's question as the "Caribbeanization of the Antilles." Chamoiseau has been arguing for this for quite some time now, but here's a simply-stated refresher:

"They [scholars] ask where the logic or the coherence within such overwhelming, ubiquitous diversity is. From the paradigm of créolité we may better understand the profound unity hidden beneath the Caribbean's apparent diversity."

Enough said. But Chamoiseau also makes it clear that créolité could, and perhaps should, be expanded into a Pan-American project rather than just a Caribbean one. I think he means this in the broadest sense possible. From what I have seen, the movement remains a rather Caribbean-centric strain of globalism. If we are honest, we must see it as an attempt to replace Euro-centric and Afro-centric ways of thinking - both of which Caribbean people have very particular and historically-determined relationships with. In this way, I think it is destined to be most relevant as a regional phenomenon, even if similar movements are emerging elsewhere. I think this may be the point - a sort of globally-engaged regional pride.

Chamoiseau wants us all to understand the créolité concept of "Relation" as he and Glissant have used it. He believes that we are now in an era in which all new ways of thinking must shed any isolationist tendencies. They will have to be suited to the era of global communication, which may be trickier than it sounds. It means finding an alternative to both a world of bland standardization and a fragmented world of endless conflicts.

While discussing "Relation", Chamoiseau makes an interesting comment regarding comparisons between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The unlikely similarities between the two regions have been posited most famously by Walcott, but Chamoiseau reminds us of Édouard Glissant's position that they may be fundamentally opposite as well. He says:

"Glissant states that the Mediterranean was characterized by its ability to condense, thus producing the world's largest monotheistic religions, while the Caribbean is characterized by its ability to diffract. The Caribbean embraces diversity, but this doesn't necessarily place us in a privileged position to understand Relation because, when we live surrounded by relativism, diversity, and conflict, we feel the need to anchor ourselves in atavism and ancestry."

It's an interesting thought. I think that what I like most about this statement is that it may answer an important question that inevitably emerges in these sorts of discussions. Why does a region that constantly celebrates its diversity also have its share of problems with racial harmony and cultural integration? Perhaps instead of being contradictory, this is what one might expect.

"...creolization is not an ideal, harmonious process. It is rather chaos and disorder. On a global scale Relation will also produce chaos. There will always be manifestations of ethnic or racial fundamentalisms, religious fundamentalisms, or sectarian nationalism because every time we are plunged into a whirlpool of diversity and alterity, we feel the need to seek shelter in ancient atavistic structures. Therefore, we should expect numerous conflicts to continue arising from the current unfolding of creolization and Relation at a global scale; it seems inevitable. This is why I say I've made myself a warrior of the imaginary, for such a warrior is the one who may remain alert in the face of such chaotic circumstances."

Chamoiseau's term "warrior of the imaginary" is an interesting one. As he points out, the Warrior's cause is "Not inverting the terms of domination, but changing the nature of the battleground." This is the key to understanding his insistence that we must celebrate global cross-cultral enrichment while still maintaining regional sovereignty.

Canals does eventually ask Chamoiseau the question that is inevitably on both of their minds (and mine as well):

"[Is it the case that] Antillean culture cannot follow the path of a Caribbeanist or a Creoliste without political independence?"

Chamoiseau's immediate and short answer is no, that is not the case. But he does not immediately address why he believes that to be so. His first response is to stress the difference between the "warrior" and the "rebel." He sees as anti-colonial rebellion as an outdated worldview that has failed to change the dynamics of power (due to the fact that the rebel depends on what he is fighting against). Later he addresses the nationalism issue directly, particularly how it relates to Martinique:

"We cannot renounce our sovereignty. On the other hand, this does not mean that we should therefore build a nation-state. I cannot guarantee what shape this sovereignty will take, or what possible forms the newly constructed could take. It might not follow the model of the nation-state. Nevertheless, we cannot renounce our right to full autonomy, to a full responsibility, a full sovereignty within the world. We can't renounce that."

"What I am after...is the project of inserting the Relational imaginary in people's consciousness; making them understand as clearly as possible that, if such an imaginary becomes widespread, it will produce the new politicians, and generate the new administrative and political structure."

In a way, this is a radical statement. Is it the way that artists in both independent and non-independent states in the Caribbean can produce change? Chamoiseau's words, though he is referring to his own island, should be familiar to anyone who reads them in Puerto Rico or the USVI:

"Here the status quo appears to be solid. People have found their comfort zone in dependency and the welfare state, but maybe in a few years we will see an explosion...You can see how the power of art or how aesthetic and artistic knowledge can modify people's psyches and minds, and produce unexpected events, volcanic eruptions. I have great faith in the powers of aesthetic and artistic consummation."

If it has populist support, Chamoiseau's aesthetic vision may well spread into politics. As of right now, it may still be too academic to fully enter that realm. Time will tell.

Photo Courtesy of Caricom.org

Caryl Phillips on Home

2011-07-20T17:45:00.000-07:00

My quick namedrop of Caryl Phillips in my last post got me thinking about just how fascinating I find his perspective and life experience. I really haven't read enough of his work - only his first novel The Final Passage - and I need to seek out more of his writing some time in the near future. I often wonder about the place of writers like Phillips within the Caribbean literary community, and what they might be able to tell us about belonging and diaspora.

In some ways, people like Phillips belong to a Caribbean that is experienced in reverse, or perhaps with an extra layer of displacement. Born in St. Kitts, but raised in England, Phillips experiences a sort of double diaspora - first from the Afro-Caribbean conception of an imagined Africa, and then a more recent separation with the Caribbean homeland. This is not simply an exile experience. It strikes me as something more complicated.

I have met quite a few people who belong to this first or second generation Afro-Caribbean diaspora in the United States, and there has existed, in most cases, a sort of solidarity between us even as we function as mirror images of each other, experiencing opposite diasporas buried beneath complicated issues of race, class, and privilege. Our conflicted relationships with the Caribbean and metropolitan values are a shared experience. Does a Caribbean person with a metropolitan genealogy belong to the region more or less than a metropolitan person with Caribbean lineage? Are these experiences in conflict or do they compliment each other? Who gets to decide the answers to these questions?

For what it's worth, Caryl Phillips does not "see himself as part of a Caribbean literary tradition; in fact he hardly thinks there is one," (really?) according to Jeremy Taylor, writing for the Caribbean Review of Books. Taylor is reviewing a collection of interviews with Phillips that was published in 2010. What's fascinating about this is that Caryl Phillips may be part of an emerging trend towards a simple embrace of complexity, without a need to explain it in academic terms. He seems to recognize an emerging way of thinking that sees postcolonial literary theory as having become too convoluted and murky to speak to anyone's real lived experience. From Taylor's Review:

"Ideologically, this later phase of his thinking may seem a bit too humanist for the more rigorous post-modern, post-colonial critics. 'We’re not really living in a post-colonial age — we’re living in a post-post-colonial age,' Phillips claims, 'so what new word do we use . . . ? I really don’t know.'

"He’s not too happy with classifications in general: 'We’ve got old labels but we’ve got new people. I write for the new people, for whom the old labels don’t fit.' Though he has been an academic almost from the start of his career, 'I’m not a great believer in what more rigidly theoretical academics would call the master narrative. It’s an increasingly unfashionable position in which doubt has been replaced by certainty.'"

It's worth noting, however, that Phillips's chief concern remains a postcolonial one. He simply doesn't have much time for academic posturings when raw emotion may be better suited to the job of exploring issues of "home" and "homelessness". In fact as the CRB review states, Phillips doesn't like writer's who "keep their emotions in check."

The whole intellectual project of exploring postcolonial identity seems to me to be a battle against emotional investment in it. Understanding the related issues on an intellectual level can decrease the obvious dangers that are inherent in understanding them only emotionally - extremism, fundamentalism, ect. But maybe Phillips has a point. Maybe an artist's job is to leave intellectual concerns behind, even if he is also an academic (Phillips teaches at Yale University). Jeremy Taylor's CRB review demonstrates Phillips's ability to express his concerns in a simple, concise way:

"...As a writer and as a human being he was faced with the task of bridging [his] multiple realities in order to understand who he was and where he belonged. 'At this stage, if I were to say what the aim of my work has been,' he tells an interviewer in 1986, 'I think it’s increasingly an exploration of the meaning of ‘home’.'

Gradually, 'home' ceases to be a single location or culture. The multiplicity of the world becomes home. 'I don’t want to live in a world in which the idea of a complex cultural and historical, racial, religious identity is something to be ashamed of,' Phillips says. 'And I want people to accept the fact that moving across these old lines in a personal way is the way forward . . . it’s not necessary to have a very concrete sense of home . . . actually, those of us who don’t have a very concrete sense of home are okay.'"

I suspect that this is the way the world is headed. Phillips may just be ahead of the curve.

Update: By the way, I really enjoyed reading Phillip's essays from the last decade, quite a few of which are available on his website. I particularly liked this one, entitled "American Tribalism."

photo courtesy of Phillips's facebook page

More on Rhysian Ambiguities

2011-07-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

To some degree this post will be a retread of ground I covered in my post on Jean Rhys from May 22, but the concept of representation as it relates to Rhys's writing is on my mind again and it's a topic that I think readers may find interesting enough for a second look.

To some extent, any writer with a trans-national identity will have to deal with interpretations of their work that locate their cultural allegiances in too narrow a way. Think of Caryl Phillips or Salman Rushdie. Who are they representing? What cultural group gets to claim them? What do we make of this phenomenon that people feel the need to "claim" artists and writers for their own cultures in the first place?

This whole question of representation seems to crop up most often in colonial and postcolonial situations. Since so many colonial experiences are trans-national to some degree, it's easy to get caught up in an endless loop of ambiguities. Hence, the central argument of postcolonial theory for a less rigid and binary view of culture and identity. And now we come to Rhys.

Here's what writer and scholar Jean D'Costa writes:

"Critics at three corners of the triangular trade lay claim to Jean Rhys. In England scholars read her as a 'British woman writer', painter of grim urban settings and social subtypes, catching time, place, mood, and the values that upheld a fading imperial world: England after Victoria, before Hitler. To American critics her work speaks mostly of woman-as-victim, although they recognize her insights into British society. In the Caribbean Rhys is the exponent of the 'terrified consciousness' of the ruling class."

D'Costa sums this up well - I have seen all three of these readings of Rhys's work in different places. To be honest, and I guess this serves the point I am trying to make, both the English and American interpretations of Rhys have always truly baffled me. In my less generous moods I have seen the English reading as completely glossing over Rhys's well-documented disdain for the English and her discomfort with "whiteness", and the American reading as a feminist revision (albeit a justified one). It 's not that Rhys's femininity does not inform her literary identity to a large degree, but it is, in my view, overshadowed in some ways by her Caribbeanness, which the American woman-as-victim interpretation tends to ignore. And yes, I have seen a few older books of Rhys criticism that interpret her background as some sort of curious, "exotic" footnote.

D'Costa continues:

"For all three groups, Rhys presents problems of classification which disguise problems of interpretation and acceptance. How can the author of 'Let them Call it Jazz', the creator of Cristophine, and the satirizer of Hestor Morgan be sincerely British? It is permissable to mock from within, but surely not to stand outside wanting to be Black, hating 'being white and getting like Hester', hating the faces like 'blind rabbits'...faces the 'colour of wood lice.' Then, too Rhys is not everywoman's feminist: the Rhys heroine is devoured as greedily by other women as by men. Caribbean readers, more concerned with class, race, and history than with the politics of sex and gender, may well question the significance of Mr. Mackenzie, or of Rene the gigolo."

Indeed, I think D'Costa is correct again. As a Caribbean reader, this has been my experience of Rhys's work - an intense focus on the "class, race, and history" elements of her novels at the expense of really seeing the themes that are less central to my own identity. I have been as guilty of "claiming" Rhys for my region as many British and American feminist readers have been of claiming her for their gender. Here's Caribbean critic Wally Look Lai's attempt to reconcile those disparate readings of Rhy's Wide Sargasso Sea to some degree (a hugely influential interpretation, by the way):

"The West Indian setting, far from being incidental, is central to the novel; it is not that it provides a mere background to the theme of rejected womanhood, but rather that the theme of rejected womanhood is utilized symbolically in order to make an artistic statement about West Indian society, and an aspect of the West Indian experience."

Jean Rhys's Historical Imagination: Reading and Writing the Creole, from which I have been quoting, makes it clear that part of the instability surrounding Rhys's identity stems from the time period in which she lived and wrote - the same decades that English literature was being reshaped by anti-colonial writers from around the British empire. And so we see the split of her identity - primarily read as "Creole, white, and exile in the Caribbean, and colonial, woman, and outsider in the metropolitan context". It seems to me that an honest view might allow for her to be all of the above.

Photo Post #18

2011-07-17T17:05:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

R. Paiewonsky, Development, and Political Status

2011-07-17T16:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed a copy of Ralph M. Paiewonsky's 1990 book Memoirs of a Governor: A Man for the People from a family member of mine. It‘s an interesting read. Paiewonsky was the appointed governor of the US Virgin Islands from 1961-69 - a consequential time period to say the least.

I initially became curious about Paiewonsky's memoir due to my increasing interest in the decades of the 1960s and '70s in the US Virgin Islands and the broader Caribbean region. I wasn't born until '86, so needless to say I experience the era at a distance, but I always had a sort of vague awareness that I was growing up in the aftermath of important events just on the edge of my consciousness. That turbulent time period was crucial to the formation of the society that exists in the Virgin Islands today. It would be ignorant of me if I didn’t try to learn more about this fairly recent history.

For the uninitiated, a general summary of those decades in the broader Caribbean can be found in Dr. Eric Williams’s 1968 history book From Columbus to Castro. Williams writes, “The contemporary (late ’60s) Caribbean is an area characterized by instability; political and economic fragmentation; constitutional diversity; economic, psychological, cultural, and in some cases political dependence; large scale unemployment and underemployment; economic uncertainty; unresolved racial tensions; potential religious conflicts; the restlessness of youth; and an all-pervading fear of the United States.”

The first thing that comes to mind when one encounters a description like this is a recognition that more than a few of those problems are still with us. I immediately had an urge to go down Williams’s list and make mental note of what my personal experience of each of these social problems has been.

Political and economic fragmentation? Still hugely problematic - and one of the things that is really isolating the USVI in the region I think.

Dependence? Ongoing at the political, cultural, psychological, and economic levels, at least on the island I come from.

Restlessness of the youth? I’d rather say alienation of the youth.

Fear of the United States? I’d say distrust is a better word than fear to use today, but this is one area where the US Virgin Islands is truly different than the rest of the Caribbean…just check out this article from The Source to see what I mean (one needs go no further than the photographs).

But I am getting off track. My main point is that many of these issues emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and every Caribbean nation experienced them is some way. In many cases tragic levels of violence were involved.

What occurred in the US Virgin Islands during that time period is as worthy of attention as the events that were transpiring in any of the other Caribbean nations. The times were famously characterized in Rape of the American Virgins as every-man-for-himself economic exploitation on St. Thomas, simmering racial tensions on St. Croix, and the first foreshadowing of a future identity crisis on sleepy St. John. It was becoming clear that the American conception of the Virgin Islands as “The Possible Dream” would soon have to answer some very serious questions about its claims at “possibility” and just whose “dream” it was.

(Anyone interested in this history should track down the 1971 New York Times Magazine Article, "The Plaint of the Virgin Islands: 'We have Been Encroached on, Invaded, Engulfed'" by J. Anthony Lukas.)

Ralph Paiewonsky’s memoir is useful as a first hand account written by the man who was at the center of U.S. Virgin Islands politics during the “development decade” of the 1960s. The decisions he made as governor largely set the course that the islands continue to follow up to the present day. Paiewonsky was unreservedly pro-tourism and pro-development. He established the College of the Virgin Islands - now a university. He was a champion of greater self-determination for Virgin Islanders, arguing for both a delegate to the US Congress and local gubernatorial elections.

There is no question that Paiewonsky accomplished a great deal during his time in office. Even if many people later felt that the “development decade” had gone horribly awry, few would question Paiewonsky’s patriotism or discount his successes. It’s important to place the governor in the context of his times. Virgin Islanders had no representation in the US congress, many people were demanding economic development and better jobs, and VI governors were still appointed by the United States. The cold war defined the global era, and a few of the newly-independent or soon-to-be independent Caribbean nations were experiencing political turbulence that frightened many U.S. Virgin Islanders. Paiewonsky wanted to increase the quality of life in his native USVI as much as anyone. Development and modernization, of course, brought a whole new set of issues.

Paiewonsky’s words on political status - always the elephant in the room in USVI politics - are what one might expect. They are very carefully chosen, and some would say typical of the times in which he governed. His position is anti-colonial without being anti-United States. He writes:

“Colonialism is on its way out,” I told Virgin Islanders in my first Transfer Day address on March 31 1962. “We shall gain these rights [of self government] because we have earned them….The stirring and striving of peoples to determine their own destinies within the span of their own lives is marked as never before in history.”

And later, with the emphasis of italics:

“I did not want independence from the United States, and I knew no responsible person who did, or anyone who wanted anything but a closer association with the United States. Virgin Islanders were proud of their US citizenship and to be a part of the US.”

This is still a fairly common political position in the USVI. I carry the same fears and ambivalence that many Virgin Islanders do on the issue of political status. By any political measure the VI government is less colonial than it was when Paiewonsky was in office. But I think we have a more complete understanding of the many facets and effects of the colonial experience today, and perhaps politics should not be the only consideration. I think most people understand that the status quo in the USVI has important economic, social, and psychological consequences - some good and others less good.

I am not really a radical, and I know that a change in political status is not a magical solution to all of the challenges that the Virgin Islands faces today. But my honest observation is that it’s hard for me to understand how being anti-colonial and at the same time in favor of direct political ties with the USA can lead to anything but stasis in the Virgin Islands. Most people, myself included, are fairly cautious about this. Any form of power simply perpetuates itself, and the "unincorporated territory" status quo seems to be no exception. Again, I point to Hawaii as an example of how full-incorporation does not eradicate feelings of neo-colonial domination. Statehood remains a perfectly viable option for the USVI if the people desire it, but perhaps we shouldn’t think of it as the anti-colonial option.

Here’s a slightly more complete look at Paiewonsky's position on political status as expressed in his memoir. It’s quite balanced, and hard to argue with:

“I have always considered the question of political status of paramount importance to the people of the Virgin Islands, and my strong views derive from my more than fifty years of active involvement in the political, economic, and social life of the Virgin Islands. In my opinion, the answer to the question of political status ought to grow out of the combined experiences of the people of the Virgin Islands under the American flag, as well as out of the practical rather than theoretical benefits to be derived from the different political-status options.”

I agree. At some point the USVI will have to make important decisions on this matter. Hopefully the discussion will be realistic, accompanied by wide recognition that whatever it is that we hope to achieve we will have to build ourselves.

Photo Post #17 - Family Archives

2011-07-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

Going Fishing - 1940
Photo by Anna Knight

...And Now Stephan Palmié on Creolization

2011-07-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

Part 2 of my ongoing exploration of the concept of creolization brings me to a 2006 essay entitled "Creolization and it's Discontents", written by University of Chicago anthropology professor Stephan Palmié. I had originally planned on waiting a little while before delving into this issue again, but it seems useful to present Palmié's thoughts as a sort of counterpoint to those of Stuart Hall, which I blogged about a few days ago.

The first reason that I think it's useful to examine these two points of view back to back is that Hall and Palmié self-identify very differently. While no one can say that Stuart Hall is not "of the Caribbean" (even though he is based in Britain), Palmié is more of an outside expert - he is a scholar on the Caribbean, but also a German native based in the United States.

Insider status is always a blessing and a curse. Emotional involvement in an issue can provide one with certain insights, but it may also obscure some things. I get the sense that Palmié is less emotionally involved with the issue of creolization than Hall, and his opinions take shape accordingly. The second reason that Palmié's essay may be useful as a counterpoint to Hall's is that their tones are very different. While both men seek to address the increasing popularization of creolization as a theory, Hall's essay takes the form of a fairly open thought experiment. Palmié's positions are more skeptical.

This skepticism is what I find most interesting about "Creolization and its Discontents". Palmié is fairly convincing in his arguments, which mostly take the form of warnings against using terminology like creole and creolization in a global sense when their meanings aren't even fully fixed in the societies where they first emerged. The use of the word creole has in fact taken many forms in the Caribbean and Latin America over the last few centuries - its agenda alternatingly inclusive and exclusionary, reactionary and progressive. The strange journey the word has taken, and its odd elasticity, should make us pause, in Palmie's view, before we rush to apply it outside of its various historical uses. Even so, he understands the impulse to do so:

"...as far as anthropology is concerned, the attractiveness of deploying generalized conceptions built on such terminology seems fairly obvious. Dovetailing with a variety of late-twentieth-century projects aiming to dismantle prior localizing strategies and ethnographic objectifications, the proliferation of concepts of creolization (along with related notions of 'hybridity', 'syncretism', and 'mestizaje') appears to offer a theoretical opening towards a critique of certain foundational fictions of our discipline, while allowing for a characterization of presumably global 'postmodern' conditions and sensibilities..."

"...It may be fair to say that the deployment of this terminology is supposed to both generate novel analytical insights about a world we have long been accustomed to consider in other terms (think of Roman Gaul or the Mormons) and render more adequate descriptions of substantially new cultural configurations and developments than previous anthropological discursive conventions might have produced (think of Nigerians or Swedes watching American TV soaps)."

Palmié argues that this academic trend stems from the fact that, "some of us are discovering that the postmodern 'conditio humana' resembles what has been known as the 'conditio Caribbeana' since at least the sixteenth century."

There is, of course, no generalized "Caribbean". Despite all the wonderful efforts I've seen at Pan-Caribbean thinking (which I support), the region is, of course, as complex as any. It consists of various peoples with different histories and very different experiences of "caribbeanness", whose societies have nevertheless been shaped by similar forces. Bridging these differences has, in fact, been one of the modern political missions of the word creole. It has at various times, in various places, been used to unite people with ostensibly little in common other than an experience of colonialism. Palmié writes:

" ... it now begins to take on the ideological weight of designating the citizenship requirements of - theoretically as of yet unimaginable - nations composed of racially heterogeneous populations (a conundrum prevented in the United States by categorical exclusion of nonwhites from the national project)"

But as Palmié points out, this has never been the only meaning of creole or creolization, nor has it always been as positive as it seems. In the 20th century this political, nation-building definition had a distinct, traceable source, which he refers to as "the ideology of a particular social segment, namely a middle class intelligentsia that seeks a leading role in an integrated, newly independent society." This is, I believe, still the source of most discussions of creolization regionally - one reason why it is such a ubiquitous and emotionally-charged word.

I don't think it is Palmié's intention to simply attack this particular use of the terminology, but he does want to show that it is not a neutral, value-less definition. In the following paragraphs, he goes on to describe all the different types of people throughout the region who call themselves, or are called, creoles. The conclusion he comes to, and it's a hard one to argue with, is this:

"Notionally highlighting endemic divisions rather than suggesting their transcendence even in its 'native habitat' as a designator of Caribbean identities, the term creole would thus appear to create illusory contrasts to the seemingly more rigidly exclusionary folk typologies of human kinds and communities observed elsewhere. Indeed, as Stewart (2007) wryly puts it, 'if the world is in creolization the Caribbean, paradoxically, may have some catching up to do.'"

Before we buy into this completely, let's acknowledge that the Caribbean has undergone some traumatic historical processes. I think that the further the region gets away from a fairly recent past of plantation slavery, genocide, indentured labor, foreign control, and mass tourism of an ugly variety, the more integrated and "creole" it will become (with some effort, of course).

I do, however, respect Palmié's assertion that creolization also has some unhappy contemporary meanings in many places. In one of his footnotes he writes:

"Perhaps expectably, the creolization terminology has come under the most sustained criticism from students in Trinidad, where the descendants of Indian indentured laborers now not only form a demographic majority, but where such language, for historical as well as contemporary reasons, denotes either exclusion of IndoTrinidadians from the national project or otherwise denigrates their identity in highly gender-specific ways."

To make matters worse, history doesn't help us much. If we look to the past to ground creolization theory in something more positive and concrete, we only encounter more confusion. The word was initially used exclusively by metropolitan Europeans and the descendants of European settlers to signify difference rather than any notion of hybridity or mixing. A source of pride on the side of settlers, and of denigration on the side of metropolitans, creole terminology became wrapped up in issues of political power and national identity. Although its meaning was grounded in difference, it did not refer to any celebration of cultural mixing. It was essentially similar, I would argue, to any form of nationalism that sprang up in white settler communities around the world - not something, in nearly all cases, to be commended. This use ("new world" alterity) still sneaks its way into many modern usages. Palmié writes:

"...contemporary adjectival use of the term can express ideas of purity (as in this 'this animal is a genuine creole, i.e. local, breed, unmixed with others from abroad) that do not sit well with our preconceptions about the term as a designator of heterogeneity and hybridity..."

Similarly, the use of creolization theory to analyze early African cultures in the Caribbean, Palmié argues, quickly runs into troubles. In his opinion:

"To call these cultures (the enslaved and maroon communities) 'creole' or 'creolized' may be to retroject anachronistically a modern terminology. Contemporaries rarely portrayed such emergent patterns of Afro-Caribbean social practice as 'creole', i.e. 'locally nostrified' developments, but tended to see them as African holdovers or the racially determined - and so principally alien - patterns of behavior on the part of structurally defined groups. Even after the end of slavery, the term creole, in certain regions, remained long unclaimed as an intentional predicate of Afro-Caribbean collective identities associated with such cultural forms and instead merely continued to mark categories of subalterns in official discourse."

"....transferring the postcolonial Latin American sense of 'lo criollo' to the social institution and cultural forms that emerged among the enslaved in the colonial Antilles would seem to imply 'confusing the creations of the dominated ethnic groups with the adaptations of European forms of the dominant ethnic group."

One could argue that Palmié does not address the fact that the usage of most words tends to change over time, thus rendering historical definitions unhelpful. But his examples serve a certain point. The use of creolization terminology in the Caribbean seems to be, in all cases, political and related to issues of power. Most of its uses, Palmié argues, seem to be making arguments for someone else's erasure, even when they appear to be making claims at nation-building inclusivity.

Although I suppose he is technically correct about this, I do disagree with part of Palmié's premise in this case. Nationalism is, indeed, always an exclusionary project, but some nationalisms are more inclusive than others. When viewed in this light, multi-racial, creole nationalisms seem to have a sort of innate potential (even if they are often not successful) - which I suspect is the reason they remain fairly popular with artists and academics to this day. Not to mention the fact that political uses of creolization today seem to have moved beyond mere nationalism in many cases.

So what exactly is Stephan Palmié's broader point by dwelling on creolization's unfixed definition within the Caribbean? He wants to argue that perhaps the term is ill-suited for leaving its 'natural habitat' with global aspirations. Even in the societies in which it has historically been applied and self-applied, it has not had a consistent enough meaning to be useful as a generalized theory. Creolization's various definitions have sprung up in wildly different contexts, and as a phenomenon should be studied with these specificities in mind. As for whether 'cultural mixing' and 'hybridity' should be primarily associated with a word from a specific Caribbean colonial context Palmié objects. His agenda, it seems, is more humanist:

"Once we let go of the conceit of, even only analytically, separate cultures (or languages, for that matter) and treat cultures and languages as artificially reified instances of variations produced by humanity's universal faculty to symbolize in infinitely diverse ways, we 'eo ipso' lose purchase on all senses in which we could use the term 'creolization' to express anything (we feel is) novel about the particular world we inhabit. Once viewed from the perspective of the inevitable continua of meaningful communicative forms produced by humanity's inate signifying capacity, precisely those criteria that some hold as indicative of our world's being 'in creolization' would ultimately reduce to those that differentiate homo sapiens from other higher primates. If so there would be no surprise in anyone's discovery of 'creolization' processes in, say, Ulan Bator and Kinshasa - or Minoan Crete and Pre-Incan Highland South America, for that matter."

So what I take away from this is that Palmié believes creolization is in fact global, but that we probably shouldn't be calling it creolization - a slippery term which is indigenous to Latin America and the Caribbean and has all sorts of political baggage. Lots to think about.

Photo Post #16 - Family Archives

2011-06-28T17:37:00.001-07:00

The governor visits St. John, 1955.
Photo by George Knight.

Midsummer by Derek Walcott

2011-06-28T14:34:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I came across the poem Midsummer by Derek Walcott while flipping through a textbook for an introductory college literature course. I already had a basic knowledge of Walcott's work at the time (he is one of my favorite writers - check the name of this blog), but this particular poem was not one I had read. The reason why I vividly remember this experience, and the reason why I thought of it somewhat unexpectedly today, is that the poem is about the US Virgin Islands.

Walcott has written about the USVI quite a few times (most notably in Tiepolo's Hound), but Midsummer, which comes from his reflective 1984 collection of the same name, is the work that I believe to be the most important for U.S. Virgin Islanders to read. It is the poem in which Walcott examines the paradoxical nature of the U.S. Virgin Islands' relationship with the United States - both destructive and benign, wanted and unwelcome, neo-colonial and democratic.

I'm not sure what prompted me to return to this poem again today, but I'm glad I did. I have to say that the experience I had while trying to find it was unusual. It's not that it's hard to locate online - it isn't - but the analysis and commentary that exists alongside it in some cases does not line up with my own view. It seems to me that many readers are taking this poem to be about a certain kind of generalized North American cultural hegemony in the Western hemisphere. While I'm sure that this issue of hegemony was on Walcott's mind when he wrote Midsummer, and it is definitely a relevant topic to discuss, it is not the whole story. This is specifically, and explicitly, a poem about the U.S. Virgin Islands. Its subject matter is the palpable atmosphere of North American neo-colonialism that exists on St. Thomas (for those who are sensitive to these things).

I don't mean to seem irritated that this point about Midsummer seems to be frequently missed, at least in online commentary, and I recognize that all art is open to interpretation. But I'd like to encourage a reading that approaches the poem with the specificities of place in mind. Many of the important themes in Midsummer do not require any deep analysis - as eloquent and poetic as Walcott's words are, they are not what I'd call cryptic in this case. He is writing about a form of neo-colonialism that is more literal, and has a more complicated history, than more straightforward readings of cultural hegemony would indicate. I don't claim to have any solutions to the underlying political issues, but I also don't disassociate myself from their history, and neither should anyone else in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

You can find a few Walcott poems, including Midsummer, online here. Midsummer is the last one on that page, so you have to scroll down to read it.

photo courtesy of Nobelprize.org

Stuart Hall on Creolization

2011-06-26T18:54:00.000-07:00

In May, I blogged about the increasing levels of interest that can be found in the process of "creolization" and the ways in which it is, some might say, converging or overlapping with the most important force of our time - "globalization".

There have been quite a few voices over the last decade insisting that the particular type of creolization that we talk about in relation to the Caribbean is really just a regional, and historically early, form of globalization. It may be a sort of proto-globalization. Likewise, some have been more cautious with their comparisons, arguing that it is unwise to lift historical processes out of their original contexts with an attempt to apply them universally.

It seems right that there should be some push-back on this. I think it's safe to say that most people from the Caribbean have encountered values that are falsely presented as universal, often leading to frustration, so I understand any skepticism that exists. With this in mind, and in an effort to learn more about contemporary Caribbean thought on creolization, I've turned to the recent writing of some of the region's foremost scholars. Fortunately, The Creolization Reader, published in 2010, has a diverse collection of essays on this very topic. First up on my list - famed Jamaican-born sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who has a particular interest in the French Caribbean term créolité.

Hall, who is very much a member of the prolific emigrant generation of the 1950s, is still a strong presence in the Caribbean intellectual community. In his 2004 essay, "Créolité and the Process of Creolization", Hall begins by laying out his goals:

"I want to think about the passage from Édouard Glissant to the effect that the whole world is becoming creolized. What can such a statement mean, and what are its conceptual implications?"

Hall wants to know, primarily, whether the Francophone Caribbean's intellectual tradition of celebrating créolité is something that can be applied to the rest of the Caribbean as well, and to go even further, whether its meaning is essentially the same as the concepts of hybridity and syncretism - both postcolonial buzzwords for some time now.

Let me first say that I have some sympathy for appropriations of créolité in the Anglophone Caribbean. We can now look back on decades of Caribbean art and literature in many languages that deals with the issues associated with créolité. This suggests that the Francophone intellectuals' use of the term is really just a variant of something larger that the entire region has experienced, and continues to experience. If we can't yet confidently say that it is a global phenomenon, we can certainly say it is regional. But, perhaps my own specific position within the Caribbean makes me ill-suited for making this case.

For what its worth, Hall seems to agree with me, although he is careful to note that the original intellectual manifestos of créolité were political (like those of the previous negritude movement), not academic, and thus may have some logical contradictions. He writes:

"Heather Smyth has recently reminded us that the literary preoccupation in the Caribbean with Creolization has produced several versions or models, including Wilson Harris's study of syncretism, Glissant's Antillanite, the creolite of Jean Barnabe, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant; Antonio Benitez Rojo's The Repeating Island; and Endward Kamau Braithwaite's work on creolization. Though few artists and intellectuals outside the French Caribbean call this phenomenon créolité, its underpinning conditions are certainly not limited to the French context."

"I would argue that the process of creolization in this sense [different cultures becoming entangled by co-habitation, though not in equal positions of power] is what defines the distinctiveness of Caribbean cultures: their "mixed" character, their creative vibrancy, their complex, troubled, unfinished relation to history, the prevalence in their narratives of the themes of voyaging, exile, and the unrequited trauma of violent expropriation and separation"

"Contrary to the simpler versions of the colonizer/colonized pardigm in its truncated binary form, this 'grappling' process is always a two way struggle as well as always reciprocal, and mutually constituting. The colonized refashions the colonizer to some degree, even as the former is forced to take the imprint of the latter's cultural hegemony."

One thing that interests me about Hall's explorations of creolization is how he imagines it as a double-sided force with a "bad side", and a "good side". His meaning here is that it is as easy to celebrate creolization as it is to suffer from it, something that's important to keep in mind lest we forget that it has caused many people a good deal of suffering and pain over the last few centuries. "The good side" of creolization manifests itself in the form of heightened creativity, which is a reaction to the loss of both cultural purity and certainty. "The bad side" is what Hall calls a "brutal rupture with the past", not to mention the way colonial power structures have typically relegated the Creole to a marginal position. This is what leads, it would seem, to the distinctive qualities of Caribbean art, and also alienation.

Hall is quite adamant in his essay that it is difficult to find a truly non-creole cultural form in the Caribbean. Things that appear at first to stem from a "pure" source - no matter what that source is - inevitably begin to look obviously hybrid if we delve just below the surface. One gets the sense that this is always true everywhere, but perhaps it is especially true in the Caribbean. As one form of proof he looks at two of our most esteemed poets, Brathwaite and Walcott, and demonstrates how, although neither are technically practitioners of creolite, both create works that are unmistakably creole even if they are quite different from each other (indeed, opposite in some ways). This is an interesting exercise, as those two writers have sometimes publicly disagreed on issues of creolization, Brathwaite privileging Africa in his work and Walcott privileging Europe in his. Hall examines Brathwaite first:

"Ostensibly, Brathwaite's practice seems to - and has been read as if it does - stem from and lead remorselessly back to an ancestral African source. His perspective is certainly 'Afrocentric' rather than creolist in emphasis. But this may be to misread a necessary re-accentuation for a wholesale substitution. Although the argument begins with the significance of pre-transportation ancestral African culture in the Caribbean, by the time Brathwaite gets to the end of the argument, he has to recognize that its 'survival' in the Caribbean can only happen as a consequence of multiple translations in the New World itself, and their reshapings in the conditions of the plantation, the colony, and postcolony. They surface in the form of, not the repetition of, a set of traditional inherited forms, but in combination with other factors, and as a continuum"

By virtue of writing in a creole language, Brathwaite's work seems to automatically qualify as poetry of creolization, regardless of the degree to which he celebrates a mixed culture. Walcott's work is, of course, not often explicitly creole in form. It is instead unabashedly English in form at times (I am talking about formal qualities only). But Hall makes the case, and I agree, that it would be difficult to argue that Walcott's poetry could ever arise out of anything other than a creolized society and a creole experience:

"...I want to suggest that if you read the settings and situations, or look at the imagery, of Walcott's poetic work, lyric, epic, or narrative; or if you consider the structures of feeling at work in the text; if you look, above all, at the rhythms of the language and the rhythmic structures of the work; if you consider its imaginary universe; if you think of the ways the heightened diction dips into the rhythm and intonation of the spoken vernacular; or of the spoken, conversational opening of his great epic poem Omeros itself; if you confine yourself to the first six or eight lines - you need go no further than that; or if you think of the whole project of the poem - remapping the departures and returns of Caribbean history and the Antilles onto the Aegean and The Odyssey; you will see that Walcott's poetic practice constantly struggles to harness those rich poetic resources into the service of forging a distinctly Caribbean voice for a highly Caribbean imaginary."

So about that whole "global multiculturalism" thing - has it developed into something we might recognize as creolization? Is it even a real thing? Hall, at the end of his essay, doesn't exactly take a stance. Although he is unequivocal about the regional applicability of créolité, he feels that perhaps the global conditions of the 21st century are too young and complex for him to say anything about them with certainty. He writes:

"Without ignoring the specificities, which remain critical, my provisional conclusion is that there is something quite distinctive, throughout these and other colonial settings, where different cultures were brought together and forced to coexist under the brutal impact of colonization, slavery, and transportation, which produced a specific cultural model: and the heart of that model is the process of creolization. This is to be understood, not by going back and disintegrating mythic origins, but by analyzing the ways in which creolization is a historical and an ongoing process, and moreover the one which produced the Caribbean and Caribbean people as distinctively "modern", albeit modern in a peculiarly 'colonial' and 'postcolonial' way. Despite the humiliations and suffering which slavery and colonization entailed, creolization remains the only basis in the present of creative practices and creative expression in the region. Whether creolization also provides the theoretical model for wider processes of cultural mixing in the contemporary, postglobal world remains to be considered."

The emphasis above is my own, and I think it is the truth at the heart of the matter. It seems to me that there can be little understanding of the Caribbean condition without at least some engagement with the issue of creolization.

Photo Post #15

2011-06-26T18:53:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Karen Fog Olwig on the Virgin Islands National Park

2011-06-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

Karen Fog Olwig is an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who specializes in African-Caribbean cultures in colonial and post-colonial contexts. In 1980 Olwig wrote National Parks, Tourism, and Local Development: A West Indian Case, a report which was published in Human Organization, Vol. 39, Issue 1. It is my opinion that this report should be required reading for every student in the US Virgin Islands, despite any problems that may arise from the sociological gaze. It is one of the few available academic inquiries into the issue of the Virgin Islands National Park (created in 1956 on the island of St. John), and it says a great deal about the islands' experience as a territory of the United States. Since St. John is the island that I grew up on, Olwig’s report is of particular relevance to me, but I also think it has the power to speak to a much larger audience on issues of development, government policy, and cultural preservation in many different contexts.

The report is not at all a polemic against development, and it presents both sides of the national park issue in a way that is more balanced than most discussions on the matter. Olwig acknowledges that the establishment of a large American national park with a Caribbean landscape has been the most important element of the St. John tourist economy. She also quickly establishes the fact that it has driven up prices to the point where it is hard for locals to afford to buy their own land. Perhaps most importantly, she illustrates how it has quickly and rather traumatically changed the native culture of the island.

In modern tourist accounts of the Virgin Islands, St. John tends to hold greater appeal than either St. Croix or St. Thomas. Visitors often claim it to be the island that delivers the experience of a true Caribbean "getaway". Much of its landscape has the look of the untouched tropical paradise that vacationers expect to find, having been fed such romantic fantasies by metropolitan media. It would be wrong to suggest that St. Johnians do not appreciate the beauty of their island in the same way that tourists do, but the simple fact of the matter is that the “untouched” landscape that has been promoted by the Virgin Islands National Park has not been an authentic St. Johnian landscape for at least 400 years. As Karen Olwig writes:

“To them (the older generation of St. Johnians), letting a large part of the island be covered by bush signified neglect of the land and the death of their society. When they had originally welcomed the park to the island, they did not realize that their concept of an ideal landscape - large cleared spaces with agriculture, pastures, and fruit trees, I.E., the landscape of small farmers - would differ so much from that of the park service…The park is administered and developed as if it were a large tract of “wilderness in a sparsely populated western state, despite the fact that it is, in fact, located on a tiny, relatively densely populated island. This inevitably leads to conflicts between the park service and the St. Johnian community.”

All of this is not to say, of course, that overgrown forest has never before been an authentic St. Johnian landscape or that it can’t be one now. Nature tourism may in fact be a more suitable economic model in today’s world than subsistence farming. However, we have to acknowledge that the commonly-held perception of St. John as the “pristine” and “natural” island of the USVI is one that has been actively created by the US government, and is not an organic, local development.

One could argue that very little in the Caribbean is completely organic and local, of course - the defining qualities of the region's history are migration and foreign control. But the dramatic changes to St. John’s physical and cultural landscape are relatively recent, and thus should command our attention as much as the rest of our colonial legacy, if not more. The situation is complicated by the fact that the park itself attracts many new residents to St. John yearly who accept its presence at face value and do not question whether or not it has marginalized local culture. One might say that the park perpetuates its own agenda.

Admirably, Olwig is also fair to the attitudes of the younger generations of St. John, to whom a traditional, rural West Indian lifestyle would be a foreign culture, unlikely to reemerge in the park’s absence anyway. She interviews one young person who says:

“There is no question that the island has benefited from the park. The park attracts a lot of tourists who bring money to the island. The park has also taught us to be appreciative of the natural beauty and peacefulness of the island. We now know that we don’t want to cover St. John with hotels and housing projects, whereas formerly we were embarrassed to tell people we were from the jungle on St. John.”

I think these benefits are widely recognized, but they also commonly create ambivalent attitudes towards the park, exemplified by one Boston-residing Virgin Islander who I spoke with last week about the issue. His words, when asked about some of the obvious problems the national park has created, were, “yeah, but the alternative is even scarier to me”, by which I think he meant rampant over-development.

What would St. John look like today if the Virgin Islands park had not been established? It is an impossible question to answer. Olwig correctly writes:

“These days, probably no St. Johnian wishes to become a peasant, although some would like to continue certain economic activities associated with their past way of life…The park itself appears to have gradually developed into a large vacation center for North Americans, one in which nature only serves as the backdrop to a pleasant time in the tropics.”

It is all a matter of perspective, I suppose. In some cases it’s even arguable that the people of St. John have not always seen the big picture. One St. Johnian who was interviewed by Olwig gives this interesting reply:

“I don’t see what kind of nature it is the park wants to preserve. There are no redwood trees or any vegetation that is of any significance. As it is now, the park is just preserving bush, mongooses, and jackasses!”

I couldn't help but find this statement a little jarring, and concede that it is probably not representative of most contemporary attitudes towards the park. But I do feel that it is in some ways typical of the way many people in the Caribbean prioritize the foreign over the local - even when what we have is enviable. Clearly, much of St. John’s ecological inheritance is worth preserving. Even those boring, gray “jackasses”, who are sometimes a local pest, are endlessly popular with tourists who stop in the road to pose for photos with them.

I have to say that I experienced a certain feeling of sadness while reading National Parks, Tourism, and Local Development. Thirty years after Olwig’s report was written, it seems to me that the problems which the National Park Service have created have become so ingrained that they are now an authentic part of St. John’s history and society rather than outside forces to be resisted, or even discussed. In full disclosure, I have derived much enjoyment from St. John’s national park over the years, even if I recognize some of the ways it has created an unhealthy dynamic on the island.

To be sure, in all colonial contexts it has proven rather useless to mourn any changes to a social landscape which cannot be reclaimed, even when the results can be interpreted negatively. Honoring the past while looking to the future is what is imperative. Culture is always a complicated thing - constantly changing and adapting, never dying. Olwig ends on a note that should resonate with all people who have adopted tourism as an economic model:

“Is the case of the Virgin Islands National Park on St. John unique, or does it raise the more general question of whether it is possible for any local population to control park development, as long as this is dependent on the promotion of tourism? …This is the case where a West Indian park was developed by an American agency (administered from afar) on land which was owned by powerful U.S. financial interests. Presumably national parks developed on independent West Indian islands (I.e., not U.S. territories) would not face the difficulties of the St. John park. I would argue, however, that when land preservation is promoted to further tourism, a dichotomy between local and foreign perceptions of what constitutes a “natural” landscape will be present”

Photo Post #14 - Family Archives

2011-06-17T21:21:00.000-07:00

1950s Portrait of Rudy DeWindt of Lavongo (born at Estate Eensomhed, St Thomas)
Photo by George Knight.

Mimicry Vs. Self-Fashioning: V.S. Naipaul and Earl Lovelace

2011-06-16T15:45:00.000-07:00

The blog Long Way From Hom e has an excellent collection of entries on Caribbean literature and thought (among many other topics). The blogger, who goes by "Roots", is clearly someone who has spent a lot of time studying the field, and the quality of his or her writing is consistently high (with a definite political edge). It's always an exciting discovery for me when I find someone with my interests who has made their writing and criticism available online - especially when it shows such a deep level of engagement and a willingness to teach.

One item from Long Way From Home that I find interesting is an examination of how two Trinidadian writers, Naipaul and Lovelace, have interpreted the infusion of North American cultural forms into the Caribbean. To be fair, the blog entry that I am speaking of is really about more than this - generally it is about how we might read Naipaul's (in)famous nonfiction work The Middle Passage - but the Lovelace comparison fascinated me for two reasons.

The first reason is that I subscribe to a pluralistic view of Caribbean literature - an interpretation that sees the multiple literary traditions of the region as part of an incredibly complex whole. I think that this is the best approach to a literary canon that some have argued is, strictly speaking, not actually one canon but several. It is my opinion that modern Afro-Caribbean, Indo-Caribbean, and Euro-Caribbean literatures are in fact part of an interconnected web of meaning, and are not categories that we should, or can, separate. When we take this approach it is impossible to see Lovelace's work and Naipaul's work as anything but inextricably linked despite their different racial/cultural/political identities (insert the names of two other Caribbean writers if you prefer).

The second reason is that I have previously noted that both Lovelace and Naipaul create characters in their work who attempt to appropriate identities from North American movies. I don't think this observation is new or novel on my part (I assume it is Lovelace's intention to comment on Naipaul's earlier work), but I enjoyed seeing it examined by "Roots", who has much more authority on the subject than I do. Here's what he/she writes on the subject:

"The present becomes another phase of mimicry for Naipaul: first, the imitation of a reified caricature of British culture, and now, the imitation of American popular and commodity culture. This is why he has a very different take on the role of the “Hollywood B-man” (56) in the Trinidadian imagination than Earl Lovelace. In Miguel Street to model your self on Rick Blaine in Casablanca, as Bogart does, is farce; to yell at Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart on the movie screen (54) in The Middle Passage is self-delusion about who one really is, living in a world that does not correspond to ones reality. But in The Dragon Can’t Dance to play the Hollywood gangster or cowboy is seen as authentic self-fashioning. It isn’t that Lovelace doesn’t slowly build up the role of “masking” in his novel. His characters must struggle to cast off old forms of the self and create new ones. He carries out a critique of his characters just as much as Naipaul. This isn’t the straw man of the “protest writer” that Naipaul sets up as his own foil and, as Derek Walcott argues, is essential for the presentation of Naipaul’s persona to the highbrow gatekeepers in London and New York. Instead, Lovelace has very different philosophical assumptions than Naipaul about the subjectivity of his characters."

The subject matter and structural qualities of Miguel Street and The Dragon Can't Dance are similar - this much is known by anyone who has read those two particular books (both of which are excellent, by the way). It is the differences in the authors' attitudes that give them their very different meanings.

In practice, the representation of a character like Bogart in Naipaul's Miguel Street does not really strike me as all that different from the way that Lovelace portrays the Hollywood posturing of the hoodlums in The Dragon Can't Dance. There is an aura of tragedy around both depictions, even if each writer interprets this differently. If these two books were written today, the influence of Hollywood outlaws would clearly be assisted by the North American music industry's exportation of hip-hop to the Caribbean, although here things get complicated - hip-hop's relationship with the region is obviously much more of a two way street than the movie business ever was. What's important is the way that the rest of Naipaul's work and Lovelace's work inform the way we should interpret their respective messages.

It's amazing to me ("Roots" also discusses this) that despite Naipaul's own life experience, he does not seem to see that the tensions of what he calls mimicry are not a static part of the Caribbean self. Rather, as Lovelace might assert, they are the sorts of tensions that give rise to whole new identities and cultural experiences. I don't mean to tear down Naipaul - he has enough critics - but I agree with them that somewhere along the line he seems to have lost sight of the fact that Caribbean society is the result of an ongoing, and increasingly global, process. He identifies many of the problems the region faces in his work (he was one of the first to do so), and yet he sees its colonial past and neo-colonial present as permanent, insurmountable obstacles. What Lovelace's account of North American hegemony has that Naipaul's does not is an understanding of the power of resistance inherent in the colonial experience.

Photo Post #13 - Another From the Family Archives

2011-06-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Sloop - St. John 1936
Photo by Anna Knight

ARC Magazine Issue 2

2011-06-05T23:43:00.000-07:00

Issue 2 of ARC magazine begins with a letter from its founders (Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins) that is intended as a “call to action”:

“…For far too long we have been disconnected. Though waves separate us, we must find a way to unify and bring together our disparate parts to realize what we are within this expanding maze. After all, there is no complete observation or understanding until the whole is present. If this fracture continues and we remain unable to repair, bond, or move as one unit, what will unite our experience?”

I don’t think that there are many among us who would not be stirred to action by this sentiment - it is this inclusive, pan-Caribbean attitude that initially drew me to ARC. Hopes that "we will move as one unit" are the very definition of idealism of course (geography and culture will still divide us in many ways) - but they are so needed. All of the countries, commonwealths, overseas departments, and unincorporated territories that we call home have their own unique internal divisions, and that's before we even begin to contend with the sorts of inter-island rivalries that exist up and down the chain. Any vision of the future that includes more gestures of solidarity, like the one made by ARC, is a hugely attractive thing as far as I'm concerned.

This second issue of ARC continues the publication's twin missions of highlighting some of the most exciting new artists coming out of the region and creating a space where various forms and identities can mix, co-mingle, and be discussed. It’s impressive in its scope, and I'm sure each reader will have different highlights that pique their interest or speak to their experience. Here are a few of mine:

The statement accompanying a new set of works by Jamaican/British artist Gerard Hanson is exactly to the point, I think, and sums up nicely the exciting moment we are in. He writes:

“Multiculturalism has brought us to a new juncture. Current generations of young people are now more aware than ever of the mix of nationality, race, and culture surrounding them. Adults alike are seeking new ways of making sense of these complicated issues, feeling ‘out of place’, and at the same time bridging the overlap of cultural, racial, and physical spaces we inhabit and exist within.”

This is happening all over the place, not just the Caribbean, but as the so-called “laboratory of globalization”, I think the region is rightly experiencing a moment of pride in its syncretic Creole model of society. I hope that my home of the U.S. Virgin Islands is also proud of this.

One of the many excellent collections in this issue is Ground Work, a photo series by Rodell Warner of T & T. (View the set on the artist's website). There are some fantastic examples of contemporary portraiture in Warner’s project, but what really sets the work apart is its conceptual brilliance - political, poignant, and visually rich. The photographer documents workers in Trinidad’s CEPEP - an unemployment relief program that sets people to work “cleaning and grooming roadsides and public spaces around the country,” as he puts it.

Warner is interested in the way the workers costume themselves - “modifying themselves into street warriors to protect themselves from occupational hazards - not only flying projectiles dislodges by their weed whackers but also how they change their identities to maybe protect themselves from the passing judgments of commuting eyes.” Warner’s photographs allow his subjects to fully inhabit their masquerade - a comment on class divisions in Trinidad with some shades of carnival thrown in for good measure.

Another feature from this issue that interested me very much was Tracy Assing’s conversation with Russell Watson, a Barbadian film-maker. I’ve been seeing discussions of Watson’s debut, A Hand Full of Dirt, turning up in various places around the web, and I'm intrigued. I’m very curious about where I might be able to see this film - it doesn’t seem to be available in many places yet. I like what Watson says about the current themes he's exploring:

“I think the gloss on the idea of independence has worn off and we can no longer ignore the reality that a flag, anthem, coat of arms, ect. do not a nation make, but that it is the security of land that will determine our ability to control our future.”

I think what Watson is expressing here is a suspicion towards tourism as an economic model that can provide the majority of Caribbean people with any great amount of control over their destinies. George Lamming’s well-known quote about tourism being “plantation 2.0” comes to mind. As for the plot of the film, it sounds like a compelling family drama involving immigration, generational conflict, and economic development. I’m looking forward to watching it. Here's the trailer courtesy of the film's youtube account:

As I said, there’s simply too much variety in this issue of ARC for me to mention every point of interest. I want to give everyone who’s interested the chance to discover the magazine’s content on their own terms. The people involved have put a lot of work into this endeavor so far and they need more support. Buy your copy of issue 2 here.

Photo Post #12

2011-06-05T19:09:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Denmark and Colonialism (Important Update)

2011-06-05T18:30:00.000-07:00

I think that this update deserves its own post, rather than a simple edit to my entry from a few days ago. Anyone interested in the Danish West Indies or postcolonial Denmark should watch this clip from the Danish National Museum's new exhibit - "Building a Colony". (Thanks to David Knight Sr for providing the photo and the link)

I think I'll let the clip stand on its own without a lot of commentary on my part - there are many political issues here that are best left up to the Danes and those Virgin Islanders with DWI heritage. As previously stated, Danish colonialism is not my area of expertise, nor is it my primary interest. The clip featured above includes interviews with Gerard Emanuel, Mario Moorhead, Olaf Hendricks, Myron Jackson, and Wayne James - all Virgin Islanders who are interested in contributing to the USVI-Denmark postcolonial dialogue. They also briefly touch on status questions and social issues that the territory is facing in the present day, which overlap a bit more with my primary concerns.

On these more contemporary issues, Dr. Olaf Hendricks, who is featured in the video, wrote an editorial (in 2007) for Crucians in Focus, which is worth reading. The reader-submitted comments that follow the article are relevant also, in that they are indicative of some real divisions in the Virgin Islands community. Or should I say communities plural?

Denmark and Colonialism

2011-06-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

I think the time has come for me to address a particular colonial experience that is interesting to me, but typically gets more or less sidelined by discussions of the vast overseas territories amassed by countries like Great Britain and France. I am speaking of the fact of Danish colonialism, something that I suspect most people in the world are only vaguely aware of, if at all. I think this is due mainly to the fact that Denmark obtained no colonies comparable to British India or French Algeria in their ability to conjure up images of wealth and exoticism in the Western imagination (I am aware that Denmark was active in India). Greenland, of course, is an enormous landmass, and I don't wish to minimize the importance of its colonial experience, but it does not command the world's attention in the same way that some much smaller former colonies do (Jamaica, for instance, has a much stronger cultural presence around the globe).

This is on my mind this evening due to a recent conversation that has made me consider what exactly the Danish colonial experience is, and how Danes are interacting with their former colonies in 2011 - particularly my home of the US Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies). It occurs to me that other European nations seem to have slightly more interest in their former colonies than Denmark does - I get the impression that colonial histories and literature are highly specialized interests not much found outside of Copenhagen's universities and libraries. In the case of the Virgin Islands, we do not share the bond of a common language that many other former colonies do with the nations that once governed them, so I imagine that this must be the source of some of the distance that I am perceiving.

A 1988 textbook, Postcolonial Literatures: Continental Europe and its Empire, puts it this way:

"In the general history of European imperialism and the creation of colonial administrations around the globe Denmark does not occupy a particularly prominent place. Its colonies were small in terms of population, and with the notable exception of Greenland, territory. But Denmark was an active partner in virtually all aspects of European imperialism...

...What is the characteristic of postcolonial Denmark then? To me it represents a historical engagement with Danish history, and its relative lack of attention to the importance of Danish colonies as a formative influence in Danish national identity...

...the problem is that even though there is a wealth of archival material on the former colonies, the vast majority of the work that has been done with this material suffers from a lack of attention to the power paradigm which the Danish state spread over its possessions. This is accompanied by a general lack of knowledge about what postcolonial criticism has achieved in particular in relation to making a critique of the British empire, and to a lesser extent the other major European powers."

I am aware that it isn't very useful to read a 23 year old book to understand what is happening in the present, but the above passage seems to support what I've recently heard about the postcolonial condition in Denmark - namely that the nation's status as a former empire is not on the minds of the general public like it is in, say, England. This seems to imply that the important national conversation about Denmark's imperial past is in need of more voices. (Any Danes who wish to correct me or refute this claim are welcome to do so - perhaps that conversation is more healthy and robust than I believe it to be. And by the way, I am aware of, and know personally, quite a few Danish scholars who are completely committed to studying the West Indies in particular. I am not questioning that interest exists.)

I want to clarify that I do NOT think that colonialism of the Danish variety is the most pressing issue that Virgin Islanders should be concerned with. This may simply be the result of the fact that I am not a Danish West Indies descendant. I confess that exploring the effects of a unique and ongoing American neo-colonialism in the territory is much more central to my agenda. But I do think that knowledge of the past is extremely important, and a dialogue between the people of the Virgin Islands and the people of Denmark can only be useful in understanding where we are, and where we want to go from here.

Here is Shelley Moorhead, one Virgin Islander who is actively and passionately engaging in conversations with Denmark over colonialism right now (The show is in Danish, but the interview is in English). I think it is absolutely essential that all voices are heard, and I find Moorhead's appearance on Danish TV really interesting (especially for the way he and the show's host interact).

Also - and this is fascinating to me - here is a presentation on Danish colonialism from a Greenlander's perspective.

Photo Post #11

2011-05-30T19:20:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Sugar Cane Alley (1983)

2011-05-27T22:11:00.000-07:00

Sugar Cane Alley or Rue Cases Negres (1983) is a Martinican film by acclaimed director Euzhan Palsy (interesting trivia - Palsy later became the first black woman to direct in Hollywood). Based on a 1950 novel by Joseph Zobel, the film tells the story of a young boy, Jose, whose promising intellect provides him with opportunities beyond those that most of the children from his plantation village dream of. Encouraged by a dedicated grandmother, Jose is enrolled in the local school in the hopes that he’ll be able to escape a life of hard labor in the cane fields. The pressures that arise from this experience (education vs. roots, colony vs. center), along with the complicated racial politics of a mixed society, are a huge part of what makes the Caribbean the Caribbean, and Sugar Cane Alley does a wonderful job of communicating these regional themes while retaining its international appeal.

One of the most interesting things about the film is the way that it skillfully develops the tensions inherent in Jose‘s colonial education. In one striking juxtaposition, the filmmakers intelligently cut from an Afro-creole funeral in the cane fields to a stuffy classroom where the teacher is reminding his students that they'll soon be quizzed on Alpine glaciers. One can practically feel Jose’s consciousness being split in two. Meanwhile, the cast of characters provides young Jose with a confusing mix of voices and perspectives to contend with, from the plantation workers with their longing for a lost ancestral home, to his friend Leopold, the spoiled son of the plantation owner, not to mention the cosmopolitan, creole citizens of Fort-De-France, where Jose eventually goes to further his education.

Luckily, this great film didn't go unnoticed on its release - it won an impressive amount of awards (mostly in France) and kicked off the career of a cinematic auteur that Martinique can be proud of. I can't recommend it highly enough to movie fans, or anyone who's interested in Caribbean culture. Rent it, buy it, watch it. Here are a few clips:

Medouze gives his philosophy on life.

Jose in Fort-De-France

Leopold goes for the plum juice...how fancy of him.

George Lamming on the Colonial Experience

2011-05-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

The psychological effects of colonialism are, by now, widely known and not at all an obscure point of interest. There is a growing sense of unease, I think, among those who feel that postcolonial discourse has become a sort of universalizing institution in politics and academia. There's a suspicion that it has simply muscled its way into its position of importance and set up a dynamic that mirrors the colonialism that it has sought to replace. I see three possible reasons for this line of thinking. Either:

A. People are becoming jaded by the the overuse of postcolonial buzzwords that dominate "serious" discussions about the previously colonized world.

B. Postcolonial theory has not been flexible enough to change with the times and incorporate new global developments.

C. Academic discussions of the "postcolonial world" that privilege a Western education are really just another step in colonization - one that was clever enough to disguise itself.

I am oversimplifying things here, but I'm sure well-argued positions along the lines of the above statements exist. With all that said, I am still extremely interested in clear expressions of the colonial experience by some of the older writers who first tackled the subject. Here's George Lamming (photo courtesy of Library of Congress) in the introduction to his most famous work, In The Castle of My Skin:

"Migration was not a word I would have used for what I was doing when I sailed with other West Indians to England in 1950. We simply thought that we were going to an England which has been planted in out childhood consciousness as a heritage and a place of welcome. It is the measure of our innocence that neither the claim of heritage nor the expectation of welcome would have been seriously doubted. England was not for us a country with classes and conflicts of interests like the islands we had left. It was the name of a responsibility whose origin may have coincided with the beginning of time"

Lamming is writing about a certain time period and specific places (Great Britain and Barbados, 1950s), and there is an experience of racial discrimination implicit in this passage, but even so there is something about his words that resonate with me in a way that makes me feel both impassioned and embarrassed. Embarrassed because there is no way for me to appropriately compare my experience to Lamming's without sounding as if I am conflating things that ought not be conflated. Impassioned because there is a part of me that truly believes that Lamming is expressing one of the core characteristics of colonialism that can be applied to some degree across national borders, racial identification, and history.

In the broader context of Lamming's introduction, it is clear that his ideas are heavily indebted to the writings of Frantz Fanon, and are meant to resonate specifically to the black experience in the Caribbean. So let me be clear - here's what I'm not doing: I'm not claiming that the odd pseudo-colonial dynamic that exists in my home of the US Virgin Islands has imposed on me a language, religion, or code of law that is foreign to my heritage, as I think Lamming is more or less saying of his life in British Barbados. What I'm saying is that there is undoubtedly something about Lamming's colonial experience that a lot of Virgin Islanders may also relate to.

The England that existed in Lamming's mind was a place that was free from social inequities and political bickering, a place where people's interpretations of reality were not significantly different from those of the citizens of his island. It existed as a place where everything ran smoothly, where no one experienced failures, and most of all it existed as a place where he would be able to integrate without any serious troubles. The naivety of this worldview was apparent to him only after the fact.

Is this the way that most people from the U.S. Virgin Islands experience the mainland United States as well? Certainly it is not far off from the innocent views that I held during my childhood - ones that have been similarly shattered in uncomfortable ways during my years in the States. I wonder if this truly has anything to do with the unincorporated status of the USVI or if it is simply the result of North America's cultural domination of the entire region over the last century. After all, the experience that Lamming had in London is now more commonly had in New York or Toronto, regardless of actual political ties.

Photo Post #10

2011-05-22T17:55:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Jean Rhys as "The Helen of Our Wars"

2011-05-22T17:05:00.000-07:00

The title of this post refers to the label that poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite has given to Jean Rhys of Dominica, and it seems to reveal a certain amount of emotion in the discussion surrounding her work. I've mentioned Rhys a few times on this blog in relation to other things, but I haven't taken the time to actually discuss the famous author at any length, partly because it's been a while since I've read her books (the last one I read was Voyage in the Dark, about a year ago). But Rhys is very much on my mind lately as I have been reading the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature's hefty volume devoted exclusively to analyzing her life and career.

It's easy to forget that there was an ongoing debate not too long ago over whether Rhys was in fact a Caribbean writer, and whether or not her books could be considered Caribbean fiction. Did her experience in a fairly insulated and politically-problematic minority community in the West Indies disqualify her from writing accurately about the place? Did her emigration to England at age 17 remove the parts of her identity that were identifiably West Indian? These questions are pretty much settled now, and not much discussed anymore as far as I can see, but even as her place in the canon has been assured, she remains somewhat separate from the main line of 20th century Caribbean writers for reasons of her race and life experience.

This is, I think, fair. One would expect the voice of a minority writer to be included, but not central, and that seems to be where Rhys stands now. If she is considered controversial in any way today, it is over the question of whether her narratives silence or distort important narratives of Afro-Caribbean resistance. Her validity as a Caribbean writer seems to hinge on this question, and I think it's a valid one to ask. After all, Rudyard Kipling was Indian by birth, but he is, for several reasons, best considered a British imperialist writer. The consensus seems to be, and I agree, that this is not the case with Rhys.

The question of Rhys's identity is a tricky one. Many Caribbean intellectuals, including Brathwaite, have argued that the most important aspects of West Indian identity are an experience of the legacy of enslavement, and of the survival of African cultural forms within an oppressive system. From the standpoint of Caribbean demographics, I think that there is a strong argument for this being true. One only has to look at popular culture in the region to see that it a major concern, perhaps the major concern. So, what are we supposed to do with the many people from the Caribbean who are not primarily of African descent? While it is true that every non-indigenous experience in the Caribbean is one of dislocation in some way, and many of us from former plantation islands do experience the legacy of slavery quite intensely regardless of race, it's true that not all of have experienced rupture and dispossession on the scale of the region's African population.

In the CSACL's study of Rhys's work, the authors are careful to contrast Rhys with other white postcolonial writers. Nadine Gordimer of South Africa, for instance, is more politically equipped to make a place for her white characters in an emerging cosmopolitan society. "By Contrast Rhy's characters are displaced loners, marked by the inequities of past and present societies...they cannot easily go home even if they know where home is...Rhys's characters are unable to locate their national or class affiliations comfortably," the authors write.

To be honest, I'm not sure if I completely buy this distinction as it is expressed above. Just this week I attended a South African play (The Syringa Tree) in which the white characters seemed to display very Rhys-ian qualities, and you can even find a similar sense of displacement in Kipling (albeit in a more disturbing, reactionary form). But I do agree that there is something different going on with Rhys, particularly her novels that deal with the Caribbean experience in explicit ways (Wide Sargasso Sea, Voyage in the Dark). I think Jamaican critic Evelyn O'Callaghan puts it best when she describes Rhys as:

"A second-class member of an already precarious social group; she's creole rather than "real" English, she belongs emotionally and spiritually to no group, despite efforts at partial integration. With neither blackness, nor money and "Englishness" as a passport to identity. She's a lonely, withdrawn, isolated and marginal figure, subject to cruel paradoxes - such as having priveleges with virtually no power, or being oppressed without the support and solidarity of fellow victims."

This summation of Rhy's alienated cultural experience strikes me as one that still applies to many lower and middle class white people in the Caribbean. I myself am situated very differently than Rhys both geographically and historically, but I have seen dynamics in my own life and the lives of others close to me that resemble this in-between social condition. I don't mean to overstate the case here, but Rhys's work doesn't seem to be particularly foreign or eccentric then, and certainly not "English". In fact, the themes that she explored in her literature are so potent that white Caribbean writers cannot stop channeling her. See Diana McCaulay and Ashley Rousseau, for examples of a contemporary take on Rhys-like alienation.

So then, the next question is, do Caribbean readers of other races relate to Rhys in a way that makes her more relevant to the entire region? I'm not qualified to answer that question, but I have seen some affirmative answers. Here's a blogger who is a peer of mine (twenty something, student, grappling with Caribbean issues) writing about her encounter with Rhys:

"I am often struck at the ways in which the voice of the “white creole” in “wide sargasso sea” brings me to a kind of “seeing” each time that i read it. i cannot escape that voice, that distinctly white west-indian voice even as i submerge myself in the text as a black west-indian. it’s personal too. in a weird way. perhaps this is all a result of what kamau brathwaite, [in relation to a reading of this very text] describes as a realization that in engaging the text, “one’s sympathies became engaged, one’s cultural orientations were involved.” which ultimately affects one’s reading of it."

This is encouraging, as I have always found Rhys to be a tragic figure. She spent her life drifting around, never really finding a community to belong to. When she died in England in 1979, I don't think people had yet come around to accepting her place as a Caribbean writer. If only she'd lived just a decade or two longer, she may have found herself finally coming to terms with home, or at least home coming to terms with her.

Earl Lovelace on the Pleasures of (Non) Exile

2011-05-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

Whenever I encounter writers of the 20th century involved in a discussion of emigration and self-exile, I try to remind myself how different their experiences must have been from the ones that we associate with emigration in 2011. How many boundaries have been knocked down by the internet? How many burdens removed? To be sure, joining online social networks or blogging to stay in touch with a place are not the same as actually physically living in that place - something is, no doubt, still lost - but even these options were not available a generation ago. Communication in the '50s and '60s was a whole different animal, and it's important to keep that in perspective. I say this because it's still easy to find, despite the circumstances of the digital age, people for whom the issue of self-exile is a chief concern.

Here's an excerpt from Volume 1, Issue 1 of Postcolonial Text (2004) that is relevant to that topic. Kelly Hewson interviews Earl Lovelace, one of the Caribbean's finest writers and a man whose talents could only tempt him to leave his home of Trinidad intermittently:

Kelly Hewson: "Many of us in our many places of origin experience a tension that often casts itself as a decision between staying put or going elsewhere, and some of us have the luxury of choice: whether or not to act on that tension and make a move. While you have moved within your place, and take regular forays out of it, you are here. What has your staying meant?"

Earl Lovelace : "I suppose it can be looked at in terms of what was gained and what might have been lost.

My staying meant, first of all, the opportunity to discover the islands, to, as I say in an essay somewhere, to discover with some intimacy the darkness/light of the religious and cultural forms that had been suppressed during colonialism. It is this discovery I think that fed my perspective. It is hard to imagine what I would have made of myself if I had left at fifteen. I had lots of feelings. I didn’t know very much. I had always loved the steel band. I would go for hours as a teenager, listening to the bands, listening as if I was waiting for something, I don’t know what and I had been drawn almost naturally to the underdog, the ordinary people, but I really did not know them at close quarters (except my family, but then family was always striving, always seeking to get out of some hole). Regarding religion, they, my family, were Methodist; otherwise, they were pretty conservative if you can use that term as it relates to people who do not have too many choices, whose real focus is to keep their children on the “right” track, encourage their education and teach them good manners.

But when I went to the countryside to work at 19 or so, I was away from family, from Port-of-Spain friends. There was no one around whom I had been to school with. I was free. There was no real middle class to tempt me. I got to know the people working, making a living in the forests and on agriculture. I went to wakes, heard and sung the songs, got to know the stickfighters. I actually stood behind the drummers and chanted, I went to the club and took part in the gambling. I was involved in the Village Councils, to some degree in the politics. I suppose it was lonely, you really had no one to share your writings with, so that became almost a secret part of me. People knew me as a fella playing cricket, football, feting, going to the gambling club, dancing. No one knew me as a writer. There were, however, a few opportunities to read in Port-of-Spain. Derek Walcott was there. I used to go and look on at The Theatre Workshop where Derek was the Director. I knew the actors, but I wasn’t part of that. So until I won the prize [BP Independence Literary Award for his first novel, While Gods are Falling] I was pretty much an unknown. And there were a few fellars who wrote and with whom I discussed writing (in Port of Spain) but even they were largely obscure figures.

But the real advantage to staying was getting to know the place and the people intimately. And this helped me to develop a love and respect for ordinary people and to want, although I did not necessarily think so, to tell their stories, to establish their validity and their values . . . I suppose in a kind of way I became one of them. I did not see myself as an ambitious individual trying to get along in the world, to join some elite. In many ways these people are elite enough for me.

But one of the things that my staying has meant is that it established the idea that you didn’t have to go away to be a writer and that I think in some way helped to reduce the feeling of secondclassness which people can settle into as a way of life.

I remember someone writing the other day about writers, a friend of mine, and he had written something about Naipaul and Selvon being our writers or something like that and I met him and I said to him “man, how could you do that? I am here.” And sometime later he wrote an article in which he mentioned me as the best of our local writers. The Local Writer. So really, part of the experience here has been that people don’t see you in relation to other writers on the international scene, so they really cannot rank you and it is important for us to rank people.

But increasingly people come up to me and congratulate me not about being a writer as such but about a book of mine that they like. And gradually they are coming to see that right here, one of them, who has grown up among them, is achieving at a certain level of excellence. This is very good for the self confidence for the people — like in Matura — they know somebody, one of them who can rank with the world. Of course, out there in the metropolitan centres, things might have been different. More might have been made of me, but which me? Without the experiences here, I would have been a different me."

I am particularly struck by Lovelace's annoyance at being considered a "local writer." In his case, I think this is not so, but it is surely something that a lot of Caribbean writers experience. I was guilty of inadvertently making this distinction just the other day when I was talking about Virgin Islands literature with Erika Waters (formerly of The Caribbean Writer). I made a comment about the USVI not having many literary voices (I have said so on this blog as well), and Dr. Waters immediately corrected me, insisting that we have a lot of literary voices. I realized at that moment that I had been referring specifically to writers who were published internationally and were successful outside the region. This is, no doubt, an ugly attitude on my part, but not an uncommon one I am sure. We all want our writers to represent us to the world (all of us who care about books, that is), but who represents us better than those who toil in semi-obscurity in the places many have left behind? Does great talent immediately attract international attention? I suspect that it does not in all cases - probably not even in most cases.

I admire Lovelace's work a lot, and his perspective on living and working primarily in the Caribbean is a useful one to hear. It's important to mention that it isn't as if Lovelace never left Trinidad (he received all of his degrees in the States), and I don't want to overstate his role as a "local writer." I think that the important thing about Lovelace, as opposed to many of his contemporaries, is that he did not leave as a young man, and his international visits later in life never lasted more than a few years. It's given him a sort of authority among Caribbean writers, and I think that what he expresses in the interview above is very relevant to the world as we find it today, despite a changing media environment.

Photo Post #9

2011-05-18T13:49:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Highlights fromThe Caribbean Writer, Volume 23 (Part1)

2011-05-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I met with Erika Waters, the founding editor of The Caribbean Writer, the literary magazine published by the University of the Virgin Islands. Dr. Waters was generous enough to give me a copy of one of the recent volumes of the CW, and I thoroughly enjoyed our discussion. The topics that we covered are ones that are very relevant to my current endeavor, ranging from the Virgin Islands' place in the Caribbean community (do we count? all of us? all ah we?) to concerns over the homicide rate in the territory (in 2010 we ranked 3rd in the world per capita behind only Honduras and El Salvador). Clearly, these are issues that effect all Virgin Islanders. I was pleased to find that Dr. Waters was prepared to offer her insights, no doubt thanks to her many years teaching at the university campus in St. Croix.

As for the newest volume of The Caribbean Writer, it should keep me busy for a while - at nearly 300 pages, there’s clearly a lot to explore. I’ve only taken a cursory look at it, and already I’ve found some very thought-provoking items. As I sink my teeth deeper into the volume I’ll share my thoughts, but here are some immediate points of interest:

1. Martin Munro contributes a few pages to the volume’s tribute to Martinique’s Aime Cesaire, and his perspective immediately intrigued me. Munro, a native of Scotland, talks briefly about his great admiration for Cesaire’s anti-colonial writings, which he found quite easy to apply to his own nation. “For me, he could have been writing about the people in my country, so docile, uncomprehending, and full of self-doubt,” Munro says.

I’ve heard it alluded to in various places that the non-English native inhabitants of the British Isles have a strong affinity for the anti-colonial writings that have come from the furthest reaches of European empire. It certainly makes sense to me, but Munro is saying so in the most direct way that I have ever heard from a Scottish, Irish, or Welsh person. Munro’s account of his one awkward encounter with Cesaire is also intriguing - it seems to imply that the famous father of the Negritude movement was not keen to accept a Scottish man’s gestures of solidarity. If true, it speaks to the caution that Cesaire must have had to adopt as an early black West Indian intellectual, although I think it’s equally possible that Munro saw more antagonism than was there. Nevertheless, his sincerity is evident when he writes, “At the moment of being physically closest to Cesaire, I unexpectedly felt the furthest and most detached from him.”

2. Kwame Dawes writes a review of Patrick French’s The World is What it Is (which I have mentioned on this blog before). This authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul is one of the most important books to be published in the last few years for those interested in Caribbean literature. I think a lot of the interest surrounding the biography has to do with a sort of morbid curiosity now that the famously secretive Naipaul has allowed the intimate details of his life to be revealed, warts and all. Mostly warts, it seems.

Dawes’ impressions of the book very much line up with my own. We can be appalled at some of Naipaul’s actions, while at the same time admiring the courage and integrity it took to sign off on this somewhat unflattering biography. Dawes asserts (and I agree) that Naipaul mirrors many of his own characters - very flawed, but ultimately tragic and somehow sympathetic. “This can be fascinating stuff, ” Dawes writes, “and that Naipaul allows (Patrick) French to expose him in this manner suggest something about Naipaul’s commitment to this work, less as a biography, and more as a novel.” I got a similar impression of the book’s odd vibe - part Naipaul biography, part Naipaul novel - and feel that The World is What it Is may just be a great work of art. At the very least, it has one of the greatest (and most jarring), endings of any biography I’ve ever read. It makes you think.

3. In the poetry section, the submission Coast Watchers, St Thomas by Thomas Reiter was of great interest to me given its familiar subject matter. I had to look up Reiter to find out more about him, and it turns out he isn’t from the U.S. Virgin Islands, or even the Caribbean, which I found surprising. His poem captures the atmosphere of St. Thomas well, and although there are some lines that I found unusual, it certainly feels like the work of someone with a deep understanding of the island. I found some of his details particularly evocative of St. Thomas as it existed during my childhood: the hurricane-scattered tin signs, the poignant logo on one of the young character‘s t-shirts, and the poet’s effective metaphor of seeds cast in the wind that can “float for years.” I can’t find a copy of the poem online, and don’t feel comfortable reproducing it here, so it looks like anyone who wants to read it will have to buy volume 23 of The Caribbean Writer.

More to come, as this is just barely scratching the surface of volume 23’s content….

The Photography of Nadia Huggins

2011-05-13T21:16:00.000-07:00

Lately, I've been interested in contemporary West Indian digital photography - especially representations of "the tropics" and the politics involved. It would be an understandable attitude for a Caribbean person to be dismissive of digital photography, seeing as our home is one of the most photographed regions of the world - mostly by visitors. Look up the phrase "Caribbean photography" online and you will find yourself wading through millions of snapshots of Coconut Palms, beaches, and colorful buildings that merely perpetuate a stereotype. For those of us who are native to both the Caribbean and the digital age, this has lead to an impression that the camera is not a valid tool for expressing our realities. If the novel was in fact the primary cultural and aesthetic form of imperialism, than photography is the primary cultural form of tourism. West Indians effectively co-opted the novel in the 20th century - is it far-fetched to suggest that something similar is happening to the digital photograph?

Nadia Huggins, from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, is one of the artists who is bringing a Caribbean voice to digital photography. She is, along with Holly Bynoe (see my post from Apr. 15), the founder of ARC magazine, the new quarterly publication committed to the region's artistic community. I visited her website to take a look at her portfolio.

Huggins' body of work is impressive. Like Bynoe, she employs a photographic technique that is unabashedly metropolitan but infused with a distinctive West Indian language. Stylisticly, her photos would not look out of place next to her peers outside the region - instead it is her subject selection that functions as the core of her art.

Many of Huggins' photos are heavily processed - with high contrast and bold tonal manipulations. This dynamic look fits naturally with the majority of her compositions, which have an energy and a tension to them that makes them nearly intimidating. In many of her photographs, bodies are contorted, angles are canted, and atmospheric skies threaten to escape the confines of the frame.

In "I Swore You Disappeared", Huggins uses the lush vegetation of the the Caribbean as the central character in what is paradoxically a portrait of a man at the margins of the image. The moody Caribbean Gothic aesthetic is perhaps an appropriate reference here. Likewise, "Leaving" strikes a melancholic note with its ferry boat nostalgia. In "Fish", Huggins uses imagery that one might call stereotypical if photographed by a tourist, but her surreal processing and tilted composition render the scene as unstable.

Just as interesting is Huggins's tumblr account that she uses for her more casual iphone-ography work. If you're not a fan of iphone app photos, it won't be your thing, but in my opinion the images there are just as worth viewing as the ones she has selected for her main portfolio. As a collection, it is less edited website, so the viewer gets a look into her aesthetic as it is developing, outside of what she considers her best professional work. Great stuff, Nadia!

Photo Post #8

2011-05-11T16:25:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

The Virgin Islands Constitution

2011-05-11T15:50:00.000-07:00

I'm having trouble finding new information about the status of the most recent constitution that the US Virgin Islands has proposed, a controversial document that nearly everyone in the territory has had something to say about over the last few years. I feel controversial just writing about it - but I do so humbly. Things seem to be pretty quiet on that front lately - the most recent news available online is an article on the U.S. Department of Justice's proposed changes to the document from about a year ago. Is this constitution, the fifth attempt since the 1960s, now dead in the water like its predecessors? I admit, I haven't been keeping up as much as I should.

As one of the 17 non-sovereign territories in the world, the US Virgin Islands is monitored by the United Nations Committee on Decolonization, and has been under pressure over the last few decades to clarify its relationship with the United States. I am aware of the difficulties of the islands' history and the many different points of view in our communities on matters of both traditional colonialism and its more recent manifestations. But it seems to me that the current political status of the territory is unhealthy in many ways. While borders and national boundaries are in many ways meaningless these days, I still feel a USVI constitution would be an important step forward for all of us. The problem seems to be that it is much easier to continue the status quo than to consider the other options available to us. It's hard to imagine any of the current unincorporated territories feeling comfortable with statehood (Hawaii proves that full incorporation does not solve the social problems that neo-colonialism generates anyway). Likewise, it's hard to imagine that a majority of Virgin Islanders are eager to give up the benefits that come with American citizenship and suffer the initial economic instability that independence might bring. Many of us are quite intertwined with the USA in various ways. The most likely path seems to be some sort of commonwealth-like association that isn't so much different than the status quo.

For more information about the USVI's political status watch: "We the People - Transfer Day Perspectives" a 2006 documentary sponsored by the humanities council.

Hence, the latest constitution's journey from the islands to Washington D.C. where Congress and President Obama must approve of the USVI's plans before they can be ratified. During the initial drafting process, there was an inevitable disagreement between our executive and legislative branches in which Governor deJongh refused to send the document to Washington because he felt it was discriminatory, and that it would embarrass the territory in front of the nation's first black president. The courts eventually forced him to send it, and as predicted Washington did have some concerns about the legality of what the USVI was proposing. No surprise - the document does violate the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution by setting up privileged groups of VI citizens based on place and time of birth. The following outcry was the same one that we go through every time a constitution is drafted and subsequently nixed. It's been going on my whole life, and unfortunately I suspect I'm not the only one who is fairly jaded about it at this point.

So what exactly were the parts of the constitution that people became upset about this time? The proposed document is available online (read it here), so I was able to take a look.

Overall, I have to say that some of the criticisms have been pretty hyperbolic, even if there are some problems. The delegates were, of course, well intentioned. I've even seen some continental people (my community) claiming some kind of racial discrimination in the comment sections of internet news articles, which is an absurd argument - race is mentioned in the document many times but only in the context of anti-discriminatory policies at all levels of government. To be honest, I'm somewhat disappointed when I hear feelings of victimhood expressed by the territory's continental community - it suggests certain blind spots in the worldview of many people who I know are also well-intentioned. And anyway, there is no racial discrimination in this document - the social dynamics here are, of course, more Caribbean than the American racial narrative accounts for. Here are the things that the constitution does that are controversial:

1. Makes it mandatory that the head of government be occupied by either a Native Virgin Islander (born in the VI) or an Ancestral Virgin Islander (Trace there lineage back to the VI before 1932)

2. Exempts Ancestral Virgin Islanders (see above) from paying property taxes.

There is also a section defining marriage as between a man and a woman, but I think most people admit that the Caribbean is still working on gay rights issues as a region. Let's concentrate on the two policies above.

I don't think anyone should have any issues with making it mandatory for a Native Virgin Islander to occupy the head of government. Is this not the same as the policy that the United States has for its presidency (it's notable that the US was, itself, a young nation with a postcolonial mindset when it enacted this rule)? Where the situation admittedly gets a little sticky is with the use of the word "or" in the phrase "or an ancestral Virgin Islander." Essentially, this makes it so that people who have spent the majority of their lives elsewhere are eligible for the highest government offices while certain Virgin Islanders born outside the VI (down island, Puerto Rico, the States, ect.) would be barred from running. I'm not sure why someone from outside the territory (albeit with VI heritage) would want to move to the islands and run for the highest office of the land, but it seems the constitution would allow it as long as they lived locally for 15 years first. It seems to me that this whole eligibility issue wouldn't cause many problems in practice, but on a certain level I can see why it's considered unfair, and probably is the wrong direction to go. I get the impulse to protect the local political power base (only relatively recently developed) but some people who are also local may be excluded as a result.

As for Ancestral Virgin Islanders not paying property taxes, I again have no problem with the theory behind it. On a practical level it seems like horrible economic policy, but I wouldn't really use the word discriminatory to describe it. And yes, I understand the impetus behind the clause, but there have to be other ways stop the rapid distribution of land into the hands of wealthy outsiders.

The problem with putting these pseudo-exclusionary laws in a constitution is that, by their nature, they essentialize people in a complicated world. There will always be people who benefit from the laws who shouldn't, and people who are harmed by them who shouldn't be. The human condition is often too complex for legislation to fathom. Yes, I fully understand that there are people in the territory today who have never had their full right to self-determination - this needs to be addressed. But unless the constitutional delegates wanted to make endless amendments, they probably shouldn't have even attempted to define what exactly a true Virgin Islander is, and who doesn't fit the bill. It's sad to see that they headed down the same road that many formerly-colonized nations have traditionally had trouble traversing. While I repeat that I don't object to what the constitution is trying to do, the current language in the document is doing it in a somewhat ineffective way.

Also this is interesting - for a perspective on the U.S. Virgin Islands' status from elsewhere in the Caribbean, check out this article from the St. Kitts - Nevis Observer. Not a perspective I often hear.

Photo Post # 7 - One from the Family Archives

2011-05-07T19:27:00.000-07:00

Cruz Bay Dock, St. John, 1940
Photo by George Knight

Photo Post #6

2011-05-04T18:49:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon E5400

Is Globalization Recreating the Creole Experience Around the World?

2011-05-04T18:23:00.000-07:00

Michaeline Chrichlow has made an interesting assertion in her new book, Globalisation and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeing the Plantation, and it's one I've seen popping up more and more. I have to admit to having not read the book yet - my sole contact with its central thesis comes from UWI professor Dylan Kerrigan’s recent review of it - but the idea (as expressed by Kerrigan) is one worth thinking about. In the 21st century we now have to wonder, is the famous Caribbean experience of hybridized identity and self-alienation now the global rule rather than the exception? Have globalization and neo-colonialism essentially recreated the important conditions of the Caribbean on a much larger scale around the world? Intriguing, and maybe controversial, questions.

It must be said that "creole" is the sort of word that undergoes shifts in meaning depending on who is using it, where, and how. Its notoriously slippery meaning has been noted by many. When most people in the United States hear the word , they tend to think of it as exclusively referring to people from Louisiana. To add to the confusion, people in the Francophone Caribbean have a different conception of the word than do people from the Anglophone Caribbean. A variety of ethnic groups have adopted the term - perhaps a problem for those who like their cultures to have more discernible boundaries. As more and more people see the term as one that describes their essential experience, emotions inevitably become involved in its usage.

Here's what 2010's The Creolization Reader has to say on the term as a contemporary identity (one that not everyone agrees with by the way):

"People of all colours can affirm a creole identity through elective processes - speaking a creole language, through friendships and relationships, or simply by identifying with the many expressions of creole popular culture (music, art, dancing, food, syncretic religion and forms of material culture) that are prevalent in their region. Creole is thus not a 'hard' racial category with strongly policed edges defined by 'blood' or colour, but a 'fuzzy' or 'soft' identity with highly permeable frontiers."

I hope I am not misrepresenting Michaeline Crichlow’s ideas, but I take it that she is using creole in its preferred academic way - as a shorthand for the sort of colonial/postcolonial, multicultural experience that is at the core of Caribbean identity formation. It is, I think, first and foremost the experience of co-opting dominant cultural forms and employing them in ways that are distinct from the norms of the metropolitan center. When used in this way, the term transcends race to apply to the various groups that have embraced it - descendants of European settlers, Afro-Caribbean people, and the mixed race people who trace their lineage to multiple continents, among others. In all of these cases, the word creole seems to signify the experience that has been commonly expressed by Caribbean people over the last three centuries - namely the loss of an authentic ethnic community, a profound feeling of dislocation, and a need to build a cultural identity out of disparate parts.

I am curious - in our globalizing moment, do these descriptions sound familiar to those who don't identify as Caribbean (I apologize if I am focusing mostly on the negative side of this experience at the expense of hyping the positive aspects)? In his review, Dylan Kerrigan points out that Chrichlow’s intent is to “let the reader see that all populations around the world who are confronted by power today and develop forms of resistance to it - where their own personhood is reshaped - are essentially involved in a modern process of creolisation, similar to what Caribbean populations went through during the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth centuries.”
Could it be that all this time the Caribbean was really a leading indicator when it comes to the conditions that globalization would later bring to the entire world? It is an idea worth considering.

Kerrigan goes on to quote a recent lecture by Trinidadian economist Lloyd Best in which he remarked, “…globalization is imposing our experience on everyone now…we have lived it for 500 years and we need to write it down and distill it.”

I don't think Best really means to say that Caribbean people have not written it down, as the region’s hugely important literary canon proves, but I find it interesting that this idea of global creolization seems to be floating around out there, and has been expressed in various places. If it’s true that the identities of people around the world are now being shaped by forces similar to those that existed in the Caribbean over the last few centuries, what sorts of other questions does that raise? Is globalization truly just a glorified form of colonialism, as its critics suggest? Will the traditional concerns of the creole be rebranded as a broader phenomenon in the 21st century? How does technology and ease of movement make this new global creolization different than the one which has taken place in the Caribbean? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I sense that they are becoming more important with each passing year.

Photo Post #5

2011-04-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Iphone hipstamatic app

ARC Magazine's First Issue

2011-04-24T19:02:00.000-07:00

I've gotten to spend some time with my copy of ARC Magazine's inaugural issue this week. I still feel like I have more to consider and digest before I can get a full picture of issue one's content, but I will say that my first impressions are very positive. The magazine definitely looks like it could be the pioneer that it aspires to be - it's sleek, politically-engaged, and it seems sincerely devoted to fostering a community of Caribbean fine artists. The content is diverse and interesting, and the print quality is exceptional.

So what is ARC bringing to the discussion of Caribbean arts and culture (aside from very high production values)? What a reader takes away from this first issue is that the editors and contributors are committed to the concept of Créolité - a Caribbean aesthetic defined by its diversity and openness. The racial and national diversity of the magazine's staff ensures a multitude of perspectives, and at times it feels slightly self-conscious (Créolité often feels self-conscious to me - not sure what that says about my particular Caribbean experience), but it is encouraging to see such an aggressively multicultural point of view. When it comes to cultural heritage, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Indigenous voices loom large in the dialogue, as should be the case. Out of this distinctive mixture of values and viewpoints, as the editors of ARC intend, an authentic Caribbean voice emerges with a sly self-awareness and confidence in its own hybridity.

In the 82 pages of ARC's first issue there are a host of worthwhile articles and interviews with Caribbean artists. Jamaican photographer Radcliffe Roye shows some of his work documenting Dancehall culture. British filmmaker Isaac Julien's short adaptation of Derek Walcott's Omeros is analyzed. A St. Lucian spoken word collective is given exposure via a feature article. The list goes on.

While the artists within don't stray much beyond the familiar Caribbean themes that might now be called traditional, they make a strong argument that issues of creolization and diaspora are far from exhausted. While I see the risk of the publication becoming somewhat repetitive if it gets stuck in a discussion over Caribbean artists' traditional concerns, the level of passion that the contributors are bringing to their work suggests that ARC will find ways to stay relevant.

If one concern can be raised about the young publication, it is an inevitable one. It's hard to ignore that ARC does suffer from problems of accessibility in both its writing and some of its subject matter - something that is awkward to address but may be necessary to mention. While the editors stress that they are attempting to unite and nurture a community - a noble goal - that community may at times be exclusionary. Many of the contributors assume a knowledge of contemporary art and theory that generally comes with an involvement in academia or the fine art world. With all respect given to the struggles involved in producing a magazine like ARC, it's easy to imagine a certain percentage of Caribbean people feeling left out of the discussion.

There still doesn't seem to be a way around this. But the last thing that ARC needs right now is to be saddled with any charges of elitism. Education in the Caribbean, after all, has not solely meant a scholarship to Europe for some time now. I'm happy to see the magazine launched and I'm anxious to see where they go from here!

Buy a copy of Arc Magazine here

Photo Post #4

2011-04-24T15:12:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000 (double exposure)

Tiphanie Yanique and the US Virgin Islands

2011-04-20T19:04:00.000-07:00

It appears that people have been taking note of St. Thomian author Tiphanie Yanique's debut book How to Escape a Leper Colony, published last year by Graywolf Press. Yanique was among one of three writers who were short-listed for the 2011 OCM Bocas prize for Caribbean literature - quite an honor when one considers that the other two nominees were none other than Caribbean literary giants Derek Walcott and Edwidge Danticat.

It is my opinion that the U.S. Virgin Islands needs more young writers who are willing to tackle the complexities and contradictions of the territory's unique social landscape circa 2011. I recently read a review of How to Escape a Leper Colony in which professor Nadia Ellis of UC Berkeley described the U.S. Virgin Islands as, "a place not sufficiently the setting of Caribbean fiction, and thus, at least for me, a place filled in my imagination by a mysterious quiet." While I would naturally disagree with the first part of that statement, I agree that there is not enough critical attention paid to representations of the U.S. Virgin Islands written by Virgin Islanders.

This deficit is somewhat surprising. There's a lot to discuss about the United States Virgin Islands that is relevant to the broader Caribbean, and yet unique enough to warrant special attention. Unfortunately, I think part of the problem is that many of the issues that might be worthy subject matter for U.S. Virgin Islands literature are difficult for many of us to discuss. Yanique, to her credit, doesn't shy away from uncomfortable topics. When asked in an interview about the politics of "Kill the Rabbits", the short story that closes her debut, Yanique replied:

"... our politics are mostly made out of insider/outsider. It’s not necessarily racial. In fact, it’s not racial, although that’s how outsiders often perceive it. So, Americans often perceive it as I’m entering into what is a racialized society and black people are the majority. So, this is what’s happening. I’m white and I’m a minority. But from our perspective as insiders, it’s that you’re American, you’re a kind of colonizing force. You come with money, or even if you didn’t come with money, you somehow get money while you’re here that we don’t have access to for whatever reason and help each other out. We are at the fringes of these communities that you create inside of our communities. And we suddenly become fringe actors in this place. So a lot of it is tourist versus native. Long-term tourists who become kind of local. And natives who often feel like they are economic and cultural minorities in their own place. So, that’s really where our politics come from. It’s outsider/insider Virgin Islands versus not Virgin Islands. And that sometimes makes its way into Virgin Islanders versus other islanders too, which is something I’m ashamed of..."

On some level, I would imagine that many Caribbean people from independent nations would find a US Virgin Islands perspective unusual, but I think that Ms. Yanique's take on USVI society is accurate (and I'm sure she has much more to say on the issue). As a U.S. Virgin Islander, and particularly as someone with North American heritage from St. John, reading Yanique's short story "Kill the Rabbits" was an experience unlike any I've had before with literature - even Caribbean literature. For the first time I was reading a short story that addressed my cultural space and my concerns directly. The subject matter, both material and emotional, was instantly recognizable.

If Tiphanie Yanique continues to be a literary voice for the U.S. Virgin Islands, I hope that she can bring the territory more regional and international attention. I'd love to see more local writers, artists, and activists get the exposure that they deserve.

On a related note here's an excerpt from an interview with Ms. Yanique from Drew University Magazine about a particular failure of U.S. Virgin Islands education:

"After a year in Jamaica and Trinidad on a Fulbright—in your words, “the flyest time” of your life —you went home to teach. Why?
I thought I had gone to the best high school on the planet, and I wanted to give back. In the Virgin Islands, there’s a lot of turnaround in schools: Many of the teachers are Americans who come for vacation, and then leave. It was the hardest job I ever had, but it was wonderful.
You were on a mission there. What was it?
I was trying to be radical and infuse Caribbean stuff into the curriculum. I remember reading Caribbean folktales as a kid, and there was a Caribbean history class. But that was so unsatisfactory to me. I went to that school, and I didn’t know there was such a thing as Caribbean literature. I didn’t want my students to end up the same way."

Blue Curry on Identity Politics in Caribbean Art

2011-04-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting comment by Blue Curry, an installation artist from the Bahamas who currently works in London (photo courtesy of Creative Caribbean Network). In an interview with Melanie Archer from DAP, Curry was asked his thoughts on the role that "place" plays in his work (the objects that Curry uses in his installations include buoys, steel drums, and conch shells). This was his reply:

"I can only feel the weight of it when I know I’m being considered a novelty, or asked to address politics which are of no interest to me. I hate being saddled with all of the superficial associations of the tourist destination just because the Caribbean can’t be understood in terms of critical thinking or contemporary art. I can’t tell you how many conversations I thought I was having about work which have ended as nothing more than fond recollections of sipping piña coladas while watching the sunset on a beach. Further, when you can be identified closely with a place on the periphery of the bigger art world, you’re considered an “international artist,” a pejorative term which is a ghetto to be avoided. If it’s not all of that to contend with, then there will be someone haranguing you about colonialism or the diaspora and expecting that you take a position, because that is still the tired theory which is pulled out of the bag to interpret art production in the region. Identity politics are of no interest to me, and I don’t have to answer to them. I’m a visual artist born in the Caribbean who works with the image of that place, but I don’t claim to be making work representative of it, nor would I want it to be the main thing to define my practice."

Here is a link to the entire interview as it appeared in the Caribbean Review of Books. (Thanks to Nicholas Laughlin)

An interesting response. On the one hand, a refusal to be pigeonholed is commendable, and I respect Curry's claim that his art is not meant to be strictly representative of the Caribbean (I feel the same way about my writings on this blog). Other parts of his perspective I find more difficult to understand. Calling issues of colonialism and diaspora "tired" may in fact be a trenchant critique of the Caribbean art scene, but can he truly avoid them? By using materials that signify "the tropics" and displaying his art primarily away from the Bahamas (particularly England), it seems to me that Curry is very much involved in the discourse that he is saying he has no interest in. In an artist's statement I found elsewhere online Curry says, "I work in sculpture, installation and video. My recent work connects with fantasies of the native, the tropical and the exotic and how these are created, reinforced and knowingly played into". This sounds like quite a different point of view than the one he seemed to be expressing in his interview with Melanie Archer.

This is not a polemic against Blue Curry at all, and perhaps I truly am falling into some sort of trap by "haranguing him about colonialism" in his words. I definitely agree that identity politics is not the whole story. I find many of his installations and sculptures really engaging, and I understand that readings which only interact with them on the level of postcolonial theory are probably superficial and inadequate. I also wonder how Bahamanian perspectives, which I know next to nothing about, are different from those found in my home of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Curry's comment struck me because identity and colonialism are often so central to Caribbean art as I have experienced it. His claim that they are unimportant to his process makes me question certain notions I have of the region's art production.

Here's a photo of Blue Curry's 2009 installation "Posttropical" on the artist's website.

Photo Post #3

2011-04-15T20:21:00.001-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000

Holly Bynoe and the Creole Aesthetic in Photography

2011-04-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

This week I ordered my copy of the first issue of ARC magazine, the new arts & culture quarterly founded by Holly Bynoe and Nadia Huggins. I am very curious to see whether or not the publication succeeds - especially given the continued fragmentation of the regional art scene. I'd love to see more local artists featured in these discussions - not just people working in the diaspora. As valuable as the diasporic perspective is, I sometimes wonder how much more can be said on the subject of exile.

While I'm waiting for my copy of the magazine, I figured I'd do a little more research into the work of co-founder and editor-in-chief Holly Bynoe of Bequia (photo above courtesy of ARC). I was struck by a recent interview of Bynoe in the Caribbean Review of Books (You can read it here), in which she talks about her most recent project using collage techniques to communicate a Creole experience. Although Bynoe's background is very different than my own, I couldn't help but relate to a lot of what she said. I also get the feeling that the two small islands that we come from are similar in essential ways.

Bynoe's collage work is very striking - the way that she appears to be struggling with her heritage and place in the context of her island is fascinating to me. I immediately wondered if Bynoe, who bills herself partially as a photographer, had done any other work on the same subject that is more strictly photographic. I headed over to her site to take a look at her photography portfolio.

The photos on Bynoe's website are even more interesting to me than her collages. While I was impressed with all her work, the images that were most effective to me were the ones in which I could clearly see Bynoe trying to articulate a Creole aesthetic using the photographic medium. Some of Bynoes arguments for this aesthetic are very successful. In the black & white "Of Age", a teenage girl stands in front of a tree filled with ripening mangoes, her expression both defiant and naive, her hair wild. In "Bedroom", a warmly lit interior displays signs of privilege (the delicate curtains) and signs of simplicity (the bare walls, the metal cot), while the open window reveals a lush garden outside. In "The Empress" Bynoe admiringly photographs a subject who seems to embody the idea of Caribbean pride, and more specifically Afro-Caribbean pride, but the woman's turned back indicates a certain distance. The melancholic "Sunday Evening Mending" references a sort of isolation that strikes me as wholly Caribbean, and perhaps Rhys-ian.

I don't know whether or not Bynoe will choose to use photography as her chosen artistic medium in the future (she says she has not been able to take pictures in some time), but I hope that she does. The themes she is exploring have often been expressed in literature, but I think there is an opening for a new generation working in digital media (including photography and video) to assert their various experiences of Caribbean identity.

Photo Post #2

2011-04-14T21:20:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Iphone hipstamatic app.

Photo Post #1

2011-04-13T22:47:00.000-07:00

Photo by David Knight
Nikon D5000